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Notes -
The division of societal surplus in the gerontocracy
One oft-repeated epithet on the left is that we ought to be working 10-20 hours a week due to productivity increases. I always found that this is kind of funny or misguided, as we have kind of done just that - we just decided to give the surplus of productivity to the old (30+ year boomer retirements with eye-watering healthcare costs and redistributive transfers) and the young (10+ years of schooling and an adolescence that now almost lasts until you are 30).
I often think about how societal surplus is spent. If you look at the fastest growing sectors in most western countries, it's almost always healthcare and related professions. This is probably due to a whole host of factors but a big one is something akin to the median voter theorem; the median voter is most western countries is now very old and wants a lot of money spent on healthcare. Hence you get 10% to almost 20% of GDP (in the US!) going to that. As someone in their late 20s who hasn't seen a healthcare professional in more than a decade, that's wild. Healthcare has a low fiscal multiplier and is often purely a consumptive good, but people rarely think we spend too much on it per se - critiques are often made at nebulous administrative bloat (which when examined is often less of a good narrative than people think it is).
Another thing is immigration. Looking at it at face value, all western democracies are addicted to it. Even though right-wing culture warriors often single out Japan or SK, even these places have seen significant immigration (and concomitant pushback) in the past decade. Even places like Russia or Belarus do it. Again very often in service of aging populations - in order to stem inflation, keep asset prices high, etc.
Many western countries now how a U-shaped happiness curve - happy when young, happy when old, relatively miserable in old age. The meme "Nick 30 ans", perhaps not so common in the US, embodies this. If you are Nick (male), 30 years old and working, you are paying into a system that benefits everyone but you, chiefly the old, the the young, then women and then maybe the unemployed. I am one of these Nicks, I am 28 years old and I pay, for the country I reside in, a massive tax bill (probably 5-6x the median) and see nothing for it.
If the purpose of a system is what it does, the the purpose of modern western democracies is to drain young people (chiefly but not exclusively young men) and give the surplus to the old, the infirm, the antisocial. There is some rebellion or exit (people moving to Dubai etc.) though it's often hard to effectuate and sometimes punished by the system.
The striking thing is that when polled, most Nick 30 ans type people think old people are something like hard done to, think they deserve their pensions, think that the issues are not structural or redistributive but something to do with greedy corporations and the rich. I think some economists, Stiglitz or Friedmann or such, predicated concentration camps for the old due to accumulation of wealth and power, but young people do not rebel, they mostly submit and place the blame on other things as the system or the rich.
I sometimes wonder what the optimal thing is for someone who is the target of redistribution is to do. NEETdom is probably rational in many cases if you are not exceptional. I also wonder how various kinds of nationalists square the fact that their elders are quite happy to sell out their country, culture etc. for yet another cruise.
I'm pretty sure that young men have ALWAYS created a surplus which was used to support the young, the elderly, and women. The difference is that in the past, this surplus was distributed in a way that was less formal and more voluntary. Before social security, it was pretty normal and common for adult children to financially support their elderly parents; before AFDC women were far more desperate to marry and had far less contempt for men; a few hundred years ago, families were ecstatic about the birth of a healthy baby boy. In part because having an able-bodied man in your family could easily mean the difference between life and death.
So perhaps your real complaint is that your hypothetical 30 year old working man is not getting the respect he (arguably) deserves.
Maybe they should have a special express lane on the highway for people who pay more than $50k a year in taxes.
Exactly this too, it's not a new phenomenon. You were always having to take care of your elderly parents and your children, and often your wife. Now even back then it wasn't enough for most men to work just on their own, child labor was the default whether it be at a factory or on the land with their dad and women did lots of hard labor at home like hauling firewood/water/sewing clothes (did you know households used to spend a higher percentage of their budget on apparel than they do now on cars?)/cleaning which was way harder without modern chemicals and machines like washing machines/dishwashers/vacuums/etc, but it was the default that the man was the main breadwinner for any outside work.
We've helped to diffuse that responsibility through welfare programs instead, and technology freed women's labor from domestic chores to be used on outside work too. And everyone has become so much wealthier that we now consider it as immoral to have our kids work, despite being necessary throughout almost all of history.
It's not as if the people 200 years ago hated their elderly parents and left them to die. It did happen more frequently than it does now, but you've always had that responsibility to your elders. They give birth to you and raise you, and you work for their benefit the same way you have children now who will hopefully love you and help take care of you when you need it. The same with the sick and infirm, there was always cruelty to the disabled but they were often someone's sibling or cousin or parent or whatever who had the responsibility to take care of them.
I think people forget about how much labor household appliances have saved, and how poor a lot of people were until relatively recently. I deposed a guy who grew up in West Virginia in the 40s and 50s in a house without running water and he talked about how every Saturday his mother did the laundry and he, his dad (whose clothes were filthy from the mines) and all his brothers and sisters would spend half the day hauling buckets of water from a spring in the woods behind their house so their mother could heat the water on a stove and do the laundry with a wringer washer.
And besides just the hard work there, knowledge spread a whole lot slower and in much lesser quantity. The number of women with stories about coming from laundry day with their hands burned on the lye improperly mixing it and thinking that was normal is astounding. Even with labor that is still around, you were likely doing inefficiently and taking more time with more suffering than you do nowadays.
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The problem is that the lack of respect is there because we've made it non voluntary. You seem to see this as a good thing, can I ask if you are a middle aged man who pays a lot in taxes?
What does this mean exactly? If your parents don't respect you, then it seems like a you and your parents issue. If you mean that older generations kinda look down on younger ones, I'm pretty sure it's always been that way. If anything, young people are more free in this sense considering the traditional view is to respect your elders and obey their authority.
I explicitly said I am against most welfare, but I can acknowledge the areas where it does help like with my own extended family members. And I don't think that governments should just shrug and not fulfill their promises.
I'm not "middle aged", younger, but otherwise yeah my family does.
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I'd add to this that there really weren't that many completely infirm/economically useless people back then either. Without modern medicine, even assuming you got past childhood mortality, there were very few people who would've made it to their 60s since a lot of things we handle nowadays, such as early heart disease or infectious disease, would've just been fatal back then. In addition to that, while there was always some degree of welfare in states, the destitute likely would die within a decade due to their weakened constitutions.
It's a good problem to have that tons of people who would've been dead in the past are alive thanks to modern economics and medicine. That being said, their continued living does necessitate a societal negotiation on how resources are distributed.
Also a good point, like the down syndrome life expectancy went from their mid 20s to their 60s in just a few decades.
And in the same way with other disabled/elderly, those down syndrome people are our friends and family too.
Even if the numbers are inaccurate a bit, lots of Americans know someone with down syndrome and I doubt most would be too be happy to see those people get locked up or killed. So the "let's lock up or kill anyone with disabling down syndrome" isn't gonna get too much widespread support.
We've improved the life conditions of disabled people a lot, and through technology a lot of folk who wouldn't have been able to work before now can (although likewise a lot of people who were just barely able to work can no longer compete in more complex jobs), but even more than that we've just helped them live a lot longer than before in general. And we did that, because we want that. Because God said so/we evolved to be empathic for some reason/whatever you believe to be the cause, it is the truth that humans are generally kind and caring like that.
But it does mean they're a financial drain for longer.
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