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I thought for a second that you meant people aren't having children because infertile boomers are hoarding the wealth from those who are young enough to marry and reproduce. For example, I married younger than most people of my generation, and we can't afford a wedding ceremony, or a child, and our marriage process still costed a lot of my net worth. I make about 95th percentile income for my age group and I am old for marriage by historical standards. We don't feel like we can afford to have a baby right now. So that would be a take based in reality, yes?
But then I saw that that boomer, who is known for his feeling of entitlement to his old-age pension, The_Nybbler, posted the comment, and I looked up the serpent's tooth quote, and ... my priors have not shifted on you.
„How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child:” I am a minority. The children are too thankful. Even if they were all like me, that would be no reason to not have kids. I still want kids. Mine will inherit my ideas. Is it a horror, that they will believe I should not exist on the dole for 30 years of retirement if they are struggling to afford to give me grand children? Not quite. That being a horror seems to only make sense if one is in denial about his mortality and the true conditions of old age. It is best for my Darwinian fitness to kill myself at age 65 for my grand children. If you do not agree, you will be replaced by those who do.
I am [not yet 35], make [~median household income] as the sole breadwinner, and have [2 - 4] children.
Obviously everyone is in a different scenario but barring very exigent life circumstances I have a hard time imagining being unable to financially afford to have children on 95th percentile income for my age. I'm very happy to chat about my lived experience in general terms if you're trying to figure out how to make it work.
It's (100% unironically) best for your Darwinian fitness for you to offer to watch the grandkids on the weekends.
What quotient of Boomer grandparents have made decisions to opt out of family obligations via fucking off to resort colonies or whatever, though? That was nowhere near as viable in previous generations
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Without knowing more details, I don't know how much of this is based in reality. It certainly beggars belief that someone in the top 5% of income couldn't afford to have multiple kids, much less a single baby. My basic Googling says that this would be over $150K for someone in their 20s and over $290K for someone in their 30s. I understand that cost-of-living varies a lot, but as someone living in a medium-high COL area who has friends and family who are decidedly NOT in the top 5% (they certainly make less than me, and I'm certainly not in the top 5% in income) who have multiple kids, I don't understand how the math could work out to make it unaffordable.
That age entitled someone to an extra $140k a year shows everything that is wrong with this economy. There is no way they are „earning” that. That's village elder UBI and it's bad because people in their 20s need it to feed their babies.
I'm worth more than two people in their twenties at work. I'd say they're underpaying me in some relative sense.
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Usually, people who are older tend to make more money because they can provide more value by nature of having more experience and understanding of how to provide value. There's also greater replacement costs when it comes to employees that have been working at a company for a long time; someone who isn't all that productive but knows a specific company's systems well could be hard to replace and thus command higher pay than a productive junior member whose responsibilities are low enough such that they could be exchanged for another junior member, and older people are more likely to have worked at a company for a long time.
It's not as if older employees automatically earn more than younger ones for the same entry-level job, except for cases of some other factor that's often correlated. E.g. some possibilities: older employees are more likely to have experience negotiating for higher base pay, or they're more likely to have kids and get a sort of parent-sympathy bump.
There's a strong argument to be made that the current allocation of compensation doesn't properly reflect the actual productivity or value that these individuals provide. There's an even stronger argument to be made, written in blood, that no one can be trusted to make a reasonable judgment call on the justice of such allocation in an economy-wide scale that is better than what we have now.
AI might obviate all of these, but, well, modern AI is less than half a decade old, barely long enough to have gone to and finished college. These things take generations to turn around, not mere single-digit years.
Back to the actual point at hand, I'm still curious what your spending is such that you don't believe that $150K+ plus whatever your wife makes isn't enough to afford a baby. Your fixed costs for things like rent/mortgage and loans must be truly astronomical to make that be the case, and at least the former of those could be changed.
I don't make that much. I'm not American, and maybe younger than you're thinking. My wife doesn't work. Why should we be dual income so some Boomer can sit on a boat and our babies don't have a full time mother? Yet another demand these olds put on young couples that is ridiculous.
I pay a ton of taxes, almost all of it goes to education, healthcare, and old age pensions. The latter two fund the old, the former funds other people's children's daycare, and waste of time for teenagers, and a guild of strangers who feel entitled to employment in that domain.
Then it's rent. We have space for a baby or two, so at least there's that. If we downsize, we don't, unless we live in poverty. I'm not living in a one room shack for the Nybbler's of the world who feel like they Earned their javascript money and like I don't deserve to get in on that because I was born too late.
My actual implementation idea is just to cut my taxes down to near 0 and increase old people taxes while slashing OAPs. How is that bloodier than the present redistribution system? Nobody in the West is doing early 20th century bolshevism.
This doesn't seem like the worst idea, or even a bad idea. I'd be curious to see the precise details and what economic models predict in terms of how this affects incentives. Perhaps you could solve your baby affordability woes by becoming a politician, then using that power to
steal from the governmentdirect money towards friends and family or make money through insider trading, because your ideas seem likely to be popular enough to have at least a decent shot at winning elections.The bloodiness in these things often come down to friction in implementation. I.e. the existing democratic system often prevents changes like this, because there are a lot of old people who vote, relative to not-old people. As such, it's usually just a matter of time before someone like you gets replaced by someone more extreme than you who calls for just
eating the richmurdering the olds, who can't really fight back all that well anyway. After all, who's easier to kill than the weak and frail?More options
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I actually agree with the basic thrust of your point - being rich in your 60s is nice but doesn't achieve much for society in most cases and younger people would be better off with more money for having children - but you are making incredibly strong and bad claims that are distracting from it.
Yes, someone in their 30s is usually worth 2x as much as someone in their 20s. They've had 6 to 10 years of seeing stuff actually happening in the real world, they've got some experience in when and why things work or fail to work, and they are able to reliably handle things without needing their hand held. They are less likely (though still distressingly likely) to decide that they've worked out how the world really is and everyone just needs to get out of the way.
I saw a recent paper measuring this claim in teachers. The difference between a teacher with 2 years of experience and 18 years of experience was 0.04 SDs. That's like half an IQ point. That's also like a correlation of 0.10 or less. Worker talent dominates, particular experience does not have that long of a tail (maybe 1 year matters but 10 is outrageous) or that big of an effect. Ultimately the experience narrative is the narrative which justifies the redistribution, but when it gets audited it fails just like the education system. All of it's looking like village elder UBI more and more.
Could they earn an extra 10% per year? Maybe. An extra 100% is an outrageous effect size.
In my industry there is a saying about some people having X years of experience and others having 1 year of experience, X times. Teachers, by nature of the job, nearly always fall into the second pattern -- each year is the same as the last. And they get seniority pay increases because they're public employees with unions. Most jobs are not like that -- if experience people get more pay, they're expected to do a better job.
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I too would be incredibly depressed and cynical were I to think that I've basically peaked and that in a decade+, I'll only be at most 10% more competent than I am today.
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That's because teaching experience doesn't do much to outcomes because, well, we've had that conversation plenty. The difference between a (good) lawyer with 2 years and 18 years of experience is a hell of a lot more than 10x, though.
I'm somewhat surprised (but not really - the answer is that people just don't really think much about these things) by how common it is that people just argue from incredulity that someone surely couldn't be worth that much more than someone else in terms of the job they do. Commonly with billionaires, or people who make $multimillion salaries compared to, say, entry-level employees who make less than 1/200 of that.
Because, looking at one of the most fair and transparent jobs in terms of measuring performance - professional athlete - it's pretty clear that the top players really can be that much better. Even just making it to the pro level likely places you at least in the 95th percentile, if not 99.9th, and when you zoom in in that tiny sliver of humanity, you realize that the gap between the top players and the median players is HUGE. In 2000, Pedro Martinez wasn't just the best pitcher in MLB, he was better than the 2nd best pitcher in MLB by a gap larger than the one between the 2nd best and the median MLB pitcher, according to most stats. If you look at other top-level talents like Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan, similar phenomena seem to occur.
Given that the gaps are this big in just that tiny top sliver, it tells me that the productivity gap between the very top and the median worker (who's probably what, in the top 30% of everyone of similar age?) is likely to be absolutely enormous. I could absolutely believe that one individual is actually a million times more valuable to a company than a junior employee in terms of value created and thus, in some cosmic sense, "earned" that salary that's a million times higher. There's no real good way of quantifying this in a rigorous and fair way, but, I'll say, I have no incredulity when it comes to this notion.
Onfield performance isn't the salient performance attribute for athletes, though. It's selling tickets/attracting eyeballs which also has its own massive disparity in ability by athlete.
If hypothetically the entire NBA roster at present were to vanish and be replaced by the next 400 or so best basketball players on earth how different would the entertainment product be? I can think of some sports where mid tier competitors produce a more compelling and competitive product than the absolute elite
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Proof?
I plead judicial notice. You can also ask any of the legal/finance posters here how biglaw works. You learn the law by doing repetitive detail-oriented shit over and over, while paying attention to the wider context of the job. Then, as you gain seniority, you've seen more and more of the strategic decisions, edge cases, long-term action-outcome links, etc. until you can start taking point on those. As you develop a track record, bigger customers will trust you with bigger things, and you can build relationships with them to keep them coming to your firm for work (you're going to need that because, even as a partner, your pay is very much tied directly to how much you earn the firm). By the time you're an elder statesman, your job is to make high-level decisions that you can only make well from atop a mountain of experience, and also to manage and mentor younger lawyers so that they can go through their work and learn the ropes without crashing into an unknown unknown and getting burned. A lot of white-collar professions work this way.
Funnily enough, law did used to have a boomer-protecting structure of the sort you decry: the firm's profits would generally be split between all partners based on lockstep seniority, with the juniors earning less and the seniors more as they go on. People were fine with that because the junior partners knew they had a job for life unless they screwed up horrifically, and expected to get that seniority in time. I have some thoughts on why this system disappeared, but that's a bit beyond the scope of your question.
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I think you copied-and-pasted the wrong link.
Sorry, repaired it. It's figure 1 I think at the bottom.
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The key word is 'feel'.
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I'm not a boomer, and I don't have a pension. I was also never middle management, for that matter, although the idea that it is "half-UBI" for the old is pretty laughable. And I didn't expect your priors to shift because integer ones never do.
No, it's really not. It's that word "feel" that gives it away.
You're over 40 and have savings and a house. Under the new rules, that's a boomer. I'm a decade-ish younger than you and a boomer as well.
Goddamit this is GenX erasure!
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I think I'm going to have to come up with some jokes to associate people making these claims with the University of Oklahoma, or the state more broadly.
What about USS OKLAHOMA, which is sadly not an OHIO-class SSBN?
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If you manage to get a good mortgage in your 30s, you've found the pathway to being a boomer, sooner.
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You are over 50 years old. Gen X is Boomer. Get with the new hip lingo.
You just think young working couples, whom the world depends on, should be poor, while you sit around on a pile of „earnings” (which really do not survive worthiness audit anyway, although that's beyond the point), and stronger younger men are barred from competing for it except for through pandering to you. The problem with this is that it is more ideal biologically to cut you completely out of the loop at this point. Is that the nicest way to do things? No. But it is evolutionarily best, and we are much too tilted toward Boomer worship and far too removed from the law of nature or nature's God.
You are a self-parody.
I just think that the pile of earnings I worked for when I was younger is my pile of earnings, and do not somehow belong to the younger generation merely because they are younger. Your idea that we should have a world where only those who are on top at any given moment should have anything is dystopian.
But we kind of have that world right now.
They belong to you insofar as you can defend them. Historically, the old pay the young to do that (in various ways, not necessarily financial, but is a good chunk of the time). The fact they're currently refusing to (because they feel, perhaps correctly, they do not need to) and at the same time preventing any other independent development is, again, kind of the central issue.
I believe I've mentioned this before: when a society is in equilibrium old vs. young and to the degree that all modern development is zero-sum, TFR should be 2.0. Lower than that means the old aren't reinvesting enough (it's very clear that they're addicted to low-cost labor, hence their preference for infinity foreigners rather than focusing on domestic reproduction); higher than that means the young are burning through the capital too quickly and are on track to create this problem.
Except none of that is happening. Taxes are paid by the "old" -- well, really, the middle aged, but our angry Zoomer doesn't make a distinction
I do not find this claim compelling.
In Zoomer parlance, the Tax system is Boomer-on-Boomer crime.
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This is how gen Z and alpha actually talk. There is no gen X in the lingo. FWIW other 55 year olds I've spoken to have also expressed disdain for being called boomer so it's not unique to you.
There's a strong argument and a weak argument here. The weak argument permits sitting on bygone glory that can't be presently defended, but audits your earnings and finds that dotcom era webdev work was overpaid. The strong argument says that even if you invented the transistor and capitalized completely fairly from that, evolution dictates that once you are done producing with that money and reproducing with your gametes, it is no longer optimal to allocate those earned resources to you. They should be dispersed, and do become dispersed, in the state of nature. That's how aging and death works.
The old gods are harsh but not dystopian. What we have now is a dystopian for young people. In reality I don't support going all the way on Gnon's law, but I think it helps to present the pure case of it and then discuss where to actually set the points of divergence. We are currently pandering way too much to old people and it has to stop. Maybe the optimal point is to cut OAPs in half and re-organize the tax system to tax reproductive age income less and old people spending more. That doesn't mean everything is taken from you overnight and you die in your 50s but it also means men like me will not be your slave while you sit on a boat somewhere into your 90s, having been retired for decades.
We express disdain for being called boomers because to the degree that "generations" exist, GenX is a generation with different life experiences and upbringings and career paths than our boomer parents.
If you just want to call everyone older than you who owns a house "Boomer," we can't stop you.
But we probably can stop your campaign to take our stuff because you want it.
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No wonder they're poor.
There's no argument at all for young people to judge the worthiness of work done by old people long ago with an eye to confiscating the fruits of their labor.
Ah, but most of us aren't dead yet. And before you suggest "that could be arranged", you might want to consider that if you were in any position to arrange it, you wouldn't be poor.
Nobody wants to arrange that. I want to arrange for you to work more and pay more taxes and receive less wealth transfer from reproductive people. The pure state of nature is mentioned because you will object to this, but in reality you should be thankful we prevent roving gangs of young people from taking your stuff from you. Therefore you owe us more and we owe you less.
Like I said, I prefer the strong argument. But on this point, I don't need to analyze old people's labor, I can just analyze labor right now. I'm convinced most of the economy is just a circus and is pretty far removed from serious natural laws. The economy should be in service to improving the human race but 95% of economic activity is not that. That means a lot of people make a lot of money producing no value, since I only count value as human race improvement. This point meets a brick wall with most people though because you can't make a man understand what his salary depends on him not understanding.
You're basically a communist, you think there is some way that we could organize the economy to produce more abundance and progress. Yet all attempts besides nibbling around the edges have failed just giving people property rights with some ground rules and letting it rip, which produces all these things you complain about. Doesn't apply to like government mandated redistribution but that's not the central case. Nothing stops you from trying to create a business that competes with the unfair and negative sum discrimination you claim is endemic, if you're right you should be able to quickly crush those institutions and take from the boomers what they didn't earn.
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