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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24103 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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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.

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.

Yet human history shows no sign that groups where the old kill themselves for the sake of their descendants actually outcompete groups where the old don't.

"Going out on the ice floe" is the exception. In a world where food is scarce and malnutrition is a major cause of death (which is almost everywhere until the 20th century) the old "kill themselves for the sake of their descendants" by letting the prime working/child-bearing age family members eat first. And they do, in almost all times and places we look at.

Families where the core workers eat first get through the hard times a few members shorter.

Families where the elderly eat first don't get through the hard times at all.

Yes it does. Most historically successful groups had high rates of death in early late age and had demographic pyramids with a healthy amount of young adults. Today's gerontocracy is unprecedented.

That doesn't mean that in those groups, the old killed themselves for the sake of their descendants.

I didn't mean it's best to do that in general. I meant it would be optimal in a crisis that demands it. Parents kill themselves for their children in history in many cases in crisis.

Well, I agree with you that it can be optimal in true crises. I guess the question is, what constitutes a crisis that is true enough.

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.

How did it cost so much if you didn't have a wedding ceremony? Did you have to pay import duty on a mail-order bride?

Mainly moving in together and her still being in university, so I go from single man no kids to supporting a wife. Plus the rings, jewelry, and so on. All this stuff can easily hit $10k in costs after a year.

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.

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 is best for my Darwinian fitness to kill myself at age 65 for my grand children.

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

I don't know the answer to your question statistically speaking, but I don't need a statistical survey to tell you that killing yourself at age 65 is even worse a dereliction of family obligations than absconding to a resort colony or whatever.

At least in the UK's uniformly fucked housing market, the average homeowning Boomer is worth more dead than alive because they are under-occupying a valuable family-sized house. Press coverage tells me that the situation in the US is similar but less extreme.

At least in the UK's uniformly fucked housing market, the average homeowning Boomer is worth more dead than alive because they are under-occupying a valuable family-sized house.

Worth more to whom?

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?

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.

My basic Googling says that this would be over $150K for someone in their 20s and over $290K for someone in their 30s.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

My actual implementation idea is just to cut my taxes down to near 0 and increase old people taxes while slashing OAPs.

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 government direct 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.

How is that bloodier than the present redistribution system? Nobody in the West is doing early 20th century bolshevism.

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 rich murdering the olds, who can't really fight back all that well anyway. After all, who's easier to kill than the weak and frail?

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Those statistics must have been stuff like games won, right? If you have a reward function that is 1 and 0, you compare two almost identical competitors that are 1% apart in underlying performance, and you run that function for 10 years, you're see a massive reward advantage stemming from the 1% difference. Biologically I just don't see how Pedro Martinez could be 9 SDs from the median while the second best player is only 2.5 SDs from the median. Very unlikely.

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.

Not intrinsically, I think when you study rich people you find top 1% genomes (or less, even) who are laser-focused on making money in some niche. I would say I'm skeptical about value of their niche and more focused on from each according to their ability, to each according to their reproductive value. A lot of money making niches seem to be randomly determined and not truly valuable.

Those statistics must have been stuff like games won, right? If you have a reward function that is 1 and 0, you compare two almost identical competitors that are 1% apart in underlying performance, and you run that function for 10 years, you're see a massive reward advantage stemming from the 1% difference.

No, it's not games won; in fact, for players in general of any team sport like baseball, wins tends to be considered pretty close to irrelevant for measuring individual performance. Notably, Martinez did not lead the league in wins that year, but there was no question to anyone that he was by far the best pitcher in the league. In that era, Earned Run Average (ERA - lower the better) used to be considered the best stats and Martinez had an ERA of 1.74, while the second best in the league had 3.7, with the league average being 4.9.

Since that time, more advanced stats have been developed. For those, Martinez had a Wins Above Replacement (WAR - higher the better - average of all players, not just pitchers is defined to be 0) of 11.7, versus the 2nd place's 6.2, with the league average for starting pitchers at around 2. For adjusted ERA+, which is an ERA-based score adjusted for strength of opponents and size/shape of stadiums and quality of defensive teammates and such (higher the better - average of all pitchers is defined to be 100), he had a score of 291, while second place had 133.

There's no single stat that we can point to as the true productivity of a player in any sport or of a human in any field, but, by most stats that baseball fans consider to reflect that productivity, Martinez was better than the 2nd best by a gap greater than that between the 2nd best and the average. That's where the "average" is among people in the top <1% among all humans or even among all healthy young males.

Biologically I just don't see how Pedro Martinez could be 9 SDs from the median while the second best player is only 2.5 SDs from the median. Very unlikely.

Sure, but you don't need to understand the how. No one truly understands the how. What matters is the is, and he is (or rather, was).

Not intrinsically, I think when you study rich people you find top 1% genomes (or less, even) who are laser-focused on making money in some niche. I would say I'm skeptical about value of their niche and more focused on from each according to their ability, to each according to their reproductive value. A lot of money making niches seem to be randomly determined and not truly valuable.

There's nothing intrinsic about any of this. Productivity is as productivity does. If you want to have some sort of top-down command economy where your judgment is deemed the Correct one in terms of employees in what industries are deemed Valuable enough to deserve Lots of Money, you're certainly free to want that. But, again, arguments against instantiating those wants is written in blood, often the blood of those who wanted it, and of their loved ones.

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

Bringing in money is certainly the best actual metric in terms of actual value generated for the company, but it's also really hard to measure on a per-employee basis. My intent was to analogize a pro athletes performance in the sport against a generic employee's value creation.

That said, most times I've encountered people attempting to model how much actual value professional athletes generate, generally the conclusion is that the top players are far underpaid relative to how much money they make for the teams and leagues. Eg. I think when Conor McGregor was in his prime, he was getting paid I think less than 2x as much by the UFC as any other lightweight championship fighter (like a few hundred thousand USD per fight, for single-digit million for the year), and I read some article claiming that he was responsible for some double digit percentage of the UFC's total revenue, which seems to be on the order of multiple hundred million USD, which seems entirely plausible. I've seen similar things written about other big stars over the years, like Michael Jordan or Shohei Ohtani, and I don't know how good these models are, but to a basic fan with some basic understanding of the way these leagues operate, they all seem quite plausible.

And given the pay disparities in some professional sports which can be like 100:1 for top players versus rookies, that this disparity is smaller than their ACTUAL value would indicate that individuals really can be worth orders of magnitude more valuable in doing the same job.

If we want to get at the ACTUAL value, perhaps we could look at actual income of musicians, who usually sink or swim by their own personal direct success at making songs popular enough to get people to listen to them on streaming platforms or even buy on CD. And so there's no company setting salary to really manipulate the income. There, we know that the top performers are billionaires, and the bottom ones don't make minimum wage.

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.

I have some thoughts on why this system disappeared, but that's a bit beyond the scope of your question.

[FWIW, the system is the same in all large professional services firms]

It still (mostly) exists in the UK - my father's firm had performance shares, but the dispersion between high and average-performing partners was about a factor of 1.5. Conventional wisdom is that it failed in the US because over-performing partners would quit to found boutiques. No idea why the US and UK are different.

I think you copied-and-pasted the wrong link.

Sorry, repaired it. It's figure 1 I think at the bottom.

The key word is 'feel'.

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.

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?

No, it's really not. It's that word "feel" that gives it away.

I'm not a boomer, and I don't have a pension.

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!

Under the new rules, that's a boomer.

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?

If you manage to get a good mortgage in your 30s, you've found the pathway to being a boomer, sooner.

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.

You are over 50 years old. Gen X is Boomer. Get with the new hip lingo.

No, it's really not. It's that word "feel" that gives it away.

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 over 50 years old. Gen X is Boomer. Get with the new hip lingo.

You are a self-parody.

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.

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.

Your idea that we should have a world where only those who are on top at any given moment [in this specific instance, that's the old] should have anything is dystopian.

But we kind of have that world right now.

and do not somehow belong to the younger generation merely because they are younger

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.

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.

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 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.

I do not find this claim compelling.

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

In Zoomer parlance, the Tax system is Boomer-on-Boomer crime.

You are a self-parody.

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.

I just think that the pile of earnings I worked for when I was younger is my pile of earnings

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.

Your idea that we should have a world where only those who are on top at any given moment should have anything is dystopian.

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.

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.

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.

This is how gen Z and alpha actually talk.

No wonder they're poor.

I just think that the pile of earnings I worked for when I was younger is my pile of earnings

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You're basically a communist, you think there is some way that we could organize the economy to produce more abundance and progress.

This is a straw man. If anyone critiques the present United States/Western economic system, he must believe in some terrible 19th century egalitarian philosophy book.

The problem with this is that basically nobody who makes this argument is willing to let the fentanyl market come to full fruition. Or many other markets. But that's not communism apparently. Yet when I say I am tired of a bunch of junky markets, that's communism. So they are special-pleading to a severe extent.

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.

What are you talking about? In reality I am only allowed, with a ton of friction, to create a tax paying company that panders to the democratic market. If I create a business that actually crushes other institutions and takes, that's called a criminal enterprise in the vast majority of cases, and the commies come in and violently destroy you. We do not live under anarcho-capitalism.

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