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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15688 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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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.

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.

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.

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 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'.

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