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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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