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It continues to be marvelously unbelievable how deeply dedicated the western liberal democracies are to ensuring that boomers have a comfortable and cushy final 20-30 years of life.
I have posted on here before how this has become my ultimate blackpill and has turned me into a single issue voter. Almost every single pressing issue we face is downstream of this boomer retirement idolatry.
Shall I go down the list?
Housing - if a boomer’s house value goes down by a single dollar it is a genocide.
Health care - if we don’t keep them alive for infinity years with free healthcare and infinity third world immigrants to wipe their asses Jesus will weep.
National debt/fiscal policy - obviously they deserve to have free money in their accounts every month, with zero means-testing. After all, they PAID INTO IT (I can’t actually blame them too much for this, it’s sold that way by the government, but social security insurance was always a tax in all but name)
I hope the connection to France and these protests is clear. Would these third world behaviors and riots still occur? Maybe. But would those people even be here in the first place if we didn’t have the need for infinity dollars to boomer retirement and housing values? Infinity health care for them? Would the productive young people still feel demoralized about the future if they could afford a house and their government actually gave a shit about their future beyond just extracting and directing their productive capacity to ensuring old people get to enjoy 30 years of retirement (really it’s limitless if you can live long enough. Enjoy your free money and free healthcare and free African ass wiper).
To what extend is Boomerism/Boomerdom even a thing in France, I wonder. They never had a Baby Boom, nor an economic miracle, I think.
Aside from the actual baby boom and economic growth that others have pointed out did happen, I'll posit (with scant evidence) that there's a distinctly French quality to boomerism: I remember reading Robert Parker's biography and thinking that it was contact with french culture (cuisine and wine) that drove the wealthy but generally thrifty Americans into a more hedonistic path. There's even an old German saying: "Wie gott in Frankreich Leben"
It's "Wie Gott in Frankreich leben".
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France did have a baby boom and they had an even larger 1945-75 economic miracle than the US did (partially driven by catch-up growth from a lower pre-war base). The French call it the Trente Glorieuses.
The 1968 riots and the resulting far-left mythos of students as the revolutionary vanguard was an international phenomenon (though not global - there were no riots in the UK for example) - France was worse hit than the US, and the French 1968 riots really were student-led. Silent Generation professors like Foucault who supported the riots became major figures in gloabl Boomer leftism, and a bunch of American boomer lefties did summer or year-abroad programmes at the Sorbonne. So I think there is a connection between French and American boomerism, at least as regards the self-indulgent lefty politics and sexual deviance.
I don't know to what extent the non-leftist aspects of Boomerism are the same in France and America.
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France definitely had a big, visible baby boom.
Plus a postwar economic boom that matched the UK and Germany and kept up with the US until 2008.
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Hyperbole aside, I am skeptical of the claim that it's the interest of boomers which are driving housing policy. To be sure, those boomers who bought houses between 1968 and 1995 have seen tremendous appreciation in home values, but there are other possible reasons for this increase other than legislative decisions aimed at serving the boomers.
A more likely scenario, in my opinion, is the urbanization trend which has been going on for quite some time now. For work, school, and cultural opportunities, lots of people want to live near big cities like New York, which arguably drives up the price of housing. An interesting example of this occurs in Israel, which has a much smaller overall percentage of baby boomers than the United States or Western Europe. And a government which is very much pro-growth. Nevertheless, it's crazy expensive to buy a house or apartment in Tel Aviv. And why not? That's where the fancy jobs are; that's where the nice restaurants are; etc.
So I guess I would ask for your evidence/argument for why housing shortages are due to legislative prioritization of baby boomers and not other causes such as urbanization.
This was an issue 20 years ago, well before the first wave of boomers became eligible for Medicare. Of course, if your argument is simply that setting up the entire Social Security system created an entitlement program with a devoted constituency, making it difficult to cut even when fiscally advisable, then of course I would have to agree. At the moment it's the boomers who are benefiting but pretty soon Generation X will start becoming eligible for Medicare. And I am pretty confident that Generation X will be pretty adamant about receiving those benefits.
I think there is means-testing in the sense that the government imposes a progressive tax on social security benefits. But anyway, as with Medicare this doesn't really seem like a Boomer problem so much as a systemic issue which resulted from decisions made back during the 1930s.
By the way, according to the AI, the annual program cost of Social Security is $1.609 billion while the annual receipts are $1.449 billion. Which is not ideal but it doesn't seem like a massive crisis waiting to happen. Just speculating, but I would guess the gap could be largely fixed through a modest increase in retirement age and higher taxes for wealthy recipients of Social Security.
That being said, given the rapid progress in AI, I doubt it's really necessary to increase retirement ages. Rather, I think that the government should get ready to start reducing the retirement age. Because the best case scenario with AI is that there is mass long-term unemployment. Which in practice means that the government needs to find a way to get money to people, and the obvious way to do this is to make use of the social welfare programs which are already set up: Social Security; Unemployment Insurance; etc.
The housing thing is part of how Anglo countries have generated generational wealth. Homes in America have always been seen as an investment and thus it’s impossible, politically, to let housing prices fall, or even slow the growth of housing prices.
This is the YIMBY/New Urbanist/Pod People story. But it isn't true. The Case-Shiller index, adjusted for inflation shows large drops in real housing prices. In fact, housing has been flat (though at a very high level) in real terms for a couple of years.
Generational wealth, in terms of inheritance, isn't much of an issue in America. We live too long. If your parents die in their 70s, you probably get your inheritance in your 50s. Whoopty-doo; by that time either you're already well-established (and your kids, if any, probably are too) or it's too damned late. So housing wealth is either borrowed to provide a cushier retirement, or borrowed to burn in the furnace of the health care/nursing care system.
This series tells the real story, I think. Single-family housing completions crashed after the bubble. The reason for the crash is obvious, but they never recovered. Why not? Well, this gets into more speculation, but my read is that the New Urbanist anti-sprawl pod people were able to use the crash to seize control of housing policy. And they preferred multifamily. However, most actual buyers don't, which limited that; you will notice that when people post about how expensive housing is over on the birdsite, they nearly always use a single-family detached home as a benchmark. Population, in terms of households, of course, kept growing. More demand, less supply... what do you expect? And COVID made things worse by making multifamily even LESS desirable.
Good news is there's a medium-term solution. All those empty-nester boomers are going to be leaving their homes, one way or another. And Z and Alpha are smaller generations. I don't know if the (mostly Millennial) anti-sprawl people will ever lose their grip on new housing policy, but I expect there will be a lot of renovation to provide single-family housing for Z and Alpha and the following generations.
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I'm skeptical about this policy you describe, which I will refer to as PHP ("protect housing prices").
How does the PHP policy work in practice? For example, there are parts of the US which are very pro-development. Texas comes to mind. There are also places which are very hostile to development, for example California. There are also areas where housing is very inexpensive, for example the area around Rochester and Buffalo, New York.
How is PHP implemented in all of these different areas?
Also, how do you explain housing prices in non-Anglo countries? I mentioned above that it's crazy expensive to get a house or apartment in or near Tel Aviv. I'm pretty sure the same is true of Rome or Oslo or Stockholm. Is every developed country implementing PHP?
Tokyo (and Japan more generally) doesn't implement PHP. Houses are culturally considered depreciating goods that are worthless after a few decades, and zoning is extremely liberal compared to all other developed countries.
To some extent you're correct, part of the problem is just urbanization, and inevitably lots of money chasing physically limited space drives up the price. The best areas of Tokyo are still extraordinarily expensive despite every pro-development policy possible and significant amounts of Japanese housing would be considered unlivable by American standards.
Despite this, there's clearly a massive difference in house price growth between Anglo PHP major metros where prices have been exploding, and Tokyo where growth has been much more sedate in comparison; even within the States, the difference between Austin and SF is palpable.
Assuming you are correct, it seems to me that's more of an accident of Japanese culture than a conscious plan to prop up (or not prop up) housing prices.
Yeah, from what I understand there is extremely inexpensive housing available in Japan in various remote areas.
Anyway, since you bring up liberal zoning in Japan, I think it's worth noting that Houston is pretty well known for having lax zoning compared to other large cities. And indeed from what I understand, there's much less of a housing crunch in Houston than there is in other big cities in the US, for example San Francisco or New York. I just having a hard time believing that the difference between these areas is the degree to which government has been captured by greedy baby boomers.
Rather, I think that Houston has plenty of land and more of an individualistic libertarian mentality among people of all age ranges. While in the New York City area, land is much scarcer and the mentality is more statist and authoritarian.
Well, the point is that culture shapes economics and politics.
Anglo people (and many other cultures e.g Chinese) view housing as an investment and hence over time laws are shaped around this preference e.g strict zoning laws to keep property values high and the population happy. To the extent that boomers are at fault it's because most are homeowners, but millennial homeowners have all the same impulses.
Japanese people don't value housing as an investment as much, and so the economy and politics are less captured by the interests of homeowners. It's not to say that this is perfect e.g Chinese investment into Tokyo has become a hot topic lately, and urban land is fundamentally scarce, but it's clearly a lot better than whatever Anglo society is doing in this regard.
I disagree that this is a cultural issue. There is a very very good reason people don't like buying houses > 30 years old: they're considerably less earthquake-proof + more likely to have wooden structural elements that may be damaged from earthquakes + humidity.
That to my mind is a temporary factor. It's entirely possible that the current culture shifts considerably now that anti-earthquake tech has got good enough that you can broadly assume buildings are going to hang around for 100 years.
You could well be right, but when and how much these things shift is of course impossible to predict.
The obvious examples that comes to mind are pork taboos; the cultural taboo against eating pork in many cultures and religions has lasted well beyond the actual danger of eating pork.
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Well what's your evidence for this link? Do agree that zoning laws are rather lax in Houston? And if so, are you saying that the culture on the Texas gulf coast doesn't see housing as an investment?
I guess I'd say that like most things it's a spectrum rather than a binary; I know little about Texan culture (or the Hispanic culture that Texas is increasingly intertwining with) but I'd guess it's probably between SF and Japan in terms of treating housing as an investment, and thus the level of zoning also lies between SF and Japan in rigidity.
For sure I agree that high housing prices are poly-casual and not solely because of boomers or whatever; e.g geography, Houston can sprawl in all directions while the most expensive places in the world like SF and Hong Kong have to deal with mountains and ocean.
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Nobody derives from first principles 'ok I want a cushy retirement - so obviously the natural thing to do is to import a bunch of foreigners, many of which hate my country and burn things down and are super expensive because they don't like working and aren't very productive'... That's not a natural thought.
They don't produce wealth! How could they? The banlieues are not industrial. America's poor migrant street vendors are not the powerhouse of the US economy. America doesn't depend on Haitian workers in the meat packaging plants for US prosperity. Uber drivers and food delivery e-bike workers are not very productive, they cannot produce a surplus for boomers to skim off.
If the boomers were purely greedy, they'd prefer simpler policies like 'to make more wealth for my retirement, I'll pursue mechanization of the economy, robots and AI' or 'to ensure my house is expensive, let's restrict housing production.' There is an argument for importing people to raise house prices sure but 5 Uber drivers aren't going to raise house prices as much as one lawyer or engineer. The Uber drivers aren't buying detached houses in good areas, are they? It's technology, high end services, advanced manufacturing and finance that provides wealth that can be redistributed to the old.
Boomers might believe that mass immigration is needed to sustain their lifestyle but boomers are also relatively anti-immigration now in their old age. They voted for Brexit and Trump. Some of my boomer friends are unsettled by the demographic transformation they've seen, all the Chinese taking over certain suburbs.
Some boomers have an ideological commitment to multiculturalism and more accept the television's arguments that migration is needed to provide labour to care for them in their old age. The fundamental issue is ideological, not economic. There's never been a real economic case for mass immigration from poor countries, that doesn't make sense. The migrants get old and want pensions too! If it was just about needing labour for retirement homes, why not just import labour solely for retirement homes? No chain migration, no uber drivers or refugees pretending to be gay, just pick out care workers.
There's a teleological, ideological project of demographic transformation that then tries to justify itself economically. That's the real issue. It's like how in Britain they say 'oh mass migration is justified because of the Empire' but in Ireland they go 'Irish migrated out overseas, Ireland has always been a nation of immigrants' - these are just justifications produced afterwards.
Almost nobody who works in retirement homes, wipes old peoples asses etc is a born American citizen. If you’ve ever had elderly relatives in these places you’d know this. The reason we can’t have an American kafala system that sends the workers home after they’ve done 5 or 10 years is the fault of progressives, and birthright citizenship of course for their children. But it’s all connected. Migrants are let in for broadly economic reasons (not in every case, eg Syrians and Somalis in Sweden, but Pakistanis in England, Turks in Germany’s and most Central Americans in the US arrived to fill labor market needs) and allowed to settle for ideological ones. In the 80s, Germany tried to mass deport the Turks but concluded it would risk social unrest and was too expensive, so eventually they just gave them citizenship.
Here in the Midwest it's mostly American blacks as well as some white underclassers. Not that this detracts from your point, of course. I think it's more that if your area has an underclass, it can work in the nursing homes; if your area is too prosperous to have its own underclass, one will be imported to work in its nursing homes.
New York has a large black population but working class African Americans tend to be more likely to work in retail, food service, the DMV and government jobs, some childcare, clerical and administrative work etc.
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My mother spent her last months in a nursing home in 2011-12, and all the non-managerial, non-professional employees were recent immigrants from West Africa. Makes me wonder what the most recent year was that a care home in the DC suburbs had an all-white workforce. If ever.
I mean DC has been heavily black since 1800, maybe before, and certainly since reconstruction, so probably never.
DC, yes, but the Virginia suburbs were 95% white from 1946 through 1980 or so.
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Over the years, I've met a lot of people who were in the United States on visas for health care workers -- generally they were women from the Philippines or the West Indies. I would be interested to know (1) how many people end up staying in the US as a result of these immigration programs; and (2) how unruly these people and their descendants are. My sense is that the bringing in of healthcare workers is a very small part of the United States' third-world immigration problem, both in relative numbers and in social problems caused.
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There's an arctotherium essay on this: Mortmain Migration https://substack.com/home/post/p-215548598
Sure, there is the example of Pakistani migrants being brought in for labour in UK textile mills that you're bringing up... But it didn't work, UK textiles went downhill anyway. Bringing in the Mirpuris didn't make the UK richer or more productive, it didn't even save the industry it was supposed to save. The only way to get richer on a national level is to improve industrial organization or to mechanize.
There's no such thing as a labour market need, only an employer desire to reduce labour costs. If wages are high, that's not necessarily a bad thing for a country. It would help sustain the middle class.
I guess it depends on how one defines economic reasons.
I don’t disagree, I’m not saying the action was successful. Clearly the studies that exist on lifetime contribution show huge net losses for third world immigration. But that wasn’t the question when they were imported, or are imported, which was ‘we need cheap care workers’ or ‘we need cheap factory laborers’.
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To build on this, the term 'labour shortage' is basically an impossibility. Workers consume, thereby increasing demand for goods and services, which increases demand for labour. Filling labour shortages creates labour shortages. The term is basically just an excuse by politicians and business leaders who want to suppress wages in a particular sector (for the UK, the clear example is the massive influx of 'care workers' during the Boriswave).
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Is it though? That seems to make perfect sense: they're democracies.
What is strange is that rioting is typically not the activity of the old. So young people apparently riot when benefits to old people they were never gonna see themselves are cut. That's a psychological puzzle
I wouldn't call it that much of a puzzle. Young people accurately assess that they too will be old one day, and that receiving benefits at that time would be pleasant.
Very few are clear headed about gibs
I pay into my countries retirement plan, I have been for some time. I would be pretty annoyed if I had to pay the same amount or more for worse benefits. I anticipate this to happen, so I am in fact annoyed now. But the median person does not think this far ahead.
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It's not that puzzling. Young conservatives pride themselves on basic moral superiority, the old have been established as morally superior to the young, so if you threaten the privilege of the old you are Literally Hitler and must die. (This also works for female privilege.)
It's an in-built instinctual response- I don't blame the young conservative, they were born that way. They're also going to destroy the country because those instincts are wrong, but at least they can say they killed and died for the right side of history, which is what matters to a six-foundation mind.
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