No matter what possessions you have, they can be taken away from you. What can't be taken away from you are your skills and knowledge - I've spent my life focusing on those, and it's served me well.
The Scandal of Financial Nihilism
81–90 of 165 posts
Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
"we saw our beloved parents struggle in old age with health and finance", This would vary from country to country but absolutely isn't the case in the UK. Most millennial's parents didn't have their income crippled by rent (with little chance of buying) and student loans (tuition fees only came in in the late 90s), and lived most their lives with a public health service that wasn't being aggressively gutted. If anyth…
Sure. Watching the world go to shit, watch everyone be worse off than their parents, watching billionaires play games with peoples lives and seeing everything getting worse while the markets are soaring ... of course that would make you think all the markets and money are not real and the world should burn. The COVID was a cherry on top, "we are in this all together," says the dude on his yacht, while you lost your j…
"when all the millennials get no inheritance, because the healthcare costs for their parents will basically eat everything"
I wonder if this one will be even worse in the US. Much of the market going up and up is because index funds have become the default retirement vehicle. So every month billions flow into the market no matter what. What will happen when the largest generation stops contributing and instead starts withdrawing. If you are right and many elderly will deplete their funds entirely, the value of everyone's retirement investments will drop dramatically in the process. How much of retirement nest eggs in places with terminal demographics like China, Germany and Japan are in international stocks as well? IMO demographics are gonna fuck over millennials yet again. I hope I'll be wrong.
Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism
#83Financial nihilism is a subset and derives from economic nihilism. The latter is basically the entirely agnostic stance of classical economic thinking that aims to decouple from the troublesome subjectivity of morality. Infamously, a lethal war adds to economic activity as people are busy building and selling weapons of destruction, thereby adding to GDP. But financial nihilism is far more potent than its parent beca…
> Infamously, a lethal war adds to economic activity as people are busy building and selling weapons of destruction, thereby adding to GDP.
Economic statistics for Russia and Ukraine would like a word.
Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of people our age feel like the world is bad and unjust and destroying current civilization through revolution will result in a just and good society. These people are idiots who aren’t aware of the death and destruction this will cause and things will likely be much worse after.
Either that, or they're history buffs. What precipitates the redistribution of wealth, historically? Some kind of gigantic disaster -- war, famine, plague, social collapse. There's never been a time when the oligarchs/monarchy/landed-gentry just calmly gave up their temporal power after listening to reasoned socioeconomic arguments. It's always been some sort of calamity. You might find that those idiots are indeed a…
> Either that, or they're history buffs. What precipitates the redistribution of wealth, historically? Some kind of gigantic disaster -- war, famine, plague, social collapse.
You're mistaking redistribution for destruction...
Sure, things are technically more equal if everyone becomes homeless. But there wasn't really a redistribution...
Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism
#85The flip side of this is sitting on a pretty good stable income, not playing high risk investment games, and needing to accept that your social class and wealth is more or less locked in for at least 20 years. Linear gains don’t move the needle. Savings do nothing once you have a house. It’s not a bad place to be, but it is a static one. If you have the ability to appreciate your circumstances it’s even a good one. B…
I wish we had the stability you talk about. Here, not in the US but in a kafkaesque hellhole, our political class decided that the job market should be flexible: that meant that finding a stable employment contract is a farce: instead of having a probationary period you have contracts for 6 months of fulltime work written of as internship and payed as such, and you can be sure the contract will not be renovated so yo…
Unable to afford anything other than distractions is a rather moving quote.
Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
"we saw our beloved parents struggle in old age with health and finance", This would vary from country to country but absolutely isn't the case in the UK. Most millennial's parents didn't have their income crippled by rent (with little chance of buying) and student loans (tuition fees only came in in the late 90s), and lived most their lives with a public health service that wasn't being aggressively gutted. If anyth…
> We were told all these bailouts and austerity and artificially low interest rates were the way to solve things and while stock markets bounced back it never felt like a genuine recovery. Maybe it's because I'm not in the US, but do people actually feel this way? Sure, the GFC was a big deal at the time, but as a millennial, who grew up upper-middle-class and is now in his mid-thirties, I don't feel it has impacted…
Absolutely. I felt this way at the time and I never stopped feeling this way. 2008-2020 always felt to me like an economic recovery for some (homeowners, investors, white-collar and tech workers), but stagnation or regression for others.
> I don't feel it has impacted me much at all.
Your post exemplifies exactly the problem I am describing.
Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
"we saw our beloved parents struggle in old age with health and finance", This would vary from country to country but absolutely isn't the case in the UK. Most millennial's parents didn't have their income crippled by rent (with little chance of buying) and student loans (tuition fees only came in in the late 90s), and lived most their lives with a public health service that wasn't being aggressively gutted. If anyth…
> We were told all these bailouts and austerity and artificially low interest rates were the way to solve things and while stock markets bounced back it never felt like a genuine recovery. Maybe it's because I'm not in the US, but do people actually feel this way? Sure, the GFC was a big deal at the time, but as a millennial, who grew up upper-middle-class and is now in his mid-thirties, I don't feel it has impacted…
Below you, everyone felt it and felt it hard, everywhere.
Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism
#88The post is kind of all over the place, more like an internal reflection than a normal message to others, but it does resonate with me on one point specifically: I am an "official" millennial, born 1989. One thing I have noticed (in an anectodical, personal and subjective way) is that my age bracket, especially those I would consider higher on an intelligence/success curve, appear to be so much more closet-nihilist t…
Agreed with your take on nihilism. But gen Z is 10x moreso. On average they are so Jaded. Theyve seen everything shocking under the sun (woman fucking horse? Check. Nun eating shit out of a priests ass. Sure. Eels in a vagina. Yep. Man beheaded by terrorists. Uh huh). And then with this over exposure to all the worst the world has to offer comes a sort of paradoxical closed mindedness. Where everything is "been there done that, ur idea sucks moving on."
So the result is this strange combination of extreme worldlyness and also naivete.
Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
It as always like that, so it doesn’t explain why more people want to see the world burn now.
In the 60s you could buy a median home with 2.1x the median income. In 2019, the ratio is 3.5x. https://themreport.com/news/data/02-02-2021/pressing-housing...
I think this here is the key. Automation (not globalisation) has removed many entry level and low so jobs. At the same time we have artificial scarcity through regulations in the housing market to keep neighborhood character and see the cost of required services that cannot be automated easily like health care and education go up and up. Instead of increasing wealth redistribution to compensate for the wealth centralization from automation, we reduce mechanisms that transfer wealth to supposedly cut cost and because regulation is local but capital is global.
Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. Watching the world go to shit, watch everyone be worse off than their parents, watching billionaires play games with peoples lives and seeing everything getting worse while the markets are soaring ... of course that would make you think all the markets and money are not real and the world should burn. The COVID was a cherry on top, "we are in this all together," says the dude on his yacht, while you lost your j…
"when all the millennials get no inheritance, because the healthcare costs for their parents will basically eat everything" I wonder if this one will be even worse in the US. Much of the market going up and up is because index funds have become the default retirement vehicle. So every month billions flow into the market no matter what. What will happen when the largest generation stops contributing and instead starts…
Younger generations are offsetting this with their own retirement savings.
I've seen it argued that millennials are under-saving compared to their parents, but I remember seeing some data recently that contradicted this assertion. I would not be surprised if it were less evenly-distributed across the economy than prior generations.
I don't think we are going to see net outflow from the stock market, maybe just a decrease in inflow.
However I do think "worker shortages" will continue to grow as older people retire from undesirable jobs and aren't replaced by younger people, pushing up wages outside of white-collar and tech jobs and thereby leading to more inflation. I think this is a good thing in the long term and a price adjustment that has been a long time coming, but it needs to be managed properly or things could get really ugly.