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The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

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Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#91

Post by nerdponx »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #41
TheFattestNinja wrote: post #16

The 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…

Most millennial parents are not even in old age yet and are statistically more affluent than they are. I don’t think your analysis is correct. Plus my own experience as someone born in 1989 doesn’t really mesh with yours. Most of my friends are both what I would call more frugal and more down to earth than their parents were because they had to live through multiple economic crashes. There is little nihilism but peop…

> Most of my friends are both what I would call more frugal and more down to earth than their parents were because they had to live through multiple economic crashes.

Is it because they had to live through multiple economic crashes, or because their own prospects are worse than those of their parents and they know it?

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#92

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

TheFattestNinja wrote: post #16

The 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…

I was a born in 1987, and I think I'm onto something similar.

Older folk believe more deeply in the legitimacy of financial abstractions because they were adults before the cracks started to show. They have a stake in continuing the fiction that hard work == rewards.

Younger folk see the abstractions as a farce that we don't really believe but that we bring out whenever we feel the need to justify an injustice that we're participating in--particularly injustices that give young people the short end of the stick.

Poorer folk are too desperate to entertain the notion that the system is fundamentally unsound. They need status in that system badly enough that anything else is just a distraction.

But if you're in the middle, you see the power that comes with a shared belief in the system and you want to live in that again, but you also see that it will never be legitimate until certain critical bugs in its design are fixed.

Then you look around and see that the people in positions to fix those bugs are exploiting them instead.

You want to build something meaningful on the ashes, to fix the critical bugs and have a just system that everyone can believe in, but it's not ashes. It's just kind of carrying on... on fire.

And you realize that you might be quite old before fixing those bugs becomes a priority. That is, unless something happens to it first. So at least for me, nihilism is a compromise. I say that it's meaningless because that's easier than explaining that it's an enemy.

Nobody who is counting the days until they retire wants to hear me explain why I want to show up at the grocery store with a dollar and have the kid tell me:

> Sorry sir, we're not doing that anymore

So I back off on the rooting-for-the apocalypse mindset and let people think that it's just nihilism.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#93

Post by luckylion »

ajmurmann wrote: post #82
glogla wrote: post #45

Earlier 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…

I'm not familiar with China or Japan, but in Germany, most people don't have large amounts of savings they could withdraw from. The middle class might own the house or flat they live in, for the upper middle class that house doesn't need 100k€ to be brought to up date, but most people don't expect large inheritances.

For German employees, the public pension system is their wealth, and that's not based on stocks etc, but on the next generations contribution + some tax subsidies. Millenials and Zoomers will have fun shouldering that.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#94

Post by danuker »

ajmurmann wrote: post #89
danuker wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 central…

> education

I argue it can be automated. I have learned more from ML MOOCs than from my Romanian college.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#95

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Devasta wrote: post #42

Not discussing climate change seems to me to be a big omission. I sometimes wonder if I will have enough to retire on; a teenager today won't have those concerns, as the best they can hope for is that they don't become climate refugees. Why plan long term in such a scenario?

I think this is a good example of the kind of pervasive nihilism the OP is describing. Climate change is bad, and "climate refugees" describes a real phenomenon that's likely to happen, but the idea of a global apocalypse where most people have no long-term future is beyond even the worst case projections in the literature. Why are people so attracted to this untrue idea?

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#96

Post by selectodude »

nerdponx wrote: post #79
college_physics wrote: post #63

Financial 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. I don't think it's a given that a lethal war adds real value when you incorporate the opportunity cost of not having the war. It's been argued that WWII is what ended the Great Depression, but I think that's partly due to the somewhat unique economic circumstances at the time, an…

WW2 didn't end the Great Depression, borrowing and spending huge percentages of GDP. From 1941 to 1946, the US borrowed 90 percent of GDP and injected it into the economy. The war was a catalyst, but unfreezing the economy with stimulus is what ended the Great Depression.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#97

Post by kiliantics »

brutusborn wrote: post #56
Devasta wrote: post #42

Not discussing climate change seems to me to be a big omission. I sometimes wonder if I will have enough to retire on; a teenager today won't have those concerns, as the best they can hope for is that they don't become climate refugees. Why plan long term in such a scenario?

It’s because people have wide beliefs of how climate change will affect them. I doubt rich countries will notice much difference until the end of the century. Like most issues, the poor of the world are the ones who will suffer the soonest and the greatest.

people in rich countries depend an awful lot on people in poor countries making stuff for them and keeping them rich

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#98

Post by xyzelement »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #77
glogla wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such an evil thing to say. You got lucky. Telling people who were not that its their own fault for not trying is just such horrible thing to say. How can people have so little empathy, I will never understand.

Hey, it could just be a troll! Or someone with nonhuman morality! Consider the dubious truthiness of "every house that comes up on the market is immediately snatched up by some 30/40 year old who is buying a home for his growing family", but then consider that the corporate person "Blackrock, Inc." is indeed 35 years old.

I keep hearing about black rock but that's not who's moving into unneighborhood.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#99

Post by Tokkemon »

TheFattestNinja wrote: post #16

The 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…

We also lived through 9/11 at a very formative time, which didn't help matters.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#100

Post by germinalphrase »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #95
Devasta wrote: post #42

Not discussing climate change seems to me to be a big omission. I sometimes wonder if I will have enough to retire on; a teenager today won't have those concerns, as the best they can hope for is that they don't become climate refugees. Why plan long term in such a scenario?

I think this is a good example of the kind of pervasive nihilism the OP is describing. Climate change is bad, and "climate refugees" describes a real phenomenon that's likely to happen, but the idea of a global apocalypse where most people have no long-term future is beyond even the worst case projections in the literature. Why are people so attracted to this untrue idea?

Because our media (which is increasingly ubiquitous) is saturated with extreme narratives about everything, so people adopt extreme beliefs about current and potential reality.
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