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It's the basic 'flaw' of Democracy: Since the majority of the people are old, they will vote in the interest of old people. That's why the pension system will never be fixed.
The majority of people being old is a relatively modern problem. One could even argue that it is a problem specific to cultures that favor low or negative birthrates.
It's the basic 'flaw' of Democracy: Since the majority of the people are old, they will vote in the interest of old people. That's why the pension system will never be fixed.
With birth rates in free fall for last twenty years, what did we expect?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe a political conflicts are more complex than a guy 150 years ago thought.
I think you're demonstrating the reluctance to admit that class conflict is a real thing. There has been a class war going on for at least four decades in the US, and the lower classes are on the loosing side. All you have to do is look at growing wage gaps in that period. We can come up with all sorts of just-so stories, but the simple answer is that the rich have captured the US government, and it is being governed…
It's the basic 'flaw' of Democracy: Since the majority of the people are old, they will vote in the interest of old people. That's why the pension system will never be fixed.
The majority of people being old is a relatively modern problem. One could even argue that it is a problem specific to cultures that favor low or negative birthrates.
It's the basic 'flaw' of Democracy: Since the majority of the people are old, they will vote in the interest of old people. That's why the pension system will never be fixed.
The median age in America is about 40, so depending on how you define old the majority could go one way or the other.
The common thread is that these are generations that climbed the class ladder early on, when infrastructure was lacking and there were opportunities. They had many children, jobs were plentiful, and medical advances delayed death, which meant that upper-level positions never opened up and the older generation just stayed put.
The Boomer generation naturally worked hard when infrastructure was scarce, and they succeeded under harsh physical conditions, so they find it hard to understand the generations below them. Meanwhile, the younger generations are despairing over the fact that the class ladder has been pulled up. Success is a universal desire, after all.
The older generation was in a harsh environment, but they were seated in the front row of a growing pie. The subsequent generations have better consumer goods and education, but the entry price for core assets and status has gone up, making success much harder to achieve
At the core, the real issue is the need for wealth redistribution. But in that process, the people who failed to climb the Boomers' class ladder are left behind. And crucially, as societies modernize, people tend to have fewer children, which shifts voting power away from the younger generations, making the problem even worse. In other words, everyone knows the future needs to support the youth, but doing so would cut into their own pensions and make their old age harder. And since most people are unwilling to give up their vested interests, the situation becomes even more difficult.
It's the basic 'flaw' of Democracy: Since the majority of the people are old, they will vote in the interest of old people. That's why the pension system will never be fixed.
I'd suggest the main issue is that the world is so complicated that the younger voters just don't know what to organise and vote for. In the US in particular, they seem to basically be running an experiment every single election to try and figure out who they need to vote for to get some sane economic policy and stop getting involved in stupid wars. No success so far but you have to admire the process. The only people not getting the message are the people paid off to ignore it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_ag...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of those things are classes in the sense of the times the notion of class warfare was first pitched, and many of them cross classes. There's plenty of poor/impoverished boomers, blues, reds, city and country folk
I think that's exactly the grandparent's point. Those conflicts are all the pretexts - they believe that it's actually class war and the other labels are all used to avoid calling it by its name.
What OP meant was the income and wealth gaps are they only things they care about, not the only things that are real.
Most of the civilised world is becoming a gerontocracy. With birth rates in free fall for last twenty years, what did we expect?
Millennials received kick in their teeth when entering adulthood and around the time when was the moment for a last (or the first, finally) child. Real estate market had never been cheap either. Exactly overlaps with falling birthrates over the last twenty years.
Looking at other countries, "interestingly" Russian invasion of Ukraine basically wiped out childless millennials on both sides. Putin noticed that's the last chance to monetize the demographic opportunity and hopefully that was his last fart.