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The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis

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Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis

#181

Post by greedo »

lenerdenator wrote: post #70
toast0 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect. Social Security as an insurance product is fiction, but playing into the fiction helps it survive to do the thing it was built for: keep the elderly out of the poor houses / off the street. Payout rates drop at higher income, and portions of the payout are taxable at higher income, so it's not like it's completely income/wealth blind.

> They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect. That's just it: they're not old. Not in the way a 65-year-old was old in the 1930s. If they had to farm, mine, log, or work in a factory, yeah, they'd be too old to work. That was most of the work available when OASDI was created, and that's what it's for: to keep you from becoming destitute as an elderly person when there is no abil…

Bollocks. We complain because jobs are being occupied by the oldsters, and now you want them to stay in their jobs even longer?

If the couple you're pillorying is so wealthy, then most of their Social Security is being taxed, and they're paying higher Medicare premiums as well. And their house? As they get older and require nursing care, they'll end up liquidating it (or Medicaid will take it).

The average retiree receives around $25k per year in SS benefits. That's not a ton of money. In most studies, retirees receive less in benefits than if they had been able to invest their Social Security contributions. But that's fine, SS really has two main goals: a forced savings towards retirement, and as a social safety net for those who would otherwise be impoverished in old age.

Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis

#182

Post by lenerdenator »

WalterBright wrote: post #30
lenerdenator wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've had decades to save up the money that allows them to do the things alongside work. They also came up in a time and place that allowed them to build social relationships outside of work. Many Gen Xers and Millennials just... don't have that kind of personal time. I know several people in my circle of friends who don't want to do anything after work because they're exhausted. Bills gotta be paid, and there's mo…

I'm curious how you figure that pressure to increase profits has increased?

The US birth rate began to drop in the 1960s. [0] At the time we were a more self-contained economy.

Since then, there are fewer births per capita, and we've opened up global markets for labor and resources.

If you have fewer people aging into markets for goods and services as time goes on, you have to monetize them more intensely in order to maintain revenues. At the same time, other markets (China, India, etc.) offered relatively-high GDP growth (and thus return on investment) compared to the US [1], since their labor costs are lower and the needs of then-developing nations were cheaper to meet.

The result is a worker that's expected to produce more profit to compete with those elsewhere, while also being more intensely monetized through their consumption habits. If they can't produce enough profit to compete with workers elsewhere, they just don't have the income necessary to be more intensely monetized, so their standard of living drops.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/datasets/global-metrics/countrie...

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?name_...

Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis

#183

Post by greedo »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #74
toast0 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They paid for Old Age Insurance, and they reached old age, so they get to collect. Social Security as an insurance product is fiction, but playing into the fiction helps it survive to do the thing it was built for: keep the elderly out of the poor houses / off the street. Payout rates drop at higher income, and portions of the payout are taxable at higher income, so it's not like it's completely income/wealth blind.

They get much more out of it than they paid in. The younger cohorts get much less out of it than they paid in. Thats not insurance, that’s generational fraud. It’s a ponzi scheme.

That's highly dependent upon the individual and their earning status, but the majority of people receive less than they contribute.

https://freefacts.org/resources/how-much-money-will-i-pay-in...

Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis

#184

Post by throw-234 »

jmull wrote: post #180
alphawhisky wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unrest will just harden the people who see your cause as unjust against it. That will be a strong majority of people, so will go no where. I think you're wrong here. Most people are pretty fed up right now.

If most people were fed up I think you'd see it in voting patterns. Instead, a substantial fraction of the population don't care enough to vote one way or the other. Those that do vote have been pushing us toward the system we have now. It's going to be hard to sell policies that disenfranchise old people... There are a lot of people who don't want to be penniless and homeless with a diminished capacity to work. That…

>It's going to be hard to sell policies that disenfranchise old people...

Not at all. Remember how before he got dementia the president ran on an antidementia platform?

> That's why I think this is all a scam. We are, almost all of us, old people or people who hope to get old. This is an effort to get us all upset enough at each other that we don't stop to realize we're fighting ourselves.

Not at all, it's just a fact that old people have arranged things so that old/young is simply more important than left/right. Old people are absolutely committed to protecting and boosting the stock/real-estate markets that young people are locked out of. The market is not the economy.. except that actually for old people with assets, it basically is. Youth may have left/right preferences, but establishment Left/Right are really just Old, and both have clear and stable intent to inflict economic violence on everyone else.

> It you want to unravel the scam, follow the money.

You're suggesting I'm a shil? The money trail is simple.. people don't have much and things are getting worse. Who's in charge now? Who was in charge before that? And who was in charge before that? Who paid off the people in charge? Who continuously benefits and who suffers?

Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis

#185

Post by coldpie »

mindslight wrote: post #175
coldpie wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. With so many high profile cases of people suffering from some form of dementia being elected to important offices (McConnell and Feinstein; Biden and Trump), it's clear that the intended electoral mechanism isn't working to replace people who are not fit to serve. Name recognition & incumbency advantage are just too strong to allow the right thing to happen. The version of the fix that I like is,…

Characterizing the problem as the electoral mechanism, wouldn't it make sense to push for better voting systems that don't empower the two party duopoly (eg Ranked Pairs) ? It feels that while gerontocracy is a valid critique to illustrate the problem, it doesn't fully capture why our processes actively choose such bad leaders. Rather it kind of papers over the problem assuming that mental faculties mean good policie…

I don't think a form of RCV would have a terribly significant impact on name recognition and incumbent advantage, which I think the are the main drivers of why we keep reelecting people who are obviously no longer competent. Feinstein's walking corpse being constantly reelected despite California having jungle primaries with many viable alternatives is a good example of how an alternate voting method does not solve this problem. It also wouldn't fix appointed positions, especially judges or filling vacated seats.

There are other great reasons to change our voting system! I just think it doesn't solve this exact problem, while an upper age limit does.

Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis

#186

Post by mindslight »

coldpie wrote: post #185
mindslight wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Characterizing the problem as the electoral mechanism, wouldn't it make sense to push for better voting systems that don't empower the two party duopoly (eg Ranked Pairs) ? It feels that while gerontocracy is a valid critique to illustrate the problem, it doesn't fully capture why our processes actively choose such bad leaders. Rather it kind of papers over the problem assuming that mental faculties mean good policie…

I don't think a form of RCV would have a terribly significant impact on name recognition and incumbent advantage, which I think the are the main drivers of why we keep reelecting people who are obviously no longer competent. Feinstein's walking corpse being constantly reelected despite California having jungle primaries with many viable alternatives is a good example of how an alternate voting method does not solve t…

I'd say that a large part of incumbent advantage is directly related to plurality. I don't know the specific details of the elections that have kept Feinstein propped up. But I'd think the primary would revolve around a bunch of challengers that are each really liked by some people, but really hated by others - so Feinstein ends up getting the defensive vote from people who don't want change towards the popular challengers. Then the general election has the same effect, plus all the people that already "made their choice" in the primary.

Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis

#187

Post by Terr_ »

tsunamifury wrote: post #161
WalterBright wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are paid according to the value they produce - equity has nothing to do with it.

This is painfully naive. People are paid by the value they produce minus the maximum extraction ownership can get.

A milder version would be: People are paid based on the marginal cost of replacing them. But still, either of those is a far cry from claiming it's "the value they create".

It's not hard to show either. Imagine you're on an island and have been gored in the stomach by a wild animal, and a skilled surgeon can save your life. Most people would instantly agree that continued existence is of immense "value".

However after making that decision, you discover that you're on an island where almost everyone is a surgeon and the going-rate is much lower than you expected. Are we supposed to believe that your new knowledge somehow reaches backwards in time and retroactively changes the "value" of Not Dying? No, that'd be crazy. Valuation is never the same as price-point.

Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis

#188

Post by mylifeandtimes »

r14c wrote: post #26
WalterBright wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Could you expand on that? My concept of fairness is pretty congruent with equity.

two ways to take it:

equity as written. Ownership. Thus fairness means all have a share in responsibility for success and rewards for that success. Yeah, I agree. Note that I include responsibility as the core part of ownership. I think our society could have more of that.

equality (assumes you made a typo). Do you mean equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? These require different things to remedy.

Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis

#189

Post by mylifeandtimes »

WalterBright wrote: post #155
estimator7292 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it did. Billionaires are a relatively new thing, but successful businesses were led by young people across the entirety of human history. And you should not praise someone for simply being a billionaire. That's a bad thing to be.

> Yes it did. I don't recall any. I remember when people were all agog when Gates became one. > successful businesses were led by young people across the entirety of human history. Sure. But billionaires? > And you should not praise someone for simply being a billionaire. If they're self-made, they earned the praise. > That's a bad thing to be. Creating value is not a bad thing. Being a self-made billionaire means th…

> Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value.

two of the people on the list did it via online gambling. Which is by definition a zero-sum game. No value was created.

Re: The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis

#190

Post by rayiner »

mindslight wrote: post #177
rayiner wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There is too much to unpack here. Perhaps you'd like to make your point in something other than identity politics anecdotes and personal attacks? If you don't like my phrasing of "boot on their necks", feel free to substitute your own when constructively responding to the point. The frustrations that have led to Trumpism are certainly palpable and understandable, so don't feign like I'm using hyperbolic language out…

[flagged]
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