On the divorce thing it seems weird not to mention the massive legal changes that happened in that period that let people divorce who couldn't previously. Which released a lot of people from unhappy, abusive or estranged marriages that still existed on paper, none of which are signs of people having great relationships. Reported satisfaction within marriage has gone up
I think that's what he was getting at when he talked about the transition from marrying your high school sweetheart and staying together "for the kids" no matter how miserable you are, to marrying for compatibility and not settling for anything less.
An alternative framing of this [...] is that we should be grateful to the Boomers for ripping off the Band-Aid in their generation and suffering the negative consequences, rather than kicking the can down the road and leaving us to be the ones who got the explosion of divorce.
It seems to me that "stay together for the kids" is yet another paradigm that boomers benefited from (i.e. when they were kids) and then got rid of once they were expected to contribute.
It seems to me that "stay together for the kids" is yet another paradigm that boomers benefited from (i.e. when they were kids) and then got rid of once they were expected to contribute.
I think it's actually an accidental counter-example. I would imagine that couples who "stay together for the kids" end up doing a lot more psychological damage to the kids than those who split up. I suppose it's possible that they can put on convincing happy faces in front of the kids for years on end, but more likely is just them having constant screaming matches.
An older adult in my family recounted their mother pulling a knife on their father in self-defense several times and continuing to stay with them for years afterward until she finally left him. I think it's safe to say that it would have been better for the kids if she had left him earlier in her life.
Motte: "The Boomers don't deserve to be hated and spat on."
Bailey: "We shouldn't raise property taxes."
It's maybe unfair to label things this way, but I also think something is weird when castigating hateful people is pressed shoulder to shoulder against talking about tax policy. If it was just about people being hateful, why need any position on tax policy?
Definitely unfair. The piece highlights and deliberates on this exact tension. That's the opposite of how a motte-and-bailey fallacy works. It won't surprise you to find that medieval castellans didn't invite the enemy within their walls and have candid discussions about the weaknesses of the fortifications.
If it was just about people being hateful, why need any position on tax policy?
This exact question is the motivation for considering the difference between natural and unnatural norms.
I think the whole framing about what is fair and unfair, and what is reasonable to expect of boomers (e.g. you'd do the same in their situation) is unhelpful. The purpose of public policy isn't fairness. Fairness is a useful heuristic for establishing good incentives and distribution of gains, but what we actually care about is the overall utility benefits of a policy.
If you reframe the question to "would increased property taxes/house building/removal of exemptions/social security tweak X improve the economy or overall quality of life" the confusion disappears
The purpose of public policy isn't fairness. Fairness is a useful heuristic for establishing good incentives and distribution of gains, but what we actually care about is the overall utility benefits of a policy.
Who is "we" here? This is alien to how I think about the role of government. It leaves the door open to all of the classic criticisms of utilitarianism, of course - would you be okay with the government sacrificing young children if that was positive-utility? - but it also totally fails to account for limits on government that protect individual rights. That means it's also alien to the structure of at least American governance: note how neither the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights frames its provisions as utility-dependent. "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, [you know, unless someone decides that it would be worthwhile according to the utilitarian calculus. If that happens, Congress should fuck those people up!]"
Somehow, I would be less reassured by the utilitarian version of the Bill of Rights.
It leaves the door open to all of the classic criticisms of utilitarianism, of course - would you be okay with the government sacrificing young children if that was positive-utility?
Let's be real here -- there are some potential issues with utilitarianism, but this, at least as expressed here, isn't a real one.
Sacrificing young children is not going to clear the utilitarian bar in any circumstance where the alternatives are not clearly worse. Why? Exactly because I, and almost everybody else wouldn't be "ok with it.". That's a HUGE negative externality (the affect on morale/satisfaction for pretty much everyone in your entire society) that has to be balanced against whatever positive effect you were trying to achieve.
If we ever actually faced the kind of convoluted philosopher-dream edge case where the positive effect was actually big enough to balance that, or all other alternatives involved similarly terrible sacrifices, then I and many other people might actually be ok with it.
If building in constraints on the power of government has net good outcomes then doing so is the correct utilitarian policy.
Nothing about making utilitarian judgements requires you to treat every problem as if it exists in a vacuum and ignore all context and wider consequences. In fact successful utilitarianism is very much the opposite.
That is distinct from treating concepts like "fairness" as ends in themselves.
If building in constraints on the power of government has net good outcomes then doing so is the correct utilitarian policy.
That is distinct from treating concepts like "fairness" as ends in themselves.
Sure, but this is an amorphous blob of a policy position. Anything that works is therefore utilitarian, anything that doesn't was clearly the wrong choice. That's fine, insofar as it offers a heuristic for judging in hindsight, but it sheds no light on policy selection and offers no assurances that the government won't become a monstrous construct destroying lives with every choice. Can you promise me that you won't steal and murder my children, government?If it seems good to me not to do that, then I won't. Again, I'm not sure you appreciate how utterly uncomforting utilitarianism is as a policy guide.
And yes, you can just say, 'well, if that discomfort with unchecked government is a problem, then we shouldn't do it. That's the utilitarian position!' And that's fine and good - but also useless. Are we going to walk through the entire set of architectural choices undergirding modern democracies - separation of powers, constitutional assurances of individual rights, limited executive terms, etc. - and decide that they're all the "utilitarian position" because they've mostly worked, despite not being guided by or working to validate their utility? What do we do when a powerful group declares that a civil protection is hugely negative-utility (e.g. liberal enclaves in America disparaging the 2nd amendment)? Do we hold onto it anyway because it's positive-utility to have civil protections at the meta-level?
If we do all of that, what was the point of declaring that we're guided by utilitarianism? It sounds like we're acting in a manner indistinguishable from that prompted by more traditional touchstones like individual rights. We're endorsing the same strictures that prevent non-utilitarian governments from flexibly pivoting to maximize utility. What advantage have we accrued?
When any group with power exercises their power selfishly and at the expense of others... isn't that sufficient to resent them? Why do they need to be uniquely selfish? That's a weirdly high bar.
I suppose the bar comes from interpreting "Boomers suck" as "Boomers suck in some absolute sense", as opposed to "Boomers suck for making life harder for other people". I think the latter is the more likely interpretation most of the time.
Incidentally, I find it a bit illuminating that these highlighted comments are like:
Millenial: Maybe we could raise property taxes, it's sad that it might hurt Boomer homeowners but everyone will be better off if young families can own houses in the city.
The one Boomer comment: "Try this and I'll literally shoot you in the face."
That's part of the problem for me (the other one is that Boomercracy is really bad here in France.) Any discussion about potential reform is immediately denounced as an existential threat by the Boomers online.
It's always a curious coincidence when the people arguing some policy is objectively optimal are exactly the people who would benefit from said policy, at your expense. So I believe that creates some scepticism.
The other thing is that if I talk to my parents about these kind of topics, they do seem unwilling to compromise. In their view they sacrificed a lot for the house they own, and objectively they did. Naturally if somebody wants to take from you what you fought long and hard to create, you'd be less than thrilled.
Take those together and I believe the boomer position is extremely relatable.
It's always a curious coincidence when the people arguing some policy is objectively optimal are exactly the people who would benefit from said policy, at your expense. So I believe that creates some scepticism.
I'm still confused by why everyone doesn't act as if this is obvious. Of course everyone, especially our best, most well-meaning, good faith of us will believe that anything that benefits themselves is also, coincidentally, through doing all the morally correct calculations, the objectively virtuous thing to do, regardless of whether or not it really is the virtuous thing to do. As such, if you want to convince me that something is actually virtuous, rather than just beneficial to you in a way that you have convinced yourself is objectively virtuous, you must be personally meaningfully harmed by it, as a costly signal that you really care about what's right, not merely what's beneficial for yourself (at the cost to others).
And yet, so many people put forth arguments that are essentially "this [thing that helps my team at the expense of people I don't care about] is clearly the Morally Correct thing to do, because [reasons]" without specifically highlighting the meaningful disadvantages that they are willing to impose on themselves and those they love and care for, if they mention them at all. The people who make these arguments seem completely ignorant of how their arguments lack any credibility whatsoever and seem to believe that just, "trust me, bro, I'm unbiased unlike the other 8 billion people on Earth" is convincing.
Here is a super well documented fact about Boomers' personal privilege.
Scott: This is just looking at the result of some political process and isn't about the Boomers per se.
Here's why some people might resent getting structurally fucked over.
Scott: But would you really do anything different if you were in the same position?
The fact is, any generation (or person) is just the sum of their genetics and influences and resentment on some level is epistemologically irrational. It's an evolutionary mechanism that can, in aggregate, deter exploitation/bullying.
On the other hand, we aren't purely rational beings and it's safer to acknowledge our feelings. If someone shot my brother in the head on the way to work because it looked fun, I would probably be 94% angry and only 6% "well if I was a sociopath, I'd probably do the same thing".
Productive discussion should probably center getting a complete economic picture (and this should probably address the massive discrepancy between Boomer and Millenial wealth at the same age) or examining differences in Boomer/GenX/Millennial culture. If you look at boomer cultural artifacts, you'll see a ton of conspicuous consumption, status quo approval. And there's a particular aesthetic of boomer ugliness you can see in Facebook memes, Fox News, etc. That isn't to say that Boomers are uniquely bad. Every generation and culture has positives and negatives; Boomers just happen to be more visible because of their immensely disproportionate power and wealth.
I would probably be 94% angry and only 6% "well if I was a sociopath, I'd probably do the same thing".
What? If someone shot my brother in the head for no reason, I am pretty certain I would be 0% empathizing with the sociopath. Being a highly enlightened decoupler should only go so far.
Fortunately, I have never been in this situation. I meant this mainly as a joke to indicate what you said, that being a perfectly enlightened decoupler is impossible past a certain point, and possibly undesirable.
And there's a particular aesthetic of boomer ugliness you can see in Facebook memes, Fox News, etc.
Thanks, that was an interesting quote.
I would say that it also points to a fact that Scott (whose age may place him closer to Boomers than young generations) may miss. Namely that boomers made the world a bit more ugly than it could have been. Which largely derived from a existential / ethical compass anchored in a mix of self centerednrss and narrow mindedness, which drove a lot of their micro and macro decisions. This may be why they became so rich, and why they also stayed so rich. Some of it was circumstantial but some of it was also the product of a deliberate effort to aggregate resources and parasitically extract more from the system than they gave to it (cue the massive increase in debt / gdp from the 70s onwards). Maybe it's not their fault as you say (like your analogy on the brother) but that's still somewhat disappointing.
You can also judge a generation by looking at its the legacy. The parents and grand parents of the Boomers didn't do a great job at all there (WWI and WWII), which is a point that could have been made. But for some reason it's like the Boomers didn't try to do any better (although they could have). But maybe that says more about some sort of selfishness at the species level and sadly demonstrates how slow understanding certain basic things like "don't go to war / don't be territorial" is. We can hope that the younger generations will be a little bit less selfish and learn from them...
Someone else commented by saying we could solve all of these problems without inconveniencing either the Boomers or the young by just increasing taxes on a few ultra-rich people. The ultra-rich could reasonably say they didn’t create this problem and it’s unfair to tax them for it. But so could the Boomers and the young! So whose “fair share” is it?
There is approximately a zero percent chance that this will convince someone holding the quoted position. Roughly all of the discourse I see against "the ultra wealthy", both online and in-person, is uninterested in considering that group's moral rights or entitlements. There aren't very many of them and no plausible intervention is going to keep them from buying a house, so fuck 'em if they complain. (I'm not saying that no one has moral justifications for the position, just that it's not the standard or widespread grounds for the complaint).
Instead, these positions are entirely built on a class conflict framework. It's good to support "your side," where your side has a cutoff that starts at hundred-millionaires and arbitrarily raises until everyone in the conversation is part of the coalition. Then you can conveniently frame all disagreement as betrayal while minimizing the incentives for anyone to try in the first place.
Hell, there was a highly upvoted comment in this subreddit just a couple of days ago where someone expressed a growing dislike for Scott grounded in his habit of offering intellectual charity to all parties, including the rich. The commenter speculated that perhaps his higher Substack payout has led him to forget which side he's playing for. It never occurred to them that he was just being fair and balanced in his assessment. Their assessment was based on logical and rhetorical interpretive errors, but that didn't harm the reception. Most people really just care about the vibes, and right now the vibe is rich=bad.
Diminishing marginal value of money is the obvious point here. Taking 50% of the income of someone who earns $50k a year makes a massive difference to their standard of living, not so to someone earning a billion a year. So if you measure fairness in terms of impact not monetary amount it's better to take a lot from them.
(In practice there probably aren't enough literal billionaires to do just this and implementation is complex but the general principle applies).
Declining marginal utility of consumption, sure. But is the declining marginal utility for capital allocation nearly so steep? I'd say no, and I'd also say that's what billionaires care about more than consumption.
I'd generally expect capital allocation by specific wealthy individuals to be worse, both in rate of return on investment, than large institutional investors (E.g. Berkshire Hathaway) or the market. As it will tend to go to personal obsessions and vanity projects, or just have the normal central planning problem that you don't properly account for all the information.
Well, again, the question isn't about 'enough', that question is about marginal utility at different points on the curve.
If you're homeless, an additional $25,000 of capital is a car you can live in so you're protected from the weather and can lock the doors, plus a cell phone you can use to keep in touch with your support network and look for jobs.
If you're a billionaire, an additional $25,000 of capital is like 1/10th of the salary + benefits needed to hire 1 more programmer for your app, which probably makes no visible difference in your experience of power.
Again, we're not saying more capital has zero marginal utility after some point. Just that it has less utility for the same absolute amount of capital, than it would have for someone poorer.
The class conflict framework also tends to ignore effect size. I don't know numbers for the US, but here in germany, fair taxation of wealth by OECD standards would generate about a 10% surplus on top of the current budget. Nothing unsubstantial, but also far from enough to solve all major societal problems of our time you can throw money on.
As I said in the original thread, the primary reason to hate boomers is because of how unbothered they are by the dismal prospects of younger generations (including those of their own children/grandchildren), even if they didn't wilfully create the conditions leading to them.
I still think that instead of facing these tough tradeoffs, we should just build more housing
And as I also said in the original thread, boomers in my city are establishing restrictive covenants on their lots so that higher density housing can never be built in their neighbourhoods, even after they are dead and gone.
These two posts have significantly diminished my esteem for Scott.
Your house shouldn't cost taxes, but your land absolutely should. Financial instruments to allow "resting" are perfectly compatible with the basic truth that the private ownership of land rents is a market failure.
There is plenty of land all over, and the grand majority is unused.
Just because you picked the right place to settle down 50 years ago, and now it's a trendy neighborhood the millennials want to settle down in, means that you need to pay more?
A healthy market would be one in which millennials would see this as a stagnant, occupied neighborhood and choose to live elsewhere.
The core problem is no new cities are springing up. The solution isn't even "build more in <highly-desirable-city>", it's go find another unoccupied plot of land and make it competitive.
But consistently we don't see this. That is the market failure.
"trendy" is just a word you used to be condescending. The economics term is "valuable". Land in cities is valuable, yes. That isn't imaginary or something, no matter how much you want to dismiss this as a problem because of your aesthetic preferences.
You can't go find another equally valuable plot of land and "make" it competitive. Land is valuable because of what is near it, not just what is on it.
If I own an empty lot, and fifty years later (((millennials))) build trains, and apartments, and restaurants, and plant trees, all around my lot, I should not personally profit year over year for my empty lot.
Yes, that is a market failure
This isn't, like, up for debate. This is econ102 stuff. >99% of economists agree. I am not expressing an opinion, in these comments, I'm explaining a known fact to you. This is, academically and mathematically, completed and utterly settled. Land rents are game theoretically market failure example #1 and taxing them is one attempt at a solution to the very simple and well defined problem.
"trendy" is just a word you used to be condescending. The economics term is "valuable". Land in cities is valuable, yes. That isn't imaginary or something, no matter how much you want to dismiss this as a problem because of your aesthetic preferences.
"trendy" is not a term I use to be condescending; I believe it to be the most accurate term to describe the situation is question: when you bought your house, demand was low (and the future of this are was uncertain), and now demand is high (and this area is obviously a "winner").
You can't go find another equally valuable plot of land and "make" it competitive. Land is valuable because of what is near it, not just what is on it.
If I own an empty lot, and fifty years later (((millennials))) build trains, and apartments, and restaurants, and plant trees, all around my lot, I should not personally profit year over year for my empty lot.
Obviously, the people buying the houses 50 years ago are also responsible for establishing the growth of the city 50 years ago. They did the hard work of building these things, and more importantly, making it desirable place to live.
Now, instead of taking the equivalent behavior as them (taking a risky bet on a settlement with an unknown future), millennials are simply going to these already fully-occupied, established cities.
The people who bought 50 years ago are being taxed more because they did good by their community.
> taking a risky bet on a settlement with an unknown future
What value does this add, though? We tax gambling. We tax investment. When property value goes up due to no effort of your own, you should be taxed on that.
That goes back to the rootless cosmopolitans point that comes up a few times in the article.
If all you want is a something affordable near good employment, it is market failure that those things are all locked up by previous generations. Where's the new boom towns?
But if what you really really want is walking distance from your parents, living elsewhere isn't an option.
Tax what gets consumed. Ideally as point-of-sale types of taxes, similar to sales tax.
For example, public transit prices should be dynamic such that it fully pays for public transit costs. Utilities are already a form of this (and work much better than if we all played a flat cost for a utility tax).
Therefor, if you cost nothing to society, you pay nothing.
Opportunity costs exists for sure, but it seems hard to argue that this creates an obligation.
If I steal your car then most people agree that I took something from you, this is bad, I should give back your car and perhaps be punished.
If instead you buy the car I wanted to buy, then what. You bought it and so I can't, this much is clear. But you haven't taken anything from me, except the opporunity to buy my dream car.
And I dunno about your moral intuitions but in my view you did nothing wrong in this hypothetical and don't owe me anything for buying the car I wanted to buy.
So why is it different if instead I buy the house you want?
I think it's basically impossible to live in a home in a city and not consume any public services. Is your house on a road? Are you going to call the police if someone breaks in? I'm on board if people living in the wilderness by themselves don't want to pay for services, but this describes < 1 person in a million. And in fact we already undertax low-density single-family residential development compared to their cost of services.
Why tax consumption specifically? I get that there are some economic reasons for taxing consumption over, say, income or investment. But the amount of sales tax you pay may have absolutely nothing to do with the amount of public services you consume.
So I agree with this in principle. However, I hardly ever see anyone else advocating for anything like it, and so I don't see how anyone who does want the government to do everything can also complain about being made to pay for it.
edit: also, there's no guarantee that this would let people keep their homes. In fact I think it's the reverse: If boomer homeowners had to actually pay market price for all of their services, it would be more expensive than it currently is.
The typical homeowner does not cost nothing to society. They receive services such as a fire department, police department, schools, libraries, and others provided by the government. I'm not sure if you are advocating for some kind of libertarian setup where these services are all individually billed or non-existent, but for most people these are all bundled under a common fee which is based on either income or property value.
On the divorce thing it seems weird not to mention the massive legal changes that happened in that period that let people divorce who couldn't previously. Which released a lot of people from unhappy, abusive or estranged marriages that still existed on paper, none of which are signs of people having great relationships. Reported satisfaction within marriage has gone up
I think that's what he was getting at when he talked about the transition from marrying your high school sweetheart and staying together "for the kids" no matter how miserable you are, to marrying for compatibility and not settling for anything less.
It seems to me that "stay together for the kids" is yet another paradigm that boomers benefited from (i.e. when they were kids) and then got rid of once they were expected to contribute.
I think it's actually an accidental counter-example. I would imagine that couples who "stay together for the kids" end up doing a lot more psychological damage to the kids than those who split up. I suppose it's possible that they can put on convincing happy faces in front of the kids for years on end, but more likely is just them having constant screaming matches.
An older adult in my family recounted their mother pulling a knife on their father in self-defense several times and continuing to stay with them for years afterward until she finally left him. I think it's safe to say that it would have been better for the kids if she had left him earlier in her life.
Motte: "The Boomers don't deserve to be hated and spat on."
Bailey: "We shouldn't raise property taxes."
It's maybe unfair to label things this way, but I also think something is weird when castigating hateful people is pressed shoulder to shoulder against talking about tax policy. If it was just about people being hateful, why need any position on tax policy?
Definitely unfair. The piece highlights and deliberates on this exact tension. That's the opposite of how a motte-and-bailey fallacy works. It won't surprise you to find that medieval castellans didn't invite the enemy within their walls and have candid discussions about the weaknesses of the fortifications.
This exact question is the motivation for considering the difference between natural and unnatural norms.
I think the whole framing about what is fair and unfair, and what is reasonable to expect of boomers (e.g. you'd do the same in their situation) is unhelpful. The purpose of public policy isn't fairness. Fairness is a useful heuristic for establishing good incentives and distribution of gains, but what we actually care about is the overall utility benefits of a policy.
If you reframe the question to "would increased property taxes/house building/removal of exemptions/social security tweak X improve the economy or overall quality of life" the confusion disappears
Who is "we" here? This is alien to how I think about the role of government. It leaves the door open to all of the classic criticisms of utilitarianism, of course - would you be okay with the government sacrificing young children if that was positive-utility? - but it also totally fails to account for limits on government that protect individual rights. That means it's also alien to the structure of at least American governance: note how neither the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights frames its provisions as utility-dependent. "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, [you know, unless someone decides that it would be worthwhile according to the utilitarian calculus. If that happens, Congress should fuck those people up!]"
Somehow, I would be less reassured by the utilitarian version of the Bill of Rights.
Let's be real here -- there are some potential issues with utilitarianism, but this, at least as expressed here, isn't a real one.
Sacrificing young children is not going to clear the utilitarian bar in any circumstance where the alternatives are not clearly worse. Why? Exactly because I, and almost everybody else wouldn't be "ok with it.". That's a HUGE negative externality (the affect on morale/satisfaction for pretty much everyone in your entire society) that has to be balanced against whatever positive effect you were trying to achieve.
If we ever actually faced the kind of convoluted philosopher-dream edge case where the positive effect was actually big enough to balance that, or all other alternatives involved similarly terrible sacrifices, then I and many other people might actually be ok with it.
If building in constraints on the power of government has net good outcomes then doing so is the correct utilitarian policy.
Nothing about making utilitarian judgements requires you to treat every problem as if it exists in a vacuum and ignore all context and wider consequences. In fact successful utilitarianism is very much the opposite.
That is distinct from treating concepts like "fairness" as ends in themselves.
Sure, but this is an amorphous blob of a policy position. Anything that works is therefore utilitarian, anything that doesn't was clearly the wrong choice. That's fine, insofar as it offers a heuristic for judging in hindsight, but it sheds no light on policy selection and offers no assurances that the government won't become a monstrous construct destroying lives with every choice. Can you promise me that you won't steal and murder my children, government? If it seems good to me not to do that, then I won't. Again, I'm not sure you appreciate how utterly uncomforting utilitarianism is as a policy guide.
And yes, you can just say, 'well, if that discomfort with unchecked government is a problem, then we shouldn't do it. That's the utilitarian position!' And that's fine and good - but also useless. Are we going to walk through the entire set of architectural choices undergirding modern democracies - separation of powers, constitutional assurances of individual rights, limited executive terms, etc. - and decide that they're all the "utilitarian position" because they've mostly worked, despite not being guided by or working to validate their utility? What do we do when a powerful group declares that a civil protection is hugely negative-utility (e.g. liberal enclaves in America disparaging the 2nd amendment)? Do we hold onto it anyway because it's positive-utility to have civil protections at the meta-level?
If we do all of that, what was the point of declaring that we're guided by utilitarianism? It sounds like we're acting in a manner indistinguishable from that prompted by more traditional touchstones like individual rights. We're endorsing the same strictures that prevent non-utilitarian governments from flexibly pivoting to maximize utility. What advantage have we accrued?
Like literally all Modern American Discourse, land value tax solves this.
Baaaaased
When any group with power exercises their power selfishly and at the expense of others... isn't that sufficient to resent them? Why do they need to be uniquely selfish? That's a weirdly high bar.
I suppose the bar comes from interpreting "Boomers suck" as "Boomers suck in some absolute sense", as opposed to "Boomers suck for making life harder for other people". I think the latter is the more likely interpretation most of the time.
For Scott the bar will always be that high. If it isn't then you're just in conflict theory mode.
Incidentally, I find it a bit illuminating that these highlighted comments are like:
That's part of the problem for me (the other one is that Boomercracy is really bad here in France.) Any discussion about potential reform is immediately denounced as an existential threat by the Boomers online.
It's always a curious coincidence when the people arguing some policy is objectively optimal are exactly the people who would benefit from said policy, at your expense. So I believe that creates some scepticism.
The other thing is that if I talk to my parents about these kind of topics, they do seem unwilling to compromise. In their view they sacrificed a lot for the house they own, and objectively they did. Naturally if somebody wants to take from you what you fought long and hard to create, you'd be less than thrilled.
Take those together and I believe the boomer position is extremely relatable.
I'm still confused by why everyone doesn't act as if this is obvious. Of course everyone, especially our best, most well-meaning, good faith of us will believe that anything that benefits themselves is also, coincidentally, through doing all the morally correct calculations, the objectively virtuous thing to do, regardless of whether or not it really is the virtuous thing to do. As such, if you want to convince me that something is actually virtuous, rather than just beneficial to you in a way that you have convinced yourself is objectively virtuous, you must be personally meaningfully harmed by it, as a costly signal that you really care about what's right, not merely what's beneficial for yourself (at the cost to others).
And yet, so many people put forth arguments that are essentially "this [thing that helps my team at the expense of people I don't care about] is clearly the Morally Correct thing to do, because [reasons]" without specifically highlighting the meaningful disadvantages that they are willing to impose on themselves and those they love and care for, if they mention them at all. The people who make these arguments seem completely ignorant of how their arguments lack any credibility whatsoever and seem to believe that just, "trust me, bro, I'm unbiased unlike the other 8 billion people on Earth" is convincing.
Most arguments fall into one of two categories:
Scott: This is just looking at the result of some political process and isn't about the Boomers per se.
Scott: But would you really do anything different if you were in the same position?
The fact is, any generation (or person) is just the sum of their genetics and influences and resentment on some level is epistemologically irrational. It's an evolutionary mechanism that can, in aggregate, deter exploitation/bullying.
On the other hand, we aren't purely rational beings and it's safer to acknowledge our feelings. If someone shot my brother in the head on the way to work because it looked fun, I would probably be 94% angry and only 6% "well if I was a sociopath, I'd probably do the same thing".
Productive discussion should probably center getting a complete economic picture (and this should probably address the massive discrepancy between Boomer and Millenial wealth at the same age) or examining differences in Boomer/GenX/Millennial culture. If you look at boomer cultural artifacts, you'll see a ton of conspicuous consumption, status quo approval. And there's a particular aesthetic of boomer ugliness you can see in Facebook memes, Fox News, etc. That isn't to say that Boomers are uniquely bad. Every generation and culture has positives and negatives; Boomers just happen to be more visible because of their immensely disproportionate power and wealth.
What? If someone shot my brother in the head for no reason, I am pretty certain I would be 0% empathizing with the sociopath. Being a highly enlightened decoupler should only go so far.
Fortunately, I have never been in this situation. I meant this mainly as a joke to indicate what you said, that being a perfectly enlightened decoupler is impossible past a certain point, and possibly undesirable.
Thanks, that was an interesting quote.
I would say that it also points to a fact that Scott (whose age may place him closer to Boomers than young generations) may miss. Namely that boomers made the world a bit more ugly than it could have been. Which largely derived from a existential / ethical compass anchored in a mix of self centerednrss and narrow mindedness, which drove a lot of their micro and macro decisions. This may be why they became so rich, and why they also stayed so rich. Some of it was circumstantial but some of it was also the product of a deliberate effort to aggregate resources and parasitically extract more from the system than they gave to it (cue the massive increase in debt / gdp from the 70s onwards). Maybe it's not their fault as you say (like your analogy on the brother) but that's still somewhat disappointing.
You can also judge a generation by looking at its the legacy. The parents and grand parents of the Boomers didn't do a great job at all there (WWI and WWII), which is a point that could have been made. But for some reason it's like the Boomers didn't try to do any better (although they could have). But maybe that says more about some sort of selfishness at the species level and sadly demonstrates how slow understanding certain basic things like "don't go to war / don't be territorial" is. We can hope that the younger generations will be a little bit less selfish and learn from them...
There is approximately a zero percent chance that this will convince someone holding the quoted position. Roughly all of the discourse I see against "the ultra wealthy", both online and in-person, is uninterested in considering that group's moral rights or entitlements. There aren't very many of them and no plausible intervention is going to keep them from buying a house, so fuck 'em if they complain. (I'm not saying that no one has moral justifications for the position, just that it's not the standard or widespread grounds for the complaint).
Instead, these positions are entirely built on a class conflict framework. It's good to support "your side," where your side has a cutoff that starts at hundred-millionaires and arbitrarily raises until everyone in the conversation is part of the coalition. Then you can conveniently frame all disagreement as betrayal while minimizing the incentives for anyone to try in the first place.
Hell, there was a highly upvoted comment in this subreddit just a couple of days ago where someone expressed a growing dislike for Scott grounded in his habit of offering intellectual charity to all parties, including the rich. The commenter speculated that perhaps his higher Substack payout has led him to forget which side he's playing for. It never occurred to them that he was just being fair and balanced in his assessment. Their assessment was based on logical and rhetorical interpretive errors, but that didn't harm the reception. Most people really just care about the vibes, and right now the vibe is rich=bad.
Diminishing marginal value of money is the obvious point here. Taking 50% of the income of someone who earns $50k a year makes a massive difference to their standard of living, not so to someone earning a billion a year. So if you measure fairness in terms of impact not monetary amount it's better to take a lot from them.
(In practice there probably aren't enough literal billionaires to do just this and implementation is complex but the general principle applies).
Declining marginal utility of consumption, sure. But is the declining marginal utility for capital allocation nearly so steep? I'd say no, and I'd also say that's what billionaires care about more than consumption.
I'd generally expect capital allocation by specific wealthy individuals to be worse, both in rate of return on investment, than large institutional investors (E.g. Berkshire Hathaway) or the market. As it will tend to go to personal obsessions and vanity projects, or just have the normal central planning problem that you don't properly account for all the information.
Individual investors can sometimes make better bets by leveraging their specific knowledge of a sector, or taking risks, or accepting a long period without returns, in a way the markets might not. But that's generally done by early stage VCs and entrepreneurs, not established wealthy. Apparently wealth managers specializing in wealthy families often have to advise people away from "cool" or high status investments
Why?
You can get completely surrounded by yes-men who praise your every word and thought at $100M very easily if you want.
Allocating capital is power, when has a certain level of power ever been enough?
Well, again, the question isn't about 'enough', that question is about marginal utility at different points on the curve.
If you're homeless, an additional $25,000 of capital is a car you can live in so you're protected from the weather and can lock the doors, plus a cell phone you can use to keep in touch with your support network and look for jobs.
If you're a billionaire, an additional $25,000 of capital is like 1/10th of the salary + benefits needed to hire 1 more programmer for your app, which probably makes no visible difference in your experience of power.
Again, we're not saying more capital has zero marginal utility after some point. Just that it has less utility for the same absolute amount of capital, than it would have for someone poorer.
The class conflict framework also tends to ignore effect size. I don't know numbers for the US, but here in germany, fair taxation of wealth by OECD standards would generate about a 10% surplus on top of the current budget. Nothing unsubstantial, but also far from enough to solve all major societal problems of our time you can throw money on.
I do enjoy the highlighted post from RH
We voted for increased taxes, but they voted for reduced immigration.
I can only assume they is the silent generation or something
As I said in the original thread, the primary reason to hate boomers is because of how unbothered they are by the dismal prospects of younger generations (including those of their own children/grandchildren), even if they didn't wilfully create the conditions leading to them.
And as I also said in the original thread, boomers in my city are establishing restrictive covenants on their lots so that higher density housing can never be built in their neighbourhoods, even after they are dead and gone.
These two posts have significantly diminished my esteem for Scott.
Seems weird to draw the line here specifically.
Don't we all just want a home? It's bad enough you have to pay any reoccurring tax at all on this.
Don't you, at some point, just want to cash-out and stop spending your days just trying to stay afloat?
Grind for a few years, buy your freedom, and rest. If it weren't for the last part, I'd have a seriously tough time justifying existing.
Your house shouldn't cost taxes, but your land absolutely should. Financial instruments to allow "resting" are perfectly compatible with the basic truth that the private ownership of land rents is a market failure.
There is plenty of land all over, and the grand majority is unused.
Just because you picked the right place to settle down 50 years ago, and now it's a trendy neighborhood the millennials want to settle down in, means that you need to pay more?
A healthy market would be one in which millennials would see this as a stagnant, occupied neighborhood and choose to live elsewhere.
The core problem is no new cities are springing up. The solution isn't even "build more in <highly-desirable-city>", it's go find another unoccupied plot of land and make it competitive.
But consistently we don't see this. That is the market failure.
"trendy" is just a word you used to be condescending. The economics term is "valuable". Land in cities is valuable, yes. That isn't imaginary or something, no matter how much you want to dismiss this as a problem because of your aesthetic preferences.
You can't go find another equally valuable plot of land and "make" it competitive. Land is valuable because of what is near it, not just what is on it.
If I own an empty lot, and fifty years later (((millennials))) build trains, and apartments, and restaurants, and plant trees, all around my lot, I should not personally profit year over year for my empty lot.
Yes, that is a market failure
This isn't, like, up for debate. This is econ102 stuff. >99% of economists agree. I am not expressing an opinion, in these comments, I'm explaining a known fact to you. This is, academically and mathematically, completed and utterly settled. Land rents are game theoretically market failure example #1 and taxing them is one attempt at a solution to the very simple and well defined problem.
"trendy" is not a term I use to be condescending; I believe it to be the most accurate term to describe the situation is question: when you bought your house, demand was low (and the future of this are was uncertain), and now demand is high (and this area is obviously a "winner").
Obviously, the people buying the houses 50 years ago are also responsible for establishing the growth of the city 50 years ago. They did the hard work of building these things, and more importantly, making it desirable place to live.
Now, instead of taking the equivalent behavior as them (taking a risky bet on a settlement with an unknown future), millennials are simply going to these already fully-occupied, established cities.
The people who bought 50 years ago are being taxed more because they did good by their community.
> taking a risky bet on a settlement with an unknown future
What value does this add, though? We tax gambling. We tax investment. When property value goes up due to no effort of your own, you should be taxed on that.
That goes back to the rootless cosmopolitans point that comes up a few times in the article.
If all you want is a something affordable near good employment, it is market failure that those things are all locked up by previous generations. Where's the new boom towns?
But if what you really really want is walking distance from your parents, living elsewhere isn't an option.
This exactly. Idk why we are being downvoted for pointing this out.
Most people want the government to provide services, which have to be paid for somehow. How do you propose they be paid for?
Tax what gets consumed. Ideally as point-of-sale types of taxes, similar to sales tax.
For example, public transit prices should be dynamic such that it fully pays for public transit costs. Utilities are already a form of this (and work much better than if we all played a flat cost for a utility tax).
Therefor, if you cost nothing to society, you pay nothing.
Occupying land consumes it though - if you're occupying a house this month, no-one else can.
Opportunity costs exists for sure, but it seems hard to argue that this creates an obligation.
If I steal your car then most people agree that I took something from you, this is bad, I should give back your car and perhaps be punished.
If instead you buy the car I wanted to buy, then what. You bought it and so I can't, this much is clear. But you haven't taken anything from me, except the opporunity to buy my dream car.
And I dunno about your moral intuitions but in my view you did nothing wrong in this hypothetical and don't owe me anything for buying the car I wanted to buy.
So why is it different if instead I buy the house you want?
If every person in the US were assigned an equal parcel of the total US land area, each person would receive approximately 6.6 acres.
Clearly the problem isn't the land itself, it's the everyone wants the same already occupied land.
I think it's basically impossible to live in a home in a city and not consume any public services. Is your house on a road? Are you going to call the police if someone breaks in? I'm on board if people living in the wilderness by themselves don't want to pay for services, but this describes < 1 person in a million. And in fact we already undertax low-density single-family residential development compared to their cost of services.
Why tax consumption specifically? I get that there are some economic reasons for taxing consumption over, say, income or investment. But the amount of sales tax you pay may have absolutely nothing to do with the amount of public services you consume.
Privatize as much as possible. Law enforcement, for example, can be a monthly subscription (like how home security systems already are).
So I agree with this in principle. However, I hardly ever see anyone else advocating for anything like it, and so I don't see how anyone who does want the government to do everything can also complain about being made to pay for it.
edit: also, there's no guarantee that this would let people keep their homes. In fact I think it's the reverse: If boomer homeowners had to actually pay market price for all of their services, it would be more expensive than it currently is.
Sounds like a great way for only the rich to afford human decency.
The typical homeowner does not cost nothing to society. They receive services such as a fire department, police department, schools, libraries, and others provided by the government. I'm not sure if you are advocating for some kind of libertarian setup where these services are all individually billed or non-existent, but for most people these are all bundled under a common fee which is based on either income or property value.