The whole argument here is relatively spurious with regard to tech. The older degrees and coding standards were tougher and there were fewer people able to do it, the decrease in brain capacity at 40 is minimal and generally would be compensated by experience. I think we’d all be happy with a 40 year old surgeon instead of a 27 year old.
IBM wanted to get rid of people who had in fact just gotten too many raises in their time. It’s also odd to decry the cost of welfare for the old and also demand the old be fired. There’s little evidence that older people are causing young people in tech to not get jobs.
You make some good points. But most people like their parents and don't want to see them poor and ALSO don't want to be personally responsible for their care/support in retirement.
And practically speaking if you told me "Hey we're cutting your parents off from SS and MCR and also no SS or MCR for you either but ur getting a 15% raise." I would not be excited and suddenly feel like I could afford more children.
U seem to be leaning towards death panels and assisted suicide to help lower the costs of health care spending on the super old. I get where u are coming from, just not sure it is the right approach. Perhaps doctors explaining to patients more about expectations and realities so that older folks can be smarter about decisions. Although that may not work either since elderly Doctors (who should know better) seem to statistically be no different than regular folks when it comes to "Do anything u can to save them" mentality.
On your point about a 15% raise: yeah, a tax cut won't incentivize anything here. For one, only something like 15-20% of US taxes are paid by people younger than 35. If you killed Social Security and handed everyone a corresponding tax cut, the largest beneficiaries would probably be people around age 50.
The way to do it would be to create more directed incentives for young families. Start with a proposal like Romney's: a very large universal payment to families with kids. Like, $5000/year/kid younger than 18. By my math, that program would cost less than half as much as Medicare. But it becomes cheaper if you roll programs like the child tax credit into it, which you absolutely should.
Yeah I'm a big fan of direct payments to families with kids. My wife stays home to raise ours. I can't remember who said it but "the government/feminism wants to pay anyone to raise your kids except you."
I was just saying that, in my mind, that 15% would have to go toward my own retirement and supporting my parents, not having more kids.
Social security is a flat tax capped at $140k, so it's a much more uniform distribution. If it was eliminated literally everyone would get a 12.4% raise on earned income up to $140k.
Correction: Most old people don't want to be burdens on their relatives, but they are perfectly happy to be a burden on society as they demand their social security and pension checks. They merely displace the burden from someone they know to the anonymous everyman.
But in reality social security taxes the working age young parents who should be having children. They have fewer children because of the tax burden to support the elderly.
Such societies will all collapse due to lack of children in about 4 to 5 generations from the initiation of socialism. This is being seen in both China and Europe.
Pensions, aren't for any old people, they are almost exclusively for government workers. And sure, government workers might not want to mooch of their friends and family but they don't mind taking as much as they can get from the government. That isn't just old people either, lots of young people are fine mooching from government in whatever way that they can.
In many other countries social security payments are called government pensions for the elderly. That is what I meant. And yes, of course mooching is not limited to the elderly. However, the AARP is one of the most powerful voting and lobbying blocks. The younger moochers are not as well organized.
"They have fewer children because of the tax burden to support the elderly."
If this were true you'd expect to see richer people having more children, which you don't. People aren't having children because relationships are unstable and they have to spend longer and longer in school before they're able to get jobs.
It just isn't considered cool to have a lot of kids. It's considered a backwards practice associated with religious fundamentalists. Small families are higher status.
Are not the government entities and corporations who set up "social security" and pensions wholly responsible for running their sometimes Ponzi schemes and their sometimes outlandish assumptions about returns and risk ultimately responsible for the underfunding?
No, the elderly are responsible for the socialist programs they vote for and refuse to let go of. Humans have a generational family contract. Working adults feed and care for their dependent children, who in turn mature and take care of their aged parents as well as their own children.
Social security and similar programs gives the elderly an "out" where the young pay taxes to support the elderly at a very high standard of living so they do not have to share a room with their adult children. But this comes at the expense of the grandchildren. And that is why it ultimately ends in societal death. The surviving great-grand-children will eventually vote to euthanize the gerontocracy.
All social safety nets will end up being ponzi schemes if the "safety net" becomes a sort of hammock, and all safety nets will tend towards hammocks because of what we call democracy.
My observation is elderly Americans are least likely to mask, while young Americans are most likely to mask. Furthermore, lockdown policies were horrific for the elderly. At least in America, "Zero Covid" has been recognized as a political loser and one reason is because the elderly are not on board.
In China either the elderly have different beliefs about Covid that make Zero Covid politically acceptable to the people or the rulers are simply demented tyrants. I lean towards the latter.
Older people lean more conservative, but from what I've observed they tend to be more Covid-cautious than young conservatives, out of basic self-preservation. It's just that younger leftists are the most Covid-cautious demographic, with some of them going beyond caution into full-blown agoraphobia.
Damn - this is a real issue but this comment feed is simply dripping in cognitive biases and heuristics (some of it approaching sorcery.) What kind of listeners and commenters do you attract? I expected better!
"It’s the social security recipient who is able to stay in a house with two extra bedrooms he doesn’t need because of monthly government payments taken from couples deciding whether to have a second baby."
You do realize it's actually their own money, right? They paid in to ss to their older counterparts, and you want to strip them of it? Also, I don't know any of these old people. Both my parents had barely enough money in retirement to pay their normal bills because of inflation. I prefer to respect the hard lives lived rather than throw them away. My solution to this problem is this: We take care of those who got us here. Forced retirement at age 57, cut welfare programs for everyone except retirees. Allow them to live a bit of life after years of being born and working all their lives. Younger people get the workforce and chance to move up and get better paying jobs, their grandparents are taken care of and they can focus on themselves and won't need the entitlements. I'm in my 40's, but I can't stomach asking old people to live like paupers for the rest of us.
The company organization is best at determining what talent and skills are needed. Some of these might be old. Laying off a person for skill not needed is a hot button issue. Age is not the only factor, lets not forget that we keep some people in the workforce who don't have the right skill due to race, gender and age but the government has rules limiting efficiency in favor of social justice. A balance needs to be made are will go broke.
"You do realize it's actually their own money, right? They paid in to ss to their older counterparts"
There is a deep mathematical/economic flaw in this reasoning.
Suppose I borrow a bunch of money and use it to pay for rent and food. I also earn money from working and use that to buy a boat. When my creditors come to collect on my debts, if I cannot repay them, they will seize my boat. The fact that I "paid for" the boat is not relevant.
The Federal government has run budget deficits every year since 2001 and all but four years since 1969. The surpluses were minuscule compared to the deficits. People retiring now were only able to pay for their older counterparts SS *because* they borrowed a bunch of money that they will never pay back. The debt accrued during this period is much, much larger than the total revenue collected from SS payroll taxes.
I will agree with you that retirees are entitled to their SS benefits, as soon as they pay off the tens of trillions they borrowed.
Social Security benefits are typically computed using "average indexed monthly earnings." This average summarizes up to 35 years of a worker's indexed earnings. We apply a formula to this average to compute the primary insurance amount (PIA). The PIA is the basis for the benefits that are paid to an individual.
Tyler Cowen wrote that in academia: "I suspect age discrimination is far more extreme [than gender and race discrimination], at least when it comes to the final stage of the process, namely the actual interview and hiring decisions." I agree with Cowen.
In tech, Hanania highlights a small number of high profile age discrimination lawsuits. But age discrimination is deeply ingrained in the industry, there's broad consensus of that, I don't find these arguments at all convincing.
Next, lots of brain-centric career tracks peak later in life, because it requires decades to develop and excel at some particular niche. Some older workers really offer unique value. There are millions of young people with young brains that aren't generating high dollar value. That is a large part of the story.
The government is welfare for lots of people, old people are just one set of constituents. Government workers, are arguably the primary welfare recipients. Hanani's mentor, Caplan, frequently says that government gives charity to the old, not the poor, but I suspect that is not entirely true. A lot of young poor people consume enormous amounts of resources. I bet a motivated researcher can dig through government spending data to tell a very different story.
I am sympathetic to some arguments that some older people have entrenched their privileges, and blocked access to the younger generation. Overall, this post is glib caricature.
I trust tech companies to be best positioned to understand who is good at tech. If there’s rampant age discrimination there’s probably a reason. That’s the benefit of markets, they can make up for entrenched privilege because civil rights and labor lawyers can’t be everywhere.
I've worked in tech for 15 years or so. Tech companies want younger people because they have more energy and are willing to spend nights and weekends at the office (or, in today's "hybrid" word, working anywhere at their laptops). That's more valuable to them than quality of code, because software companies work on the assumption that code will always be buggy but can be fixed pronto if you have an eager 25-year old who is up at 2am and at your beck and call. When it comes to actual code quality, a highly-experienced 55 year old may churn out better (i.e., more robust) software than an eager but inexperienced 30-year old.
Sure, I agree with pro-market views and agree that tech companies should hire the people they want to hire, even when that includes age discrimination.
I disagree with the claim of the article that the laws and lawsuits mentioned have prohibited age discrimination. Age discrimination is not like race discrimination. People holding positions of power view race discrimination as the ultimate taboo, but view many forms of age discrimination as entirely justified. Go to any graduate school, and people will tell you that a 40 year old does not get the same opportunity to go to graduate school that a 25 year old does, and that's not an injustice, but that is justified.
We need to revisit this essay when Mr. Hanania is 64. ;)
Seriously:
1. As you say, people want to survive to get old. Even if 19% of them don't make it, we have a hard enough time convincing young people not to do dangerous things. I think too many people expect programs for the old will be there for them when the time comes and want to protect them.
2. I don't think enough people believe in the superiority of Western culture anymore. On the left it is the most evil culture that ever existed (I strongly disagree but that's not the point here), and on the right (a) conservatives lean old so this is going to be a hard sell (b) one of the main features of conservatism is respect for the past and that ties in with respect for your elders.
Frankly I am starting to wonder if the Chinese have the edge over us--the West and East trade dominance every couple hundred years, this could be Beijing's time in the sun.
Martin Armstrong says China will dominate after 2032, at least financially. He bases his prediction on proprietary data crunching. I think he’s onto something but seems to be one of those people marginalized during his lifetime.
Normally I’d read something this superficial and incomplete and assume it’s just low-effort propaganda but I’m wondering if you’re really this clueless about why the system works the way it does. You hinted at awareness in mentioning that some people die before collecting retirement benefits. But everyone else does receive them -- unlike all the other entitlement categories we can all expect to become old and benefit from this system. So it’s not typical welfare in the sense of taking from winners and giving to losers. We all start young and all get old and seem to have chosen to rob our young selves to pay our old selves.
Supposedly Social Security was enacted because elderly poverty used to be a thing. Not sure you can look at currently successful olds and assume the whole system is worthless. Presumably the current system is why those olds aren’t broke and miserable.
I’m sure lots of workplace protections are excessive but I suspect there was at some point an implicit deal of “work hard while you’re young, we’ll take care of you when you’re old” but thanks to incompetent management IBM now wants to renege on that deal and unload the olds.
//Presumably the current system is why those olds aren’t broke and miserable//
If someone is retired and relying on SSI, I can assure you they are particularly broke and miserable. These are most certainly NOT the folks in this demographic that are "successful olds."
Full disclosure: I am one of the evil persons who made a lot of money AND got old (67). The situation we find ourselves in is solely due to human nature. The government could have changed the rules at any time. I played by the rules as I found them. If they HAD created a system to push more of retirement savings on the individual, I (or we in the case of my wife and I) would have aggressively done so (we did anyway), but MOST PEOPLE WOULD NOT. Then we would be in the same situation... pressure on the government to take more of my money to give it to people who did not save.
It is naive in the extreme to think that rearranging laws will fix this. And FWIW, I know that the system is not sustainable. Humans did not evolve with this much wealth and longevity. Even a wise king could not manage an equitable division of society's. wealth, even if he wanted to.
Perhaps a strict libertarianism would work, at least as far as laws go, but humans cannot live in such a world which would look like Central America with shantys next to gated communities, and people starving on the streets. To quote the great John Derbyshire: We're Doomed.
Much of what Richard says I agree with, but he overeggs the pudding. Yes, I transferred wealth from my young self to my old self (I'm 70 and retired). My wealth is higher than it was when I was 30, 40, or 50, but guess what? My income is lower, for the obvious reason that I get no paycheck. I'm living off my savings (yes, social security too). I read an analysis some years ago to the effect that my parents' generation (the so-called Greatest Generation) got a great deal from Social Security in that they paid little into it and got a lot out, but the deal has been getting worse for every succeeding cohort.
But yes, too many programs and policies favor the old, most egregiously the recent COVID policies, which have been devastating for children, teenagers, and young adults.
1. From a purely practical standpoint, how do you successfully work yourself out of a Ponzi scheme? If The U.S. government simply defaulted on its Social Security promises it would likely suffer an unsurvivable crisis of legitimacy. The solution for now at least is to keep it going.
2. One of the reasons human societies venerate the old is to motivate the young. The young work hard so they can generate wealth, survive to be old, and enjoy the fruits of their labor. A society in which working age people think their best years are behind them is in a very bad place, and indeed that may be where Western societies are headed.
Aside from the venerable Ecological Movement preaching to 1970-1990s youngsters to have fewer or no kids due to the upcoming (at the time) environmental and social disaster, there is a _big_ problem to any government-backed social security scheme in the world: no kids to keep the funds flowing.
There is no way to keep the lights on, unless there is some technological advancement to make _very cheap_ to care the elderly. The ultra-low fertility in Japan and Korea comes to mind in this regard.
I actually really like this as a theory about old engineers contributing to the ossification of companies. As companies age, their workforce does too. But while once upon a time a new CEO could come in, clear out the old-timers and refocus the company, now the law prevents this.
Though my thought would be, if you can't fire them, maybe it's still permissible to find some other approach within the bounds of the law. E.g., reshuffling all of them into the same business unit, and then spinning it off -- chopping off a gangrenous arm to save the body.
If you're a bright young engineer fresh out of school, you probably want to work with other engineers that are somewhat more experienced than you but still very much "with it." Say, guys around age 25-30. The thing about having an engineering department with lots of 50-somethings is that it's actually an impediment to hiring young guys.
It's from 2016 but I found this graphic showing average age of engineers by company. And yep, IBM, Oracle, and HP are at the back of the pack there.
I argued with the childless that they’re gaming the system by not taking away from their own life to raise another generation but expecting/understanding that the next generation will take care of them. I’m not saying I blame them, it makes sense.
What if SS and Medicare were tweaked to provide non means tested credits for people who raised children who pay into the system and reduced means tested benefits for those that don’t?
Essentially you would be earning your right to be taken care of when you’re old by sacrificing and taking care of others when you’re young.
I dont view this as a priority really aside from pensions. Im in my 20s, I feel good knowing that there are laws which will ensure I get to stay working as long as I would like to.
The generations following the boomers and gen x are thoroughly unhinged, so i hope the boomers (xers are mostly nonentities) stay in power as long as possible. I assume the generations that follow my own will be even worse
Hanania's argument works in economic terms, and I believe there's truth to it there. But yeah, in political terms, on the eve of what seems like the last mentally healthy American generations riding into the sunset, I largely sympathize with your second paragraph.
As someone they call an "Xennial", who affiliated a lot with older kids (i.e. Gen X) growing up, I feel like I stand astride the line where things really fell apart. One of the first things I noticed: my peers and I were ecstatic to go to college, to enjoy that freedom and independence, just like our parents had been. Then kids a few years younger than me started complaining about crushing "mental health" and anxiety at college. What on Earth was going on? How did they make a fun time into a total bummer?
Well, as they come to power, a lot more things are going to become total bummers, I fear.
I'm a millen-X-ennial. Right between Millenials and Xennials like you. If you don't like hyper-narrow categories like that, you can just call me an old millennial. My parents worked for a high school though, so I spent a ton of time around gen X high schoolers while I was a kid. I have come to see that this influenced my development a lot and has tended to put me at odds ideologically with my generational cohort.
What I absorbed from the gen Xers was a deep skepticism of authority and an obsession with being authentic to the true self. The only true authority is the self. My generation instead emphasizes submitting to the "right" authorities, and a self-righteous perception of themsevles in relation to society.
Pensions benefit long-term government workers specifically, not older people in general. Pensions are expensive and generally unreasonable and unfair, but I would blame politicians and government unions more than the elderly for this.
Social security and Medicare/Medicaid often find their sophisticated defenses not as transfer programs but as insurance programs: they insure against running out of money in old age and dying from poor medical care. In exchange for this ex-ante insurance, younger people give up some of their income.
Because the richer die later than the poorer, an irony arises: the greater the insurance function of social security, the more anti progressive social security and Medicare would seem to be.
At any rate, an anti-gerontocracy political coalition seems doomed from the start for straightforward reasons but also more subtle ones. The politicians most critical of the elderly are generally most supportive of social security and Medicare. The reverse is also true. You can find amusing tea party quotes of town halls in which an old woman says something along the lines of “keep your government hands out of my Medicare”.
The whole argument here is relatively spurious with regard to tech. The older degrees and coding standards were tougher and there were fewer people able to do it, the decrease in brain capacity at 40 is minimal and generally would be compensated by experience. I think we’d all be happy with a 40 year old surgeon instead of a 27 year old.
IBM wanted to get rid of people who had in fact just gotten too many raises in their time. It’s also odd to decry the cost of welfare for the old and also demand the old be fired. There’s little evidence that older people are causing young people in tech to not get jobs.
You make some good points. But most people like their parents and don't want to see them poor and ALSO don't want to be personally responsible for their care/support in retirement.
And practically speaking if you told me "Hey we're cutting your parents off from SS and MCR and also no SS or MCR for you either but ur getting a 15% raise." I would not be excited and suddenly feel like I could afford more children.
U seem to be leaning towards death panels and assisted suicide to help lower the costs of health care spending on the super old. I get where u are coming from, just not sure it is the right approach. Perhaps doctors explaining to patients more about expectations and realities so that older folks can be smarter about decisions. Although that may not work either since elderly Doctors (who should know better) seem to statistically be no different than regular folks when it comes to "Do anything u can to save them" mentality.
On your point about a 15% raise: yeah, a tax cut won't incentivize anything here. For one, only something like 15-20% of US taxes are paid by people younger than 35. If you killed Social Security and handed everyone a corresponding tax cut, the largest beneficiaries would probably be people around age 50.
The way to do it would be to create more directed incentives for young families. Start with a proposal like Romney's: a very large universal payment to families with kids. Like, $5000/year/kid younger than 18. By my math, that program would cost less than half as much as Medicare. But it becomes cheaper if you roll programs like the child tax credit into it, which you absolutely should.
Yeah I'm a big fan of direct payments to families with kids. My wife stays home to raise ours. I can't remember who said it but "the government/feminism wants to pay anyone to raise your kids except you."
I was just saying that, in my mind, that 15% would have to go toward my own retirement and supporting my parents, not having more kids.
Social security is a flat tax capped at $140k, so it's a much more uniform distribution. If it was eliminated literally everyone would get a 12.4% raise on earned income up to $140k.
Good catch.
"their parents and don't want to see them poor"
Most of them are rich. Subsidies should be distributed to poor people, not old people.
Take this to its logical conclusion and then you'll wind up wondering why nobody saves money anymore.
You want to be careful about effective marginal tax rates, ie after taking into account phasing out welfare payments.
But it's still pretty silly to give welfare to the well off.
Correction: Most old people don't want to be burdens on their relatives, but they are perfectly happy to be a burden on society as they demand their social security and pension checks. They merely displace the burden from someone they know to the anonymous everyman.
But in reality social security taxes the working age young parents who should be having children. They have fewer children because of the tax burden to support the elderly.
Such societies will all collapse due to lack of children in about 4 to 5 generations from the initiation of socialism. This is being seen in both China and Europe.
Pensions, aren't for any old people, they are almost exclusively for government workers. And sure, government workers might not want to mooch of their friends and family but they don't mind taking as much as they can get from the government. That isn't just old people either, lots of young people are fine mooching from government in whatever way that they can.
In many other countries social security payments are called government pensions for the elderly. That is what I meant. And yes, of course mooching is not limited to the elderly. However, the AARP is one of the most powerful voting and lobbying blocks. The younger moochers are not as well organized.
"They have fewer children because of the tax burden to support the elderly."
If this were true you'd expect to see richer people having more children, which you don't. People aren't having children because relationships are unstable and they have to spend longer and longer in school before they're able to get jobs.
It just isn't considered cool to have a lot of kids. It's considered a backwards practice associated with religious fundamentalists. Small families are higher status.
Are not the government entities and corporations who set up "social security" and pensions wholly responsible for running their sometimes Ponzi schemes and their sometimes outlandish assumptions about returns and risk ultimately responsible for the underfunding?
No, the elderly are responsible for the socialist programs they vote for and refuse to let go of. Humans have a generational family contract. Working adults feed and care for their dependent children, who in turn mature and take care of their aged parents as well as their own children.
Social security and similar programs gives the elderly an "out" where the young pay taxes to support the elderly at a very high standard of living so they do not have to share a room with their adult children. But this comes at the expense of the grandchildren. And that is why it ultimately ends in societal death. The surviving great-grand-children will eventually vote to euthanize the gerontocracy.
Yeah it’s not bad to have a social safety net imo but it is set up as a ponzi
All social safety nets will end up being ponzi schemes if the "safety net" becomes a sort of hammock, and all safety nets will tend towards hammocks because of what we call democracy.
My observation is elderly Americans are least likely to mask, while young Americans are most likely to mask. Furthermore, lockdown policies were horrific for the elderly. At least in America, "Zero Covid" has been recognized as a political loser and one reason is because the elderly are not on board.
In China either the elderly have different beliefs about Covid that make Zero Covid politically acceptable to the people or the rulers are simply demented tyrants. I lean towards the latter.
Older people lean more conservative, but from what I've observed they tend to be more Covid-cautious than young conservatives, out of basic self-preservation. It's just that younger leftists are the most Covid-cautious demographic, with some of them going beyond caution into full-blown agoraphobia.
Damn - this is a real issue but this comment feed is simply dripping in cognitive biases and heuristics (some of it approaching sorcery.) What kind of listeners and commenters do you attract? I expected better!
Most casual policy discussion is laced with biases and heuristics.
"It’s the social security recipient who is able to stay in a house with two extra bedrooms he doesn’t need because of monthly government payments taken from couples deciding whether to have a second baby."
You do realize it's actually their own money, right? They paid in to ss to their older counterparts, and you want to strip them of it? Also, I don't know any of these old people. Both my parents had barely enough money in retirement to pay their normal bills because of inflation. I prefer to respect the hard lives lived rather than throw them away. My solution to this problem is this: We take care of those who got us here. Forced retirement at age 57, cut welfare programs for everyone except retirees. Allow them to live a bit of life after years of being born and working all their lives. Younger people get the workforce and chance to move up and get better paying jobs, their grandparents are taken care of and they can focus on themselves and won't need the entitlements. I'm in my 40's, but I can't stomach asking old people to live like paupers for the rest of us.
The company organization is best at determining what talent and skills are needed. Some of these might be old. Laying off a person for skill not needed is a hot button issue. Age is not the only factor, lets not forget that we keep some people in the workforce who don't have the right skill due to race, gender and age but the government has rules limiting efficiency in favor of social justice. A balance needs to be made are will go broke.
Agreed
"You do realize it's actually their own money, right? They paid in to ss to their older counterparts"
There is a deep mathematical/economic flaw in this reasoning.
Suppose I borrow a bunch of money and use it to pay for rent and food. I also earn money from working and use that to buy a boat. When my creditors come to collect on my debts, if I cannot repay them, they will seize my boat. The fact that I "paid for" the boat is not relevant.
The Federal government has run budget deficits every year since 2001 and all but four years since 1969. The surpluses were minuscule compared to the deficits. People retiring now were only able to pay for their older counterparts SS *because* they borrowed a bunch of money that they will never pay back. The debt accrued during this period is much, much larger than the total revenue collected from SS payroll taxes.
I will agree with you that retirees are entitled to their SS benefits, as soon as they pay off the tens of trillions they borrowed.
It's not their own money, because they extract more than they paid in. If people were getting out what they put in, this would not be an issue.
Social Security benefits are typically computed using "average indexed monthly earnings." This average summarizes up to 35 years of a worker's indexed earnings. We apply a formula to this average to compute the primary insurance amount (PIA). The PIA is the basis for the benefits that are paid to an individual.
Tyler Cowen wrote that in academia: "I suspect age discrimination is far more extreme [than gender and race discrimination], at least when it comes to the final stage of the process, namely the actual interview and hiring decisions." I agree with Cowen.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/02/how-bad-is-age-discrimination-in-academia.html
In tech, Hanania highlights a small number of high profile age discrimination lawsuits. But age discrimination is deeply ingrained in the industry, there's broad consensus of that, I don't find these arguments at all convincing.
Next, lots of brain-centric career tracks peak later in life, because it requires decades to develop and excel at some particular niche. Some older workers really offer unique value. There are millions of young people with young brains that aren't generating high dollar value. That is a large part of the story.
The government is welfare for lots of people, old people are just one set of constituents. Government workers, are arguably the primary welfare recipients. Hanani's mentor, Caplan, frequently says that government gives charity to the old, not the poor, but I suspect that is not entirely true. A lot of young poor people consume enormous amounts of resources. I bet a motivated researcher can dig through government spending data to tell a very different story.
I am sympathetic to some arguments that some older people have entrenched their privileges, and blocked access to the younger generation. Overall, this post is glib caricature.
I trust tech companies to be best positioned to understand who is good at tech. If there’s rampant age discrimination there’s probably a reason. That’s the benefit of markets, they can make up for entrenched privilege because civil rights and labor lawyers can’t be everywhere.
I've worked in tech for 15 years or so. Tech companies want younger people because they have more energy and are willing to spend nights and weekends at the office (or, in today's "hybrid" word, working anywhere at their laptops). That's more valuable to them than quality of code, because software companies work on the assumption that code will always be buggy but can be fixed pronto if you have an eager 25-year old who is up at 2am and at your beck and call. When it comes to actual code quality, a highly-experienced 55 year old may churn out better (i.e., more robust) software than an eager but inexperienced 30-year old.
Well that’s also a great reason to hire someone.
Sure, I agree with pro-market views and agree that tech companies should hire the people they want to hire, even when that includes age discrimination.
I disagree with the claim of the article that the laws and lawsuits mentioned have prohibited age discrimination. Age discrimination is not like race discrimination. People holding positions of power view race discrimination as the ultimate taboo, but view many forms of age discrimination as entirely justified. Go to any graduate school, and people will tell you that a 40 year old does not get the same opportunity to go to graduate school that a 25 year old does, and that's not an injustice, but that is justified.
We need to revisit this essay when Mr. Hanania is 64. ;)
Seriously:
1. As you say, people want to survive to get old. Even if 19% of them don't make it, we have a hard enough time convincing young people not to do dangerous things. I think too many people expect programs for the old will be there for them when the time comes and want to protect them.
2. I don't think enough people believe in the superiority of Western culture anymore. On the left it is the most evil culture that ever existed (I strongly disagree but that's not the point here), and on the right (a) conservatives lean old so this is going to be a hard sell (b) one of the main features of conservatism is respect for the past and that ties in with respect for your elders.
Frankly I am starting to wonder if the Chinese have the edge over us--the West and East trade dominance every couple hundred years, this could be Beijing's time in the sun.
Martin Armstrong says China will dominate after 2032, at least financially. He bases his prediction on proprietary data crunching. I think he’s onto something but seems to be one of those people marginalized during his lifetime.
Normally I’d read something this superficial and incomplete and assume it’s just low-effort propaganda but I’m wondering if you’re really this clueless about why the system works the way it does. You hinted at awareness in mentioning that some people die before collecting retirement benefits. But everyone else does receive them -- unlike all the other entitlement categories we can all expect to become old and benefit from this system. So it’s not typical welfare in the sense of taking from winners and giving to losers. We all start young and all get old and seem to have chosen to rob our young selves to pay our old selves.
Supposedly Social Security was enacted because elderly poverty used to be a thing. Not sure you can look at currently successful olds and assume the whole system is worthless. Presumably the current system is why those olds aren’t broke and miserable.
I’m sure lots of workplace protections are excessive but I suspect there was at some point an implicit deal of “work hard while you’re young, we’ll take care of you when you’re old” but thanks to incompetent management IBM now wants to renege on that deal and unload the olds.
//Presumably the current system is why those olds aren’t broke and miserable//
If someone is retired and relying on SSI, I can assure you they are particularly broke and miserable. These are most certainly NOT the folks in this demographic that are "successful olds."
None of this fixes the math problem that is paying people in today dollars while contributions are made in yesterday's dollars.
Full disclosure: I am one of the evil persons who made a lot of money AND got old (67). The situation we find ourselves in is solely due to human nature. The government could have changed the rules at any time. I played by the rules as I found them. If they HAD created a system to push more of retirement savings on the individual, I (or we in the case of my wife and I) would have aggressively done so (we did anyway), but MOST PEOPLE WOULD NOT. Then we would be in the same situation... pressure on the government to take more of my money to give it to people who did not save.
It is naive in the extreme to think that rearranging laws will fix this. And FWIW, I know that the system is not sustainable. Humans did not evolve with this much wealth and longevity. Even a wise king could not manage an equitable division of society's. wealth, even if he wanted to.
Perhaps a strict libertarianism would work, at least as far as laws go, but humans cannot live in such a world which would look like Central America with shantys next to gated communities, and people starving on the streets. To quote the great John Derbyshire: We're Doomed.
Thank you for representing us very well.
Much of what Richard says I agree with, but he overeggs the pudding. Yes, I transferred wealth from my young self to my old self (I'm 70 and retired). My wealth is higher than it was when I was 30, 40, or 50, but guess what? My income is lower, for the obvious reason that I get no paycheck. I'm living off my savings (yes, social security too). I read an analysis some years ago to the effect that my parents' generation (the so-called Greatest Generation) got a great deal from Social Security in that they paid little into it and got a lot out, but the deal has been getting worse for every succeeding cohort.
But yes, too many programs and policies favor the old, most egregiously the recent COVID policies, which have been devastating for children, teenagers, and young adults.
Two problems with Richard’s argument:
1. From a purely practical standpoint, how do you successfully work yourself out of a Ponzi scheme? If The U.S. government simply defaulted on its Social Security promises it would likely suffer an unsurvivable crisis of legitimacy. The solution for now at least is to keep it going.
2. One of the reasons human societies venerate the old is to motivate the young. The young work hard so they can generate wealth, survive to be old, and enjoy the fruits of their labor. A society in which working age people think their best years are behind them is in a very bad place, and indeed that may be where Western societies are headed.
Aside from the venerable Ecological Movement preaching to 1970-1990s youngsters to have fewer or no kids due to the upcoming (at the time) environmental and social disaster, there is a _big_ problem to any government-backed social security scheme in the world: no kids to keep the funds flowing.
https://thefertilityhub.com/the-population-implosion/
There is no way to keep the lights on, unless there is some technological advancement to make _very cheap_ to care the elderly. The ultra-low fertility in Japan and Korea comes to mind in this regard.
I actually really like this as a theory about old engineers contributing to the ossification of companies. As companies age, their workforce does too. But while once upon a time a new CEO could come in, clear out the old-timers and refocus the company, now the law prevents this.
Though my thought would be, if you can't fire them, maybe it's still permissible to find some other approach within the bounds of the law. E.g., reshuffling all of them into the same business unit, and then spinning it off -- chopping off a gangrenous arm to save the body.
If you're a bright young engineer fresh out of school, you probably want to work with other engineers that are somewhat more experienced than you but still very much "with it." Say, guys around age 25-30. The thing about having an engineering department with lots of 50-somethings is that it's actually an impediment to hiring young guys.
It's from 2016 but I found this graphic showing average age of engineers by company. And yep, IBM, Oracle, and HP are at the back of the pack there.
https://www.smartinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Screen-Shot-2016-05-30-at-13.25.31.png
I argued with the childless that they’re gaming the system by not taking away from their own life to raise another generation but expecting/understanding that the next generation will take care of them. I’m not saying I blame them, it makes sense.
What if SS and Medicare were tweaked to provide non means tested credits for people who raised children who pay into the system and reduced means tested benefits for those that don’t?
Essentially you would be earning your right to be taken care of when you’re old by sacrificing and taking care of others when you’re young.
This is an interesting idea if only because it confirms its a ponzi scheme.
I dont view this as a priority really aside from pensions. Im in my 20s, I feel good knowing that there are laws which will ensure I get to stay working as long as I would like to.
The generations following the boomers and gen x are thoroughly unhinged, so i hope the boomers (xers are mostly nonentities) stay in power as long as possible. I assume the generations that follow my own will be even worse
Hanania's argument works in economic terms, and I believe there's truth to it there. But yeah, in political terms, on the eve of what seems like the last mentally healthy American generations riding into the sunset, I largely sympathize with your second paragraph.
As someone they call an "Xennial", who affiliated a lot with older kids (i.e. Gen X) growing up, I feel like I stand astride the line where things really fell apart. One of the first things I noticed: my peers and I were ecstatic to go to college, to enjoy that freedom and independence, just like our parents had been. Then kids a few years younger than me started complaining about crushing "mental health" and anxiety at college. What on Earth was going on? How did they make a fun time into a total bummer?
Well, as they come to power, a lot more things are going to become total bummers, I fear.
I'm a millen-X-ennial. Right between Millenials and Xennials like you. If you don't like hyper-narrow categories like that, you can just call me an old millennial. My parents worked for a high school though, so I spent a ton of time around gen X high schoolers while I was a kid. I have come to see that this influenced my development a lot and has tended to put me at odds ideologically with my generational cohort.
What I absorbed from the gen Xers was a deep skepticism of authority and an obsession with being authentic to the true self. The only true authority is the self. My generation instead emphasizes submitting to the "right" authorities, and a self-righteous perception of themsevles in relation to society.
Pensions benefit long-term government workers specifically, not older people in general. Pensions are expensive and generally unreasonable and unfair, but I would blame politicians and government unions more than the elderly for this.
Wow. You like having the boomers in power because nothing could be better? I can imagine better governance in a dung hill.
Its boomers vs the likely succeeding alternatives, not boomers vs Marcus Aurelius
Social security and Medicare/Medicaid often find their sophisticated defenses not as transfer programs but as insurance programs: they insure against running out of money in old age and dying from poor medical care. In exchange for this ex-ante insurance, younger people give up some of their income.
Because the richer die later than the poorer, an irony arises: the greater the insurance function of social security, the more anti progressive social security and Medicare would seem to be.
At any rate, an anti-gerontocracy political coalition seems doomed from the start for straightforward reasons but also more subtle ones. The politicians most critical of the elderly are generally most supportive of social security and Medicare. The reverse is also true. You can find amusing tea party quotes of town halls in which an old woman says something along the lines of “keep your government hands out of my Medicare”.
It cannot be viewed as insurance simply because the premiums will never cover the costs.