Both groups have a hard time with the basics: getting a job, being able to afford a place to live where the jobs are, and most importantly (implied by the difficulty finding a mate) getting respect because of the lack of first two.
I'd say more difference than connection. China is facing a terrifying 'demographic cliff' due to the previous 1 child policy, much more so than western nations. This also skewed gender towards males in the Chinese Gen Y cohort (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8957256...).
Similar story is rural India; lots of 'missing women' from the population. In both cases, the first born son is/was culturally expected to be the 'old age pension fund' of the parents, whereas girls were considered financial liabilities until they could be married off (i.e. someone else's problem).
The very disturbing implication being: if you can only have 1 child, and you believe only boys can support you in retirement, what do you do when you give birth and find out it's a girl?
"The 'one-child' policy has also led to what Amartya Sen first called 'Missing Women', or the 100 million girls 'missing' from the populations of China (and other developing countries) as a result of female infanticide, abandonment, and neglect".
> The very disturbing implication being: if you can only have 1 child, and you believe only boys can support you in retirement, what do you do when you give birth and find out it's a girl?
In China's urban populations at least, it is increasingly common for women to take care of their aging parents, I imagine this is partly due to one-child policy. Another interesting shift in social norm is, now single guys need to have a house to be considered an "eligible bachelor", which is a considerable financial burden to many parents due to ballooning housing costs. Those who preferred sons 20 years ago are probably feeling the burn right now.
SHEN XIANG LIVES in a shipping crate on a construction site in Shanghai which he shares with at least seven other young workers. He sleeps in a bunk and uses a bucket to wash in. “It’s uncomfortable,” he says. Still, he pays no rent and the walk to work is only a few paces. Mr Shen, who was born in 1989, hails from a village of “mountains, rivers and trees”. He is a migrant worker and the son of two migrants, so he has always been a second-class citizen in his own country.
In China, many public services in cities are reserved for those with a hukou (residence permit). Despite recent reforms, it is still hard for a rural migrant to obtain a big-city hukou. Mr Shen was shut out of government schools in Shanghai even though his parents worked there. Instead he had to make do with a worse one back in his village.
Now he paints hotels. The pay is good—300 yuan ($47) for an 11-hour day—and jobs are more plentiful in Shanghai than back in the countryside. His ambition is “to get married as fast as I can”. But he cannot afford to. There are more young men than young women in China because so many girl babies were aborted in previous decades. So the women today can afford to be picky. Mr Shen had a girlfriend once, but her family demanded that he buy her a house. “I didn’t have enough money, so we broke up,” he recalls. Mr Shen doubts that he will ever be able to buy a flat in Shanghai. In any case, without the right hukou his children would not get subsidised education or health care there. “It’s unfair,” he says.
There are 1.8 billion young people in the world, roughly a quarter of the total population. (This report defines “young” as between about 15 and 30.) All generalisations about such a vast group should be taken with a bucket of salt. What is true of young Chinese may not apply to young Americans or Burundians. But the young do have some things in common: they grew up in the age of smartphones and in the shadow of a global financial disaster. They fret that it is hard to get a good education, a steady job, a home and—eventually—a mate with whom to start a family.
Companies are obsessed with understanding how “millennials” think, the better to recruit them or sell them stuff. Consultants churn out endless reports explaining that they like to share, require constant praise and so forth. Pundits fret that millennials in rich countries never seem to grow out of adolescence, with their constant posting of selfies on social media and their desire for “safe spaces” at university, shielded from discomforting ideas.
This report takes a global view, since 85% of young people live in developing countries, and focuses on practical matters, such as education and jobs. And it will argue that the young are an oppressed minority, held back by their elders. They are unlike other oppressed minorities, of course. Their “oppressors” do not set out to harm them. On the contrary, they often love and nurture them. Many would gladly swap places with them, too.
In some respects the young have never had it so good. They are richer and likely to live longer than any previous generation. On their smartphones they can find all the information in the world. If they are female or gay, in most countries they enjoy freedoms that their predecessors could barely have imagined. They are also brainier than any previous generation. Average scores on intelligence tests have been rising for decades in many countries, thanks to better nutrition and mass education.
Yet much of their talent is being squandered. In most regions they are at least twice as likely as their elders to be unemployed. Over 25% of youngsters in middle-income nations and 15% in rich ones are NEETs: not in education, employment or training. The job market they are entering is more competitive than ever, and in many countries the rules are rigged to favour those who already have a job.
Education has become so expensive that many students rack up heavy debts. Housing has grown costlier, too, especially in the globally connect...
> Throughout human history, the old have subsidised the young. In rich countries, however, that flow has recently started to reverse. Ronald Lee of the University of California, Berkeley, and Andrew Mason at the University of Hawaii measured how much people earn at different ages in 23 countries, and how much they consume. Within families, intergenerational transfers still flow almost entirely from older to younger. However, in rich countries public spending favours pensions and health care for the old over education for the young.
Speaking in broad strokes (i.e. I'm sure there are plenty of individual examples to the contrary) the baby boom generation is the most selfish generation in recent history, voting to cut taxes and benefits for government and societal services after they had gotten their full use out of them.
> What really made me feel ancient is that the 1981 UW student guide shows the Med school charged only $1,029 a year back then. Today: $28,040!
> The reason a summer at KFC could pay for a year of UW med school in 1981 isn’t that we were so hardworking and industrious. It’s that taxpayers back then picked up 90 percent of the tab. We weren’t Horatio Algers. We were socialists.
> Today, the public picks up only 30 percent of UW tuition, and dropping.
Imagine what would happen if young people actually voted.
Why not get to the root of the problem? An education should not cost that much. Much of the reason the cost has outpaced inflation is the subsidizing of the tuition price paid by the student instead of making the process of educating less costly by using technology.
Imagine what would happen if a degree was about what you know, not just a credential.
Education always costs a great deal. Teachers need to be paid, schools need buildings, universities needs labs, etc.
The only question is how payments are organised: taxes, fees, some hybrid ... Whatever mechanism is chosen, somebody feels hard up and will seek to change it.
Yet, it's always the old paying for the education of the young, just like it is always the young paying the oldies' pensions.
Should people be able to live at university forever, with a living wage from the public purse? What if they were enrolled but didn't ever attend?
Should the government even be involved in education? Were it not for government protection, what kind of disruption would we have seen to the education sector by now?
Given that university-educated people earn more than other taxpayers, why is it unreasonable to expect that they should be responsible for covering the cost of their education?
Consider the deferred payment system of the Australian model.
The Swiss model is interesting as well. In Switzerland, each university has to take whoever wants to go. But there's no rules about the conditions that they give you when you get there. So if 200 people applied and they were only set up for 50 places, they could give aptitude tests to them all, and then put seats and books in the gym for the remaining 150 with instruction to submit one difficult major project for pass-fail assessment each per semester.
> Should the government even be involved in education? Were it not for government protection, what kind of disruption would we have seen to the education sector by now?
> Should people be able to live at university forever, with a living wage from the public purse? What if they were enrolled but didn't ever attend?
One way to sort it is the finnish system where you have certain amount of months you can get paid for. Your courses are tracked and if you are enrolled but are not advancing fast enough you need to payback your benefits. If you advance to further studies you can get more months, but eventually you run out of them.
There is only so many places available to study and you need to take test to get into most places.
It's not without its problems and it certainly is not 'free'.
I always think of disrupt from the perspective of creative destruction, and it always being unambiguously good. So if I was in a stagnant industry, I'd be trying to reform. And if I was getting hit hard by reformers, I'd see that as justice that I was on the wrong side of.
Hence, I'm tempted to say that both meanings mean the same thing to me.
But it's interesting you raise it. I recently reread _A Second Chance at Eden_ by Peter F Hamilton. In one of the stories, a character turns down an opportunity at fabulous wealth from a mindset that it would cause vast social trauma. This seeded a thought - perhaps creative destruction is not as unambiguously good as I presume. But it still hasn't yet sunk in. (And such a correction would require a worldview rebuild - a trauma of its own :) )
Assuming you are discussing college and similar forms of education with high marginal costs (e.g. stuff involving teachers), how do you prevent society from wasting resources on unproductive education?
Of course, if you are discussing education in general, the cost is already close to $0. Khan, duolingo, wikipedia, etc are all free.
Well, yummyfajitas did say, "close to $0", not free. And I think you are forgetting about libraries. They offer Internet access and they are far cheaper than colleges.
Edit: In 2011, the cost for all libraries in the US was $11.5 billion.[1] In the same year, $483 billion was spent in the US on college education.[2] That's a 42x difference. Granted, the uses and use-cases are different. But anyone who can go to college can, if they have the motivation, get the same knowledge for far cheaper.
Of course (excepting a few unusual disciplines like programming), credentials help one's career more than knowledge.
I went almost straight into the workforce instead of going to college so I feel like I should be on your side here. However I don't think I would really mind some of my tax dollars going to people thinking about women in society as I rather like women, or managing sports teams, as I also enjoy watching sports. Is this opinion entirely out of vogue now? What the hell else am I getting out of my sizable federal tax bill?
When you hear the word "taxpayer" brought up in an argument, it's a good hint that what will follow is a screed against providing anyone any assistance from the public purse whatsoever, despite any such benefits the author may have received and conveniently forgotten in their personal "self made man" narrative.
Quick summary: subsidizing positional goods makes them more expensive (because there's always someone willing to pay more for a higher place on the totem pole), and it looks like this effect has driven up the cost of higher education, which is partly a positional good. Beware of throwing more money at this.
>If a society is not able to provide free education for the upcoming generations, then the basis of such a society should be questioned.
And every developed country/society on the planet has done it, except one.
It's extremely obvious which society has it figured out when you move from a country where people are encouraged and paid to further their education, to one where people take on crushing debt to get it. It genuinely feels like a society of slaves in comparison.
> Much of the reason the cost has outpaced inflation is the subsidizing of the tuition price
But is this really true? Student tuition debt would say otherwise. In any case, you should follow the money and see where all this cost increase has landed. Certainly isn't the professor/TA salaries. Most of the increase has flowed into administrative costs. An entire bureaucratic edifice has been constructed that contributes nothing to education. Same with healthcare. Guess what, most of the bureaucrats are Boomers!. One more reason to designate the Boomers as the worst generation.
This is what happens when incentives for efficiency are removed. In industries with large amounts of regulation we see this over and over. In education with more than 50% of money spent on administration it's just particularly obvious.
This is true, but it is not the root cause of the problem - and it is a distraction from the issue because it places the blame on providers. In the past, there was no significant incentive for the cost of higher education to increase at the pace we've seen for the last 20-30 years.
The big mistake was pushing for individual loans for each student to pay for college rather than subsidizing the system. This created distorted incentives where schools needed to spend money on "extra" things to attract students who had money to spend, rather than trying to push down the cost of providing quality education to each student. Schools that didn't invest would not attract paying customers. Providing the level of service & extra amenities students expect is expensive, and carries a lot of overhead support cost from administrative staff.
> making the process of educating less costly by using technology
Technology is not a silver bullet. The cost of delivering education at scale is not where the waste is. Much like the healthcare sector, there is a huge administrative infrastructure at every school dedicated to facilitating a complex system of loans, grants, scholarships, individual payments, etc., for accounting. These jobs are unlikely to be eliminated with automation. The best answer is to make them unnecessary outright.
> if a degree was about what you know, not just a credential
A degree has never been about what you know, otherwise we'd award them to everyone who has equivalent work and life experience. But it's also not just a credential. The value of college is not limited to the academic requirements. A society benefits from an informed and educated populace, and from the personal growth that happens when smart folks learn together. That isn't to say that the country club lifestyle of American colleges today is providing services worth the cost...
You might be making the false correlation that education == schooling from reading your comment. Being schooled does not make you educated, and you can be educated without being schooled. Just because today the expectation in the west is extensive schooling to provide education does not mean that is the best way (or even a viable way for many) to be educated.
Personally I want there to be more coop learning. Combining democratic resources like wikibooks / open courseware and like minded individuals that want to learn the same things, plus a potential volunteer veteran or two, and for a lot of people that can produce a much better education than an overpriced book and lecture seminar with standardized testing ever could. For others, apprenticeship may be optimal. Or fully automated programs like Code Academy or Khan's Academy might be best for some, where they learn best through self-enforcement and learn-at-your-own-pace self pacing.
One of the largest takeaways from the past twenty years should be that trying to push a generation through traditional lecture-based coursework in classical university settings is not a one size fits all solution to education, and that it did not work - this article presents plenty of statistics denoting the failure of that model.
Edit: Side note, I think Stack Overflow is a great model for tutelage in the future. That is basically what it already is for the entire software community, and they have expanded the model into many other disciplines - that kind of ask a question, the community decides on the best answer, and once solved is locked / memorialized for others to easily find when they themselves encounter the same question is immensely valuable. It would be revolutionary to get most people answering their own questions through resources like that.
Gen Y is more than 1 quarter of the US population and outnumber the baby-boomers. We're the children of the baby boomers, hence the alternative name for Gen Y: 'echo boomers'.
It is only the very tail-end of that group which are still in HS or below. You need the numbers for the kids born between (say) 1998 and 2015-minus whatever year they start preschool.
Also baby boomers may have retired but most don't need to be in a nursing home yet (which is the really expensive part).
At least in Australia, the really expensive 'contingent liability' (i.e. future tax burden on Gen Y) comes from health care expenditure, which tends to sky-rocket as one grows older. Might be different in the US given the more limited government expenditure on public health.
Actual tax situation is this : In the United States, federal tax revenues since World War II have always been approximately equal to 19.5% of GDP, regardless of wide fluctuations in the marginal tax rate.
Just eyeballing it, from 1975 to 2005 the tax to GDP ratio in the US was always above 24% and peaked at 30% in 2000. Is the discrepancy due to State taxes being included in the graph?
In a sense you're right. Government spending is the problem: the money was 'spent' over the past few decades but just won't be paid out until grandfathered boomer pensions and medicaid payments fall due. Pretty sweet deal for politicians and boomers: buy political capital from the boomers now, and let the children pay for it later by raising their taxes in future, cutting their entitlements and raising the retirement age so that they'll be working until they're dead.
Not that Gen Y are blameless. Politicians respond to incentives just like anyone else. If you don't vote, don't expect them to give a crap about you.
The most recent data from the US Census Bureau indicates that the turnout rate for the 18-29 age group is at the lowest it's ever been since at least 1986 (this is as far back as the charted data goes). They are the age group with the lowest participation.
Would you blame those that didn't vote in the one-candidate elections held in the Soviet Union? How bout the recent Venezuelan 'elections '?
Now ask yourself just how much more honest are the national elections in the US are these days?
What's that saying... "If voting mattered, they wouldn't let you do it."
Do you truly believe American democracy is so far gone that it's comparable to 'democracy' in the former Soviet Union? For me, I honestly couldn't say with any certainty (I'm not an American).
From an outsider's perspective, I don't perceive American elections as being anywhere close to one-candidate Soviet Union elections. Heck, even the 'primaries' process that your major parties use to select presidential nominees seems to create greater scope for the public to influence outcomes.
Not that the US system is without its problems:
- Administratively, the way US elections are run is worthy of a third world banana republic. I find it astounding that gerrymandering and 'vote caging' are routine occurrences in a country that espouses such a strong belief in democracy.
- 'First past the post' is a terrible voting system that guarantees a 2 party system. However, so does Ranked preference/Instant run-off voting (despite what its advocates think).
- US public political discourse does seem to be influenced, to a relatively greater degree, by powerful private interests and god knows who else...
- [This is a bit controversial] Voluntary voting leads to worse outcomes compared to compulsory voting. The greatest virtue of CV is that politicians are forced to consider minorities or cohorts that would otherwise have low turnout rates under voluntary systems.
I suspect once the baby boomers are gone things will slowly start to improve. They are generally the ones who both invented and keep alive such atrocities as the drug war, our un-winnable foreign wars in too many countries to keep track of, and countless other insanities they either perpetrated themselves or took to a new level. Seriously, how can you expect socialism when both ruling parties are only interested in war, war, war, of all kinds and have absolutely no interest in education or their children's future (environment, opportunities, health care, etc.). Look what it took just to get a healthcare bill that says you have a right to buy health insurance passed. Before that, fuck off and die you sick bastard was the policy for sick, poor people, many of them young. Or education, which is now mostly unreachable except for the truly rich. The governing consensus (of most boomers who rule congress) is that we should be making money off of our young people instead of helping them get educated. I wonder why they're doing worse than other generations economically when they're being exploited by their parents generation without a hint of compassion. Student loans cannot even be gotten rid of if you declare bankruptcy.
This thought is both extremely sad and extremely hopeful. It's sad because there are a lot of boomers who I love dearly in my life as with probably most everyone here. It's hopeful because a lot of young people, including myself, are fucking sick and tired of being exploited by the old for their literally insane pursuits (mostly war and hate). In this sense, death is a welcome factor. I'm certain I'm not part of the first generation to think this about their elders nor am I part of the rest. The old, outdated, stupid, insane, cruel, hateful, hurtful ideas have to go and unfortunately the only thing that ever helps in such situations is death. Death is truly, the bringer of change, and in the current status quo, hopeful change.
The healthcare bill took forever to pass because of its half-assed marketplace that's offering terrible healthcare for lots of people. $621/mo premium with everything out of pocket up to a $6,000 deductible is a joke. That's as much as a mortgage payment for many people and it amounts to nothing more than catastrophic coverage.
And that's for one young, healthy person! The plans available, coverage, and costs are terrible. I can't imagine how regular workers making < $100k are paying those premiums and they're going up by about $50/year consistently. The bill had many other good provisions, but other than Medicaid expansion (which was turned down once again by mostly baby boomer asshole governors whose demonstrated compassion and empathy levels are so low they don't belong in the human race) none of them actually provides health care. It creates a market, and like you say, not a very good one, and fixes problems that shouldn't have existed in the first place like denying people coverage because they're sick (preexisting conditions) or went a month without coverage.
And this is amazing progress and the best we can expect in America from the mostly baby boomer assholes in power. But if we repeat mindlessly that America is the greatest country on earth enough, we can overlook the fact that it is dead last in healthcare out of all developed countries. Why socialize medicine, pharmaceuticals, and other industries that profit off of people's misfortunes, sickness, and death? Why not profit off of other people's misfortunes, sickness, and death? Die already so I can get rich. That is the American way, after all, and that's why those prices are so fucking high.
The average cost for an ACA premium in 2015 was $374 per month, but since 85 percent of people signing up receive a subsidy the cost is actually much lower.
"Among consumers who are signed up for 2015 coverage to date in the 37 HealthCare.gov states, 8 in 10 could choose a plan with a premium of $100 or less after tax credits, based on available options."[1]
Yes, but I'm sure that includes health insurance not on the Platinum level (pays 90-100% of costs) which is even worse than what is described above and truly only for catastrophes. In New Jersey, there is no Platinum health plan < $500 per person and most of the plans, even at the Platinum level, still have outrageous out of pocket maximums, deductibles, or limits on coverage. For example, in New Jersey out of half a dozen or so Platinum plans only one has a nationwide network. It wouldn't matter for a person who gets sick on these non platinum plans because having to pay 20-50% of the whole bill with such high out of pocket maximums will most likely bankrupt anyone who can't afford the premium for more expensive plans.
I believe strongly that the boomers dying will also result in a wide, and wholesale transfer of wealth - it may not go intergenerationally directly - but it will unleash a torrent of stored wealth on the economy, and may cause a crash on housing prices (again) because of so much of the market 20-40% turning in 20 years.
> Speaking in broad strokes (i.e. I'm sure there are plenty of individual examples to the contrary) the baby boom generation is the most selfish generation in recent history, voting to cut taxes and benefits for government and societal services after they had gotten their full use out of them.
The government spends more than ever as a percent of GDP:
Not sure what your point is. About 60% of the federal budget is Social Security and Medicare. Besides defense (a large chunk of which is VA and pensions), the other big ticket item is SSDI which lso goes to the older at a very high rate. So it seems like the majority of federal dollars do, in fact, go to the elderly.
I'm not denying that - but the benefits have not been cut. The spending is larger than ever. The increase in government spending correlates with the hollowing out of the middle class. I'm very skeptical that even more spending will reverse it - sort of like building giant air conditioners to combat global warming.
I can relate to the allegation that baby boomers like to 'keep millennials down' - I truly cannot stand aspects of family renunions with aunts, uncles, even my parents who casually dismiss the majority of things I stand for or aspire to as 'a phase' or as 'nerdy'... meanwhile they swear by Fox News, pedal oversimplified, uncompromising viewpoints, and are more interested in talking to me about how I find time to party than the projects I work on ("Work hard, party hard, Orthoganol"). I sit at my grandfather's table when I can, maybe it's just an effect of old age, but I feel like his generation better understands the important things.
I think it's too simple to say "this is how all generations think of the previous one." I think baby boomers, admirably, set out to create a new identity - coming of age at the height of the 60s, time of prosperity meaning more independence, with Vietnam and the civil rights movements probably casting doubts about the prior generation's values (rightfully so). A clean break of sorts. I think the problem is they threw out the old, but failed to actually assert something substantial that could raise the next generation. Vague values and sentiments, really. Millennials get told to just be ourselves, find our passions, and are encouraged to party, drink, have sex... don't work too hard. Partying is treated almost as importantly if not more, as working hard to make something out of yourself and your life. Nerd culture is despised, maybe because they all watched a ton of jock 80s movies. I don't doubt a correlation between being raised on those values and the depression and mental illness rates we see today among young people... you can surely overcome it eventually, but you're raised on it by default. I'm painting with a broad stroke, but I think the baby boomers represent a sort of 'break' with the generations before them, and it didn't set up the next generation so well. My grandfather's generation, while they weren't socially progressive by any means, seems more grounded overall - they at least have access to the wisdom of many generations before.
It's interesting that you relate better to your grandfather's generation. Assuming you're a Gen Y, and he's part of the 'G.I. Generation', then you're both of the same generational archetype (see Strauss-Howe generational theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...).
Of the 4 generational archetypes, Gen Y and the G.I. Generation are both of the 'Hero' type:
"Hero generations are born after an Awakening, during an Unraveling, a time of individual pragmatism, self-reliance, and laissez faire. Heroes grow up as increasingly protected post-Awakening children, come of age as team-oriented young optimists during a Crisis, emerge as energetic, overly-confident midlifers, and age into politically powerful elders attacked by another Awakening."
In contrast, the Baby Boomers fall in to the 'Prophet' archetype:
"Prophet generations are born near the end of a Crisis, during a time of rejuvenated community life and consensus around a new societal order. Prophets grow up as the increasingly indulged children of this post-Crisis era, come of age as self-absorbed young crusaders of an Awakening, focus on morals and principles in midlife, and emerge as elders guiding another Crisis."
The internet has solved most problems that the article is referring to; but not for everybody. From his "village of mountains, rivers and trees" he could create the next facebook on his laptop (or even something less ambitious). The reason why he does not do that, has nothing to do with a lack of "hukou" privilege. When he says: "It is unfair", he is fixating himself on a problem that he cannot solve, instead of moving on. Seriously, the "hukou"-holding Chinese are as ignorant as he is. They will not create the next facebook either. There is nothing to learn from them or their schools. That is what him and 99% of the world's population don't seem to see. With the internet around, location does not matter. You can make exactly as much money as your intelligence allows you to. That means: almost nothing in terms of money for the "hukou" guys.
This article does not address trends in health care or pension spend. These are the two largest total (federal, state, and local combined) spend items in our collective budget. 2015 figures:
Healthcare expenses lean heavily towards the old but are funded by the working age population. What happens as the birth rate decreases and the average individual lives longer? Expenses increase for the working-age population.
Currently, social security is taking in ~$74bn less in payroll taxes than it pays out in benefits. The $2.83tn fund is invested in federal debt that pays 3.4% interest. So the interest payment (from the Federal government) of $96.2b is enough to cover the deficit.
By 2020, interest will no longer be enough to cover the deficit between revenue in from taxes and expenditures out to retirees. At that point, the SS fund will need to start redeeming treasuries for cash. The federal government will then need to issue new debt and/or raise taxes to cover SS treasury bond redemptions.
If the Federal Reserve follows through in its quest to raise interest rates and inflation, it will be relatively expensive to raise the $2.83tn in debt that we will need to fund SS through 2029, when it is projected to completely deplete its reserves of treasury notes. At this point, SS will only be able to pay out 75% of promised benefits given the current tax rate and demographic trends.
I'm less concerned about spend on education (which is broken) than I am about how we plan to fund our health care and pension systems. The only feasible way I can see is through increased taxation. I just started working last year. Hell of a time to enter the work force!
Overall it seems to me like we are paying an increasing amount of our federal budget on the older population than we anticipated we would need to and that we did not adequately provision for.
And to think I'll be "getting a pension" (or so I'm told) in 2047, or 18 years after Social security is broke, assuming 4% average return, which we're not getting.
"They are also brainier than any previous generation. Average scores on intelligence tests have been rising for decades in many countries, thanks to better nutrition and mass education."
Is this true? From what I've read on the Flynn effect[0], these are only possible explanations.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadSimilar story is rural India; lots of 'missing women' from the population. In both cases, the first born son is/was culturally expected to be the 'old age pension fund' of the parents, whereas girls were considered financial liabilities until they could be married off (i.e. someone else's problem).
The very disturbing implication being: if you can only have 1 child, and you believe only boys can support you in retirement, what do you do when you give birth and find out it's a girl?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_sex_discernment#India
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Effect_on_inf...
and this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticide_in_India#Co...
"The 'one-child' policy has also led to what Amartya Sen first called 'Missing Women', or the 100 million girls 'missing' from the populations of China (and other developing countries) as a result of female infanticide, abandonment, and neglect".
In China's urban populations at least, it is increasingly common for women to take care of their aging parents, I imagine this is partly due to one-child policy. Another interesting shift in social norm is, now single guys need to have a house to be considered an "eligible bachelor", which is a considerable financial burden to many parents due to ballooning housing costs. Those who preferred sons 20 years ago are probably feeling the burn right now.
Edit: Strangely The Economist seems to be blocking Tunisian IP addresses.
In China, many public services in cities are reserved for those with a hukou (residence permit). Despite recent reforms, it is still hard for a rural migrant to obtain a big-city hukou. Mr Shen was shut out of government schools in Shanghai even though his parents worked there. Instead he had to make do with a worse one back in his village. Now he paints hotels. The pay is good—300 yuan ($47) for an 11-hour day—and jobs are more plentiful in Shanghai than back in the countryside. His ambition is “to get married as fast as I can”. But he cannot afford to. There are more young men than young women in China because so many girl babies were aborted in previous decades. So the women today can afford to be picky. Mr Shen had a girlfriend once, but her family demanded that he buy her a house. “I didn’t have enough money, so we broke up,” he recalls. Mr Shen doubts that he will ever be able to buy a flat in Shanghai. In any case, without the right hukou his children would not get subsidised education or health care there. “It’s unfair,” he says.
There are 1.8 billion young people in the world, roughly a quarter of the total population. (This report defines “young” as between about 15 and 30.) All generalisations about such a vast group should be taken with a bucket of salt. What is true of young Chinese may not apply to young Americans or Burundians. But the young do have some things in common: they grew up in the age of smartphones and in the shadow of a global financial disaster. They fret that it is hard to get a good education, a steady job, a home and—eventually—a mate with whom to start a family.
Companies are obsessed with understanding how “millennials” think, the better to recruit them or sell them stuff. Consultants churn out endless reports explaining that they like to share, require constant praise and so forth. Pundits fret that millennials in rich countries never seem to grow out of adolescence, with their constant posting of selfies on social media and their desire for “safe spaces” at university, shielded from discomforting ideas.
This report takes a global view, since 85% of young people live in developing countries, and focuses on practical matters, such as education and jobs. And it will argue that the young are an oppressed minority, held back by their elders. They are unlike other oppressed minorities, of course. Their “oppressors” do not set out to harm them. On the contrary, they often love and nurture them. Many would gladly swap places with them, too.
In some respects the young have never had it so good. They are richer and likely to live longer than any previous generation. On their smartphones they can find all the information in the world. If they are female or gay, in most countries they enjoy freedoms that their predecessors could barely have imagined. They are also brainier than any previous generation. Average scores on intelligence tests have been rising for decades in many countries, thanks to better nutrition and mass education.
Yet much of their talent is being squandered. In most regions they are at least twice as likely as their elders to be unemployed. Over 25% of youngsters in middle-income nations and 15% in rich ones are NEETs: not in education, employment or training. The job market they are entering is more competitive than ever, and in many countries the rules are rigged to favour those who already have a job.
Education has become so expensive that many students rack up heavy debts. Housing has grown costlier, too, especially in the globally connect...
Speaking in broad strokes (i.e. I'm sure there are plenty of individual examples to the contrary) the baby boom generation is the most selfish generation in recent history, voting to cut taxes and benefits for government and societal services after they had gotten their full use out of them.
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/yes-summer-job-paid...
> What really made me feel ancient is that the 1981 UW student guide shows the Med school charged only $1,029 a year back then. Today: $28,040!
> The reason a summer at KFC could pay for a year of UW med school in 1981 isn’t that we were so hardworking and industrious. It’s that taxpayers back then picked up 90 percent of the tab. We weren’t Horatio Algers. We were socialists.
> Today, the public picks up only 30 percent of UW tuition, and dropping.
Imagine what would happen if young people actually voted.
Imagine what would happen if a degree was about what you know, not just a credential.
If a society is not able to provide free education for the upcoming generations, then the basis of such a society should be questioned, rightfully so.
Education always costs a great deal. Teachers need to be paid, schools need buildings, universities needs labs, etc.
The only question is how payments are organised: taxes, fees, some hybrid ... Whatever mechanism is chosen, somebody feels hard up and will seek to change it.
Yet, it's always the old paying for the education of the young, just like it is always the young paying the oldies' pensions.
Should people be able to live at university forever, with a living wage from the public purse? What if they were enrolled but didn't ever attend?
Should the government even be involved in education? Were it not for government protection, what kind of disruption would we have seen to the education sector by now?
Given that university-educated people earn more than other taxpayers, why is it unreasonable to expect that they should be responsible for covering the cost of their education?
Consider the deferred payment system of the Australian model.
The Swiss model is interesting as well. In Switzerland, each university has to take whoever wants to go. But there's no rules about the conditions that they give you when you get there. So if 200 people applied and they were only set up for 50 places, they could give aptitude tests to them all, and then put seats and books in the gym for the remaining 150 with instruction to submit one difficult major project for pass-fail assessment each per semester.
More for profit colleges?
One way to sort it is the finnish system where you have certain amount of months you can get paid for. Your courses are tracked and if you are enrolled but are not advancing fast enough you need to payback your benefits. If you advance to further studies you can get more months, but eventually you run out of them.
There is only so many places available to study and you need to take test to get into most places.
It's not without its problems and it certainly is not 'free'.
- do you use "disrupt" in a positive sense, or in its original dictionary sense:
"interrupt (an event, activity, or process) by causing a disturbance or problem, alter or destroy the structure of .."
My point is also that often when people mean to disrupt in one way, they end up achieving the other.
Hence, I'm tempted to say that both meanings mean the same thing to me.
But it's interesting you raise it. I recently reread _A Second Chance at Eden_ by Peter F Hamilton. In one of the stories, a character turns down an opportunity at fabulous wealth from a mindset that it would cause vast social trauma. This seeded a thought - perhaps creative destruction is not as unambiguously good as I presume. But it still hasn't yet sunk in. (And such a correction would require a worldview rebuild - a trauma of its own :) )
Of course, if you are discussing education in general, the cost is already close to $0. Khan, duolingo, wikipedia, etc are all free.
Edit: In 2011, the cost for all libraries in the US was $11.5 billion.[1] In the same year, $483 billion was spent in the US on college education.[2] That's a 42x difference. Granted, the uses and use-cases are different. But anyone who can go to college can, if they have the motivation, get the same knowledge for far cheaper.
Of course (excepting a few unusual disciplines like programming), credentials help one's career more than knowledge.
1. https://www.imls.gov/assets/1/AssetManager/FY2012%20PLS_Tabl...
2. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_029.asp
So taxpayers should foot the bill for someone to get an expensive degree in women's studies or sports management?
Somebody has to use resources to build, pay salaries, pay for research etc
And every developed country/society on the planet has done it, except one.
It's extremely obvious which society has it figured out when you move from a country where people are encouraged and paid to further their education, to one where people take on crushing debt to get it. It genuinely feels like a society of slaves in comparison.
But is this really true? Student tuition debt would say otherwise. In any case, you should follow the money and see where all this cost increase has landed. Certainly isn't the professor/TA salaries. Most of the increase has flowed into administrative costs. An entire bureaucratic edifice has been constructed that contributes nothing to education. Same with healthcare. Guess what, most of the bureaucrats are Boomers!. One more reason to designate the Boomers as the worst generation.
This is true, but it is not the root cause of the problem - and it is a distraction from the issue because it places the blame on providers. In the past, there was no significant incentive for the cost of higher education to increase at the pace we've seen for the last 20-30 years.
The big mistake was pushing for individual loans for each student to pay for college rather than subsidizing the system. This created distorted incentives where schools needed to spend money on "extra" things to attract students who had money to spend, rather than trying to push down the cost of providing quality education to each student. Schools that didn't invest would not attract paying customers. Providing the level of service & extra amenities students expect is expensive, and carries a lot of overhead support cost from administrative staff.
> making the process of educating less costly by using technology
Technology is not a silver bullet. The cost of delivering education at scale is not where the waste is. Much like the healthcare sector, there is a huge administrative infrastructure at every school dedicated to facilitating a complex system of loans, grants, scholarships, individual payments, etc., for accounting. These jobs are unlikely to be eliminated with automation. The best answer is to make them unnecessary outright.
> if a degree was about what you know, not just a credential
A degree has never been about what you know, otherwise we'd award them to everyone who has equivalent work and life experience. But it's also not just a credential. The value of college is not limited to the academic requirements. A society benefits from an informed and educated populace, and from the personal growth that happens when smart folks learn together. That isn't to say that the country club lifestyle of American colleges today is providing services worth the cost...
Personally I want there to be more coop learning. Combining democratic resources like wikibooks / open courseware and like minded individuals that want to learn the same things, plus a potential volunteer veteran or two, and for a lot of people that can produce a much better education than an overpriced book and lecture seminar with standardized testing ever could. For others, apprenticeship may be optimal. Or fully automated programs like Code Academy or Khan's Academy might be best for some, where they learn best through self-enforcement and learn-at-your-own-pace self pacing.
One of the largest takeaways from the past twenty years should be that trying to push a generation through traditional lecture-based coursework in classical university settings is not a one size fits all solution to education, and that it did not work - this article presents plenty of statistics denoting the failure of that model.
Edit: Side note, I think Stack Overflow is a great model for tutelage in the future. That is basically what it already is for the entire software community, and they have expanded the model into many other disciplines - that kind of ask a question, the community decides on the best answer, and once solved is locked / memorialized for others to easily find when they themselves encounter the same question is immensely valuable. It would be revolutionary to get most people answering their own questions through resources like that.
Gen Y is more than 1 quarter of the US population and outnumber the baby-boomers. We're the children of the baby boomers, hence the alternative name for Gen Y: 'echo boomers'.
Also baby boomers may have retired but most don't need to be in a nursing home yet (which is the really expensive part).
At least in Australia, the really expensive 'contingent liability' (i.e. future tax burden on Gen Y) comes from health care expenditure, which tends to sky-rocket as one grows older. Might be different in the US given the more limited government expenditure on public health.
What? See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law
Actual tax situation is this : In the United States, federal tax revenues since World War II have always been approximately equal to 19.5% of GDP, regardless of wide fluctuations in the marginal tax rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law
I'll agree with you if your saying that growing government spending is a big problem, though.
And of course you'll find wide disagreement on whether we need to cut spending or raise taxes to deal with it.
Just eyeballing it, from 1975 to 2005 the tax to GDP ratio in the US was always above 24% and peaked at 30% in 2000. Is the discrepancy due to State taxes being included in the graph?
In a sense you're right. Government spending is the problem: the money was 'spent' over the past few decades but just won't be paid out until grandfathered boomer pensions and medicaid payments fall due. Pretty sweet deal for politicians and boomers: buy political capital from the boomers now, and let the children pay for it later by raising their taxes in future, cutting their entitlements and raising the retirement age so that they'll be working until they're dead.
Not that Gen Y are blameless. Politicians respond to incentives just like anyone else. If you don't vote, don't expect them to give a crap about you.
An image from the same page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_law#/media/File:U.S._... . Folks argue a lot but rate is fairly steady.
In answer to your question: no. I'm not blaming anyone who turned up to vote. I'm blaming those who didn't turn up to vote.
http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/demographics/...
The most recent data from the US Census Bureau indicates that the turnout rate for the 18-29 age group is at the lowest it's ever been since at least 1986 (this is as far back as the charted data goes). They are the age group with the lowest participation.
It's from this page http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/demographics/ (3rd chart on page). I think the charts were made using data found here: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/socdemo/voting/
Now ask yourself just how much more honest are the national elections in the US are these days? What's that saying... "If voting mattered, they wouldn't let you do it."
From an outsider's perspective, I don't perceive American elections as being anywhere close to one-candidate Soviet Union elections. Heck, even the 'primaries' process that your major parties use to select presidential nominees seems to create greater scope for the public to influence outcomes.
Not that the US system is without its problems:
- Administratively, the way US elections are run is worthy of a third world banana republic. I find it astounding that gerrymandering and 'vote caging' are routine occurrences in a country that espouses such a strong belief in democracy.
- 'First past the post' is a terrible voting system that guarantees a 2 party system. However, so does Ranked preference/Instant run-off voting (despite what its advocates think).
- US public political discourse does seem to be influenced, to a relatively greater degree, by powerful private interests and god knows who else...
- [This is a bit controversial] Voluntary voting leads to worse outcomes compared to compulsory voting. The greatest virtue of CV is that politicians are forced to consider minorities or cohorts that would otherwise have low turnout rates under voluntary systems.
This thought is both extremely sad and extremely hopeful. It's sad because there are a lot of boomers who I love dearly in my life as with probably most everyone here. It's hopeful because a lot of young people, including myself, are fucking sick and tired of being exploited by the old for their literally insane pursuits (mostly war and hate). In this sense, death is a welcome factor. I'm certain I'm not part of the first generation to think this about their elders nor am I part of the rest. The old, outdated, stupid, insane, cruel, hateful, hurtful ideas have to go and unfortunately the only thing that ever helps in such situations is death. Death is truly, the bringer of change, and in the current status quo, hopeful change.
And this is amazing progress and the best we can expect in America from the mostly baby boomer assholes in power. But if we repeat mindlessly that America is the greatest country on earth enough, we can overlook the fact that it is dead last in healthcare out of all developed countries. Why socialize medicine, pharmaceuticals, and other industries that profit off of people's misfortunes, sickness, and death? Why not profit off of other people's misfortunes, sickness, and death? Die already so I can get rich. That is the American way, after all, and that's why those prices are so fucking high.
"Among consumers who are signed up for 2015 coverage to date in the 37 HealthCare.gov states, 8 in 10 could choose a plan with a premium of $100 or less after tax credits, based on available options."[1]
[1]http://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2015/02/09/almost-6-point-5-mi...
Is that true though? Having lots of kids so they can work on the farm and mom and dad living with you until they die?
The government spends more than ever as a percent of GDP:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/total_spending_chart
except for during WW2. This does not look like any recent austerity program.
If you aren't a liberal by age 20, you don't have a heart. If you aren't a conservative by age 35, you don't have a brain.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/
My generation blamed the previous one, as well. "Don't trust anyone over 30", "Hope I die before I get old", etc.
Of the 4 generational archetypes, Gen Y and the G.I. Generation are both of the 'Hero' type:
"Hero generations are born after an Awakening, during an Unraveling, a time of individual pragmatism, self-reliance, and laissez faire. Heroes grow up as increasingly protected post-Awakening children, come of age as team-oriented young optimists during a Crisis, emerge as energetic, overly-confident midlifers, and age into politically powerful elders attacked by another Awakening."
In contrast, the Baby Boomers fall in to the 'Prophet' archetype:
"Prophet generations are born near the end of a Crisis, during a time of rejuvenated community life and consensus around a new societal order. Prophets grow up as the increasingly indulged children of this post-Crisis era, come of age as self-absorbed young crusaders of an Awakening, focus on morals and principles in midlife, and emerge as elders guiding another Crisis."
Edit: What I mean is, what makes you question that explanation?
Currently, social security is taking in ~$74bn less in payroll taxes than it pays out in benefits. The $2.83tn fund is invested in federal debt that pays 3.4% interest. So the interest payment (from the Federal government) of $96.2b is enough to cover the deficit.
By 2020, interest will no longer be enough to cover the deficit between revenue in from taxes and expenditures out to retirees. At that point, the SS fund will need to start redeeming treasuries for cash. The federal government will then need to issue new debt and/or raise taxes to cover SS treasury bond redemptions.
If the Federal Reserve follows through in its quest to raise interest rates and inflation, it will be relatively expensive to raise the $2.83tn in debt that we will need to fund SS through 2029, when it is projected to completely deplete its reserves of treasury notes. At this point, SS will only be able to pay out 75% of promised benefits given the current tax rate and demographic trends.
I'm less concerned about spend on education (which is broken) than I am about how we plan to fund our health care and pension systems. The only feasible way I can see is through increased taxation. I just started working last year. Hell of a time to enter the work force!
Overall it seems to me like we are paying an increasing amount of our federal budget on the older population than we anticipated we would need to and that we did not adequately provision for.
"They are also brainier than any previous generation. Average scores on intelligence tests have been rising for decades in many countries, thanks to better nutrition and mass education."
Is this true? From what I've read on the Flynn effect[0], these are only possible explanations.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Proposed_explanat...
A reasonable observer would conclude that either
a) the statement is false because politicians listen to the people with power/money
b) the set of democracies is empty, and the statement, while true, is a tautology.