Reading ithinkinstereo's post ridiculing the increasingly unsteady optimism / deluded thinking of "millennials" (it's always millennials now isn't it) I couldn't help but think "once that optimism or whatever-you-want-to-call-it is gone, all that's left is a 21st century American Reign of Terror".

Like whatever the reason for it: bad parenting, trashy culture, Bill Clinton, or maybe - maybe - that their parents pissed away the legacy of their forebears and the birthright of their progeny - whatever the reason, there are consequences to flushing an entire generation of people down the toilet. Consequences like mass revolt and death. It's really not good to leave large numbers of people with little to lose.

I'm not blaming any of this on "millennials". I hope that's not how my comment reads.

I agree that some of the blame should be directed towards the prior generation; I was trying to allude to that with my criticism of their parenting technique, which I think is inherently hypocritical, given the advantages they enjoyed that kids today don't have.

I am a Gen Xer born in the early 70s, and I have to say I totally agree with you. I feel lucky I was able to go to college before it was basically expected that you'd be paying off college loans for 20 years or so.

Economically this is not at all what happened though. The baby boomer generation was simply exceptionally lucky, economically speaking. Gen X and Y are still in the very lucky category. Compared to the generation that actually went to war, we still have it much better economically.

Unfortunately that mostly means that our kids will likely have it worse, not better. Starting with baby boomers we simply had too few children to keep growing GDP. GDP, and economic activity in general shows a remarkable and extremely direct relation to two things : total amount of energy used, and total amount of people. For the first time in over 70 years, both are stagnating, slowly.

And it's too late : to fix the population growth rate, gen X should have been having lots of kids one to two decades ago, and that has decidedly not happened. For the foreseeable future, we'll have to do more with less, both in terms of energy, but especially in terms of labor available.

You might say "but machine learning", "but robots", etc. Well that's exactly what they said in the 80s with the car plant closings. That was patently false. Then they said it again with Japan crashing and then stagnating. Again, not true. Now we're saying it about ourselves (but doubly so for China). I don't think this time it will be right either.

> You might say "but machine learning", "but robots", etc. Well that's exactly what they said in the 80s with the car plant closings. That was patently false. Then they said it again with Japan crashing and then stagnating. Again, not true. Now we're saying it about ourselves (but doubly so for China). I don't think this time it will be right either.

Well, I do remain hopeful that we will reach an inflexion point at which such technologies will make labor immensely cheap. If you think about the very basic requirements for having ever increasing population and GDP: you need young people to keep your factories running, working your farms and running your investment funds etc. Once most of these things are automated, labor productivity would have reached the point where there won't be a need for ever-expanding population to achieve the same standard of life.

Millennials are the largest generation in US history.

And the problem isn't keeping GDP growing, it is growing it enough to pay for spending obligations.

And we sort of obviously don't have resource problems, we have a problem with matching supply and demand.

The likely fix is rampant inflation. Erases debt, erases the value of property relative to wages, etc.

I agree 100%. The boomers, preceded by the "greatest generation" will likely go down in history as the "greediest generation."

Is there a good reason to blame the generation before rather the corporations, shareholders, and economic paradigms that they had nothing to do with? People just do their jobs and live. The people running the world make the rules. They don't belong to a generation they belong to a ruling class. A ruling class which has obfuscated itself using different rhetorics and the mass media to deliver that rhetoric to protect itself from the blame. But really marketing, psychological manipulation, credit cards, consumer culture. All this stuff raised these people to act the way that they do. They didn't decide to be selfish assholes, it's the culture. They are a product of the system. Their conditioning has been conditioned. The ruling class made the rules, and their corporations used various tactics to raise these people as who they are for their personal benefit. They want consumers that spend so they can capture all that wealth rather than let it sit around and do nothing in the bank accounts of the masses.

Yes in the sense that the prior generation enjoyed tremendous social/government benefits, that they then systematically dismantled when they came into power.

Of course our neoliberal, hyper capitalistic society doesn't help either...

>Yes in the sense that the prior generation enjoyed tremendous social/government benefits, that they then systematically dismantled when they came into power.

The people that came into power dismantled them, no the generation.

The people in power before them, and after them equally were for dismantling things.

> The people that came into power dismantled them, no the generation.

Its the generation that votes/puts people in power in a democratic political system. Politicians are representatives of the people i.e. generation.

> The people in power before them, and after them equally were for dismantling things.

Nope. The New Deal was the opposite of dismantling: using government resources to kickstart the economy. And then the Great Society programs to enable higher standards of living for all.

>Its the generation that votes/puts people in power in a democratic political system. Politicians are representatives of the people i.e. generation.

In an ideal world. In practice they're in the pockets of many interests (including their own), and people only get to vote 1 in 4 years or so, and only accept a candidate "wholesale". How many promises did Obama broke to the people that elected him? How many will Trump?

>Nope. The New Deal was the opposite of dismantling: using government resources to kickstart the economy. And then the Great Society programs to enable higher standards of living for all.

The New Deal was rather the exception, after a near fatal crash, and under the pressure of a unionized America and an increased communist global influence, where the ruling classes had to show that they were for more than exploiting too. Similar things happened all over the world and established the early welfare state, but not because the 1930's generation was somehow special in voting for better people.

>Frankly, millennials were completely robbed by the generation before them in the United States.

Do you seriously think its "generations of people" that do stuff to other generations?

The ones making the calls for all those things were the 0.1% then and are 0.1% now, regardless of whether they are 30 year olds or baby boomers.

I agree with you but don't think its as simple as that. The 0.1% are surely orchestrating things in their interests, but political power has definitely become a lot more diffuse than what it used to be.

And yes generations do decide on a lot. For instance, the baby boomers instituted social welfare programs that generation after them paid for, but the programs won't be funded long enough to take care of the next generations? Sounds like the biggest ponzi scheme in the history of Mankind.

I also think it's worth considering the various cultural shifts, etc. from one generation to the next.

One thing that I always found interesting about the greatest generation vs the boomers is the shift in attitudes towards wealth, one's civic duty, etc.

The finance industry is a nice microcosm to study this shift... 40-50-60 years ago banker salaries and the enviability of their jobs were both low. Top grads from the ivies would sneer at their classmates for going into finance over something like the diplomatic corps. Today that's 100% reversed.

I always felt that the "professional services" industry is basically a giant con perpetuated by lazy boomers because it's an easy, optically nice appearing, way to shift money into one's own pocket. Collectively, they've created these upper-income professions that serve little to no value, solely in place to fund "elite" society. The result is that the greatest minds of my generation are wasted in the pursuit of making silly and irrelevant powerpoint decks (Consulting) or rent-seeking in the capital markets (Banking). And look, it's even infesting technology as evidenced by the legion of irrelevant startups. Why work hard at something difficult when you can roll the dice with someone else's pension funds (and if that fails, onwards and upwards to HBS)?

Side note:

The reason people make a lot of money in any case is because they can eliminate the information asymmetry associated with them delivering value.

In finance the people that are paid well are the ones who can show with clarity that they delivered dollars to the bottom line. Investment bankers show it through the huge fees they earn by winning contracts with companies IPOing etc.

Portfolio managers show it through pointing to their measured performance and showing their AUM gains. AUM x Fees = revenue.

People in big corp have a much harder time showing how their individual production helped the bottom line. Engineers have a REALLY REALLY hard time with this. Those engineers that do are making ridiculous money because of the scale that they can add value.