It's the baby boomer phenomenon. They reaped the rewards back then and are still reaping the rewards. The benefits have been following that age group through their lives. Its like a rolling window.

somewhat tangential, but most interesting phenomeon is the phaseshift non-boomers will undergo when they're around 45, surveying what's left, realizing how much they have paid into the system already, and desperate to claim the same rewards. it's a perpetuum mobile. if it needs to end, the young will have to wrestle it from their seniors _now_, because that gap closes fast.

Most developed countries are peaking in costs to young people right now. The people entering workforce now are getting a huge bad surprise, but the cost of supporting older people will start to decrease very soon.

So, if you are looking for some future phase shift, you are searching for the wrong thing.

Also, most of the developing countries will be in that situation in ~20 years. Most underdeveloped ones will get there in an extra decade or two.

the population bulge is at 50-60. with tfr as low as they are, we're looking at at multiple decades of a top-heavy pyramid. that's not disappearing anytime soon, it will take a lifetime.

Can you blame them for existing during early globalization, before over the financialization of everything? It's not like they actively took more than they "should have" from anyone directly, it's a consequence of their local economy and where it was at the time.

> It's not like they actively took more than they "should have" from anyone directly

And who do you think exactly contributed to the over financialization of everything? Every single thing, good or bad, is a direct result of the actions of the generation before. We can thank them for creating a world where women get to vote but also criticize them for creating a world where everything costs a million dollars and all young people can earn is pennies. At any point in time they could’ve been like “this may not in my selfish interest, but it will ensure the future generations can have the same life as i do” and pushed for policies accordingly. But that didn’t happen.

Has any society ever behaved that way? It's already a push to get people to think of the middle/lower classes during the present.

I understand the desire to find an entity or group of people to blame, but they were acting in their own self interest at a peak time, they didn't know the party would be over soon, for many of them, it still isn't.

> And who do you think exactly contributed to the over financialization of everything? Every single thing, good or bad, is a direct result of the actions of the generation before.

Some elements of the generation before. It's is exceedingly unhelpful the blame an entire generation for the actions of a few. There were some elite people with a plan, many more who bought the propaganda they were served, and a lot who had nothing to do with any of it.

Also, it's worth noting (to help build empathy) that you and me likely have been suckered by propaganda for things that the next generation will curse us for, but we just think we're being sensible and informed.

The least you could do is blame an ideological faction of that generation (e.g. neoliberals), rather than blaming the whole generation itself. Among many advantages, that names the problem in a way that can solve it.

> It's is exceedingly unhelpful the blame an entire generation for the actions of a few.

The unfortunate reality is that every generation has the power to change things if they want to. Shifting the blame to the actions of the few is an easy way to absolve yourself of the blame. Who allows the few to take those actions? How did those few come into power to be able to take those actions? Once the actions were taken, why were they not corrected if the entire generation disagreed with them?

Maybe in the future the generations will blame my generation for a bunch of wrongs, even if I personally may not have contributed to those wrongs, I will still share the burden of not doing enough to prevent it.

> The unfortunate reality is that every generation has the power to change things if they want to.

That's an illusion. I think what you're really doing is putting unreasonable demands on the entire baby boomer generation, then blaming them for not succeeding at an impossible task. I mean, seriously, you really think, say, some boomer factory worker in Ohio is to blame for not foreseeing the effects of some 1980-era policy on 2026 or even 2006? They didn't have the benefit of the hindsight that we have.

It sounds like you're really holding tight onto blame, but what good does that do you? It solves no problems, and at best, alienates people from you.

Yes. The effects of 1980s policy was talked about endlessly and everywhere, to the point childhood me understood the coming effects. I used to joke to my parents my generation was going to create old people homes attached to factories to make them pay us back.

You _can_ blame them for several high-impact things they willingly did or at least supported, e.g. benefiting greatly from public spending yet successively voting to restrict it later on; f*cking over the real estate market and squeezing younger generations with extreme rents/prices; refusing any kind of social reforms while it has been obvious for decades that current models don't scale; decoupling of productivity from wages; and last but not least racking up huge carbon debt that later generations will pay dearly for.

They didn’t passively exist during it. They implemented it. They are culpable.

There are 67 million baby boomers in the US. How can you rationally blame them all? Roughly 20% of the population.

Saying the "boomers ruined everything" is not sophisticated, we can't move forward from a blame game, we have to diagnose the actions and actors that implemented them, but of course this is much more challenging.

Ancedotally, I know plenty of poor boomers. Have you seen who works at a Dollar Tree lately?

The popular dialogue that boomer=rich and greedy, millennial=poor and exploited is not productive, it's a fabricated generational war that distracts us from the real issues.

My parents are poor boomers, but if they had to live as I do, they'd be rich boomers. They have no financial discipline and burned through cash like crazy. If they would have saved even a little bit in the 80s and 90s, they'd be in a much better situation.

> So it is just a case of older people pulling the ladder up behind themselves.

Is it though? I have a feeling that previous generations were simply happy with less. Now we are so connected and everybody wants what they consider the standard according to social media: huge house in the most prominent city in their country, N exotic vacations every year, meaningful job, etc. But this would be a pretty tall order even 20 or 40 years ago.

I too feel this is a huge part of it, coupled with the fact that "basics" of last generation (a home you own, a stable job that doesn't overwork you on evenings and weekends, affordable options to have a family) are also being priced out of many peoples lives. You feel like you're not matching what your parents and cultural artifacts tell you you should be achieving at your age, and at the same time you're flooded with influencers on ski trips to Japan or snorkelling in Jamaica every other weekend, and it's a perfect recipe for feeling bad about your life no matter how well off you're doing compared to yesterdays median statistic.

> I have a feeling that previous generations were simply happy with less.

They could also afford to buy houses on minimum wage salaries.

I have a much higher salary than my parents, and I'm theory I can get more things from further afar, but I still live in a much more precarious situation.

I wonder about that.

I'm older now, work with a lot of great young peers. Their lifestyle though at that age is nothing like mine was. I worked through school (admittedly because I wasn't very good at school). My first real jobs just barely paid for everything. First apartment was pretty, spartan. Eating out or going out was infrequent.

That's not the lifestyle I see today. I don't blame younger folks for wanting it, it's shown to them everywhere. But the expectations are different and living them has financial consequences too.

Ironically you are probably doing the thing you are accusing of young people doing which is taking a tiny sample size of a privileged group and assuming that's the norm.

We're all limited by our own pov.