1) Wouldn't the primary premise of this article be true by definition. If GDP is constantly growing, then each generation is more wealthy in absolute terms.
Didn't they phrase is as % of wealth for a reason, to control for this. The author says it doesn't matter, but it clearly matters for rival goods...like real estate.
It fits with Arnold's question. If I'm a Millennial in an overpriced house far from my job I have an asset, but I also know all the better housing closer to my job has been bought up by boomers. A huge proportion of our neighborhood is boomer retirees even though the houses are clearly meant for young families.
A quick example of boomer waste. Two of the twenty houses just sold. These boomers moved in just a couple years go, got killer 2020 mortgage rates, and now they have decided they don't actually need 5000 SQFT and a yard as two retired people. The waste! That home (20% cheaper back then) and 3% mortgage rate could have gone to a young family that would actually fill it an be young enough to take care of it. And their kids could have played with other kids in the neighborhood. Shame!
2) Assuming that the education behind that student debt is an asset is a leap of faith.
The gross percentages for generations seem to be obscuring the per capita numbers with adjustment for age according to Horpedahl. I do not disagree about housing and have seen some things elsewhere that talks about the wealth composition by asset type between generations being quite different in the present. No idea how this compares to wealth by asset type for different ages and cohorts in the past.
The solution to generational wealth differential is huge tax incentives to have children. This will transfer wealth from the old to parents in their 20s and 30s.
"...things that can be done to address the generational wealth gap...? Why are all the things on the list aimed at the government taking from some and giving to others? Government theft impoverishes us all. FICA-Social Security tax stole 12% of boomers income throughout they working lives. Rather than investing those funds, Big G squandered them on all sorts of hustles.
The only real solution to life-cycle differences in wealth is creative work over time: (i) be patient, (ii) work, (iii) save, and (iv) invest. Indeed, that patient process is the only way to create wealth. Other "things" are just destruction delusions--stealing from Pauline to pay Peter, and, in the process, destroying wealth through premature consumption and the transaction costs of bureaucracy.
RE: Life Extension: There are a lot of world altering technologies that are almost here. Let's see... driverless cars, cold fusion power generation, infinite life extension, functional renewable energy sources that can replace the current grid (batteries in there somewhere)... I feel like I am forgetting a few in there, although flying cars, nano-scale production and in home 3D printers for making everything sort of fell off the radar after a few decades. We would do well to remember that there are two ways to make money as a researcher: 1- produce a product technology that works, and 2 - collect money from investors by promising you have a product technology that will work shortly and they can get in on the ground floor if they pay now.
2 is far easier.
Re: Housing: I am sorry to hear your daughter is having troubles with housing. Is she looking in the DC metro area?
It seems to me that much of the housing cost issue is centered on the big cities, and I am wondering when or if the trend will start to shift where companies move out of those areas and their metro-sprawl to smaller towns again.
If that switch was going to come, it would have come with COVID.
Instead we've seen massive reversal of work from home. It seems that independence from big metro housing can't survive a recession. The second employers have leverage the executives want their serfs back on the manor genuflecting to them.
I don't know about that; where I am in eastern PA the move away from cities has been continuing, and a few businesses I know of have moved headquarters out away from the high cost urban areas. Very few, but just the ones I am personally aware of.
I do think there is going to be a move away from working from home for a variety of reasons, but I wouldn't be too surprised to see companies moving out of the bigger cities to lower cost locations as exiting the cities becomes more socially normal.
I don't know though, it could go either way. There might be some highly desirable aspects of cities that I am blind to. Then again, many seem to have serious problems with rising crime, so possibly companies will decide the lower security costs are the last straw. *shrug*
Moving from NY to Dallas is a big boost, but working from anywhere is an even bigger boost.
Eventually the inner suburbs of the Sunbelt will have the same cost disease as the inner suburbs of the old mega cities. Until you can live all the way out in the exurbs without a crushing five day commute land is scarce.
The highly desirable aspects of cities require an executive salary. Decisions are being made for them, not for employees or even the company.
Yea, I don't think you are entirely wrong there, especially about the executives making many of the decisions. However, there is sooner or later going to be a few executives who say "eh, I kind of like my country home, maybe I could just live there full time." Or, in the case of the Mainline near Philly, "I already have my mansion outside the city. What if I just drove West to go to work instead of East?" In the latter case the regular workers would just live to the west of work, while the execs live on the east, but all have lower costs.
I don't know, it is both interesting that it isn't happening more, and interesting that it could. Maybe it will be one of those things where once a few companies do it a lot more follow suit, like how companies fleeing CA started as a trickle than it became something "sensible companies like us do".
Then again, maybe it will devolve more into executives keep the HQ in the cities, but other roles get moved to suburb/exurb offices, like how most plants are out somewhere cheap while the offices are in more expensive areas.
Have you considered buying your kids a house? Perhaps living in it with them.
Most of our savings is being stored for the purpose of giving our kids down payments one day, and for at least one child we plan to live in the house with them if they will have us.
I've found having my parents move in with us a mostly positive experience and while I'm sure its not for everyone I think its for more people they currently take advantage of it. I do recommend getting the right house though (you need privacy and self sufficiency built in).
It's also a pretty good way to transfer inter-generational wealth.
re: "The last set of bullets tells me that Bard has ideological blinders."
Although its possible that came from its fine tuning training to be woke: its also possible that its what emerged from the initial huge corpus of human text it was trained on. It doesn't evaluate the arguments in the text its trained on and therefore it seems likely that on many topics the side of a debate that has the most text written about it may be the most likely output. A leftist media and academia are going to implicitly lean it leftist on many topics the volume of text will likely lead LLMs to similar defaults, and to populism on some topics where the media spouts more text than academia on a topic.
I seem to recall that some generic net text is trained with a lower weighting than other sources, but it also seems on some topics a populist slant from that will also weigh in.
Once it gets started on a certain bias: it seems the likelihood of words that continue along that bias will have been raised.
Even those who try to train an LLM with a superficial layer of tweaks to sound more centrist probably aren't going to hit all potential topics and its underlying core training will likely shine through.
I keep up with the work of life-extension. The need to worry about "immortal" humans is still pretty far into the future, in my opinion. I won't benefit from it, nor is it likely anyone alive today will.
The first link goes to the substack but not the article.
There are two kinds of anti-aging.
1) We are kept alive at the peak of our powers.
2) We are kept alive as decrepit senior citizens, perhaps with ever slipping mental faculties.
#2 sounds like a hellscape to me. I already regard current medical technology as a small version of this.
#1 might have merits but its not really for me. I wouldn't want the parenting part of my life to be so small, and I think I would be bored of doing the same bullshit over and over. Both at an individual and societal level I don't think it would match my preference.
H/t Steve Hayward @ PowerLine (who I sure wish could be convinced to move over to SubStack)
Patrick Ruffini offers some caution on reading too much into that WSJ poll result. Not necessarily the directionality but the rapidity of the drop.
"My initial reaction to these numbers was different than most. If these numbers had been produced by my firm, I would immediately assume we had made a mistake and send them back to an analyst to double check.
Take a look at the zig-zaggy pattern on the community involvement question, for instance. That’s the only pro-social item on here that went up in the previous 21 years before the 2019 survey, but it’s declined by more than half in just four years without any clear inciting event explaining why. One could maybe speculate that people locked inside during the pandemic did not go out and do volunteer work, but a drop of 35 points in four years is implausible on its face."
I wasn’t entirely convinced by the excerpt—as Lenin said, there are decades where weeks happen and weeks where decades happen. But this part is pretty hard to argue with—
“The point here is not that the Wall Street Journal and NORC released bad data. The Journal is one of the more thoughtful media sponsors of polling and NORC is the premier survey data-collection organization in the country. Rather, the dramatically different results we see from 2019 and 2023 are because the data was collected differently. The March 2023 survey was collected via NORC’s Amerispeak, an extremely high-quality online panel. In the fine print below the chart, we can see that data from previous waves was collected via telephone survey.”
Jeremy Horpedahl on intergenerational wealth... https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2021/09/01/who-is-the-wealthiest-generation/
1) Wouldn't the primary premise of this article be true by definition. If GDP is constantly growing, then each generation is more wealthy in absolute terms.
Didn't they phrase is as % of wealth for a reason, to control for this. The author says it doesn't matter, but it clearly matters for rival goods...like real estate.
It fits with Arnold's question. If I'm a Millennial in an overpriced house far from my job I have an asset, but I also know all the better housing closer to my job has been bought up by boomers. A huge proportion of our neighborhood is boomer retirees even though the houses are clearly meant for young families.
A quick example of boomer waste. Two of the twenty houses just sold. These boomers moved in just a couple years go, got killer 2020 mortgage rates, and now they have decided they don't actually need 5000 SQFT and a yard as two retired people. The waste! That home (20% cheaper back then) and 3% mortgage rate could have gone to a young family that would actually fill it an be young enough to take care of it. And their kids could have played with other kids in the neighborhood. Shame!
2) Assuming that the education behind that student debt is an asset is a leap of faith.
The gross percentages for generations seem to be obscuring the per capita numbers with adjustment for age according to Horpedahl. I do not disagree about housing and have seen some things elsewhere that talks about the wealth composition by asset type between generations being quite different in the present. No idea how this compares to wealth by asset type for different ages and cohorts in the past.
The solution to generational wealth differential is huge tax incentives to have children. This will transfer wealth from the old to parents in their 20s and 30s.
"...things that can be done to address the generational wealth gap...? Why are all the things on the list aimed at the government taking from some and giving to others? Government theft impoverishes us all. FICA-Social Security tax stole 12% of boomers income throughout they working lives. Rather than investing those funds, Big G squandered them on all sorts of hustles.
The only real solution to life-cycle differences in wealth is creative work over time: (i) be patient, (ii) work, (iii) save, and (iv) invest. Indeed, that patient process is the only way to create wealth. Other "things" are just destruction delusions--stealing from Pauline to pay Peter, and, in the process, destroying wealth through premature consumption and the transaction costs of bureaucracy.
RE: Life Extension: There are a lot of world altering technologies that are almost here. Let's see... driverless cars, cold fusion power generation, infinite life extension, functional renewable energy sources that can replace the current grid (batteries in there somewhere)... I feel like I am forgetting a few in there, although flying cars, nano-scale production and in home 3D printers for making everything sort of fell off the radar after a few decades. We would do well to remember that there are two ways to make money as a researcher: 1- produce a product technology that works, and 2 - collect money from investors by promising you have a product technology that will work shortly and they can get in on the ground floor if they pay now.
2 is far easier.
Re: Housing: I am sorry to hear your daughter is having troubles with housing. Is she looking in the DC metro area?
It seems to me that much of the housing cost issue is centered on the big cities, and I am wondering when or if the trend will start to shift where companies move out of those areas and their metro-sprawl to smaller towns again.
If that switch was going to come, it would have come with COVID.
Instead we've seen massive reversal of work from home. It seems that independence from big metro housing can't survive a recession. The second employers have leverage the executives want their serfs back on the manor genuflecting to them.
I don't know about that; where I am in eastern PA the move away from cities has been continuing, and a few businesses I know of have moved headquarters out away from the high cost urban areas. Very few, but just the ones I am personally aware of.
I do think there is going to be a move away from working from home for a variety of reasons, but I wouldn't be too surprised to see companies moving out of the bigger cities to lower cost locations as exiting the cities becomes more socially normal.
I don't know though, it could go either way. There might be some highly desirable aspects of cities that I am blind to. Then again, many seem to have serious problems with rising crime, so possibly companies will decide the lower security costs are the last straw. *shrug*
Moving from NY to Dallas is a big boost, but working from anywhere is an even bigger boost.
Eventually the inner suburbs of the Sunbelt will have the same cost disease as the inner suburbs of the old mega cities. Until you can live all the way out in the exurbs without a crushing five day commute land is scarce.
The highly desirable aspects of cities require an executive salary. Decisions are being made for them, not for employees or even the company.
Yea, I don't think you are entirely wrong there, especially about the executives making many of the decisions. However, there is sooner or later going to be a few executives who say "eh, I kind of like my country home, maybe I could just live there full time." Or, in the case of the Mainline near Philly, "I already have my mansion outside the city. What if I just drove West to go to work instead of East?" In the latter case the regular workers would just live to the west of work, while the execs live on the east, but all have lower costs.
I don't know, it is both interesting that it isn't happening more, and interesting that it could. Maybe it will be one of those things where once a few companies do it a lot more follow suit, like how companies fleeing CA started as a trickle than it became something "sensible companies like us do".
Then again, maybe it will devolve more into executives keep the HQ in the cities, but other roles get moved to suburb/exurb offices, like how most plants are out somewhere cheap while the offices are in more expensive areas.
Have you considered buying your kids a house? Perhaps living in it with them.
Most of our savings is being stored for the purpose of giving our kids down payments one day, and for at least one child we plan to live in the house with them if they will have us.
I've found having my parents move in with us a mostly positive experience and while I'm sure its not for everyone I think its for more people they currently take advantage of it. I do recommend getting the right house though (you need privacy and self sufficiency built in).
It's also a pretty good way to transfer inter-generational wealth.
Whenever someone says "We are all in this together" I immediately replace it with "The call is coming from inside the house"
re: "The last set of bullets tells me that Bard has ideological blinders."
Although its possible that came from its fine tuning training to be woke: its also possible that its what emerged from the initial huge corpus of human text it was trained on. It doesn't evaluate the arguments in the text its trained on and therefore it seems likely that on many topics the side of a debate that has the most text written about it may be the most likely output. A leftist media and academia are going to implicitly lean it leftist on many topics the volume of text will likely lead LLMs to similar defaults, and to populism on some topics where the media spouts more text than academia on a topic.
I seem to recall that some generic net text is trained with a lower weighting than other sources, but it also seems on some topics a populist slant from that will also weigh in.
Once it gets started on a certain bias: it seems the likelihood of words that continue along that bias will have been raised.
Even those who try to train an LLM with a superficial layer of tweaks to sound more centrist probably aren't going to hit all potential topics and its underlying core training will likely shine through.
I keep up with the work of life-extension. The need to worry about "immortal" humans is still pretty far into the future, in my opinion. I won't benefit from it, nor is it likely anyone alive today will.
You omitted "Have a nice day."
The first link goes to the substack but not the article.
There are two kinds of anti-aging.
1) We are kept alive at the peak of our powers.
2) We are kept alive as decrepit senior citizens, perhaps with ever slipping mental faculties.
#2 sounds like a hellscape to me. I already regard current medical technology as a small version of this.
#1 might have merits but its not really for me. I wouldn't want the parenting part of my life to be so small, and I think I would be bored of doing the same bullshit over and over. Both at an individual and societal level I don't think it would match my preference.
H/t Steve Hayward @ PowerLine (who I sure wish could be convinced to move over to SubStack)
Patrick Ruffini offers some caution on reading too much into that WSJ poll result. Not necessarily the directionality but the rapidity of the drop.
"My initial reaction to these numbers was different than most. If these numbers had been produced by my firm, I would immediately assume we had made a mistake and send them back to an analyst to double check.
Take a look at the zig-zaggy pattern on the community involvement question, for instance. That’s the only pro-social item on here that went up in the previous 21 years before the 2019 survey, but it’s declined by more than half in just four years without any clear inciting event explaining why. One could maybe speculate that people locked inside during the pandemic did not go out and do volunteer work, but a drop of 35 points in four years is implausible on its face."
https://patrickruffini.substack.com/p/why-this-extremely-viral-poll-result
I wasn’t entirely convinced by the excerpt—as Lenin said, there are decades where weeks happen and weeks where decades happen. But this part is pretty hard to argue with—
“The point here is not that the Wall Street Journal and NORC released bad data. The Journal is one of the more thoughtful media sponsors of polling and NORC is the premier survey data-collection organization in the country. Rather, the dramatically different results we see from 2019 and 2023 are because the data was collected differently. The March 2023 survey was collected via NORC’s Amerispeak, an extremely high-quality online panel. In the fine print below the chart, we can see that data from previous waves was collected via telephone survey.”
Thanks for sharing!