The me generation was aptly named, generation X ate the table scraps, and now we millennials are being left with the bill.
Edit: I suppose the question now is, what can we do about it?
Edit: I suppose the question now is, what can we do about it?
Your statement above about millennials being left with the bill, meanwhile gen x feels the baby boomers did them in like another comment here states, the baby boomers is mad at the generation before them (silent generation) about sending them to the disasters that was the vietnam and korean wars, and they in turn is mad about WW1 and WW2 and the great depression that they had to endure because their parents were living it up in the swinging 1910's and 20s.
I do not have the figures but in these 'little wars' there has been a lot of silver spent on munitions. The whole process is just a lot more efficient so we are not at total war on the domestic front, just paying our taxes so the military can buy vastly more effective killing machines. Things may have gone away from the unguided bombs of times gone past, war zones may be in different places, but otherwise, there is a lot to compare today's wars with WW1/WW2 when it comes to $$$ spend and devastation caused.
If I may ask, how do you get to your statement? Is there some metric one can look at to determine it?
I'm not saying that there isn't localized violence, just that global level is down. Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature is one source to support this idea.
Yes it's an old debate whether the US should have gotten involved in all these conflicts, but back to your original point:
That the US national debt has increased dramatically in peace time.
My point is that it is not peace time, and that a substantial part of that debt stems from the US's military industrial complex. It is after all not nothing that (famous tv saying) "the US spends more on defense than the next 26 countries combined" or something like that.
Some gen x and millennials are being left considerable wealth. Some even multi-generational wealth.
I mean, the canonical example is the German student protests in the 1960s ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_student_movement ), which led to things like the Red Army Faction ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction ). These were people whose parents were literally Nazis....
You consider statistics to be pointless? What do you propose instead?
Worth noting that the GFC was one of the best times in history to buy stocks. I'd be in a terrible situation right now if it wasn't for the GFC: I bought some brand name stocks (supermarkets, mining, banking) at huge discounts. One of them more than tripled in price in 5 years and is still throwing off a 20% cash dividend every year.
Don't give up. You never know when a Black Swan event might swing things in a way that benefits you. And Millennials have so much online access to education about stock market trading, E-Trade, online banking, and new things like crowdfunding that just weren't around before. It's not easy for Millennials, but there's a lot of amazing opportunities that other generations would be jealous of.
But they didn't had that chance to begin with. The predictions were as bad back then than they are now; back in the 80s the collapse of the market economy was predicted for shortly after 2000, and in the 90s, it was pushed back to as early as 2020 and as late as 2040. Last I have checked western countries are still on course to default by the mid to late 21st century.
I find this generation view short sighted and you should look at the different strate of the society instead to see who in that generation has managed to get ahead of the game and get a confortable situation for themselves. Those are the one that conformed to the rules and custom of the previous generation.
I am sorry to say this, but if you want to see a change you will have to get out of your way and make that change happens.
Allowing the dollar to weaken, and digging out the entrenched interests in US health care would fix everything. It's just that a weak dollar and lower health care spend is a problem for the rich, and the petty bourgeoisie have thus far mindlessly supported them. (Because racists.)
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/balance-of-tra...
technology and economy do change. The changes can't be stopped. The question is how you adapt to them. When many people suddenly lost their job as soldiers 70 years ago there was in particular GI bill created to help manage the transition. What was done to manage the specific transition of domestic manufacturing jobs disappearing and overall transition to globalization and "information" economy? Nothing. Education and safety net are the main missing pieces which would support the transition. Yet, the country during last several decades has been either electing or seriously consider to elect a Republican :) Just think about couple trillions buried in the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan - that was basically total squandering of the humongous peace benefit of ending Cold War. It could have been a humongous improvement in education and medical systems and country infrastructure which would help tremendously to the transitioning GenX-ers as well as to the graduating and entering workforce Millenials... yet the country in 2000 decided that "lower taxes" outweigh it all. Well, you get what you pay for.
Blaming all those issues onto the third world countries for using the chance to improve their life just a bit, to stop being hungry every day - well, lets say that blaming is pointless whining at best and pretty heartless at least.
Concepts like exponential change and globalization certainly weren't mainstream in the 80s when I was a child. In fact, I'd bet that most adults at the time still worked at the same company, in the same town, for most of their adult life. Companies at the time were still providing pensions and health care and middle class salaries, and employees (owners, bosses, and workers) generally all still worked in the same place.
It is silly in hindsight, yes. We were quite naive. But, I think you're being overly harsh (or maybe I'm just too sensitive). Many of us assumed that changes would happen linearly, not exponentially, and that we would live out our lives differently, but mostly similar to our parents.
Hopefully, those under 30 today have been better trained to be highly adaptive. However, at a certain point, even the most well-trained Human will reach an adaptive limit.
when it happened to apes, humans emerged, and the same way new species of humans will emerge too :)
I'd say it's nice for developed countries to help out like that - but we all know the real winners are the businessmen behind your politicians bankrolling this stuff.
But those aren't "already wealthy capitalists". They're "newly wealthy capitalists". End of the day it's the same thing - a few wealthy capitalists - but it's still more wealth in developing countries than before.
I'd argue that there is zero historical precedent for wealth not to be concentrated though. It's just the nature of wealth - wealth creates wealth, debt creates debt. And that's more of a universal truth than a capitalistic one, and more accurately described as 'value creates value', 'obligation creates obligation'.
If you sell fish, and do really well at selling fish, you'll acquire wealth. That wealth will let you build bigger boats than someone without wealth. Same seems to apply to everything. Even little apps on the app store. If you make a successful app, you get a large following of users. This will give you a springboard of users when launching your next app, and having all those users on your old app gives you valuable data on how to build the next one.
Do you see where I'm coming from about the nature of wealth?