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Comment by crdoconnor | Hacker News Reader

If the 0.1% can successfully convince people to blame their grandparents and magical robots for stealing all of the country's wealth then this trend is likely to continue.

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I wish I could up vote this more. Supporting elderly people, or disabled people? These are good things that are good to do. Corporations paying for the negative externalities they dump on everyone else, and for upkeep on the society they owe their existence to? Also good things that are good to do.

It's not their fault we make less, but they should have personal responsibility for their own retirement, especially since the massive amount of growth in housing value and the stockmarket over their lifetime.

We're talking about people who fall within a certain age range. Personal responsibility is something that makes sense when talking about a person, not a population. To my mind, therefore, personal responsibility doesn't have much to do with good policy.

Is someone wealthy just because the house they own has grown in value? Practical wealth is how much you have relative to the cost of living. Someone in a $1M house is not necessarily more wealthy than when their house was $100K if all their other living expenses have also grown 10x.

If they are near retirement they could always reverse mortgage it. Our generation will not have that option.

Why won't we?

Because the increasing trend is that it is not financially viable for younger families to buy a home. So they would thus not have a mortgage to reverse in the first place.

Rather, they would be stuck paying rent and hopefully have enough savings/Social Security/other income to cover it as long as they needed.

There is also the issue of population growth rates.

Future generations CANNOT keep growing like that. Be it by directed reproduction limits or global resource wars/pollution/plagues/extinction from the preceding the population will shrink.

According to Google/Wolphram Alpha the US population is flat[1].

[1]https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+population+growth

More likely people choosing not to have kids, which is a trend appearing in rich countries. Population growth is mostly fueled by poor people.

Or, more people not being able to afford to have kids, another trend appearing in rich countries.

What will become of all the homes (and wealth) controlled by older people and families once the owners are outlived by the younger generation?

Great question. I don't know the answer, but you can imagine what some of the considerations might be...

Population growth in the US is slightly declining and generally remaining flat, although life expectancy is increasing.

So it seems likely the older people will need their homes longer than previous generations. When they die they might pass them along, but that certainly doesn't happen to everyone, and in many cases they might be sold, increasing supply.

That said, home value distributions are interesting. Jobs are stagnant or disappearing throughout much of the country, and it is primarily the cities where people are increasingly moving due to availability of jobs. This means those cities are much more desirable, and there is still too little supply, even with people turning things over to children.

Realistically though, the vast majority of the population has near non-existent savings. Many of these Baby Boomer retirees will need to downsize, reverse mortgage, or do something to tap their home for cash as that is still by far and away most families biggest investment. This might point more to the house being sold.

Still won't be enough to meet demand though in big cities since that is increasing, not decreasing. And if fewer are living in places without jobs, those homes may not be options for many families.

I think the idea is that we won't have the option to help us support our parents, because we'll need to keep living in the house (and haven't finished paying for it so we don't have the equity to borrow from anyway).

Social Security lifted the responsibility of saving for their own retirement. It's not much use to blame them for following incentives.

You make it sound as if before Social Security, people saved for retirement because they recognized they had to.

But of course they didn't-- because they didn't earn enough to save-- just like people nowadays.

Social Security is insurance against destitution in old age. It really doesn't function to take away any saving incentive. It just keeps old people from being homeless and starving.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109520630433518093

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CEFDE1E38F...

Good point. Those lazy bums can just sit in furnished rooms and sell apples in the street.

Um, what? (No seriously, wtf? Is this a reference to something?)

Should have included a sarcasm tag.

Pre social security, it was common for the elderly to end up like that.

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