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Comment by qzw | Hacker News Reader

I assume you’re fairly young. I know things look pretty grim at the moment, but in the longer term the younger people are going to be in the driver’s seat like few generations before. The demographic trends in most countries forecast aging populations that will face serious labor shortages. So the younger generations should be able to leverage that into better economic outcomes. But the tricky part will be in getting around the institutional barriers that the older generations have and will continue to put up in order to maintain the economic upper hand.

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That makes sense on the surface, but often times it’s not the case. Turns out in a democracy where everyone thinks only of themselves the older and more numerous generations vote for their own pensions and protections and stiff the younger generations.

People always only think of themselves, democracy or not. That's been true since the dawn of time. That's why I said the younger generations will need to overcome some of the institutional barriers. Nothing is going to be just handed to them.

This is incorrect, it is a cultural phenomenon. There has always been a balance between doing constructive things for others depending on how close they are socially and caring for themselves. You have all the emotions, you know how it works.

There are tribes where no one cares who gave birth to the kids. We did countless wars and profited at the expense of others but if you fail to account for the soldiers moral it kinda not makes sense for them to make the ultimate sacrifice. We had many religions and some political ideologies where selfishness was not just not admired but frowned upon and undesirable. Most of our quality of life comes from previous generations doing the hard work for us, often intentionally. Try starting from scratch on the "only think of myself" principal and you get something nonsensical like Liberland.

Almost everything was just handed to you. You got a good hand of cards. Almost nothing was the result of you taking care of you.

So do what the boomers did and form unions. Working together, you can collectively demand higher wages, or shit does not get done. This has been proven out in practice to work - that's why the boomers did it in the first place. Is it perfect? No. But it gets you closer to where you want to go instead of bitching about wages being too low, then following it up with American Individualism and Exceptionalism.

And overcoming self imposed barriers, like investing in crypto and avoiding equities. It will be harder to overcome an older generation that owns all the means of production.

This overlooks the fact that automation is eating jobs requiring human input *much* faster than new human jobs are being created.

How come the number of people employed is going up and not down?

We can only wish this is the case.

We are about to have a demographic crunch where we will have massive worker shortages. That is inherently inflationary, and we will need automation which is inherently deflationary if we want to keep the lifestyle we have.

Automation has never eaten jobs. People just do more interesting or more valuable work.

Can you cite a source? Every generation for the last 200 years has felt this way, and I was taught from an econ degree years ago that historic averages turned out to be ~1.2 jobs created for every job lost to automation. Economies also tends to be self balancing which further lends credance to the idea that it’s really hard not have an employed work force. I think the bigger problem isn’t automation, it’s the way we treat capex vs opex in corporate accounting. We’d go a long way to make paying someone more tax beneficial than to go the ludite route.

(I also don’t mean to downplay the pain if displacement from automation, it’s a very real problem and a reason I’m a big fan of social safety nets)

that is not possible. it's like asking a plant to thrive in toxic soil

but humans are not like plants, they move and immigrate. look at southern europe for an example. Democracy serves a bad deal to younger generations and they know it

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