Old people are organized and more social. I see it in my community. They run the newsletters and they host community events. "Oh that's because they're retired!" No, many of them are not. Many still work.
I want the gerontocracy to end, but I'm also worried what takes its place. Gen Xers like me seem to lack some of the abilities present in our older generations.
We'll probably be more equitable and fair, but will we be as politically effective and organized towards achieving our goals? I sort of doubt it.
Organization is a skill that can be passed on, and to the degree that old people are still doing it themselves they’re depriving us of opportunities to learn and to practice and to benefit from their experience. That’s why we’re not as good at it.
> and to the degree that old people are still doing it themselves they’re depriving us of opportunities to learn and to practice and to benefit from their experience.
Young people’s ability and motivation to organize and communicate is not dependent on anything other than themselves choosing to do it and get involved
> That’s why we’re not as good at it.
If you continue to believe that you’re dependent on older generations to teach you everything you’ll never get anywhere.
What works for older generations isn’t going to be good advice for getting younger generations to organize and communicate. The age differences are large.
Relatedly, it's a skill that goes with positions that are clung to such that nobody else gets to practice and learn said skill.
An awful lot of young people are starting businesses. Look at all the people under 30 becoming billionaires. This just didn't happen when I was young.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2025/12/22/why-there-...
> Fueled by AI, prediction markets and online gambling, there are more self-made billionaires under 30 than ever before, 13 up from a previous record of 7.
Two of those examples are online gambling, which is controversial to the extent that it's partly outlawed in the US.
But more importantly, 13 isn't an awful lot. Approximately how many young people today have started successful businesses whose valuation is under $1 billion?
> Approximately how many young people today have started successful businesses whose valuation is under $1 billion?
You can type such questions into google as well as I can.
> 13 isn't an awful lot
There aren't that many self-made billionaires of any age.
Yes it did. Billionaires are a relatively new thing, but successful businesses were led by young people across the entirety of human history.
And you should not praise someone for simply being a billionaire. That's a bad thing to be.
> Yes it did.
I don't recall any. I remember when people were all agog when Gates became one.
> successful businesses were led by young people across the entirety of human history.
Sure. But billionaires?
> And you should not praise someone for simply being a billionaire.
If they're self-made, they earned the praise.
> That's a bad thing to be.
Creating value is not a bad thing. Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value. They didn't take it from you or anyone else. Creating SpaceX, Starlink, etc., are good things.
> If they're self-made, they earned the praise.
They aren’t and they didn’t.
> Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value. They didn't take it from you or anyone else.
Nobody is a “self made” billionaire. That value you’re talking about didn’t just spring into existence. It had to come from somewhere. There is always a source.
Who flew the rocket? Who built the rocket? Who built the parts for the rocket? Who mixed the fuel?
Building big ambitious things is a good thing. But consolidating an amount of money that nobody could ever reasonably spend into the hands of one person (especially when that money is just the excess value produced by the workers) is unethical and unneeded.
> That value you’re talking about didn’t just spring into existence. It had to come from somewhere.
Are you arguing that wealth is not created, but is transferred? Where was SpaceX's value transferred from? Where was the current wealth in the United States 250 years ago?
What you're referring to are called "expenses". The value created is what somebody is willing to pay for a piece of that action (i.e. an ownership share). Expenses reduce the value.
For example, if you bake a cake the value you created is what you can sell the cake for minus the cost of the ingredients and the use of an oven. For SpaceX, the money spent to buy materials and pay employees takes away value.
> that nobody could ever reasonably spend into the hands of one person (especially when that money is just the excess value produced by the workers) is unethical and unneeded.
Musk doesn't spend much of his money. He invests it in creating more businesses.
> is unethical and unneeded.
You're arguing that Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, etc., are unethical and unneeded. None of those companies would exist without Musk investing his fortune into them.
BTW, why don't you and your friends get together and start a rocket company and make yourselves billionaires?
This is usually the part of the conversation where someone mentions slave labour in an emerald mine and immigration fraud and then comes the part where you usually say something along the lines like "hasn't been proven in court!"
Musk started with a $20,000 loan from his family. You could buy a used car for $20,000, no emerald mine and slaves required.
Musk parlayed the loan into $trillions.
It would have been so cool if you didn't derail this conversation about 'Confronting America’s gerontocratic crisis' with your Elon Musk fanboy-ism.
So cool.
> Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value.
two of the people on the list did it via online gambling. Which is by definition a zero-sum game. No value was created.
Need more information.
Sure, and if I was so inclined I could go rub noses with them. They're eager to find young folks who are community minded. But I don't want that. I'm gen x and full of cynicism and antisocial attitudes. The only people I know who aren't that way in my generation are churchgoing types and a few influencers.
What I’ve seen where I’m at is many of the old people who organize don’t want to give anything up to a next generation. They want all the accolades for themselves. So they’re happy to have young people do the work but aren’t comfortable letting them lead while teaching them the skills.
Equity and fairness are at odds with each other.
Could you expand on that? My concept of fairness is pretty congruent with equity.
Equity means equal results.
If you work harder than I, for the same pay, that is equitable but it isn't fair.
Equity? You mean equality (and that's still about rights, not pay.) Equity is just a stake in the outcome at all.
Equality: starting out at the same position, for example we have equal rights under the law
Equity: winding up at the same position, for example when everybody in a race wins the same medal, regardless of how hard they trained or how talented they are.
An apocryphal story about equity:
https://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
There's no definition of equity that I can find that returns that result so we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Equity in this context usually refers to the concept of Social Equity, which is interested in equality of outcome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_equity
The extent to which equality of outcome is pursued and for which groups are traditionally factors, but the overarching idea is in pursuit of equality of outcome.
I think we're talking about different things then.
Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work. That's fair.
Doing good work should be rewarded!
> Nobody is asking for equal result. Equity means sharing the rewards of productivity, instead of allowing a group of people who do nothing get rich off of other people's hard work.
Your two sentences contradict each other.
Yeah I guess we're talking about different things. Thanks for clarifying.
> Nobody is asking for equal result.
Pursuing some level of equality of outcomes has been a core concept in social equity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_equity
Social equality is focused around equality of opportunity. Social equity is about pursuing equality of outcome, generally by allocating resources and services unequally to give groups perceived as having historical disadvantages an extra boost.
Oh I see. I guess that's one way of looking at it. I tend to favor appropriation because it simplifies the accounting. You don't need equal outcomes exactly, you just ensure that everyone has their basic needs met and the ability to improve themselves. Historical context matters, but the issue tends to boil down social instability due to repeated displacement (redlining, gentrification). Allow people get rooted into a place and they'll build whatever they need to flourish.
two ways to take it:
equity as written. Ownership. Thus fairness means all have a share in responsibility for success and rewards for that success. Yeah, I agree. Note that I include responsibility as the core part of ownership. I think our society could have more of that.
equality (assumes you made a typo). Do you mean equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? These require different things to remedy.
Mixing work and hobbies is easy. Mixing kids and hobbies is not.
They've had decades to save up the money that allows them to do the things alongside work.
They also came up in a time and place that allowed them to build social relationships outside of work. Many Gen Xers and Millennials just... don't have that kind of personal time. I know several people in my circle of friends who don't want to do anything after work because they're exhausted. Bills gotta be paid, and there's more pressure to squeeze more productivity and consumption out of individuals than there was in 1980-1995. A lot of that pressure, oddly enough, comes from the necessity to keep shareholder returns high to keep the retirement accounts of the Boomers flush with cash.
Gen X and Millennials are also less likely to have had kids than the Boomers, so the socialization that came along with having a child (extracurriculars, PTA meetings, etc.) just never happened.
We incentivized, and eventually started requiring, economic output and consumption over building in-person social networks and hosting events outside of work. It was what we considered important.
I'm curious how you figure that pressure to increase profits has increased?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Criticism
The US birth rate began to drop in the 1960s. [0] At the time we were a more self-contained economy.
Since then, there are fewer births per capita, and we've opened up global markets for labor and resources.
If you have fewer people aging into markets for goods and services as time goes on, you have to monetize them more intensely in order to maintain revenues. At the same time, other markets (China, India, etc.) offered relatively-high GDP growth (and thus return on investment) compared to the US [1], since their labor costs are lower and the needs of then-developing nations were cheaper to meet.
The result is a worker that's expected to produce more profit to compete with those elsewhere, while also being more intensely monetized through their consumption habits. If they can't produce enough profit to compete with workers elsewhere, they just don't have the income necessary to be more intensely monetized, so their standard of living drops.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/datasets/global-metrics/countrie...
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?name_...
Why wouldn't people "monetize" things before?
Because you can only monetize people so much before they get testy about it.
They get tired of being advertised to. They start complaining about being nickeled and dimed for every single thing they used to get as a part of another purchase. They look at their wages staying flat while costs go up and up.
>A lot of that pressure, oddly enough, comes from the necessity to keep shareholder returns high to keep the retirement accounts of the Boomers flush with cash.
This is it. The American economy has been warped by the interests of older people who are more interested in keeping the wealth that they've accrued safe than in investing in ventures that are riskier but that provide a broader and more diverse base of opportunity. When you ask, "Why are so many young people unemployed or underemployed today?", it's because cash, which could have funded the investments that stupid young people would have made in risky small businesses that employ workers with idiosyncratic or less-than-expert skill sets, were instead placed in the hands of boomers who just bought more FAANG stock.
Suddenly, those huge conglomerates are the only ones with capital, so they bid up wages and costs to keep resources out of the hands of would-be competitors. This creates a cycle of "growth" (or, rather, when the organic growth subsides, government steps in with subsidies because they can't let the largest employers and economic engines in the country do poorly).
And here we are.