War on the Young

[LK Day]

"The war on the young is led ‘by cadres of elderly men, content to manage decline. and exacerbated by younger generations, who don’t seem to know what’s going on or understand the gravity of the financial situation that will hit them in the future. . . .

The war on the young is most intense in countries (and, in the US, industries and states) which have the blue social model deeply embedded in their social institutions. It is an interesting struggle: these days, the young face serious trouble finding employment and will be saddled with debts run up by their elders as they grow up.

The older generations benefited from a kind of escalator system in life. You step on the escalator after finishing your education and it almost automatically carries you upward in life, with higher pay and higher status until, at retirement, you step off and enjoy a good, level standard of living for the rest of your days.

One of the younger generations’ biggest problems is that many of those escalators don’t work anymore. In Italy and Japan, companies are reluctant to hire young people on what American universities call “tenure track”; unsure about their future needs and resources they don’t want high cost employees that can’t be fired. The older workers are too powerful to dislodge — just as in American universities the tenured professors are too powerful to give up tenure. So younger workers increasingly are hired if at all on temporary contracts, with lower benefits and fewer prospects for promotion."
Walter Russell Mead

[clif]

i think it is safe to say, and most people would agree in general, that there are some 'seismic' social shifts occurring.

i've some suspicions on the academic\abstract construction presented here. it's framework seems mostly confined to post WW I dynamics, FDR and so forth.
for me, this is complicated by my own experience in seeing my parents having both grown up on family farms or grandparents still being in the farming business.
i did not (visited frequently, no longer an option)

the whole 'upward mobility' mindset is a product of over 50 years, many decades, but another way of seeing the cycle is the removable of self sufficiency from land.

the history of land rights is much longer. seems a struggle of legacy (or liquidity?) now, except those farm (Jeffersonian?) legacies embed a certain useful knowledge, pertaining to survival.

[caribe]

We need increased progressive taxation.

[pigsteak]

actually, the solution is the same for all, govt and individuals. do not spend more than you have in your checking account. pretty simple really. if the govt hasnt been able to tackle the deficit with the levels of revenue for the last 50 years, what in the world makes us think they will start now...in that vein, a balanced approach would seem to work better.

cut lifetime appointments for university professors would be a great start. no one should have a guaranteed job..if their performance suffers, see ya. (ok, time for the libs to say this would silence new views and differing opinions.) same for union members.

[Shamis]

Our economy is a pyramid scheme.

[nik]

the kitchen table approach to debt makes no sense for the federal gov't. national debt has, and has always, had more to do with the overall performance of the economy than with spending. this is why clinton, who some of you would describe, i'm sure, as a free-spending big government democrat (despite the fact that he gutted welfare for you), was able to balance the budget. was it fiscal responsibility? not really. he presided over the dot.com boom and had some other demographics working in his favor. spending matters, as do revenues, but the larger state of the global economy matters more. and, this leads into the mobility point.

mobility is threatened in western industrialized countries in a big way for the first time in the post WWII era not because of a moral failure by one age group or another or because of overly generous pensions or university professors (though i'd be fine with getting rid of tenure and reforming pensions of public employees somehow), but because of the basic facts of global capital. hard to see how it is sustainable to provide post WWII, GM style pensions and career ladders when companies have to compete with international labor in countries with lower living wages and zero to no labor rights. some industries have maintained an amount of mobility ("knowledge" sector jobs, gov't jobs, etc.) but many have not (in particular, industrial manufacturing).

hard also to see what the answer is. best i can see is that we're waiting for the next big boom cycle (green energy manufacturing? although china has up beat there...some other technological innovation?) to produce a bunch of jobs. if we want to remain the place to be for that next boom to be located, though, we damn sure better pay attention to broad-based education.

oh, also should mention a pretty big reason why we're in the fiscal situation we are in right now is because old people are living longer and longer. in other words, our medical advances have been great, but have come with unintended negative consequences. that is really how the old people are waging war on the young -- by continuing to breathe (and to need more and more treatments and drugs to breathe).

[pigsteak]

spot on nik....and add in the fact that living longer only burdens social security further. my kitchen table analogy was flippant. a better insight would to make sure all American kids learn Mandarin, because many of them will be working for the Chinese some day.

[clif]

pr interview for a book on the pension issue-

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/ ... index.html

[nik]

haha, yeah, seems like we may be headed that way!