

Future Generations Steal from Themselves - alexandros
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/future_generations_steal_from_themselves/

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edanm
This is a point I've often wondered about. For most of history, "the people"
have had more power collectively than the rulers. And yet the rulers had all
the wealth, and consequently lived much better. Why did "the people" put up
with this?

This is just as true today, by the way. Collectively, the people in most
Western countries could do amazing things to help world hunger, world peace,
and so on. And yet for the most part, not much is done.

I think this is the same reason most people don't even think of starting their
own company. It just never occurs to them that _they can chose_ what to do
with their life; most people just "go with the flow" in a manner of speaking,
and let the world around them choose for them.

~~~
barrkel
Non-hierarchies are unstable because there are super-linear cumulative rewards
to climbing towards the top of the pyramid, even if it's only a local pyramid,
and even if that means the sum output of all the people put together is
reduced because they are formed into a hierarchy.

But it's also more complicated. There are significant rewards for
specialization, and leadership is also a specialization. A group, even a
hierarchy, with a good distribution of specializations, will beat the loose
affiliation of individualists any day of the week.

------
Herring
>I would argue that the people who take the most physical and mental risks for
the benefit of society should get the most pay. That seems perfectly
reasonable and moral to me.

It shouldn't. Society should reward benefits, not costs.

~~~
acon
Yes, but how do we decide how much society benefits from what you do? The
military and police, keeping the mob rule at bay may be a great benefit, since
it protects the rest of society and gives it the opportunity to invent and
build things. Teaching people, healing people, motivating people. How should
we value and reward all these things?

~~~
Herring
The way it works, ideally, is there's competition & people vote with their
dollars according to how they like the benefits & the prices.

~~~
acon
If something is very beneficial, but in great supply the price tends to be
low, like clean water in Sweden, it will be very cheap, so I don't think
somethings price on the market is enough to decide how much benefit it has.
Somethings which are of great benefit to us, like air we can breath, are even
free.

------
daniel-cussen
The Roman empire became like this later on in its history: people with muscles
and swords made a lot of money off everyone else by taxing them.

~~~
dualogy
\--- and then it collapsed =)

------
lkrubner
> Arguably, the most important function of human > language is to protect the
> smart from the strong.

I understand what he means, though when defined like this, "the smart" include
Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Idi Amin and a bunch of others, none of whom
could have won a fist fight with their strongest soldiers. Yet the soldiers
remained loyal to the rulers.

I was just reading a book about the fall of Berlin in 1945. One thing I've
wondered about in the past is why the German soldiers kept fighting when it
was clear that the war was lost. And one thing I just read was that any
soldier that tried to desert, and was caught, was tortured and then killed. So
the soldiers kept fighting since quitting seemed even more dangerous than
fighting. Thus a hopeless cause was prolonged for several months.

Anyone who knows anything about World War I knows that a lot of very smart
people died in the fighting. And language was used by all sides to rally
people and get them excited about the war. So one function of language is to
rally smart people into clusters where they can be killed in large numbers. If
language really protected the smart from the strong then the Battle Of The
Somme would never have happened.

------
kreek
We'll have to wait and see for the current generation 'steals from itself' but
the baby boom generation have definitely screwed themselves. Other than the
few unlucky souls who went to Vietnam the baby boomers lived through an era of
unprecedented peace and prosperity and all they have to show for it is a
mountain of debt.

~~~
gaius
Debt? What they have are assets (real estate priced out of the range of their
kids) and pensions (gold-plated final salary, paid for by their kids taxes).
The Boomers are unbelievably good at running this kind of generational heist.

Probably the kids of Gen X and the Millenials will still be working off the
Boomer's debt (i.e. government deficit here in the UK).

~~~
lkrubner
It does make me wonder whether Gen X and Millenials will become pro-inflation.
After all, that is one way for a group to get out of paying a debt. Most debts
are fixed in nominal terms, and the burden of debt could therefore be reduced,
in real terms, with a bout of inflation. The Boomers tended to be anti-
inflation because they remember the hyper-inflation of the 1970s, but neither
Gen X nor Millenials remember the 1970s.

For the most part, a bout of strong of inflation could be regarded as a form
of cheating, a form of welching on a debt. The public (at least in the US)
hasn't favored that kind of policy, partly because I think a lot of people
feel it would be unethical to get out of a debt that way. But then, avoiding
unethical behavior depends on a notion of fairness, and that goes both ways.
The Gen Xers and the Millenials might ask themselves, "Was it fair for the
Boomers to run up a few trillion in debt and then leave it to us?" If a
substantial portion of those generations come to believe that the debt was
unfairly incurred, then they may think it is fair to use unfair tactics to get
out of paying the unfair debt.

~~~
gaius
The Boomers need to foot the bill for environmental damage and geopolitical
instability too remember. It's not just financial debt.

------
napierzaza
It's too bad that Scott Adams has no idea what he's talking about.

What makes him think that A: The youth of today agree with how things are
going B: They are NOT trying to change things C: The people in charge ARE NOT
trying to maintain the status quo.

It's not so simple as just using a gun or muscle is it? We have laws, ones to
do with economics and even criminality that can keep the youths marginalized.
The older generation run the companies that pick and choose who to hire. In
general, the real power of society is with the old.

I don't even see the middle-class (and old) majority having much sway over the
rich who control politics in so many senses. Business interests have squelched
a lot of progress for the current and last generation.

I find that Adams is pretty aloof to these sorts of ideas.

He also seems to be recommending a revolution of sorts.

"Society's founding geniuses engineered a social system that encourages the
young people who have guns to shoot at each other instead of robbing old
people. Forgive me for calling that awesome."

I'm not sure if this is a racially motivated statement.

It's also interesting how he uses "smarts" as a term when "manipulation" and
"control" would do better to describe the way society works. I'm guessing he's
a hard-core Rand follower. Great.

~~~
m0nty
The key quotation from this piece is "the most important function of human
language is to protect the smart from the strong". He's talking (in a very
tongue-in-cheek manner) about how ethics very often override self-interest.
Seriously, I think you're over-analyzing.

