Jeremiah

Title, Highlights from the Comments on Boomers.

This is an audio version of Astral Codex X, Scott Alexander's Substack.

If you like it, you can subscribe at astralcodex10.substack.com.

Before getting started, first, I wish I'd been more careful to differentiate the following claims.

1.

Boomers had it much easier than later generations.

2.

The political system unfairly prioritizes boomers over other generations.

3.

Boomers are uniquely bad on some axis like narcissism, selfishness, short-termism, or willingness to defect on the social contract.

Anti-boomerism conflates all three of these positions, and in arguing against it I try to argue against all three of these positions, I think with varying degrees of success.

But these are separate claims that could stand or fall separately, and I think a true argument against anti-boomerists would demand they declare explicitly which ones they support, rather than letting them switch among them as convenient, than arguing against whichever ones they say are key to their position.

Second, I wish I'd highlighted how much of this discussion centres around disagreements over which policies are natural or unmarked versus unnatural slash marked.

Nobody is passing laws that literally say, confiscate wealth from Generation A and give it to Generation B. We're mostly discussing tax policy, where Tax Policy 1 is more favourable to old people, and Tax Policy 2 is more favourable to young people.

If you're young, you might feel like Tax Policy 1 is a declaration of intergenerational warfare, where the old are enriching themselves at young people's expense.

But if you're old, you might feel like reversing Tax Policy 1 and switching to Tax Policy 2 would be intergenerational warfare confiscating your stuff.

But in fact, they're just two different tax policies, and it's not obvious which one a fair society with no intergenerational warfare in quotes would have, even assuming there was such a thing.

We'll see this most clearly in the section on housing, but I'll try to highlight it whenever it comes up.

I'm in a fighty frame of mind here and probably defend the boomers and myself in these responses more than I would in an ideal world.

Anyway, here are your comments.