Jeremiah

For the most part, they not only never help their kids as adults, but they also blame them for everything that has turned out less than ideal in their lives.

They don't offer loving or even useful guidance.

They are supremely disinterested in their grandchildren beyond new photos every year for their condo in Florida.

Did I mention they moved away as fast as they could and absolutely will not return to where they left their kids, who can't afford to leave, and grandkids?

Nor are their families welcome to visit them at their home, which is too nice for little kids to ever enter.

They're nasty, antisocial parasites.

If it is in fact the case that they haven't hoarded most of our culture's wealth, it's not from lack of motivation to do so.

This is not a universal description, obviously, but it's very close to the experience of a large fraction of the children and grandchildren of boomers.

It's not about charts and graphs and economics or even demography.

They're assholes.

And we knew and deeply loved their parents.

We were there and we saw it happen.

End quote.

Scott writes, Chance Johnson writes, quote, quote,

Ethiopia was an economic basket case in the early 1980s.

Thanks to warfare, their economy is again doing poorly.

But in between, they had a miraculous recovery.

I read that the catalyst for their resurgence was radical land distribution quickly followed by the return of a capitalist government.

A government that enforced free markets and relatively strong rule of law, but refused to undo the redistribution of their Marxist forebears.

This combination of redistribution plus free markets was an accident of history, of course.