Scott Alexander

One of the many reasons I rarely go to San Francisco.

But I don't like feeling omnipresent despair at the impending collapse of everything.

Having specific thoughts like, house prices are up since the pandemic, so it's no surprise that there are more homeless people and more of the usual bad things downstream of homeless people, rather than vague ones like, RIP civilization 4000 BC to 2026 AD.

isn't just more grounded in the evidence.

It's also more compatible with living a normal life.

I'm not a pragmatist who thinks you should be allowed to lie or do a biased survey of the evidence in order to live a normal life and escape despair.

But I'm also not some kind of weird anti-pragmatist who makes a virtue out of ignoring evidence in order to keep despairing.

Here, as with the vibe session, I will try to keep one foot in the statistical story, one foot in the vibes, and hold myself lightly enough not to miss whatever evidence comes next.

The European discourse can be, for lack of a better term, America-brained.

We hear stories of Black Lives Matter marches in countries without significant black populations, or defendants demanding their First Amendment rights in countries without constitutions.

Why shouldn't the opposite phenomenon exist?

Europe is more populous than the US and looms large in the American imagination.

Why shouldn't we find ourselves accidentally absorbing European ideas that don't make sense in the American context?

In my post on baby boomers, I argued against claims that America keeps raising taxes on the young so it can award larger pensions to the old.

In fact, social security payouts per person have become less generous over time, not more, although total subsidies to the elderly are rising because of increasing longevity and health insurance costs.

Several European readers wrote in to say that whether or not this is happening in America, it definitely happens in Europe.

Here's Sokal, quote, The anti-boomer take has been imported in part from the EU and the UK, where the pension system is not the same.

And here's a link to the Pensions Act 2007 section of the Wikipedia article on the state pension in the United Kingdom.

There is a lot of similar things in France that I could dig up, such as all attempts to tax benefits being defeated.

And from The Fall, quote,