money from one generation to the next
I've said it before, so this might be a repeat, but what the hey:
What is an economy? It is a system for the distribution of wealth. What does that mean? Well, it's way to hand money over from one group to the next. Otherwise, people would accumulate wealth and take it with them to their grave at which point it would become part of the public fund. An economy allows the money to pass from the old to the young.
This is pretty simple logic, but you need to imagine that there are problems with this, namely--what does it mean to be young, and what does it mean to be old. See, for my parents, old was 60 and young was 22. So, they hit 22 and began to get the jobs of 60 year olds and began to have access to their things like houses.
Over the years, however, old has come to mean later and later because of medical science and the saturation of the job market with baby boomers. Now, old means 70 and young? Young, in this sense, probably now means 32.
These numbers aren't arbitrary. You can only spend so long training for a career or waiting to get a home so as to start a family. It ins't that the houses don't exist, it's that the wealth and the means for that wealth are tied up. You can't expect people to wait until they are 32 to become economically speaking adults, but that's precisely what this system has done. What's worse, because of the recession, even fewer people want to give up their wealth or access to wealth and so we have people being told that they will have to wait even longer or that the stores of their wealth (like social security) will soon be used up.
There are many ways to conceptualize the current recession. For me, I think the ever widening gulf of one economic generation to the next is a more reasonable candidate than commodity futures and housing bubbles. This is the reason we have commodity futures. This is the reason for the housing bubble.
What is an economy? It is a system for the distribution of wealth. What does that mean? Well, it's way to hand money over from one group to the next. Otherwise, people would accumulate wealth and take it with them to their grave at which point it would become part of the public fund. An economy allows the money to pass from the old to the young.
This is pretty simple logic, but you need to imagine that there are problems with this, namely--what does it mean to be young, and what does it mean to be old. See, for my parents, old was 60 and young was 22. So, they hit 22 and began to get the jobs of 60 year olds and began to have access to their things like houses.
Over the years, however, old has come to mean later and later because of medical science and the saturation of the job market with baby boomers. Now, old means 70 and young? Young, in this sense, probably now means 32.
These numbers aren't arbitrary. You can only spend so long training for a career or waiting to get a home so as to start a family. It ins't that the houses don't exist, it's that the wealth and the means for that wealth are tied up. You can't expect people to wait until they are 32 to become economically speaking adults, but that's precisely what this system has done. What's worse, because of the recession, even fewer people want to give up their wealth or access to wealth and so we have people being told that they will have to wait even longer or that the stores of their wealth (like social security) will soon be used up.
There are many ways to conceptualize the current recession. For me, I think the ever widening gulf of one economic generation to the next is a more reasonable candidate than commodity futures and housing bubbles. This is the reason we have commodity futures. This is the reason for the housing bubble.
posted by Monstro D. Whale at
7:13 AM
2 Comments:
I stand by the conspiracy rumor that I heard. The wealth is being relocated to Europe and the US is set to collapse.
If ever there was a time when the vaunted American ingenuity needed to show up, it is now.
If it doesn't, the next twenty years will be hellish in the US as people undergo a painful adjustment to less-privileged lifestyles and the absence of an educated middle class.
There will still be a middle class, but it will consist predominately of military veterans, active military, Federal employees, construction and utility workers, and upper management. As we already know, these are not usually the cream of the crop with regards to academia.
I think SS is supposed to run out of money by 2020 or sooner now. The funny thing, is that the government claims that within ten years after that, there is going to be a SS surplus of a couple billion dollars. And then, a few years later SS will be bankrupt and in the red again.
Wait, what?! Doesn't this go against all economic theory and business practice?
A good administrator would make sure that SS doesn't EVER go too deeply in the red to recover. In fact, a good administrator would not have allowed the funds to be stolen by the government in the first place. Oh wait, the administrator IS the government. Whose brilliant idea was that?
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