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I'm going to be plenty sarcastic and start by flipping the "eat less avocado toast" argument.
Most of the problems are with the boomers, and if they actually wanted a better future then they should have cared more about it. Almost all of the American problems are from boomers being too selfish.
What's that one quote? "A good society is one where people plant trees that they will never know their shade?"
Boomers took the ability to live on minimum wage, after they benefited from it. Boomers took the ability to get promoted after healthcare kept them alive. Boomers are hoarding more wealth than ever and everyone is worse from it.
If the lower classes had the ability to spend any meaningful amount of money then we could easily support people after retirement. But now we have some of the most stagnant economies, and it will only get worse before it gets better.
The earth could easily support more if people actually cared by doing things like stopping coal power plants. But now instead of creating solutions we have people like you who want to force pregnancy on people for your own selfish WANTS.
I mean, it's not just boomers, because it's a world wide problem. But in general inequality is more or less the biggest problem. After every financial crisis birth rates drop and stay down.
All graphs realted to inequality and general quality of life have been steadily dropping since 1971 when we introduced the FIAT money system. Basically ever since then the entire system is set up to steal from anyone who can't benefit from debt and give that money to those who can. Any savings and income is constantly eroded away steadily making the bottom ~80% poorer. Then we also started artifically lowering interest rates, which made the stock market and real estate markets go nuts, making everyone who already had assets rich and those who didn't even poorer.
Boomers didn't really cause this, they have no idea what any of that even means, they just passively benefited from it, because they already had assets. It's more or less created by a tiny policial and financial elite conspiring to takw over our monetary system in 1971. The entire financial and monetary system were reengineered to benefit the rich.
Mark Blyth frames it as a revolt of capital in his book Angrynomics. Basically before that workers benefited hugely from the system, because wages were constantly rising in line with productivity growth and cumulative inflation was so low that you would actually save. There were no crazy real estate bubbles created by the central bank like we see today. That stopped after 1971.
I wouldn't say Boomers did this, because they were way too uneducated to even notice what happened, because they got all their news from the same people that stole their children's future. You can blame them for being to stupid to stop it, yes.
There's some other factors too, like people moving to cities and social issues, but inequality is one of the biggest, if not the biggest. It's pretty much clear as day in the data if anyone cares to even look. It's not some big mystery, it's just going completely ignored, because it would be a huge problem for the people in power.
Oh yeah, and the reason why this problem is world wide is because we exported that same system all over the world to pretty mich every country on earth. Ghadaffi wanted to break that system with an African stable gold backed currency and that's why Libya was destroyed. It would completely invalidate our imaginary money like the Dollar or the Euro and the powerful couldn't steal from the rest of us every single day.
I appreciate you responding, even if most of what I was doing was screaming into the void.
FIAT and gold standards will have similar issues, and where they differ FIAT is better. Unless you want degrowth, then gold standard is better. Our current economy is built on growth. Without growth you die.
I do feel it being correlation and not causation with line go down and FIAT. I can more easily point to legislation than I can gold.
The system was set up to steal before too. It's just now a more shuffle assets around and magic presto you now have more money.
Lol, fair enough.
You kind of lost me there. I strongly doubt there are people who planned 4d chess and have it to roll out like this. Look at Elon, who has been failing upward his whole life. Look at Bill Gates being a big baby with copy righn. In most cases it seems to be people arguing for immediate short term benefits to themselves while disregarding the future.
If you're talking about raw size, sure. People use to also be much quicker to violence. You used to have striking union workers getting gunned down by the state for a 40hr work week. We are much more tolerant to being abused.
Moving to cities have generally been what made most human technological progress. Cities are much better than suburbs.
Well, that is certainly a view. I think we'll just talk past each other on that one.