Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
Venice was the longest lasting, most stable state in Europe.
Old people are organized and more social. I see it in my community. They run the newsletters and they host community events. "Oh that's because they're retired!" No, many of them are not. Many still work.
I want the gerontocracy to end, but I'm also worried what takes its place. Gen Xers like me seem to lack some of the abilities present in our older generations.
We'll probably be more equitable and fair, but will we be as politically effective and organized towards achieving our goals? I sort of doubt it.
Organization is a skill that can be passed on, and to the degree that old people are still doing it themselves they’re depriving us of opportunities to learn and to practice and to benefit from their experience. That’s why we’re not as good at it.
They've had decades to save up the money that allows them to do the things alongside work.
They also came up in a time and place that allowed them to build social relationships outside of work. Many Gen Xers and Millennials just... don't have that kind of personal time. I know several people in my circle of friends who don't want to do anything after work because they're exhausted. Bills gotta be paid, and there's more pressure to squeeze more productivity and consumption out of individuals than there was in 1980-1995. A lot of that pressure, oddly enough, comes from the necessity to keep shareholder returns high to keep the retirement accounts of the Boomers flush with cash.
Gen X and Millennials are also less likely to have had kids than the Boomers, so the socialization that came along with having a child (extracurriculars, PTA meetings, etc.) just never happened.
We incentivized, and eventually started requiring, economic output and consumption over building in-person social networks and hosting events outside of work. It was what we considered important.
This is likely the worst issue humanity will be facing over the next 50 years, even more than climate change.
An increasingly old demographic will sabatoge the future of humanity as they drain enormous resources and abuse democratic processes to reroute resources to their preservation of life over young people and familes.
Young people and families will choke to death under the strain of elders who demand unlimited services, money, support while outvoting them, staying in jobs and houses and giving little to nothing back to society.
Innovation will grind to a halt, families will continue to shrink, work hours will get longer and longer as taxes get higher and higher to pay for and increasingly super old leadership and voting base.
Society will begin to lose hope to solve problems like going into space or fixing climate change as increasingly the elderly population will obsess over themselves and continued life.
It is one of the hardest moral problems we will face in our era.
I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money, which in this case is the boomers votes with the younger generations money. This will continue until nothing is left.
This already happened with the triple pension lock in GB, mathematically ensuring the bankruptcy of the state.
A Modest Proposal: Allow different tax rates for taxpayers who could vote, but don't. Perhaps if the pain was more personal, then few people would regularly vote straight-ticket for the Apathetic Party?
We could pay people to vote. Many states have unemployment insurance and that system could be repurposed to give people a wage for election day without making it political.
Here’s a better proposal: add none of the above to every ballot. If a super majority (say 80%) pick that the election is an automatic do-over and the people on the ballot can’t run for a period of say five years.
A couple cycles of this will flush the crap out of the system.
This would mostly end up punishing people who live in places where voting is deliberately made difficult due to having to skip an entire workday (and its pay, if you're paid hourly instead of salaried) to go to some out-of-the-way location to vote.
Yeah, I've lived in Australia and the US. The fine isn't big, the attempts at suppressing voter turnout or inconvenience aren't there, and the privacy of the ballot box means that even if you turn up, and put a ballot in the box, no-one's stopping you writing "You all suck" and not casting any preferences.
But at that point you are choosing to explicitly express your non-support of the candidates. That is still more meaningful than simply not showing up IMO
Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys.
Venice was the longest lasting, most stable state in Europe.
I want the gerontocracy to end, but I'm also worried what takes its place. Gen Xers like me seem to lack some of the abilities present in our older generations.
We'll probably be more equitable and fair, but will we be as politically effective and organized towards achieving our goals? I sort of doubt it.
They also came up in a time and place that allowed them to build social relationships outside of work. Many Gen Xers and Millennials just... don't have that kind of personal time. I know several people in my circle of friends who don't want to do anything after work because they're exhausted. Bills gotta be paid, and there's more pressure to squeeze more productivity and consumption out of individuals than there was in 1980-1995. A lot of that pressure, oddly enough, comes from the necessity to keep shareholder returns high to keep the retirement accounts of the Boomers flush with cash.
Gen X and Millennials are also less likely to have had kids than the Boomers, so the socialization that came along with having a child (extracurriculars, PTA meetings, etc.) just never happened.
We incentivized, and eventually started requiring, economic output and consumption over building in-person social networks and hosting events outside of work. It was what we considered important.
An increasingly old demographic will sabatoge the future of humanity as they drain enormous resources and abuse democratic processes to reroute resources to their preservation of life over young people and familes.
Young people and families will choke to death under the strain of elders who demand unlimited services, money, support while outvoting them, staying in jobs and houses and giving little to nothing back to society.
Innovation will grind to a halt, families will continue to shrink, work hours will get longer and longer as taxes get higher and higher to pay for and increasingly super old leadership and voting base.
Society will begin to lose hope to solve problems like going into space or fixing climate change as increasingly the elderly population will obsess over themselves and continued life.
It is one of the hardest moral problems we will face in our era.
This already happened with the triple pension lock in GB, mathematically ensuring the bankruptcy of the state.
You can see that in all the voter ID laws.
Just imagine the headlines, "voter fraud made even more profitable, immigrants getting paid to vote illegally".
A couple cycles of this will flush the crap out of the system.
Those people would heavily incentivized to protect their ability to vote.
The fine for not voting in Australia is about $30.
This is...nothing in the grand scheme of things.
But it's enough.
And you don't even have to vote: you have to turn up, that's it.