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Honestly I think this is obvious to anyone who is not financially motivated to think otherwise. The biggest problem is the rich have created a system in which

• WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
  The system is totally unsustainable... unless we're willing to have a society of debtors, noone is going to buy homes from the boomers. The majority of retirement the average middle class has is their home.
  • bequanna 4y ago
    I’m not sure what you mean when you refer to “the system” but the extradorinaiy price increases in homes were caused by boomers printing an unprecedented amount of money for themselves and lowering interest rates. If history repeats itself, real estate valuations should revert to a long term mean which would make homes somewhat more affordable. There are some early indications that this is happening.
• CottonMcKnight 4y ago
  I would absolutely love it if dividend yield stocks made a big comeback.
• moffkalast 4y ago
  Frankly the only other currently implemented alternative is state funded pensions, which instead of the market rely on an ever expanding population of workers paying their taxes to fund it and is not exactly better. In countries where population growth levelled off it seems to have recently resulted in raising of the retirement age ever higher. It's basically a state run ponzi scheme. I frankly wish we had a tax free investing account option available instead.
  • supernovae 4y ago
    isn’t that a 401k? I wish they raised the limits.. it’s woefully inadequate after years of inflation.
    • strongpigeon 4y ago
      The biggest difference being that typically the state assumes the underperformance risk for a pension, versus the individual for a 401k.
    • oneoff786 4y ago
      A 401k is like a state funded pension? No, not at all?
      • gruez 4y ago
        You got the quotes mixed up, the relevant parts are: >>I frankly wish we had a tax free investing account option available instead. > isn’t that a 401k?
    • jnwatson 4y ago
      The IRS raises the limits every year. I imagine they will raise it quite a bit next year.
    • moffkalast 4y ago
      Yeah we don't get that one nor Roth IRA in most of Europe. Afaik it's only a USA thing (though on second thought I do think pensions are optional in the UK so they may have a similar system). The main difference between this and a 401k is that the money you pay into it isn't yours and doesn't affect what you get in the end, only your work years fed into some chart determine that. The taxes go directly to current payouts as it would be in a literal ponzi scheme.
• mc32 4y ago
  I'm not an economist and don't pretend to be... For thousands of years of our existence, progress was very slow and sometimes we went in reverse in some regions. Economic growth plus innovation resulted in progress and pulled the 99% who were not wealthy out of utter subsistence poverty over the last few hundred years. Also, we cannot grow forever (unless we figure out how to colonize other planets). We have to figure out how to live in a worldwide demographic "Japan" zero to negative pop growth, decline and be comfortable and work with it. New generations don't have to be richer than the last. We can achieve some maintainable level of comfort and be okay with that. Of course the assumption of growth underpins most modern societies, as far as I know, but we will have to find a new model for a new reality.
  • wahnfrieden 4y ago
    recent graeber/wengrow research shows your understanding of human progress is way out of date
    • whimsicalism 4y ago
      Care to elaborate?
      • mc32 4y ago
        I think they aim to say that ancients weren't dumb dullards. Which I don't think people are saying they were so. We're saying that to get where we are took as long as it took humanity to get where we are (Outside of some fabulous thinking that there existed "modern" historical societies that disappeared). When Hobbes said life would be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' he was referring to life outside of the outcast's society.
        • wahnfrieden 4y ago
          speaking more to the progress part
      • dataflow 4y ago
• Magnusmaster 4y ago
  I live in Argentina where the government took over pensioner funds and gave away millions of pensions to people who have never worked in a formal job, and therefore never put a penny into a pension fund. The result is that almost every pensioner earns peanuts regardless of how much they worked or how much they gave to the pension fund, and almost every pensioner earns half the poverty line basket. Guaranteeing financial security to anyone is impossible.
  • Forgeties79 4y ago
    > Guaranteeing financial security to anyone is impossible. Plenty of countries have done just fine. What you described is horrible mismanagement and not the only way to do things.
• closeparen 4y ago
  For the government to redistribute real productive capacity and resources to the elderly, they first have to exist. The demographic crisis already means the elderly are going to need quite a bit relative to what we can produce; without growth things would be even tighter.
• rmbyrro 4y ago
  > governments/employers not wanting to guarantee financial security of elders and offload the risk to the individual One can argue for a well-fare state that provides all guarantees one wants. But you're flipping the issue here. First, you have a risk of not aging. But most people are inevitably going to age and retire. This risk is inherent to the individual. Now we can offload that risk to the government (please, it's not the other way around), but it's going to have costs. And I think offloading it to the government is even riskier, because governments make stupid decisions and are subject to massive corruption.
• mrharrison 4y ago
  I don't think it's obvious. Growth and innovation go hand and hand. A tug of war between capitalism and socialism is essential for a healthy society that can solve exciting problems via markets. It's not perfect, but the growth model keeps society agile, with many options via startups and market competition. It gives us the toolbelt to solve complex problems quickly. It's challenging to start up industries and maintain the plumbing to combat world problems when we have non-innovative, non-incentivized markets. It's apparent that I'm rattling off some generalizations.
  • orev 4y ago
    False Dilemma fallacy: capitalism vs socialism
    • convolvatron 4y ago
      I don't know any socialists that want to completely disassemble capitalism. I do know several capitalists that want to completely disassemble socialism, or at least greviously wound it at any opportunity.
    • mrharrison 4y ago
      I didn't say VS, I said a tug of war. Meaning they pull at each other, and play with each other well. Growth and government stability via policy, keeping each other in balance. Too much socialism leads to a central authority with too much power, too much capitalism leads to monopolies with too much power. And yes there is more than capitalism and socialism. But the author was OP was focused on growth and socialist policies.
• dan-robertson 4y ago
  The typical counter-argument to complaints about the impossibility of endless growth is that growth/gdp are usually sufficiently vaguely defined that it is possible to go on forever – there isn’t any fundamental relationship between growth and resource use. I don’t really understand your last paragraph; it feels to me like it is written from a very American perspective. There seem to exist countries that achieve economic growth while having sane healthcare, childcare, etc, and it feels clear to me that U.S. issues are more related to the current local optimum the political system has come to rest in than to some obsession with growth. So what is the argument here about growth? Is it that the other countries don’t actually have growth or that they don’t actually provide stability on social issues or what?
• caramelcustard 4y ago
  "Honestly I think this is obvious to anyone who is not financially motivated to think otherwise." which implies that the interviewer and the economist are acting in good faith and are not financially motivated to push certain ideas. "The biggest problem is the rich have created a system in which people's future (retirement) is basically linked to "the market" growing over their lifetime." ah so trade and supply/demand that are moved by "standard persons" = rich people, ah yes. "This system of course is built 100% on governments/employers not wanting to guarantee financial security of elders and offload the risk to the individual." great idea, have people at governments mercy and build a voter block that is going to put the tick where they're going to be told to for some of that extra pension plan dough. "...the rich benefit insanely more by market movements than a standard person does..." while also contributing the most tax revenue...
  • bergenty 4y ago
    What are you smoking? The rich pay capital gains which is way, way less than the average person is paying.
    • caramelcustard 4y ago
      "The latest government data show that in 2018, the top 1% of income earners—those who earned more than $540,000—earned 21% of all U.S. income while paying 40% of all federal income taxes. The top 10% earned 48% of the income and paid 71% of federal income taxes." https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-the-rich-pay-taxes https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t... Nice of you to imply that only "the rich" can buy/sell assets, especially in a post-Gamestop world.
      • orwin 4y ago
        Now, add VAT to income taxes, and change the referential. Top 1% gives back X% of their income as taxes, top10% gives back Y%. If Y>X, you have inequality issues.
        • 4y ago
• rr888 4y ago
  > The biggest problem is the rich have created a system in which people's future (retirement) is basically linked to "the market" growing over their lifetime. Not really, half retired Americans live off Social Security alone, and another big chunk I'm guessing a quarter rely on it. Many others have property, business or keep working. I'm guessing its about 10-20% of Americans really have enough 401k savings to live off.
  • PeterisP 4y ago
    I don't know much about details of the USA Social Security model, however from what I recall doesn't it effectively require continued economic growth to plausibly be able to pay out what it should without significantly raising the starting age to decrease the number of years it pays out?
    • rr888 4y ago
      There is definitely a problem with people living longer and bulge of baby boomers. There are alternatives to fund this such as raising taxes or debt, but yes likely people will have to work longer if they keep living longer.
• throwawaymaths 4y ago
  > This system of course is built 100% on governments/employers not wanting to guarantee financial security of elders and offload the risk to the individual. The growth obsession phenomenon also happens in countries which demonstrably put more effort into caring about the elderly and the poor. They still get left behind, albeit at marginally lower rates than in a country like the US. It's the juiced economic statistics and obsession paper growth that's the core problem, not necessarily "rich people have influence"
• prichino 4y ago
  The problem is when a civilization stops providing ways for its inhabitants to keep winning inside of it, the civilization collapses. In Western civilization, if there is no growth, how will you motivate people to keep working? The only thing left is to steal from the people who already have things.
  • turns0ut 4y ago
    We have two options; intentionally iterate away from this society or it will collapse for SOME reason; bigotry, environment catastrophe… Physical laws do not give a fuck about our philosophy. Accept figurative death, cowards. Steal from people who intentionally changed the rules to deflate our wealth. The laws and their interpretation are no accident. What this debate is is deference to the elderly or the youth. Tacit ageism against the future or well reasoned action against the past. Gramps; you had a good run. Bye. Edit: I have an MSc in elastic structures, used to work in high powered switching equipment. I understand rates of change in high energy systems like a planets climate. This is not an emotional argument from a place of ignorance.
  • caust1c 4y ago
    Many if not most philosophies and religions arise precisely to answer this very question. It's possible to live happily and healthily without growth. People will always work because work needs to be done. Food, shelter, power, all of it requires active work by people. No stealing necessary. The laissez-faire rhetoric of "no growth, nobody to work" is exactly the problem mindset this economist is trying to address.
  • BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    You don't need growth in zero-sum areas or areas that would make us face environmental collapse for people to want to survive and see their needs met. Perishable goods still exist. People will still work to create perishable goods to consume. They will still change cultures and create solutions in areas where the game is not (pseudo-)zero-sum. You also can't grow everything forever, as real estate is showing. If your concern is people stealing, that's an obvious target.
• seibelj 4y ago
  You can have endless growth as long as productivity is increasing faster than population loss. Increasing productivity needs technological advancement. Alternatively we can stem the tide of population loss by having humans live longer, or by waiting for the current generation of non-breeders to die off allowing the breeders’ children to reproduce. Likely they are more genetically predisposed to reproduction.
• dionidium 4y ago
  > Honestly I think this is obvious to anyone who is not financially motivated to think otherwise. The problem here is that there's no grand conspiracy to pursue growth. People make the individual decision to pursue growth because of the individual benefits.
  • meheleventyone 4y ago
    But the point is that this privileges a small percentage of the population with outsized political sway so the net effect is the same. People acting in their own interests doesn’t make the end result objectively correct or stop us rethinking incentives.
• nostromo 4y ago
  Retiring off of investment into the economy in return for a piece of the growth is a very happy situation for everyone involved. Companies get access to capital. Retirees get money to live off of. Capital is allocated to those who can make the most value in return. Retiring off of pensions is a zero sum game. Companies charge more to pay pensioners. Customers don't get any additional value, they just pay higher costs for the same goods and services. Owners get lower returns from the company. Retirees are stuck on fixed income, which is devastating during an inflationary period.
  • zwkrt 4y ago
    Right but the world is a bigger place than that of capital, customers, investors, and companies. That's the problem. As an example, there are trees, which is a class of thing that doesn't fit into any of those above categories. And even worse it doesn't really work, it just works maybe amortized over time for people who start far enough ahead.
• throwaway787544 4y ago
  > And there's almost nothing to do about it- that's the way things currently "work" and it seems insurmountable to do anything about it. A small handful of the super-rich have already pointed out the only thing "we" can do about it: revolution. Inequality that continues for too long leads to overthrow. The rich get eaten, the poor become a rabble, monarchy/autocracy/totalitarianism eventually returns, and the cycle starts over. That's where we're headed. The funny thing is, our social ills might be the cause before our economic ones are.
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