I recently wrote about the board game Descent which I am not going to buy because it is too expensive for me. But I hope the game matters because it tests the competitiveness of a $175 board game outside of crowdfunding. Since then, I've watched several YouTube videos from the board game channel talking about the high price of Descent and some Kickstarter games. In one, Alex from BoardGameCo reports that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (and this is pre-pandemic data ).
In the course of my work and because I am a baby boomer, I also read and watch videos about the generation gap. Millennials think they are doing much worse than baby boomers, and they think baby boomers have gone to great lengths to mislead them. Looking at various economic data, it's clear that in many ways, millennials are far worse off financially than boomers. But while baby boomers can sometimes make the nice but not so important statement to millennials that success is the result of life's choices and values, the idea of a generation-against-younger plot is simply ridiculous. When you study human behavior, one of the recurring psychological traits of people is that they go out of their way to improve the lives of their children. Not that they always do a good job, look at climate change for example. But it is highly unlikely that an entire generation conspired to make their children's lives financially worse.
On an individual level, I believe that your financial success depends on luck, financial circumstances, and life choices. If you take the entire population, the effects of luck and life choices become statistical noise, and all that's left is the state of the economy. When 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, it basically means that the entire economic system is at odds with what Marx might call the proletariat , the wage-earning social class. Much of the inequality stems from differential taxes on wages and capital gains, which benefit those who live on capital gains. So the well-known story is that Warren Buffett pays less in taxes than his secretary . Or, as he himself put it : "Of course there was a class war, but my class, the rich class, fought the war and we won it."
It is clear that there is a certain relationship between age and wealth, the old being richer than the young, and this is increasing . But there are many elderly people living in poverty . As easy as mocking the hippie generation 50 years later, they would at least define the problem correctly as a class struggle problem. Identity politics, including generational identity politics, has in recent decades largely diverged from this. In essence, the economic conditions created in the 1980s by the powerful pair Reagan and Thatcher, with less regulation and more globalization, created winners and losers. The so-called "knowledge workers" are on the winning side. This is a moral issue for them because they are left-wing intellectuals. Thus, the left abandoned the class struggle and replaced the struggle for better economic conditions for wage workers with identity politics. You don't protest "burdening the rich" if you are *relatively* rich.
I think old-school left-wing politics is better: if we taxed capital gains in the same way we tax wages and give workers a fairer share of the wealth they create, then many identity-based social problems would be solved at the same time. Improving the economic conditions of low-income people will help black families far more than wealthy white intellectuals labeled Black Lives Matter. This is not communism (which obviously didn't work). Nobody wants to turn the United States into communist Russia. But we must want to turn the United States (and elsewhere) into a Scandinavian country. Because their economic system has been proven to work and make people happier .
