If euthanasia is illegal, access will be difficult. My grandmother was blind and in excruciating pain during her final months. She wanted to die. I wanted to help her but didn’t want to risk prison. Her doctors were just as afraid of prison and even less inclined to help her. She suffered needlessly.
Don’t ask don’t tell doesn’t work for end of life decisions for the same reason it doesn’t work for abortions. This isn’t like prostitution or pot where s conviction would be a misdemeanor and illegality can chill excesses without ruining any one’s life. If someone chooses to prosecute, you are at risk of years or decades in prison. If doctors aren’t willing to break abortion laws to help sympathetic young women, why would they break laws with even stricter penalties to help old people?
Yeah, I agree Matt's suggestion just isn't going to work. Watching both of my grandmothers end of life situations has left firmly in the camp that euthanasia should be allowed. It was heartbreaking to listen to one of them tell me over and over again that she desperately wanted to die because she was in so much pain and being unable to help.
I also think it's a little silly that I can have an advanced care directive that states that I don't want to be revived in certain situations because I think the quality of life would be too low for me to consider it worth living, but that if I happen to just slide into that exact mental situation, which I've already described as one where I don't want to be alive, there is nothing my family could do to help me end my life.
True. But swinging too hard the other way like Canada is arguably worse. Read the AP coverage. If half the reporting is true we are looking at massive human rights violations, to put it mildly. The type of stuff the next generation will issue endless public apologies for and will build memorials to commemorate the victims and denounce the crimes being legally committed right now.
So the answer must be sensible laws that work hard to minimize abuse. Some Western European countries maybe closer to that.
I read the article Matt linked and I can't really tell what people are objecting to. It kind of takes a tone of "what if people are getting euthanized who don't want to be?" but it doesn't provide any evidence that that is happening at all. Is there more reporting on this elsewhere?
The very first example presented is a man who was euthanized without a terminal medical condition. End-of-life euthanasia care and fully legalized assisted suicide are completely different propositions.
Thanks for sharing this article. It's a good reminder of all the hard cases out there to consider. I will say that I support some level of legal euthanasia, which still places me left-of-center of this issue. I just think there should be strong guard-rails in place. I agree with Matt and think Canada probably went too far.
It does provide evidence that someone felt pressured towards euthanasia despite not wanting it. I guess it’s possible that he’s the only one, or that no such pressure has ever had an effect, but I don’t think those are smart bets.
The article matt linked to only discussed a single case. The dude’s family didn’t want him to die, but it appears that he did. I see no problem with that. If his family are willing and able to make his life enjoyable, great! But if dude is depressed/unhappy, over 25, and wants to die for an extended period of time, what’s the problem?
Are you talking about the AP article? Because a guy mentioned in that article did *not* want to die and started recording his meetings with doctors and ethicists because he had the feeling they were encouraging him to. Pardon an extended quote:
“Roger Foley, who has a degenerative brain disorder and is hospitalized in London, Ontario, was so alarmed by staffers mentioning euthanasia that he began secretly recording some of their conversations.
In one recording obtained by the AP, the hospital’s director of ethics told Foley that for him to remain in the hospital, it would cost “north of $1,500 a day.” Foley replied that mentioning fees felt like coercion and asked what plan there was for his long-term care.
“Roger, this is not my show,” the ethicist responded. “My piece of this was to talk to you, (to see) if you had an interest in assisted dying.”
Foley said he had never previously mentioned euthanasia. The hospital says there is no prohibition on staff raising the issue.”
It'd be very difficult to enforce for the same reason that elder abuse can be difficult to catch--the most vulnerable elderly people are often very isolated.
Regarding someone wanting to die: why do doctors have to get involved? Why not just leave it to the individual to commit suicide? Of course, some people who want to die may be too incapacitated to kill themselves, but that excludes the vast vast majority of over-25s with suicidal feelings.
I think if someone wants to commit suicide, it would be better for them to have the ability to do so in some sort of palliative context, with painkillers, rather than with a gun or whatever pills they have lying around at home.
The thing is that I think if someone wants to commit suicide it would almost always be better for them not to do it. Now, earlier I was criticizing people for suggesting someone else might be wrong to think their life is worth living, so maybe I'm a hypocrite for saying someone is wrong to think their life ISN'T worth living, but I think there are both philosophical and practical reasons to say the second and not the first, and while obviously botched suicides can have horrendous results, I just can't see a good way to extend euthanasia to people who have hope of a healthy life but are plagued with suicidal feelings—the tradeoffs and slopes just seem too great and too slippery.
Off topic (to say the least) but I've often wondered: why isn't that approach followed in US states where capital punishment is practiced? Can't the condemned simply be given a large dose of narcotics? Aren't there cases of badly botched lethal injections causing suffering?
As someone who’s seen a family member go through Alzheimer's, I am personally worried about not having a euthanasia option for myself should I be in a similar position one day. I’d particularly like the option to pre-file for euthanasia under certain conditions since a patient in this mental state is in no position to understand their condition and make such a consequential decision.
Yes, there are risks that patients that are mentally and physically weakened may be convinced to accept euthanasia when options exists to improve their condition. Particularly when it would require great expense from the state or a private insurer to treat the individual.
Yet, I personally don’t find this to be a particularly concerning outcome. Should my future self find themselves in a state of mental and physical dimishment where they can be convinced to accept euthanasia rather than lobby for better options then I find that an acceptable outcome. At that point I’d be quite far gone and couldn’t properly contemplate the tradeoffs. I’d much prefer that early ending than the alternative of possibly being kept alive in a diminished state as long as possible; particularly so if it comes at great social cost.
I completely get this concern and have similar fears myself. My challenge is that I don't find it morally appropriate to kill mentally challenged children who otherwise can have a reasonably enjoyable life, so why do i find it acceptable to do the same for older people - including myself. I think the situation might be different if there is a massive amount of pain, but even then many people live in pain for years and don't choose death. I wouldn't support the government, doctors, etc. encouraging functioning people living in chronic pain to die, what changes the situation for older people?
If I'm honest with myself (and this is just me), its because my current self is sufficiently prideful that I don't want to be that. Though I often frame it as not wanting to be a burden on others. Perhaps my future self in that situation would be the same, but I don't know. A moral belief I have, which is best expressed by butchering a quote: do not go gently into the night, but to fight the dying of the light. Its hard to reconcile what feels like violating that belief over pride.
I want to live in a society in which every human life is considered precious and cannot be deprived without due process. I believe this principle is it used to be , widely accepted and is enshrined in the un declaration of human rights, the us constitution and many other comparable documents. I don’t see how a principle where the lives of whole classes of people is considered expendable is in line with that.
Did you read the AP article? The danger here is not primarily that which you outline but a project of “euthanizing” the perfectly healthy disabled in mass.
Good people have a tendency to assume all other people are like they are. This is usually a good trait. But when it comes to life-and-death, we need to realize there are a lot of people who are ... not like us.
My grandmother, in Oregon where assisted suicide is legal, lived alone (with my folks about a ten minute drive) until the very end. She initiated whatever the process looks like with her doctors. One day, some particular daily life activity was beyond her (I don't know what that was), and she called her daughter and said "that's it, it's time". Later that day, it was all over.
It's important to have effective and thoughtful guardrails for the reasons Matt identifies, but I think that's pretty good.
The system looks good for mentally capable folks living relatively independently. But folks who are in long term care at great expense to the state or to different institutions are another question. We can pay attention and put in place guardrails. We could say, ‘this option is only available to XYZ folks who we feel confident can make the choice free from pressure’ but that’s like enshrining peoples fears of unequal access under Matt’s ‘benign neglect’ scheme into the actual law.
It’s just not an easy question to solve and gets harder the more elder care burden falls on the states expense, which is going to continue imo.
A little bit like the DC trash situation, the only real solution is for it to be something practical voters pay attention to. I just don’t know how plausible that is.
Honestly, while this is something of an invasion of privacy, I think the single most effective and least intrusive guiderail would be a requirement for a close friend or family member to be involved in the decision. No requirement for their agreement or permission, simply that they must be in a position to confirm that this decision is genuinely being made by the person in question and not any of the constellation of providers and caretakers around them.
Anything else would just be an attempt to have the state half-assedly simulate the same guiderail, at greater expense and with less effect.
I guess she had already been talking to doctors about it, but deciding to go through with euthanasia and then dying the same day is somewhat unsettling to me. Even a 24-hour waiting period seems good.
Oregon has a waiting period, there are exemptions only if you are likely to die within 15 days. She probably didn’t tell your mom until the waiting period was over.
Some questions have no good answers. Its just a question of which tradeoffs we are more willing to accept. Do we accept that some people will live longer in more pain than they would choose to otherwise, or do we setup a system where older people who might want to live longer will be pressured into dying.
I’ll be the first to admit i’m just more pro death than the median voter. Deaths of old people do not bother me, they are often a relief. Deaths of very ill people or long term addicts don’t bother me either. They are predictable and unavoidable.
Objectively, keeping old, unproductive people alive is expensive. Much of this cost is socialized through medicare and social security. The typical person runs up five or six figures of medical bills in their final months and doesn’t really enjoy those expenditures. I’d much rather focus on nurturing the young and having better conditions for healthy workers than caregiving for the old and very infirm.
Given that the federal government pays most of the cost of keeping old, unproductive people alive and families don’t have to internalize most of those costs, there’s already a huge fist on the scales in favor of living longer than is socially optimal. A certain amount of encouragement to die seems ok given the fact that the negative externalities of staying alive are inflicted on the treasury.
It is a fine line between "87 year old Mary wanted to die" and "87 year old Mary's kids convinced her to die because she is a drain on their resources."
I suspect that David would bite that bullet. Perhaps her kids have a filial duty to support her, but why should David be forced to do so (and if we are already taking his money, why force him to do that rather than to buy more school lunches in a world of finite state resources). Mary's medical care must necessarily rationed, the question is how and by whom (prices? Trump/Hillary? some agency? Mary's kids who would otherwise be able to send *their* kids to school?).
I am less, ah, ghoulish [sorry] than David but there is a real tendency in these debates to say "we should just spend some of the infinite resources society has available and never have to make tradeoffs about what we prioritize!" which is not a real option. People are better at noticing this when talking about "free" college for all, then they are when talking about end of life care choices.
But we aren't talking about health care rationing in the sense of not using public funds to pay for expensive treatments with a low risk of success and low improvements to QoL. We're talking about "if we killed this person it would save us money."
I think "focus on quality of life, not just length of life" is a more politically palatable statement that probably gets you to about the same place in the end.
Politically, I agree. However, as someone who doesn’t want to live if I’m terribly infirm, I don’t like having the costs of other people living too long inflicted on me.
I understand where you are coming from on this, but it's worth noting that there is a considerable amount of fuzziness around what does and does not qualify as "very infirm" or "very ill," and different people will have different views about where to draw the line. So that's why this is a problem, and considering that we are literally talking about life-or-death, it's a big deal.
I believe back at ThinkProgress that Matt suggested (or at least conducted a thought experiment about) lowering the age for Medicare to 55, but capping it at 95. His calculations were that this would cost about the same or less, but spectacularly improve total "quality of life years" at the obvious trade off of "premature" (by a matters of weeks or a few months in most cases) deaths of super elderly people.
Yes, probably? There's definitely good arguments to be made that government policy could be a lot more coercive on "stopping the cycle of poverty" by coming up with ways to reduce the numbers of children lower income people have/need to support, although that would obviously run counter to our host's "OBA" proposal.
Maybe not 'encouraging', but the state could certainly offer that as an option, perhaps in exchange for cash. My priors being that anyone who would trade their kid for cash shouldn't be a parent anyways, so we're effectively filtering for the right crowd
Well, my start point is that the state should not offer many of these types of benefits at all. If it does, I think it should have pretty broad freedom to attach conditions on accessing them to deter use of the benefits or reduce the need for such benefits in the future. (This is contrary to numerous SCOTUS rulings, but we're talking idealized here, not actual permissible policy.)
I think what Matt is implicitly suggesting is something like decriminalization vs. legalization. Instead of treating assisted suicide like murder, make it a misdemeanor or civil penalty. If an institution pressured people to choose euthanasia to save money, they'd face a huge fine, and it wouldn't be worth it. But if a lone doctor euthanized someone out of compassion, they'd face little consequence.
It occurs to me that you're not taking your own advice when it comes to popularism in your TV reviewing. If you want to effect change in real America you have to be suggesting improvements in the story telling of Yellowstone.
It's also not obvious to me that "on the margin wards of the state that live unpleasant lives at great taxpayer expense will be pressured to end them painlessly" is a horrible tradeoff (if actually true) compared to "we routinely lock people into unimaginable torture".
Geez, I don't know ES. Even if the utilitarian calculus produced a wash, my act/omission worries get triggered here. Dying slow painful deaths has been ubiquitous throughout human history, and is still ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom. We didn't cause that; it's the default. Yes, medicine and technology should be used to improve our lot over the state of nature. But the pain of dying is not in and of itself our fault.
The moral issues involved in pressuring people to end their lives, on the other hand, look quite serious. Inter alia, do you want to create the sort of people whose job it is to pressure said seniors into ending their lives? We have some experience with self-appointed "angels of mercy," i.e. medical professionals who take it upon themselves to do this. The track-record is not good; they often go way over whatever line they originally thought they were respecting.
1. The act/omission distinction lies on pretty shaky philosophical ground (walking past drowning babies being blameworthy).
2. Even accepting that such a distinction is morally relevant, most don't hold it to be *determinative* in the face of starkly different outcomes--unless you are talking to Kant himself, you can pretty much always add enough innocent people to the other track in a trolley problem to get people to switch (kill 1 to save 40 trillion is an easy call).
3. Even if it *were* determinative, the state is already acting to save these people. The "natural" course would be for them to die ill in the streets, not receive expensive care as a ward of the state. It does not strike me as some new intervention in the natural course of events to say "we'll still keep giving you all this expensive medical care we paid for with money extracted through force from taxpayers...but it really would be better if you elected to painlessly end your life instead".
4. To be clear, I do not in fact want to create people whose job it is to do this. I think it is bad to do it. However, in the veil of tears we live in, where we have limited resources and have to make tradeoffs, it seems to me "maybe some people on the margin will still act like way despite all of our efforts to regulate these conversations to ensure it does not happen" vs "we will for sure lock people into involuntary and unceasing torment", call seems easy to make.
In the one case, you have people leading mostly miserable lives using money that could be spent on feeding children or deworming or private enterprise or building hospitals or anything else than "expensive end of life care for people dying soon anyway" ending them a little earlier than they otherwise might. In the other case you have someone for sure suffering significant agony. I also think there are a lot more people in camp "needlessly suffering" than camp "tricked into suicide by bureaucrats".
TL DR: I don't think Logan's Run is a plausible outcome of relaxing treatment rules. You face similar but more difficult questions when it comes to institutionalizing the mentally ill too, but properly regulated mental health hospitals still make sense.
Determining for yourself that these other people are living miserable lives--when their defining characteristic is that they want to keep living--is also a rationalization that has led to some awful places. But it doesn’t need to lead there to be bad on its face. If we think the money is better spent on deworming, then we should cut the budget for medical care. Or cut some other part of the budget. Or raise more revenue, or do more deficit spending. “See if we can talk some people who we’re taking care of into dying” should not be Plan B, C, or even Z.
Good thing nobody is arguing that pressuring people into suicide as a cost saving measure is a good outcome to strive for then, rather than a risk to be avoided to the greatest extent possible while achieving other even worthier goals.
I certainly don’t want to think that other people want me dead. A world in which I was afraid that my family and neighbors wanted to kill me would suck. No one should be shamed into dying. Even withholding expensive care seems cruel in a country as rich as ours.
And yet suicide is so stigmatized that there are often strong social pressures not to do it. We should certainly move the slider towards less stigma against suicide.
Part of this should be 1) speaking frankly about the costs of largely futile medical treatments and 2) admitting that suicide is often a courageous and unselfish act.
I'm sorry if I misapprehended your view, but I didn't see any suggestion in your comment that there are reforms or restrictions to the euthanasia regime that we should consider—only a binary between "leave people in agony" and "pressure people who want to live towards suicide, which is not such a horrible tradeoff."
It's only the public facade of popularism that leads him to pretend that any television has artistic value. En famille, he only has eyes for Knausgård and Saramago.
Matt’s been pretty consistent that educated cosmopolitan class snobbery should stay where it belongs, in cultural consumption, rather than in politics.
Also, suggesting improvements to the somewhat aimless state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe post-Endgame. Though that might go over here even more poorly than the guest posts.
I'm nowhere near retirement age, but I work in the sciences and have had more than a few coworkers who've retired recently (across an age span, from early 60s to early 70s). We all enjoy (or enjoyed) our jobs, but it's stressful and eventually you want to enjoy your life. The ones in their early 60s have told me things like "I'm still relatively physically healthy, there are a lot of things I want to do (travel etc.) while I'm still able to do them." Or they want to spend more time with their grandchildren. Or they want to take up a hobby. Or they want to volunteer giving walking tours in a historical setting. Or they are content to do things like contract patent writing.
Always seemed to me as though you have a plan to keep yourself occupied and intellectually stimulated in retirement and you'll be fine. Sit around watching Fox News all day and your mind turns to mush.
My dad retired from his research job at a pretty conventional age a year or two ago, and he commented that he would dearly have loved to take on some sort of part-time emeritus role and consult (maybe even for free) with his younger colleagues who were still active in the lab.
There wasn't a way to make that happen, unfortunately, but that sounds like a good retirement to me.
Law firms, for all their problems as workplaces, often do this, at least for their more eminent partners. They'll put on suits and come into the office well into their 80s, mostly to use the office phone to call various customer service lines.
Law firms also genuinely benefit from these arrangements because those partners can help to maintain their client relationships and pass them on to younger partners.
I think the concept of "institutional knowledge" is a lot broader, or should be understood to be broader.
I have an excellent personal relationship with my former boss, and neither of us minds an occasional phone call of "hey bossname, do you remember why we did X this way?". Very valuable.
When my dad retired, I witnessed, I believe, a dramatic fall in cognitive abilities etc and it scared the hell out of me.
I will reach the age when I don't need a job for financial reasons fairly soon but my wife will want to work some seven years after my date of retirement. Part-time work would combine the need for mental stimulation, deadlines etc with opportunities to travel, play more games and sports and so on.
I think all of this is true and also pretty obvious.
The first main factor, as MY points out is, do you like your job or is it making you depressed? This is a good sign you should retire.
But the second factor is, you can't just retire into a life of nothing or you are just accelerating your own death. Unfortunately, at least a majority of people are pretty bad at managing their own health through lifestyle choices. So there are plenty of people who maybe aren't very happy in their jobs, but if they could retire would end up wrecking their own mental health. And the default assumptions of US society make the challenge of developing a suitable mental and social life after retirement greater than it could be.
I am a late 30s DINK and my friends in similar situation chat on retirement a lot, as so much of retirement advice intersects with grand parenting advice. As none of us have or plan to have kids, being purposeful about what an alternative retirement looks like becomes more important. Big thing is all of us owning property within walking distance of each other. As that is hard in VHCOL cities we need to start working towards it now.
you may already be doing this, but one thing i would suggest is telling your local government about this vision you have so that they know their constituents care about stuff that's not 100% parking.
I’ve always thought that going part time was underrated as an alternative to early retirement, if you like your job. Or our company (in old-school engineering) has “pensioners” where former employees who retired and now collect a pension are allowed to work some small number of hours a year, maybe 500 or less, and still collect their full pension. Seems like best of both worlds?
This is a great option if available. But for operational and leadership roles, it's hard to find part-time assignments that work for the business and for the retiree.
Consulting is an option but (a) requires being comfortable with the sales effort needed to build a practice and (b) becomes a full-time effort if successful in (a). The solution I evolved to is consulting almost exclusively via the knowledge networks - GLG, Alphasights, Guidepoint etc. They bring the work to you, it's interesting but relatively low stakes, it's only an hour or two a week. What's missing from this option is the social interaction involved in working in the office with the same cast of characters every week.
I'm interested that your org has retirees with company pensions. I thought that the private sector was ~ 100% defined contribution pensions now. The impact of that shift on family finances is an interesting topic. I think it has been positive, but I am an optimist.
My company still has pensions for anyone who started prior to 2011 (including, luckily, me), but they froze them in 2020. My husband (same boat) and I still expect a healthy amount of retirement income from it tho. But we also have 401ks. I don’t know anyone at our company who was planning to be totally reliant on the pension. Still waiting on a lump sum offer to buy us out, hasn’t happened yet.
I had final salary pensions from two employers when I worked in the UK. UK pension plans have to give you an offer of the "Cash Equivalent Transfer Value" on request. I only found this out about 20 years after leaving the UK. The transfer values then were about 30x the annual pension amount based on immediate commencement (I was 58 then, and had just retired early). The only challenge was finding a financial advisor that would provide the mandatory (UK law) opinion that transfer was a wise choice. Hope that your employer steps up to the plate with good cash buyout offers.
Law firms generally let partners maintain offices perpetually, so it's common for them to go from fully active status to winding down, then semi-retired, then retired-but-still-helping-out-here-and-there from their 60s through their 80s. It's one of the nice parts of the profession.
I retired at 58 and was completely shocked at loss of distance in my golf shots compared with when I was playing regularly in my mid-40s. About 30 yards on drives. And the expert golfers I play with tell me that the distance is never coming back. Not that important to me -- that's what the yellow tees are for.
Very cool. Retirement options probably vary by industry and country.
My dad is in his 60s, retired in the last few years after initially trying part-time work. The main reason he retired was that he couldn't find employment anymore. Even when he was okay with pay cuts, pay in the (Indian) IT services is often tied to experience, and that made it difficult. There were also a couple of unnerving overt incidents of ageism, which probably was off-putting.
I'll repeat my pushback that "illegal while also allowing for a fair amount of hypocrisy, lax enforcement, and unasked questions" is a bad recipe for selective enforcement that tend to hurt the most vulnerable. Like Matt, I don't have a strong view on euthanasia, but I've seen this state of law suggested for other things like gambling and especially sex work where I think it can be more commonly damaging. Abortion law could also easily fall into this trap depending on how the post-Dobbs world shakes out.
Either way we are thinking about the most vulnerable getting harmed. As these things often shake out. On the one hand we have fear about vulnerable folks experiencing unnecessary pain. On the other we fear the most vulnerable will be killed for profit. The fears need to be weighed. Saying the downsides from one will fall on the vulnerable just doesn’t answer the problem. It’s always ‘the vulnerable’ who are vulnerable.
I mean, the gambling situation is one we had until very recently, but I think the new model is going to be much harder on the most vulnerable (specifically, the poor, and also anyone who is predisposed to gabbling addiction) than the old model. Don’t you?
In other words, as Nick says, we can’t just think of the harm of being arrested, or of not getting the thing desired, but also of the harm of getting it when it isn’t what one wants.
Well, in the case of gambling, what were some harms done by restricting gambling to a couple of specific states? Were ordinary civilians getting locked up a lot? Sincere question!
People who want to gamble, but can't do so legally, may get drawn into an illegal gambling underworld. An illegal bookmaker wants his clients to go deeper into debt, diverting money his way. He doesn't care how they get that money, and may send them to loan sharks, who will harm the client who can't pay them back, creating a vicious cycle that ends in busted legs or death. Regulated legal gambling can (not always) stop that cycle by putting limits on the bookmaker so that they're forced to blacklist clients when their losses get too big rather than encourage them to go into illegal debt.
Locked up, overwhelmingly no, but most people try to strive to be law abiding citizens, and many would get deprived of the ability to legally gamble and not feel the pressure of potentially committing a crime just because they happen to live far away from one of the lucky duck states.
Michael’s question about the Supreme Court’s evolving jurisprudence on the establishment clause is interesting. In an age of political and cultural polarization I think it’s increasingly challenging to define what “coercion” means and whether that’s the right word to apply to public school teachers expressing their personal values in ways which might influence a student to depart from the beliefs taught at home.
While I agree with Matt that kids aren’t going to just blindly adopt the social/religious views of their teachers, I think for the sake of maintaining the health of our public education system it would be better to find a way to reduce the tension between parents’ views and school curriculum. Many liberals feel uncomfortable with the football coach who prayed after games, and conservatives feel uncomfortable with schools celebrating Pride Month or teaching kids about systemic racism and white privilege.
Call me crazy, but I think schools should dial back on *all* non-academic programming where there’s not a broad consensus around the topic. Even conservatives don’t want their kids bullied at school, and want their kids to be held to decent standards when it comes to honesty, language use, etc.
But, in a world where we’re using the force of law to require students to come to the classroom to learn, I think it’s perfectly appropriate to expect teachers to focus first and foremost on teaching their assigned subject effectively rather than evangelizing their social/cultural/religious views.
After observing my parents boomer retirement process and spending a couple of decades in school and a career, I have decided the best way to approach the retirement question is to not think of it as a binary.
I have a good job that pays fairly, but I'd still rather spend Friday afternoon disc golfing than working. But if all I had was time, I think I'd get, if not bored, too self-involved. I think to me retirement means achieving a level of financial independence to live life entirely on my terms, without a complete stoppage of productive work.
Specifically, I see it as, less work, the ability to prioritize enjoying a job over high pay, the ability to take on a risky job because losing it wouldn't matter, the ability to volunteer, and/or the ability to choose a more humane schedule than the 9-5. I think all of those are ways to make retirement more of an ongoing process than a single day where your work life stops, and the added bonus is you can start a little earlier because you still expect to be making some money.
Agree. I’m in my late 40s and often describe myself as half-retired. I’m a freelance UX designer and my schedule changes from week to week, but I average about 25 hours a week. This leads to a very chill lifestyle, while I still have enough money. I’m happy to keep working as long as I can and can even see working part time in a hardware store or something if I ever age out of my profession. So much more appealing to me than my parents generation who worked their asses off when they were young and retired at 55-60 to look at their iPad all day.
Agreed. As a mid-30s software engineer, I expect there’s going to be a lot of interest in part-time tech work over the coming decade or so as my cohort ages. From my biased sample of friends and coworkers, there doesn’t seem to be sufficient lifestyle creep to consume their increasingly high financial compensation.
I could see many tech workers' reasons that they’re set for a long retirement if they can just delay withdrawing for another decade to allow for more compounding. Plus, it’s nice to have something to do and many of us enjoy the work (or at least parts of the work).
I’ve known several software engineers in their 40s and 50s that have taken some informal approach to this. The general pattern is to withdraw from management and formal leadership roles and settle into more of an advisory role. That would entail lower compensation, but also lower responsibilities and more focus on mentorship and interesting technical problems. One engineer in particular would take year-long sabbaticals between roles at different companies; with a focus on finding a firm that could benefit from their experience in an advisory role. I’m confident that few of these engineers actually needed the money since they all joined pre-IPO companies that went on to 10x their market cap.
It would be challenging for a tech firm to provide part time roles in my opinion, particularly because so much time is already spent keeping up to speed on what is going on. Yet I bet there’s a lot of labor cost savings available if a firm can figure it out. I bet there’d be a lot of interest in half-time roles where the tech worker would take far less than half pay. E.g., rather than $400k total comp for a full time role, the half time worker might accept $100k or less.
The way software is concentrated in some VHCOL cities, most people in the industry have a very simple way to drastically cut costs when they want to: move. If they managed to buy rather than rent, they likely have hundreds of thousands of dollars of equity in their house as well. This will let a lot of them slowly ease into retirement rather than just quitting forever at 63.
Yeah I think this is how most of the FIRE people talk about it. Obviously most of those people are high achieving types, so I think they typically all still do some work/have some income. But because they don't need it, they don't have to compromise in their choices. So they've retired from obligatory day-to-day work, which is what I think most people resent doing.
"So they've retired from obligatory day-to-day work, which is what I think most people resent doing."
It's this and the lack of flexibility. In my own line of work, there's either never a good time to take a stress-free vacation, or else if there is one it often comes up on such short notice that you basically have to try and figure out the logistics within a couple days (and pay inflated costs for short term travel arrangements). While on a day to day basis there's a lot of flexibility in how the work is arranged, there's also not enough regularity to it do do so much as even take up a hobby with scheduled times, let alone plan specific time off. At least for me the FIRE fantasy is as much about not being nose-to-the-grindstone all the time and actually having some time set aside to be oneself as it is about everything else--not that the "everything else" is trivial, mind.
One thing I worry about is the schedule. If I was only working part time would I be able to get up on time and maintain productive energy at work on the days I work or would I be sort of lackadaisical from my days off. I just worry I’d cut back hours and then my brain will constantly beg me to cut back more. Full disclosure my brain is dysfunctional and poor at responding to my suggestions.
“it’s a big, pluralistic tent of charlatans and scammers.”
A big, pluralistic tent of charlatans and scammers has a very good chance, on the sort of timescales that matter in the history of a nation-state, of evolving into something other than charlatans and scammers. And a much lower chance of backsliding on the pluralism once it’s embedded.
I’m still torn on what the hell the GOP is these days but I’m pretty confident that it’s going to change a lot in ways not all bad over the coming few decades.
I think a lot of this hinges on Trump himself since he is (in my opinion) uniquely awful. None of the imitators seem to be able to match him in terms of unhinged ego and self aggrandizing nor in terms of clear disregard of the law.
Once Trump is out of the picture, I have no clue how the GOP will evolve. And not only could he likely end up in jail soon, he’s also an obese geriatric so he could just keel over any day.
Yeah, I agree the GOP is gonna look really different a decade from now, and a lot of what that difference entails will hinge on Trump. If Trump wins again in 2024, I imagine it would look something like "a group of shambolic, quasi-fascist charlatans," which is pretty terrifying (albeit not in quite the same way that progressives imagine). If Trump fades from the scene, I imagine the GOP evolving into something like a 21st century American version of European Christian Democratic parties (this is an inexact analogy, but it's close enough). Progressives would still act like they're fascists, but they wouldn't be that scary, all in all.
His personal charisma ties things together a lot. I see other yahoos try to do what he is doing to some degree- Cruz, rando folks in primaries, but they are not on his level. He is absolutely repulsive to me, but is he the most charismatic political charlatan in the world right now? He really dwarfed people on stage during primary debates back in the day.
It's incredible how many of both the nutjobs and the grifters are winning primaries solely due to Trump's blessing.
I really can't tell if the GOP is going to revert to "limited government" form after he's gone, in which case they'll end up presiding over another crisis and face another '08-style blowout eventually.
But if they really are driven by their demographics to shift towards populism, then they're going to look a heck of a lot like the incipient New Deal Democratic coalition in 1925, while the Democrats increasingly look like the GOP in 1955.
I think which direct the GOP evolves toward will depend almost entirely on how many elections they win or lose in their current configuration over the coming years. The Democrats picking up net three Senate seats in 2022 and Trump losing the 2024 general election would have far more effect on that future state than pretty much anything else.
On the government efficiency topic, Democrats don't really have an incentive for civil service reform and improved government efficiency because that would require taking on and hurting their public sector union allies. Republicans, by and large, just don't care about improving government efficiency, because they think the private sector can/should make up for it.
As someone who believes people should have the freedom to seek euthanasia at the end of their life (and as someone who hopes to make use of that option myself in a good many decades), the reports of what's happening in Canada are extremely disturbing. No one should ever be pressured into pursuing that option. How any doctor thought mentioning how much of a burden a patient is in the context of end of life care is truly jaw dropping. That being said, I think these failures can be prevented.
First, blanket ban on offering the option; patients need to request euthanasia before doctors can discuss it. Second, there needs to oversight and review of every case. Maybe even require the patient be under 24/7 video surveillance for a week leading up to the assisted suicide. Then have someone review the footage for signs of coercion, from any party. And finally, having the counselors/physicians who advise and eventually approve the use of Euthanasia need to be a totally separate group from their regular physicians with completely different incentives.
Yes--some people on both sides are acting as though the choice is between these pressures and just a total prohibition of euthanasia, but it seems obvious that reforms and regulations of euthanasia policy should be our first priority.
An issue with the last requirement is that doctors who seek out that role would likely be aggressively pro-euthanasia, which has (depending on who you listen to) been a problem in Belgium
(1) "Assholes have lots of ways of making you feel uncomfortable regardless of the rules, and kind people can make everyone feel included, even if there are crucifixes on the wall."
(2) The modern Republican party: "a big, pluralistic tent of charlatans and scammers."
Retirement questions are always interesting to read...I guess I could save this for applying to the next Mailbag Sweepstakes, but eh. There's a lot of, I don't think "doomer" is a great term, but a sort of nihilistic pessimism about retirement among my peer group...many of us don't actually believe we'll ever be able to retire*. Whether it's due to Social Security going bankrupt, an x-risk like climate change, or the general decay of American society, we largely expect to work until we physically can't, and then sort of just...roll the dice and hope they don't come up Death. Perhaps The Revolution will save us in time, or we'll get really lucky and score a Respectable Adult Job, or our inheritance will be greater than expected, or...just a lot of external luck-based things, basically. The concept of ever having enough money to buy a house, play golf, sail a yacht, etc. just seems like a laughable fantasy.
But I wonder if retirement is sort of a Pascal's Wager type thing...no matter how utterly improbable it might actually be in reality, the potential reward of having the option to retire is huge. Very much worth believing in, and taking actions as if it's true. If nothing else, learning a bit of delayed-gratification is a good skill for life in general...
*Not necessarily a conscious thought, but if one lives only for the present continuously, that's a revealed preference for not-thinking-about-retirement. Until it's too late. Every time I do the math, I kick myself again for not starting savings until late 20s...that's so many years of disposable income that could have been compounding away. Stings to think about. Those FIRE nerds were right, it's totally possible to retire young even on a modest income. If only I'd listened during college years.
"...many of us don't actually believe we'll ever be able to retire*. Whether it's due to Social Security going bankrupt...."
Remember that whenever you worry about the solvency of the SSA, you are the victim of a decades - long disinformation campaign by Republicans who want to kill the SSA.
They want to "privatize" it in order to steal trillions and impoverish ordinary Americans, and they know that in order to do that they have to undermine political support for it. So they try to depict it as unreliable and unsustainable, when it is actually a successful program that has made life better for hundreds of millions, and can continue doing so forever.
We have two self-fulfilling prophecies: if the grifters can spook us into despair, then they will be able to weaken support and steal all the cash. But if people have confidence in the SSA, then it will be there for our children and our children's children.
"But if people have confidence in the SSA, then it will be there for our children and our children's children."
I mean, that's not the only precondition. If we have a demographic collapse on par with China's, I don't think we could support our current Social Security transfers, no matter how much confidence we have. Another good reason to back 1 Billion Americans though.
We won't have a China like demographic collapse though. The US receives a lot of immigration (often undocumented) as-is from high birth rate populations, and that will smooth our age curve. Plus even beyond that, White Americans have fairly high birth rates compared to Han Chinese etc.
It wouldn't matter much for anyone alive today except possibly the very youngest, but doesn't that rely on a pyramid-scheme type logic to perpetuate? You're probably not saying it doesn't and only commenting on the current situation, but I guess I always think of it as "society will have to learn to deal with bad demographics sooner or later"
Sure, but "sooner" and "later" are very different, because nothing else holds equal in that time.
China having to play Japan at near-present levels of wealth/capital accumulation/technological sophistication is going to be much worse than Japan and South Korea doing so while substantially richer, which in turn is worse than 2050 America doing the same, which is still worse than the US in 2100 contending with those problems.
At least, assuming that global society doesn't collapse entirely due to climate change/resource depletion/whatever, which is to me extremely unlikely.
As for the SS program in particular, I'm going to keep beating the "sovereign wealth fund" drum. It's genuinely about the only case of "something for nothing" in modern politics. Requiring SS to invest exclusively in below-inflation-rate-of-return Treasuries is profoundly stupid and has made the saving of money an actual drag on the program rather than a benefit. It's the governmental equivalent of stuffing cash under your mattress in 1968 and expecting it to be safe.
Pyramid schemes need to grow exponentially to stay in business, which is mathematically impossible. For Social Security to work, you just need the working-age pop to keep growing a little bit.
That is still exponential growth, unless you're using the term more loosely than the mathematical definition. If you needed to add 1M people a year that would be linear or constant growth. But for SSN you need to increase by a % per year. Even if you only need to increase by 1% each generation that would be exponential: 1.01 x 1.01 x 1.01 etc... given enough generations even a slow rate gets to unsustainable numbers much quicker than a flat 1M a year.
How early would they have to phase it out? Like in the future, when they get rid of SSA, it would be the X year olds of that day who don’t get it. How old is X? I just don’t see voters allowing SSA to go away ever
There's a billion good reasons to aim for OBA. But we need nothing like a billion Americans to keep SSA solvent. Modest population growth will do the trick.
Population growth literally - not figuratively, literally -- cannot continue indefinitely, though, and the fact that current generations are paying based on past demographic curves makes sustainability thus have aspects that are intrinsically those of a Ponzi scheme. Some manner of transitioning SSA into more of a forced-savings package seems like it's intrinsically desirable inter alia because it makes the solvency of the program no longer dependent on the structure of the demographic pyramid and ties output later in life to output earlier in life. I admit I have no idea what that's supposed to look like (though IIRC Singapore does something kinda-sorta like this vis a vis forced-savings? Can't say I'm familiar with the details of that program, though.)
Disclaimer: I also think that fewer, better (likely genetically engineered) humans with attendant lower ecological footprint and higher per-human resources and capacity is also a much better equilibrium / teleological goal than OBA type thinking.
I don't have a philosophical objection to a sovereign wealth fund approach (and I think it probably has significant advantages in certain respects), but I worry it introduces a constant incentive to just raid the fund to increase benefits to present beneficiaries at the expense of long-term solvency (of course, AIUI, in the inverse of this problem the Social Security surplus has been raided to pay into the general fund since forever and thus SS is significantly less solvent than it *should* be). I think we'd need a mostly-apolitical trustreeship of financial technocrats to keep a handle on whatever receipts, investments and disbursements were earmarked for such benefits (something like the Fed but for SS I guess).
"They want to "privatize" it in order to steal trillions and impoverish ordinary Americans, and they know that in order to do that they have to undermine political support for it."
This seems overly rancorous. I'm an ordinary American and privatization would have been great for me personally. On the other hand, I recognize that for many people with less financial knowledge it would be easy to get scammed or just not know what to do. Having a guaranteed pension from the government is reasonable and I think probably for the best, but I don't think its unreasonable to wish you had more control over it.
If we want to realize the benefits of privatization without the moral hazard, the guarantee of unequal outcomes, etc, just change the law to require the SSTF to be invested in a basket of Treasuries and American private-sector bonds and equities.
Then continue paying out on the same progressive basis as before while we see if we can get far enough ahead of the curve on returns to stabilize benefits.
The benefits of privatization were entirely down to enabling proper investment strategy, so rather than opening the can of worms of asking everyone to manage their own government pension, let's just do it sensibly at the macro level.
I thought about that - but a couple of things struck me:
1) Treasury bonds are just paid out by the government right? So how is that fundamentally different than what we're already doing? Is it just increasing the payments?
2) Private sector investment - SSA is _so_ large I worry about any government picked choice of how to invest it. At least individual pension funds - though large - have to pick different things.
What happens if the private sector has a recession and the bonds/equities can't pay out? Do we declare we're just going to print money to make the baseline payment?
When I first thought about it during GWB's term, privatization sounded good to me at a top-level, and not to undermine it's effectiveness but to try to make it _more_ effective.
In the end however, I just couldn't get past the choice of moral hazard/not "secure", but impoverishment was never a goal - more individual control was - it just looks like one that can't exist with the other goals we agree on for Social Security.
That does seem like it would eliminate the moral hazard problem.
Does it overly benefit those indices which are suddenly allowed to take this large selection of investment?
If we wanted to go this route, I'd like to see this divert like 10% of social security investment and see how it goes/pros/cons etc. Ideally big enough to be noticeable small enough that it won't wreck everything if we get it wrong.
I think this is both right and wrong. The SSA will continue to collect funds and be able to distribute them and that won’t change because it is a politically popular program.
However the reality is that the program won’t have enough income to meet its promises for a variety of reasons. This is going to happen right about the time Gen-X is eligible for benefits. Addressing the fiscal problems is going to take hard and difficult choices.
I just have a difficult time getting over the fact that both parties have basically tacitly agreed to not even touch SSA reform until they absolutely have to sometime in the 2030s under a crisis situation because it won't be able to make promised payments. At that point, tax increases and benefit cuts will be larger than if we did them now (or heck, 10 years ago when forecasts for SSA began to show funding would run out).
Yeah, it's frustrating but unfortunately that's just the way Congress and our political system operate - do nothing until the crisis is nigh or actually hits.
The upcoming catastrophe of Social Security has been an ongoing concern for at least forty years and it continues to do just fine, with the occasional tweak. At some point, we should probably admit that our warnings of disaster haven't exactly been on point.
Except we've known, based on demographics alone, that social security would need significant adjustment in the future because otherwise it will be insolvent (ie. it won't have enough revenue to cover expenses). That is already the case now, as the program already has a negative cash flow of around $150 billion/year. The programs are only able to continue at current benefit levels due to transfers from general revenues from the so-called trust fund. Once those run out in about a decade, the program will have an estimated 20-25% shortfall in revenue which will trigger automatic benefit cuts. A 20-25% cut in benefits will be a disaster for many who depend on this program.
And the cash flow problem will only grow over time. Dealing with a negative cash flow of $150 billion/year today and even more than that in a decade will take a lot more than tweaking.
We've heard these "SS will collapse in ten years" many times before. And it's always ten years in the future and like Achilles and the tortoise, we never seem to get there -- it's always receding just over the horizon.
It may happen some day, but given the track record, those predicting disaster should revise their priors and show some humility in their forecasting.
I'm of a similar mind. Relatedly, clearly the political will doesn't exist to tackle this "problem" that may or may not occur in a few decades. I mean, I guess people can fret over something that simply isn't present, but I'd rather not waste the energy. Waiting until we're forced to act seems to me a reasonable path. Because at that point we *will* be able to act. But right now we can't!
As Krugman often notes, a standard Republican argument is "we need to cut Social Security benefits now, otherwise we'll have to cut Social Security benefits . . . later."
I mean... just removing the payroll tax cap (making SS taxes flat instead of regressive) will make the SSTF solvent for another 20-odd years, which is about as far out as one can make meaningful projections anyway.
If we were to, ya know, reform it into a sovereign wealth fund while it's still pretty flush, realistically we can expect to be able to fund current benefits indefinitely as economic growth then works in our favor instead of against us.
I love the idea of a SWF in theory, but I think the US is too big to have one that is meaningful in any way. If you took the current SS trust fund, it would be bigger than the three largest SWFs combined, and the trust fund is that large. (Calling it a trust fund is also entirely silly, if my right hand promises to pay my left hand 50 bucks, I'm not richer or poorer in the process).
There are definitely multiple ways to fix the underlying problem, but they will still be politically difficult and Congress likely won't doing anything until it is forced to.
Are Canada's demographics really that much worse? I'll take your word for it, but Canada is badly outperforming the US right now in terms of immigration inflows (something like double America's net immigration rate in recent. years, and many/most of those immigrants are uni grads).
Oh, I meant more in an inverted-demographic-pyramid way. Too many old (SS-eligible) people supported by too few working youth. We're still a long way from China or Japan-level crisis, but trendlines haven't been terribly encouraging. The same people like my peers who think retirement is a myth are often the same sorts who end up not having kids due to being too poor...immigration is a thing, of course, but that's just moving pie slices around rather than making the total pie bigger. Any immigrants we get to move here and pay into SS are emigrants some other place no longer has paying into their welfare system. (Yes, I know it's more complicated than that, it's not really a Ponzi scheme...but.)
Although since you bring it up...I'd probably be happy scrapping everything and just giving out equivalent cash directly. I always feel slightly paternalistic ringing up a foodstamps customer who can pick up as much beans and rice as they can carry, but still have to pay out of pocket for toilet paper. Both are necessities; money is fungible. Ought to be. Not sure how evilly Republican that ranks.
Out of all those things "The Revolution" is the very least likely to save you. Revolutions do not have strong track records when it comes to ushering in utopias and not just burning down whatever already exists.
But aanyways I think if retirement means sail a yacht or golf everyday or some other very expensive hobby very people humans who have ever lived have ever gotten that lucky. If it means spend time with friends playing dominos with friends or taking walks or something then it's much more attainable and basically what old people have always done if they aren't subsistence farmers.
Oh, I agree, but have learned that my socialist/Marxist/anarchist (sorry, they all kind of blend together) friends need that sort of false-consciousness hope or they just crumple into total giving-up despair. So I try not to pick straws out of their rafts, given that I'd prefer they keep existing as semi-functional human beings that are fun to hang out with. People need something to believe in, you know? (I've placed my faith in the Heart of <s>the Cards</s> Slow Incremental Capitalist Change, personally, but that's hells a boring and not a trendy identity flair. Things will work out, somehow.)
I think you make a good point about lifestyle inflation and reasonable expectations...out of almost every person I know, I've got a cheaper rent than anyone. But "cheap rent in SF" is still housing-burdened (e.g. costs more than 1/3 of income) for a low-end retail job. The others I know, yeah, some earn more than I do...but some don't, yet pay 50% or even more each month on rent. That...is not very much cushion to eke a retirement out of. Lotsa people grumble about moving cause The Rent Is Too Damn High, but it doesn't actually happen that often vs. complaint rate.
I know this is an economic mistake, which is the whole reason I put up with a shitty job near a dingy apartment, and try not to be tempted by costly city amenities...but...it's hard, man. Like in that mailbag question, I don't wanna only be able to afford to have fun when I'm no longer physically/mentally capable of enjoying it. It's lonely saving for mystical Retirementland when all your peers are out partying instead. Lonelier still once we're all old, and they move cause they're broke, and I don't follow. That's a real fear for me.
I actually ask this much more as a question than as a suggestion: I never understood why people try to live and work a lowish-wage job in a place like SF? Is it family or friend connections? Inertia and the difficulty of starting fresh? The culture of the place or a fear of the culture in Boise?
Again, I'm not saying it's a mistake because I don't have the facts and I can't walk a mile in another's shoes. It's just from an outsider's perspective it seems odd to me. FWIW I live in the rust belt and life is a lot easier here compared to when I lived in LA. And the amenities are not really all that different (but ymmv on that).
Can't speak for anyone else - for weird reasons I don't understand, the vast majority of my coworkers have always been from SoCal - but I was born and raised here. It's all I've ever known in life...not lucky enough to have friends or family elsewhere that'd be worth tearing up 30+ years of roots and habits for. Change is hard, I'm mobility-limited (can't drive), strong hand in Victim Card Poker which makes some locales intrinsically more dangerous than others, very limited resume with no education to speak of, yadda, yadda. Still on my first real job, honestly - checkered employment history, to put it mildly. Took a long time to get out of the NEET trap.
I *used to* have a plan regardless - the company I work for has branches in almost every state, and it's generally not too difficult to transfer, even cross-country. Once upon a time, in the Golden Age, employees were allowed to keep their current wage wherever they moved. So it was a real ladder of opportunity to get hired in one of the high-wage/high COL locations, earn some pay increases + company plaudits, and then transfer to a comfortable low-COL place on now-relatively-kingly wages. Lotsa folks used to do this...get hired in SF, bounce to Montana, buy a ranch or whatever. Sadly, like all Golden Ages, this one also ended...now, your post-transfer wage gets adjusted upwards *or* downwards based on the local minimum wage. So it makes more sense to move *to* SF than *away* from it.
Which is exactly nuts and backwards, as you say. Have yet to work out a new escape plan. SF's too rich for me, and too liberal...it's not the same quirky-left-libertarian place I grew up in, and I don't feel like I fit in/am wanted anymore. But it's hard to just up and leave, too.
"not lucky enough to have friends or family elsewhere that'd be worth tearing up 30+ years of roots and habits for"
Just chiming in that I feel like I'd like to see Matt Y (and economists at large) address this issue more squarely. Every so often Vox puts out something about how Americans aren't mobile enough and everyone needs to be an atomized individual and move to opportunity and whatnot, and I'm like "this all makes sense right up to the point where you assign exactly zero value to intrinsically location-based social capital. Can someone please take the time to put a number on that?"
Case in point, even as a (yes, potential at the time as we were fresh out of school) high-SES family unit, my wife and I settled in Philadelphia when coming back/here from China because I had family ties which made settling in and job-hunting possible.
We're here now partly because of that, partly because she's established a locally-rooted career, partly because my work can be remote, and partly because of investment opportunities.
But if we, with $20k in the bank and graduate degrees, would have found a "move to opportunity" approach challenging right off the plane, then I can only imagine how difficult it is for people who don't have either.
> "not lucky enough to have friends or family elsewhere that'd be worth tearing up 30+ years of roots and habits for."
FWIW, as an academic, I've done this a few times (and am contemplating doing it again). It feels hard at first (and is!), but it's also *very* refreshing; you clear away so much built up crap from your life that you just put up with because it's comfortable. I even count some friends in this, who it turns out I can live perfectly fine without.
I kind of think more native Californians in situations like what you describe ought to move to Sacramento. It's relatively affordable, but still in California. And not a bad place to live: very diverse, has an NBA team, etc.
Yes, moving within CA is still a decent easier option, even as the whole state slowly bids up COL due to the densest richest parts being stubbornly NIMBY. Not too long ago, it was still feasible to live in Oakland or Berkeley or whatever and ride BART to work in SF...or Daly City, San Mateo, South San Francisco, etc. for driving. Less so now...plus giving up a 15 minute commute is a hard sell for me, haha. That's a real privilege that I'm gonna seriously miss when I change jobs/move.
But I think I'd rather move out of CA entirely, all things considered. Some parts are at the proper purplish-reddish level of cultural comfort, but they're...pretty empty. I might not be a city girl at heart, but I do like being around a decent number of people. More than a Dunbar Number "everyone knows everyone" size, not quite enough to always get lost in a crowd. (Packed-in-public-transit-like-sardines is too many.)
It's obvious and it goes without saying that you only need share this if you feel like it, but I'm curious enough to ask - what is your personal situation such that much of the country would be dangerous for you, and how much of the country do you think is significantly dangerous? I can't think of any type of person who seems to be in much danger based on their identity around where I live in a pretty typical area of the US. Of course, the major caveat is like I said before I can't say that for sure or truly speak for anyone else if our life experiences are different. So maybe I'm wrong. But that's my feel of the situation.
I guess this is why people frequently put such obvious Identity Politics cruft in their social media bios. Let's draw a couple cards: Transgender Woman, Chinese. The former has obvious safety and legal implications which I won't rehash here. The latter...didn't used to be so much a problem, but after covid, Hmmm. I grew up hearing stories from my parents about their time living in Atlanta before I was born. Cool place, one of the better Southern cities, amazing food, nice folks. Mostly...
But even back then, the race thing was just...you know. There's a different way of living when you visibly stand out in a way that can't be hidden at all, versus mostly fitting into the local phenotype. Part of why I live in SF is to avoid that low-grade daily stress - Asians are the second or third-biggest minority group here, no one gives a shit. It's just nice to be around My People, whether I participate in that culture or not. Unfortunately, most of the Chinese diaspora communities set up shop in what later became high-COL areas, so this is another difficulty. I guess there's Vancouver, but that's international moving, a whole other layer of hassle...
Ultimately I know it must sound like a list of excuses to avoid making the rational economic choice. But these things really are important, and hard to quantify into the unit of caring. There are lower-COL places which have many of the same benefits, in kind if not degree, yet tradeoffs abound. Always. Moving's just harder the more tradeoffs one has to make. (If I'd stayed in New York during college years rather than moving back home, there's a good chance I'd have set my life up there instead...at 18 it's so much easier to just pack up and leave it all behind. Sunk cost fallacy, I suppose.)
avalancheGenesis should of course speak for themselves but not being able to drive would very significantly impair one's ability to do things in like 95% of the US, and is at least arguably dangerous in places that do not have adequate pedestrian infrastructure (which isn't quite 95% of the US, but is still a whole lot of it).
I will add that, as someone from a VHCOL city who is married to someone from another VHCOL city, I do find the whole "just move to the Rust Belt/Houston/wherever!" thing kind of insulting. Most people who live in NYC or the Bay Area or Boston or DC or LA are not there because they need to be close to cool cafes or because they're afraid of evil MAGAs or something. They're there because that's where they're from, or maybe because of work. I don't think moving potentially thousands of miles away from everyone you know in exchange for maybe being able to afford a house is a great life plan for most people.
Not saying that you are specifically making that argument, but this is just a pet peeve of mine! Also part of why I'm a YIMBY.
I think MY’s answer on the establishment clause seriously misses the mark. To participate in Christian school prayer can go directly against the religious teachings of some minority students. This means they would be forced to seek an exemption, which, even if granted, socially isolates them from their peers. This kind of visible marking out of said minority students as different, potentially from a very young age, can’t be simply dismissed as “not a big deal”. Alternatively , those minority students might be tempted to go against their own religious doctrines in order to fit in. A third option is that they will have to withdraw from public school altogether. None of this is in line with pluralism or the logic of the first amendment as understood for decades. It’s a very sad day for America.
In principle I agree fully, but in practice I thought his answer was pretty accurate. I went to elementary school in a small town and I and a couple of Jehovah's Witness kids were the only ones who didn't participate in classroom Christmas, Easter, etc, activities. It was no big deal, and even gave us a bit of superiority over the other kids because they all thought Santa was real, whereas we knew they were just gullible. But don't mistake what I'm saying as support for prayers and other religious observations in public school.
You may have taken it that way, others won’t. We also don’t know how the majority group took it when considering you. I think we’ll agree that the fact that some come out fine (even better off!) with this kind of structural ostracizing hardly justifies it.
"Because assholes have lots of ways of making you feel uncomfortable regardless of the rules, and kind people can make everyone feel included, even if there are crucifixes on the wall."
That’s hardly the point though. The question is to whom does the public sphere belong? Is this a Christian nation in which everyone else can just hope to do ok because the majority won’t be assholes towards them, or is this a secular nation in which everyone is on an equal footing and people may or may not be assholes individually but the state itself does not take sides?
Strong upvote. In today's world it gets missed a lot that most of the plaintiffs from the great separation of church and state cases from the mid-20th century were not atheists, but devout practitioners of minority religions. If schools are insistent in bringing back Christian rituals of the most common variant, this shit will hit the fan once again.
Kennedy v. Bremerton is still nowhere near a blanket permission for school prayer--the media overhyped it a lot because of the Dobbs background, it wasn't exceptional versus the mine run of other recent SCOTUS religious liberty cases
It’s a step in that direction. We’re debating the principle itself. Why we need the establishment clause anyway and what is the danger in its erosion of any with regards to public schools. I’m aware that we have reached rock bottom of the slippery slope yet, and I hope we never will, but I don’t think it’s crazy to think we may get closer and closer with the composition of this court and the precedents being set in recent years.
Research funding: It is true that overhead charges are high and growing, but that does not mean that "... about a third of all grant money doesn't go toward scientific research."
(*) Universities do actually incur very substantial overhead costs. You could argue that they are not 58%, but they are not zero, or anywhere close to it. To avoid having to list the costs, I will simply ask you to look at how other countries handle this. The US rates are simply not that different from those in many European countries with much more streamlined systems.
(*) Whatever the "fair" percentage is, you need to allow universities some profit margin. This incentivizes administrators to support successful research, and sustains a high level of competitiveness in the system. Remember that the vast majority of proposals are not funded.
(*) The fact that there is a profit margin gives the feds leverage to steer the direction of university research. For instance, some disciplines shrink (e.g. aerospace) and some grow (e.g. AI, biotech), and the US government wants universities to be attentive to its preferences.
(*) An important reason that overhead keeps going up is that the government keeps ratcheting up the cost of "compliance" with federal rules and laws - Title IX, ADA, research on human subjects, etc. The feds do not want to dial this back, and with that being the case, somebody needs to pay for it.
Having said all that, I do think there is a strong case for trying to stop the upwards creep. I would welcome a freeze or a ceiling, but I would want to federal government to compensate for this by doing a very serious overhaul of the regulatory system. This stuff is out of control, in a way that differentiates the US from our competitors. Universities should not be forced to hire legions of lawyers and compliance officers.
Do we have a great Navy? Hasn't the Navy had several ships crash in recent years, the proximate causes of which were all "no one knows how to navigate anymore"?
The Navy's problems are best understood as "rode hard, put away wet". For a hundred years (literally), the big tension between the US Navy and various European powers has been that the USN runs everything ragged while the European fleets largely baby the hardware and so tend to have it in better condition, but less tested.
I think both sides have persuasive arguments here, but fundamentally the USN needs more sailors and more sleep.
Yeah the navy is a fairly poor example. We have a lot of tonnage and firepower but in terms of actual executive competence it's not particularly great.
Maybe an example could be NASA -- its a very cautious and risk averse agency which leads to cost overruns and delays but at the very least they do manage to do very impressive things without failing all the time.
It seems entirely plausible that we still have the best Navy -- largely due to spending a ton and specific technical advancements. But also that in relative terms our load over other nations has substantially declined.
I think our relative lead in the Navy is still broadly uncontested at least on a hulls level (we have 11 aircraft carriers. The nations with the next-most are all tied at 2) but the management and staffing (especially for the surface warfare fleet) have a poor rep and low morale relative to their sister branches which leads to serious questions about warfighting capacity even without an actual live conflict (most acutely reified in the Pacific collisions, which AFAICT are symptomatic of constant unreasonable schedule demands and inadequate staffing by the Seventh Fleet as much as any individual failures.)
The narrative (as an outside observer with *far less* information than anyone currently in service) seems to be that the brass for whatever reason are always incentivized to say "Yes, we can do this" to their superiors even as mission demands become ever more intense[1] --presumably because confessing to inadequacies in the fleet under their command is a bad look career-wise -- and then the shit continues to roll downhill with eventually catastrophic consequences. It's also illuminating to look at the general tenor of discussion on the r/navy subreddit vs that of the other branches--there's always going to be something to complain about in military service (or any other occupation) but I think the naval discussion tends to view the organizational dysfunction as a bit more entrenched and impossible to fix, although the most immediate problem for the Seventh Fleet seems to be "too much mission scope, not enough personnel" which is conceptually just a resources problem. Maybe we should start paying people more to be stuck in a relatively small world unto itself away from anyone else for months at a time....
The Air Force is often derided as having a more corporatized, golf-playing leadership (hence "Chair Force") but dang if they haven't gotten pretty good at blowing stuff up when and where we want them to. Probably a better example for MY to point to than the navy at this exact moment in time.
[1] e.g. due to Chinese aggression in the South China Sea.
Did you see the tonnage that the PLAN put around Taiwan the other week? They are absolutely competing, and making no bones about it. We don't have much time to respond, or they'll overtake us.
The problem is more analogous to the UK leafing up to WWI. They had the best Navy, but it was unclear if they could stay big enough to beat Germany everywhere. The Germans were too cautious, but probably could have attacked the brits in the north sea more effectively early on.
China is building for dominance in the South China Sea and we want to keep shipping lanes open everywhere. We definitely have a bigger lift.
Yes we seem overmatched already but hey that makes us number 2 worldwide!
Potentially all these big boats are an outdated liability anyway but I don’t have the expertise to say and doubt we are going to counter China with some new cost effective, status quo busting way of war so we should probably try to step things up
They put a lot around Taiwan for sure, but when Pelosi visited Taiwan we not only sent the USS Ronald Reagan through the Taiwan Strait, but also a smaller amphibious assault ship. This is important because those smaller ships can still carry a lot of planes, but are also smaller targets for China's missiles.
Anyone have any bright ideas on how to improve American's interest in policy? Matt's description of Swiss people as basically knowing the standard arguments for and against a policy, even if they hadn't thought too critically about them, seems almost laughably utopian by American standards.
I was a high school debate coach for a while and it's quite good at getting a certain sort of politically-minded kid to think deeply about policy instead of just horse race stuff and elections, but I've almost never observed it taking a teenager who had 0 interest in politics and turn them into someone who even moderately cares. And we had a number of those kids because they were shoved into our debate class by guidance!
I think "Americans' interest in policy" has likely increased a lot since arrival of the internet and Fox/MSNBC+political chat shows (Colbert, Stewart, etc). This is especially so since social media got going. There's been a lot written about "politics as an avocation" in recent times. Both Matt and his former colleague Ezra Klein have written about this phenomenon, I think.
Sure, some of that additional interest is focused on just the horse-race stuff. But not all of it.
To clarify: I think one strand of thought sometimes raised by popularists is that we might actually be better off if more people were normies.
Nontrivial numbers of Americans can apparently now cogently discuss such engrossing topics as budget reconciliation rules, community rating, or the Independent Legislature doctrine.
America wasn't always like this. It's far from clear on net it's an improvement.
I think that Steve ballmers main philanthropy may be involved in making government figures and programs more transparent? Sounds boring but good maybe? I think pushing progressive donors to fund small issue stuff (how good are trash pick ups and highways and dmv service in different places) rather than big issues (climate change, racism) may help? Get people more aware of worrying about how well the institutions are doing their jobs rather than the bigger picture of what their job should be defined as.
I have done a few diets (I’m on one now!) and I sort of think of them like gambling. When I go to Vegas I always set aside some amount of money for “entertainment” and that includes cash for gambling. I spend the money and have fun, I don’t really worry about what I’m losing because I’ve agreed that there is a limit that is acceptable.
When I do a diet I know the odds are low that it will help with all the health things I want. Some of this is due to the actual scientific data behind the diet and some is due to my failure to adhere completely to the rules of the diet. So I don’t expect any diet to be a miracle but as long as it helps me feel a little better I don’t stress about the scale in the morning.
That’s been helpful for me and has led to overall better health in recent years. Through all the diets the only thing that seems to consistently led to losing weight is low carbs and a moderate amount of consistent calorie restriction.
If euthanasia is illegal, access will be difficult. My grandmother was blind and in excruciating pain during her final months. She wanted to die. I wanted to help her but didn’t want to risk prison. Her doctors were just as afraid of prison and even less inclined to help her. She suffered needlessly.
Don’t ask don’t tell doesn’t work for end of life decisions for the same reason it doesn’t work for abortions. This isn’t like prostitution or pot where s conviction would be a misdemeanor and illegality can chill excesses without ruining any one’s life. If someone chooses to prosecute, you are at risk of years or decades in prison. If doctors aren’t willing to break abortion laws to help sympathetic young women, why would they break laws with even stricter penalties to help old people?
Yeah, I agree Matt's suggestion just isn't going to work. Watching both of my grandmothers end of life situations has left firmly in the camp that euthanasia should be allowed. It was heartbreaking to listen to one of them tell me over and over again that she desperately wanted to die because she was in so much pain and being unable to help.
I also think it's a little silly that I can have an advanced care directive that states that I don't want to be revived in certain situations because I think the quality of life would be too low for me to consider it worth living, but that if I happen to just slide into that exact mental situation, which I've already described as one where I don't want to be alive, there is nothing my family could do to help me end my life.
True. But swinging too hard the other way like Canada is arguably worse. Read the AP coverage. If half the reporting is true we are looking at massive human rights violations, to put it mildly. The type of stuff the next generation will issue endless public apologies for and will build memorials to commemorate the victims and denounce the crimes being legally committed right now.
So the answer must be sensible laws that work hard to minimize abuse. Some Western European countries maybe closer to that.
I read the article Matt linked and I can't really tell what people are objecting to. It kind of takes a tone of "what if people are getting euthanized who don't want to be?" but it doesn't provide any evidence that that is happening at all. Is there more reporting on this elsewhere?
The very first example presented is a man who was euthanized without a terminal medical condition. End-of-life euthanasia care and fully legalized assisted suicide are completely different propositions.
Are they? I don't know. Forcing someone who feels their life is unbearable to live despite their wishes seems barbaric to me.
This is something a friend of mine wrote on the topic that's deeply shaped how I feel about this - https://badsciencewriting.wordpress.com/2014/08/18/suicide-and-self-identity/
Thanks for sharing this article. It's a good reminder of all the hard cases out there to consider. I will say that I support some level of legal euthanasia, which still places me left-of-center of this issue. I just think there should be strong guard-rails in place. I agree with Matt and think Canada probably went too far.
How about forcing someone to die against their will?
Was just about to jump in with "this seems like the person in question likely *didn't* want to die."
It does provide evidence that someone felt pressured towards euthanasia despite not wanting it. I guess it’s possible that he’s the only one, or that no such pressure has ever had an effect, but I don’t think those are smart bets.
The article matt linked to only discussed a single case. The dude’s family didn’t want him to die, but it appears that he did. I see no problem with that. If his family are willing and able to make his life enjoyable, great! But if dude is depressed/unhappy, over 25, and wants to die for an extended period of time, what’s the problem?
Are you talking about the AP article? Because a guy mentioned in that article did *not* want to die and started recording his meetings with doctors and ethicists because he had the feeling they were encouraging him to. Pardon an extended quote:
“Roger Foley, who has a degenerative brain disorder and is hospitalized in London, Ontario, was so alarmed by staffers mentioning euthanasia that he began secretly recording some of their conversations.
In one recording obtained by the AP, the hospital’s director of ethics told Foley that for him to remain in the hospital, it would cost “north of $1,500 a day.” Foley replied that mentioning fees felt like coercion and asked what plan there was for his long-term care.
“Roger, this is not my show,” the ethicist responded. “My piece of this was to talk to you, (to see) if you had an interest in assisted dying.”
Foley said he had never previously mentioned euthanasia. The hospital says there is no prohibition on staff raising the issue.”
"there is no prohibition on staff raising the issue."
This seems like the better place for Matt's ban to go, rather than formally banning the process but letting it happen under the table.
I agree with that. Staff can't bring up the issue, cost can't be brought up as a topic, etc.
It'd be very difficult to enforce for the same reason that elder abuse can be difficult to catch--the most vulnerable elderly people are often very isolated.
Regarding someone wanting to die: why do doctors have to get involved? Why not just leave it to the individual to commit suicide? Of course, some people who want to die may be too incapacitated to kill themselves, but that excludes the vast vast majority of over-25s with suicidal feelings.
I think if someone wants to commit suicide, it would be better for them to have the ability to do so in some sort of palliative context, with painkillers, rather than with a gun or whatever pills they have lying around at home.
The thing is that I think if someone wants to commit suicide it would almost always be better for them not to do it. Now, earlier I was criticizing people for suggesting someone else might be wrong to think their life is worth living, so maybe I'm a hypocrite for saying someone is wrong to think their life ISN'T worth living, but I think there are both philosophical and practical reasons to say the second and not the first, and while obviously botched suicides can have horrendous results, I just can't see a good way to extend euthanasia to people who have hope of a healthy life but are plagued with suicidal feelings—the tradeoffs and slopes just seem too great and too slippery.
Off topic (to say the least) but I've often wondered: why isn't that approach followed in US states where capital punishment is practiced? Can't the condemned simply be given a large dose of narcotics? Aren't there cases of badly botched lethal injections causing suffering?
"...and wants to die for an extended period of time, what’s the problem?"
You don't see any problem with dying for an extended period of time? Only a nut-case would want that. I'd rather have it short and sweet, thanks.
As someone who’s seen a family member go through Alzheimer's, I am personally worried about not having a euthanasia option for myself should I be in a similar position one day. I’d particularly like the option to pre-file for euthanasia under certain conditions since a patient in this mental state is in no position to understand their condition and make such a consequential decision.
Yes, there are risks that patients that are mentally and physically weakened may be convinced to accept euthanasia when options exists to improve their condition. Particularly when it would require great expense from the state or a private insurer to treat the individual.
Yet, I personally don’t find this to be a particularly concerning outcome. Should my future self find themselves in a state of mental and physical dimishment where they can be convinced to accept euthanasia rather than lobby for better options then I find that an acceptable outcome. At that point I’d be quite far gone and couldn’t properly contemplate the tradeoffs. I’d much prefer that early ending than the alternative of possibly being kept alive in a diminished state as long as possible; particularly so if it comes at great social cost.
I completely get this concern and have similar fears myself. My challenge is that I don't find it morally appropriate to kill mentally challenged children who otherwise can have a reasonably enjoyable life, so why do i find it acceptable to do the same for older people - including myself. I think the situation might be different if there is a massive amount of pain, but even then many people live in pain for years and don't choose death. I wouldn't support the government, doctors, etc. encouraging functioning people living in chronic pain to die, what changes the situation for older people?
If I'm honest with myself (and this is just me), its because my current self is sufficiently prideful that I don't want to be that. Though I often frame it as not wanting to be a burden on others. Perhaps my future self in that situation would be the same, but I don't know. A moral belief I have, which is best expressed by butchering a quote: do not go gently into the night, but to fight the dying of the light. Its hard to reconcile what feels like violating that belief over pride.
I want to live in a society in which every human life is considered precious and cannot be deprived without due process. I believe this principle is it used to be , widely accepted and is enshrined in the un declaration of human rights, the us constitution and many other comparable documents. I don’t see how a principle where the lives of whole classes of people is considered expendable is in line with that.
Did you read the AP article? The danger here is not primarily that which you outline but a project of “euthanizing” the perfectly healthy disabled in mass.
Good people have a tendency to assume all other people are like they are. This is usually a good trait. But when it comes to life-and-death, we need to realize there are a lot of people who are ... not like us.
My grandmother, in Oregon where assisted suicide is legal, lived alone (with my folks about a ten minute drive) until the very end. She initiated whatever the process looks like with her doctors. One day, some particular daily life activity was beyond her (I don't know what that was), and she called her daughter and said "that's it, it's time". Later that day, it was all over.
It's important to have effective and thoughtful guardrails for the reasons Matt identifies, but I think that's pretty good.
The system looks good for mentally capable folks living relatively independently. But folks who are in long term care at great expense to the state or to different institutions are another question. We can pay attention and put in place guardrails. We could say, ‘this option is only available to XYZ folks who we feel confident can make the choice free from pressure’ but that’s like enshrining peoples fears of unequal access under Matt’s ‘benign neglect’ scheme into the actual law.
It’s just not an easy question to solve and gets harder the more elder care burden falls on the states expense, which is going to continue imo.
A little bit like the DC trash situation, the only real solution is for it to be something practical voters pay attention to. I just don’t know how plausible that is.
Honestly, while this is something of an invasion of privacy, I think the single most effective and least intrusive guiderail would be a requirement for a close friend or family member to be involved in the decision. No requirement for their agreement or permission, simply that they must be in a position to confirm that this decision is genuinely being made by the person in question and not any of the constellation of providers and caretakers around them.
Anything else would just be an attempt to have the state half-assedly simulate the same guiderail, at greater expense and with less effect.
I guess she had already been talking to doctors about it, but deciding to go through with euthanasia and then dying the same day is somewhat unsettling to me. Even a 24-hour waiting period seems good.
Oregon has a waiting period, there are exemptions only if you are likely to die within 15 days. She probably didn’t tell your mom until the waiting period was over.
https://www.oregon.gov/oha/PH/PROVIDERPARTNERRESOURCES/EVALUATIONRESEARCH/DEATHWITHDIGNITYACT/Documents/faqs.pdf
I should say--it wasn't a secret from the family or anything. We totally supported her in her decision, not that this should be a precondition.
Assisted suicide is legal here in Oregon but euthanasia is illegal. You have to be able to take the medicine yourself.
Some questions have no good answers. Its just a question of which tradeoffs we are more willing to accept. Do we accept that some people will live longer in more pain than they would choose to otherwise, or do we setup a system where older people who might want to live longer will be pressured into dying.
I’ll be the first to admit i’m just more pro death than the median voter. Deaths of old people do not bother me, they are often a relief. Deaths of very ill people or long term addicts don’t bother me either. They are predictable and unavoidable.
Objectively, keeping old, unproductive people alive is expensive. Much of this cost is socialized through medicare and social security. The typical person runs up five or six figures of medical bills in their final months and doesn’t really enjoy those expenditures. I’d much rather focus on nurturing the young and having better conditions for healthy workers than caregiving for the old and very infirm.
Given that the federal government pays most of the cost of keeping old, unproductive people alive and families don’t have to internalize most of those costs, there’s already a huge fist on the scales in favor of living longer than is socially optimal. A certain amount of encouragement to die seems ok given the fact that the negative externalities of staying alive are inflicted on the treasury.
I gotta say, this sounds pretty ghoulish to me.
It is a fine line between "87 year old Mary wanted to die" and "87 year old Mary's kids convinced her to die because she is a drain on their resources."
I suspect that David would bite that bullet. Perhaps her kids have a filial duty to support her, but why should David be forced to do so (and if we are already taking his money, why force him to do that rather than to buy more school lunches in a world of finite state resources). Mary's medical care must necessarily rationed, the question is how and by whom (prices? Trump/Hillary? some agency? Mary's kids who would otherwise be able to send *their* kids to school?).
I am less, ah, ghoulish [sorry] than David but there is a real tendency in these debates to say "we should just spend some of the infinite resources society has available and never have to make tradeoffs about what we prioritize!" which is not a real option. People are better at noticing this when talking about "free" college for all, then they are when talking about end of life care choices.
But we aren't talking about health care rationing in the sense of not using public funds to pay for expensive treatments with a low risk of success and low improvements to QoL. We're talking about "if we killed this person it would save us money."
>>>I’ll be the first to admit i’m just more pro death than the median voter.<<<
This could be the start of one helluva political career.
I think "focus on quality of life, not just length of life" is a more politically palatable statement that probably gets you to about the same place in the end.
Politically, I agree. However, as someone who doesn’t want to live if I’m terribly infirm, I don’t like having the costs of other people living too long inflicted on me.
I understand where you are coming from on this, but it's worth noting that there is a considerable amount of fuzziness around what does and does not qualify as "very infirm" or "very ill," and different people will have different views about where to draw the line. So that's why this is a problem, and considering that we are literally talking about life-or-death, it's a big deal.
I believe back at ThinkProgress that Matt suggested (or at least conducted a thought experiment about) lowering the age for Medicare to 55, but capping it at 95. His calculations were that this would cost about the same or less, but spectacularly improve total "quality of life years" at the obvious trade off of "premature" (by a matters of weeks or a few months in most cases) deaths of super elderly people.
Are there enough 95+ year olds for that to make a significant difference?
The premise of Matt's post at the time was that there were. I have no clue if the numbers, either then or now, actually work or not.
It doesn't take that many if the care they get is extremely expensive (which I believe is the claim that is sometimes made).
“A certain amount of encouragement to die seems ok given the fact that the negative externalities of staying alive are inflicted on the treasury.”
Talk me through this. Should we also be encouraging parents on welfare to give their kids up for adoption?
Yes, probably? There's definitely good arguments to be made that government policy could be a lot more coercive on "stopping the cycle of poverty" by coming up with ways to reduce the numbers of children lower income people have/need to support, although that would obviously run counter to our host's "OBA" proposal.
Maybe not 'encouraging', but the state could certainly offer that as an option, perhaps in exchange for cash. My priors being that anyone who would trade their kid for cash shouldn't be a parent anyways, so we're effectively filtering for the right crowd
I feel like it would also run counter to the role the state should play in people's lives.
Well, my start point is that the state should not offer many of these types of benefits at all. If it does, I think it should have pretty broad freedom to attach conditions on accessing them to deter use of the benefits or reduce the need for such benefits in the future. (This is contrary to numerous SCOTUS rulings, but we're talking idealized here, not actual permissible policy.)
I think what Matt is implicitly suggesting is something like decriminalization vs. legalization. Instead of treating assisted suicide like murder, make it a misdemeanor or civil penalty. If an institution pressured people to choose euthanasia to save money, they'd face a huge fine, and it wouldn't be worth it. But if a lone doctor euthanized someone out of compassion, they'd face little consequence.
Great response, David. A rare total whiff by Matt.
It occurs to me that you're not taking your own advice when it comes to popularism in your TV reviewing. If you want to effect change in real America you have to be suggesting improvements in the story telling of Yellowstone.
It's also not obvious to me that "on the margin wards of the state that live unpleasant lives at great taxpayer expense will be pressured to end them painlessly" is a horrible tradeoff (if actually true) compared to "we routinely lock people into unimaginable torture".
Geez, I don't know ES. Even if the utilitarian calculus produced a wash, my act/omission worries get triggered here. Dying slow painful deaths has been ubiquitous throughout human history, and is still ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom. We didn't cause that; it's the default. Yes, medicine and technology should be used to improve our lot over the state of nature. But the pain of dying is not in and of itself our fault.
The moral issues involved in pressuring people to end their lives, on the other hand, look quite serious. Inter alia, do you want to create the sort of people whose job it is to pressure said seniors into ending their lives? We have some experience with self-appointed "angels of mercy," i.e. medical professionals who take it upon themselves to do this. The track-record is not good; they often go way over whatever line they originally thought they were respecting.
Fair, but a few thoughts here:
1. The act/omission distinction lies on pretty shaky philosophical ground (walking past drowning babies being blameworthy).
2. Even accepting that such a distinction is morally relevant, most don't hold it to be *determinative* in the face of starkly different outcomes--unless you are talking to Kant himself, you can pretty much always add enough innocent people to the other track in a trolley problem to get people to switch (kill 1 to save 40 trillion is an easy call).
3. Even if it *were* determinative, the state is already acting to save these people. The "natural" course would be for them to die ill in the streets, not receive expensive care as a ward of the state. It does not strike me as some new intervention in the natural course of events to say "we'll still keep giving you all this expensive medical care we paid for with money extracted through force from taxpayers...but it really would be better if you elected to painlessly end your life instead".
4. To be clear, I do not in fact want to create people whose job it is to do this. I think it is bad to do it. However, in the veil of tears we live in, where we have limited resources and have to make tradeoffs, it seems to me "maybe some people on the margin will still act like way despite all of our efforts to regulate these conversations to ensure it does not happen" vs "we will for sure lock people into involuntary and unceasing torment", call seems easy to make.
In the one case, you have people leading mostly miserable lives using money that could be spent on feeding children or deworming or private enterprise or building hospitals or anything else than "expensive end of life care for people dying soon anyway" ending them a little earlier than they otherwise might. In the other case you have someone for sure suffering significant agony. I also think there are a lot more people in camp "needlessly suffering" than camp "tricked into suicide by bureaucrats".
TL DR: I don't think Logan's Run is a plausible outcome of relaxing treatment rules. You face similar but more difficult questions when it comes to institutionalizing the mentally ill too, but properly regulated mental health hospitals still make sense.
Determining for yourself that these other people are living miserable lives--when their defining characteristic is that they want to keep living--is also a rationalization that has led to some awful places. But it doesn’t need to lead there to be bad on its face. If we think the money is better spent on deworming, then we should cut the budget for medical care. Or cut some other part of the budget. Or raise more revenue, or do more deficit spending. “See if we can talk some people who we’re taking care of into dying” should not be Plan B, C, or even Z.
Good thing nobody is arguing that pressuring people into suicide as a cost saving measure is a good outcome to strive for then, rather than a risk to be avoided to the greatest extent possible while achieving other even worthier goals.
I certainly don’t want to think that other people want me dead. A world in which I was afraid that my family and neighbors wanted to kill me would suck. No one should be shamed into dying. Even withholding expensive care seems cruel in a country as rich as ours.
And yet suicide is so stigmatized that there are often strong social pressures not to do it. We should certainly move the slider towards less stigma against suicide.
Part of this should be 1) speaking frankly about the costs of largely futile medical treatments and 2) admitting that suicide is often a courageous and unselfish act.
I'm glad you're not arguing for that but there is at least someone arguing for that in this comments section! https://www.slowboring.com/p/better-call-mailbag/comment/8493408
I'm sorry if I misapprehended your view, but I didn't see any suggestion in your comment that there are reforms or restrictions to the euthanasia regime that we should consider—only a binary between "leave people in agony" and "pressure people who want to live towards suicide, which is not such a horrible tradeoff."
Did you reply to the wrong post?
Looks like many of the replies got scrambled? Like the entire comments section list it's threading.
It's only the public facade of popularism that leads him to pretend that any television has artistic value. En famille, he only has eyes for Knausgård and Saramago.
Matt’s been pretty consistent that educated cosmopolitan class snobbery should stay where it belongs, in cultural consumption, rather than in politics.
Also, suggesting improvements to the somewhat aimless state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe post-Endgame. Though that might go over here even more poorly than the guest posts.
MCU isn't aimless: it's dead on for profits without effort.
I cannot wait for Matt's Purple Hearts takes.
I'm nowhere near retirement age, but I work in the sciences and have had more than a few coworkers who've retired recently (across an age span, from early 60s to early 70s). We all enjoy (or enjoyed) our jobs, but it's stressful and eventually you want to enjoy your life. The ones in their early 60s have told me things like "I'm still relatively physically healthy, there are a lot of things I want to do (travel etc.) while I'm still able to do them." Or they want to spend more time with their grandchildren. Or they want to take up a hobby. Or they want to volunteer giving walking tours in a historical setting. Or they are content to do things like contract patent writing.
Always seemed to me as though you have a plan to keep yourself occupied and intellectually stimulated in retirement and you'll be fine. Sit around watching Fox News all day and your mind turns to mush.
My dad retired from his research job at a pretty conventional age a year or two ago, and he commented that he would dearly have loved to take on some sort of part-time emeritus role and consult (maybe even for free) with his younger colleagues who were still active in the lab.
There wasn't a way to make that happen, unfortunately, but that sounds like a good retirement to me.
Law firms, for all their problems as workplaces, often do this, at least for their more eminent partners. They'll put on suits and come into the office well into their 80s, mostly to use the office phone to call various customer service lines.
Law firms also genuinely benefit from these arrangements because those partners can help to maintain their client relationships and pass them on to younger partners.
I think the concept of "institutional knowledge" is a lot broader, or should be understood to be broader.
I have an excellent personal relationship with my former boss, and neither of us minds an occasional phone call of "hey bossname, do you remember why we did X this way?". Very valuable.
Especially if he was a white male. No opportunities.
Isn't part-time work a solution to the issue?
When my dad retired, I witnessed, I believe, a dramatic fall in cognitive abilities etc and it scared the hell out of me.
I will reach the age when I don't need a job for financial reasons fairly soon but my wife will want to work some seven years after my date of retirement. Part-time work would combine the need for mental stimulation, deadlines etc with opportunities to travel, play more games and sports and so on.
I think all of this is true and also pretty obvious.
The first main factor, as MY points out is, do you like your job or is it making you depressed? This is a good sign you should retire.
But the second factor is, you can't just retire into a life of nothing or you are just accelerating your own death. Unfortunately, at least a majority of people are pretty bad at managing their own health through lifestyle choices. So there are plenty of people who maybe aren't very happy in their jobs, but if they could retire would end up wrecking their own mental health. And the default assumptions of US society make the challenge of developing a suitable mental and social life after retirement greater than it could be.
I am a late 30s DINK and my friends in similar situation chat on retirement a lot, as so much of retirement advice intersects with grand parenting advice. As none of us have or plan to have kids, being purposeful about what an alternative retirement looks like becomes more important. Big thing is all of us owning property within walking distance of each other. As that is hard in VHCOL cities we need to start working towards it now.
you may already be doing this, but one thing i would suggest is telling your local government about this vision you have so that they know their constituents care about stuff that's not 100% parking.
Am a very involved local YIMBY 👍
I’ve always thought that going part time was underrated as an alternative to early retirement, if you like your job. Or our company (in old-school engineering) has “pensioners” where former employees who retired and now collect a pension are allowed to work some small number of hours a year, maybe 500 or less, and still collect their full pension. Seems like best of both worlds?
This is a great option if available. But for operational and leadership roles, it's hard to find part-time assignments that work for the business and for the retiree.
Consulting is an option but (a) requires being comfortable with the sales effort needed to build a practice and (b) becomes a full-time effort if successful in (a). The solution I evolved to is consulting almost exclusively via the knowledge networks - GLG, Alphasights, Guidepoint etc. They bring the work to you, it's interesting but relatively low stakes, it's only an hour or two a week. What's missing from this option is the social interaction involved in working in the office with the same cast of characters every week.
I'm interested that your org has retirees with company pensions. I thought that the private sector was ~ 100% defined contribution pensions now. The impact of that shift on family finances is an interesting topic. I think it has been positive, but I am an optimist.
My company still has pensions for anyone who started prior to 2011 (including, luckily, me), but they froze them in 2020. My husband (same boat) and I still expect a healthy amount of retirement income from it tho. But we also have 401ks. I don’t know anyone at our company who was planning to be totally reliant on the pension. Still waiting on a lump sum offer to buy us out, hasn’t happened yet.
I had final salary pensions from two employers when I worked in the UK. UK pension plans have to give you an offer of the "Cash Equivalent Transfer Value" on request. I only found this out about 20 years after leaving the UK. The transfer values then were about 30x the annual pension amount based on immediate commencement (I was 58 then, and had just retired early). The only challenge was finding a financial advisor that would provide the mandatory (UK law) opinion that transfer was a wise choice. Hope that your employer steps up to the plate with good cash buyout offers.
Law firms generally let partners maintain offices perpetually, so it's common for them to go from fully active status to winding down, then semi-retired, then retired-but-still-helping-out-here-and-there from their 60s through their 80s. It's one of the nice parts of the profession.
If you want an active retirement (golf, ski etc) you can hit a golf ball much farther at 58 than 68. depends hat is important to you.
I retired at 58 and was completely shocked at loss of distance in my golf shots compared with when I was playing regularly in my mid-40s. About 30 yards on drives. And the expert golfers I play with tell me that the distance is never coming back. Not that important to me -- that's what the yellow tees are for.
Very cool. Retirement options probably vary by industry and country.
My dad is in his 60s, retired in the last few years after initially trying part-time work. The main reason he retired was that he couldn't find employment anymore. Even when he was okay with pay cuts, pay in the (Indian) IT services is often tied to experience, and that made it difficult. There were also a couple of unnerving overt incidents of ageism, which probably was off-putting.
I'll repeat my pushback that "illegal while also allowing for a fair amount of hypocrisy, lax enforcement, and unasked questions" is a bad recipe for selective enforcement that tend to hurt the most vulnerable. Like Matt, I don't have a strong view on euthanasia, but I've seen this state of law suggested for other things like gambling and especially sex work where I think it can be more commonly damaging. Abortion law could also easily fall into this trap depending on how the post-Dobbs world shakes out.
Either way we are thinking about the most vulnerable getting harmed. As these things often shake out. On the one hand we have fear about vulnerable folks experiencing unnecessary pain. On the other we fear the most vulnerable will be killed for profit. The fears need to be weighed. Saying the downsides from one will fall on the vulnerable just doesn’t answer the problem. It’s always ‘the vulnerable’ who are vulnerable.
I mean, the gambling situation is one we had until very recently, but I think the new model is going to be much harder on the most vulnerable (specifically, the poor, and also anyone who is predisposed to gabbling addiction) than the old model. Don’t you?
In other words, as Nick says, we can’t just think of the harm of being arrested, or of not getting the thing desired, but also of the harm of getting it when it isn’t what one wants.
I guess I just see “risk of being turned into a criminal” as much worse.
But if one does want to make something illegal, then stick in that lane and enforce it fair and consistent.
I don’t know. This Douthat column, along with my observations on the ground, helped convince me that consistency is overrated and that, once again, hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/12/opinion/super-bowl-gambling-sports.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
I just feel like it's easy for people to tolerate inconsistency until they're the ones that are on the wrong end of the inconsistency.
Well, in the case of gambling, what were some harms done by restricting gambling to a couple of specific states? Were ordinary civilians getting locked up a lot? Sincere question!
People who want to gamble, but can't do so legally, may get drawn into an illegal gambling underworld. An illegal bookmaker wants his clients to go deeper into debt, diverting money his way. He doesn't care how they get that money, and may send them to loan sharks, who will harm the client who can't pay them back, creating a vicious cycle that ends in busted legs or death. Regulated legal gambling can (not always) stop that cycle by putting limits on the bookmaker so that they're forced to blacklist clients when their losses get too big rather than encourage them to go into illegal debt.
Locked up, overwhelmingly no, but most people try to strive to be law abiding citizens, and many would get deprived of the ability to legally gamble and not feel the pressure of potentially committing a crime just because they happen to live far away from one of the lucky duck states.
Michael’s question about the Supreme Court’s evolving jurisprudence on the establishment clause is interesting. In an age of political and cultural polarization I think it’s increasingly challenging to define what “coercion” means and whether that’s the right word to apply to public school teachers expressing their personal values in ways which might influence a student to depart from the beliefs taught at home.
While I agree with Matt that kids aren’t going to just blindly adopt the social/religious views of their teachers, I think for the sake of maintaining the health of our public education system it would be better to find a way to reduce the tension between parents’ views and school curriculum. Many liberals feel uncomfortable with the football coach who prayed after games, and conservatives feel uncomfortable with schools celebrating Pride Month or teaching kids about systemic racism and white privilege.
Call me crazy, but I think schools should dial back on *all* non-academic programming where there’s not a broad consensus around the topic. Even conservatives don’t want their kids bullied at school, and want their kids to be held to decent standards when it comes to honesty, language use, etc.
But, in a world where we’re using the force of law to require students to come to the classroom to learn, I think it’s perfectly appropriate to expect teachers to focus first and foremost on teaching their assigned subject effectively rather than evangelizing their social/cultural/religious views.
After observing my parents boomer retirement process and spending a couple of decades in school and a career, I have decided the best way to approach the retirement question is to not think of it as a binary.
I have a good job that pays fairly, but I'd still rather spend Friday afternoon disc golfing than working. But if all I had was time, I think I'd get, if not bored, too self-involved. I think to me retirement means achieving a level of financial independence to live life entirely on my terms, without a complete stoppage of productive work.
Specifically, I see it as, less work, the ability to prioritize enjoying a job over high pay, the ability to take on a risky job because losing it wouldn't matter, the ability to volunteer, and/or the ability to choose a more humane schedule than the 9-5. I think all of those are ways to make retirement more of an ongoing process than a single day where your work life stops, and the added bonus is you can start a little earlier because you still expect to be making some money.
Agree. I’m in my late 40s and often describe myself as half-retired. I’m a freelance UX designer and my schedule changes from week to week, but I average about 25 hours a week. This leads to a very chill lifestyle, while I still have enough money. I’m happy to keep working as long as I can and can even see working part time in a hardware store or something if I ever age out of my profession. So much more appealing to me than my parents generation who worked their asses off when they were young and retired at 55-60 to look at their iPad all day.
Agreed. As a mid-30s software engineer, I expect there’s going to be a lot of interest in part-time tech work over the coming decade or so as my cohort ages. From my biased sample of friends and coworkers, there doesn’t seem to be sufficient lifestyle creep to consume their increasingly high financial compensation.
I could see many tech workers' reasons that they’re set for a long retirement if they can just delay withdrawing for another decade to allow for more compounding. Plus, it’s nice to have something to do and many of us enjoy the work (or at least parts of the work).
I’ve known several software engineers in their 40s and 50s that have taken some informal approach to this. The general pattern is to withdraw from management and formal leadership roles and settle into more of an advisory role. That would entail lower compensation, but also lower responsibilities and more focus on mentorship and interesting technical problems. One engineer in particular would take year-long sabbaticals between roles at different companies; with a focus on finding a firm that could benefit from their experience in an advisory role. I’m confident that few of these engineers actually needed the money since they all joined pre-IPO companies that went on to 10x their market cap.
It would be challenging for a tech firm to provide part time roles in my opinion, particularly because so much time is already spent keeping up to speed on what is going on. Yet I bet there’s a lot of labor cost savings available if a firm can figure it out. I bet there’d be a lot of interest in half-time roles where the tech worker would take far less than half pay. E.g., rather than $400k total comp for a full time role, the half time worker might accept $100k or less.
The way software is concentrated in some VHCOL cities, most people in the industry have a very simple way to drastically cut costs when they want to: move. If they managed to buy rather than rent, they likely have hundreds of thousands of dollars of equity in their house as well. This will let a lot of them slowly ease into retirement rather than just quitting forever at 63.
Yeah I think this is how most of the FIRE people talk about it. Obviously most of those people are high achieving types, so I think they typically all still do some work/have some income. But because they don't need it, they don't have to compromise in their choices. So they've retired from obligatory day-to-day work, which is what I think most people resent doing.
"So they've retired from obligatory day-to-day work, which is what I think most people resent doing."
It's this and the lack of flexibility. In my own line of work, there's either never a good time to take a stress-free vacation, or else if there is one it often comes up on such short notice that you basically have to try and figure out the logistics within a couple days (and pay inflated costs for short term travel arrangements). While on a day to day basis there's a lot of flexibility in how the work is arranged, there's also not enough regularity to it do do so much as even take up a hobby with scheduled times, let alone plan specific time off. At least for me the FIRE fantasy is as much about not being nose-to-the-grindstone all the time and actually having some time set aside to be oneself as it is about everything else--not that the "everything else" is trivial, mind.
One thing I worry about is the schedule. If I was only working part time would I be able to get up on time and maintain productive energy at work on the days I work or would I be sort of lackadaisical from my days off. I just worry I’d cut back hours and then my brain will constantly beg me to cut back more. Full disclosure my brain is dysfunctional and poor at responding to my suggestions.
Yeah this is a concept borrowed from them, but it can apply even if you're disciplined enough to retire at 37.
“it’s a big, pluralistic tent of charlatans and scammers.”
A big, pluralistic tent of charlatans and scammers has a very good chance, on the sort of timescales that matter in the history of a nation-state, of evolving into something other than charlatans and scammers. And a much lower chance of backsliding on the pluralism once it’s embedded.
I’m still torn on what the hell the GOP is these days but I’m pretty confident that it’s going to change a lot in ways not all bad over the coming few decades.
I think a lot of this hinges on Trump himself since he is (in my opinion) uniquely awful. None of the imitators seem to be able to match him in terms of unhinged ego and self aggrandizing nor in terms of clear disregard of the law.
Once Trump is out of the picture, I have no clue how the GOP will evolve. And not only could he likely end up in jail soon, he’s also an obese geriatric so he could just keel over any day.
Yeah, I agree the GOP is gonna look really different a decade from now, and a lot of what that difference entails will hinge on Trump. If Trump wins again in 2024, I imagine it would look something like "a group of shambolic, quasi-fascist charlatans," which is pretty terrifying (albeit not in quite the same way that progressives imagine). If Trump fades from the scene, I imagine the GOP evolving into something like a 21st century American version of European Christian Democratic parties (this is an inexact analogy, but it's close enough). Progressives would still act like they're fascists, but they wouldn't be that scary, all in all.
His personal charisma ties things together a lot. I see other yahoos try to do what he is doing to some degree- Cruz, rando folks in primaries, but they are not on his level. He is absolutely repulsive to me, but is he the most charismatic political charlatan in the world right now? He really dwarfed people on stage during primary debates back in the day.
It's incredible how many of both the nutjobs and the grifters are winning primaries solely due to Trump's blessing.
I really can't tell if the GOP is going to revert to "limited government" form after he's gone, in which case they'll end up presiding over another crisis and face another '08-style blowout eventually.
But if they really are driven by their demographics to shift towards populism, then they're going to look a heck of a lot like the incipient New Deal Democratic coalition in 1925, while the Democrats increasingly look like the GOP in 1955.
History rhymes, indeed.
I think which direct the GOP evolves toward will depend almost entirely on how many elections they win or lose in their current configuration over the coming years. The Democrats picking up net three Senate seats in 2022 and Trump losing the 2024 general election would have far more effect on that future state than pretty much anything else.
Ehh.
I think the changing make-up of their base and their primary electorate matters as much or more.
On the government efficiency topic, Democrats don't really have an incentive for civil service reform and improved government efficiency because that would require taking on and hurting their public sector union allies. Republicans, by and large, just don't care about improving government efficiency, because they think the private sector can/should make up for it.
Yep, until one of these things changes, “good governance” as a policy issue isn’t going anywhere.
As someone who believes people should have the freedom to seek euthanasia at the end of their life (and as someone who hopes to make use of that option myself in a good many decades), the reports of what's happening in Canada are extremely disturbing. No one should ever be pressured into pursuing that option. How any doctor thought mentioning how much of a burden a patient is in the context of end of life care is truly jaw dropping. That being said, I think these failures can be prevented.
First, blanket ban on offering the option; patients need to request euthanasia before doctors can discuss it. Second, there needs to oversight and review of every case. Maybe even require the patient be under 24/7 video surveillance for a week leading up to the assisted suicide. Then have someone review the footage for signs of coercion, from any party. And finally, having the counselors/physicians who advise and eventually approve the use of Euthanasia need to be a totally separate group from their regular physicians with completely different incentives.
Yes--some people on both sides are acting as though the choice is between these pressures and just a total prohibition of euthanasia, but it seems obvious that reforms and regulations of euthanasia policy should be our first priority.
An issue with the last requirement is that doctors who seek out that role would likely be aggressively pro-euthanasia, which has (depending on who you listen to) been a problem in Belgium
Just giving a hat tip to two sharp observations:
(1) "Assholes have lots of ways of making you feel uncomfortable regardless of the rules, and kind people can make everyone feel included, even if there are crucifixes on the wall."
(2) The modern Republican party: "a big, pluralistic tent of charlatans and scammers."
Retirement questions are always interesting to read...I guess I could save this for applying to the next Mailbag Sweepstakes, but eh. There's a lot of, I don't think "doomer" is a great term, but a sort of nihilistic pessimism about retirement among my peer group...many of us don't actually believe we'll ever be able to retire*. Whether it's due to Social Security going bankrupt, an x-risk like climate change, or the general decay of American society, we largely expect to work until we physically can't, and then sort of just...roll the dice and hope they don't come up Death. Perhaps The Revolution will save us in time, or we'll get really lucky and score a Respectable Adult Job, or our inheritance will be greater than expected, or...just a lot of external luck-based things, basically. The concept of ever having enough money to buy a house, play golf, sail a yacht, etc. just seems like a laughable fantasy.
But I wonder if retirement is sort of a Pascal's Wager type thing...no matter how utterly improbable it might actually be in reality, the potential reward of having the option to retire is huge. Very much worth believing in, and taking actions as if it's true. If nothing else, learning a bit of delayed-gratification is a good skill for life in general...
*Not necessarily a conscious thought, but if one lives only for the present continuously, that's a revealed preference for not-thinking-about-retirement. Until it's too late. Every time I do the math, I kick myself again for not starting savings until late 20s...that's so many years of disposable income that could have been compounding away. Stings to think about. Those FIRE nerds were right, it's totally possible to retire young even on a modest income. If only I'd listened during college years.
"...many of us don't actually believe we'll ever be able to retire*. Whether it's due to Social Security going bankrupt...."
Remember that whenever you worry about the solvency of the SSA, you are the victim of a decades - long disinformation campaign by Republicans who want to kill the SSA.
They want to "privatize" it in order to steal trillions and impoverish ordinary Americans, and they know that in order to do that they have to undermine political support for it. So they try to depict it as unreliable and unsustainable, when it is actually a successful program that has made life better for hundreds of millions, and can continue doing so forever.
We have two self-fulfilling prophecies: if the grifters can spook us into despair, then they will be able to weaken support and steal all the cash. But if people have confidence in the SSA, then it will be there for our children and our children's children.
"But if people have confidence in the SSA, then it will be there for our children and our children's children."
I mean, that's not the only precondition. If we have a demographic collapse on par with China's, I don't think we could support our current Social Security transfers, no matter how much confidence we have. Another good reason to back 1 Billion Americans though.
We won't have a China like demographic collapse though. The US receives a lot of immigration (often undocumented) as-is from high birth rate populations, and that will smooth our age curve. Plus even beyond that, White Americans have fairly high birth rates compared to Han Chinese etc.
It wouldn't matter much for anyone alive today except possibly the very youngest, but doesn't that rely on a pyramid-scheme type logic to perpetuate? You're probably not saying it doesn't and only commenting on the current situation, but I guess I always think of it as "society will have to learn to deal with bad demographics sooner or later"
Sure, but "sooner" and "later" are very different, because nothing else holds equal in that time.
China having to play Japan at near-present levels of wealth/capital accumulation/technological sophistication is going to be much worse than Japan and South Korea doing so while substantially richer, which in turn is worse than 2050 America doing the same, which is still worse than the US in 2100 contending with those problems.
At least, assuming that global society doesn't collapse entirely due to climate change/resource depletion/whatever, which is to me extremely unlikely.
As for the SS program in particular, I'm going to keep beating the "sovereign wealth fund" drum. It's genuinely about the only case of "something for nothing" in modern politics. Requiring SS to invest exclusively in below-inflation-rate-of-return Treasuries is profoundly stupid and has made the saving of money an actual drag on the program rather than a benefit. It's the governmental equivalent of stuffing cash under your mattress in 1968 and expecting it to be safe.
What's the nickel version of why a US sovereign wealth fund is a good idea?
Pyramid schemes need to grow exponentially to stay in business, which is mathematically impossible. For Social Security to work, you just need the working-age pop to keep growing a little bit.
That is still exponential growth, unless you're using the term more loosely than the mathematical definition. If you needed to add 1M people a year that would be linear or constant growth. But for SSN you need to increase by a % per year. Even if you only need to increase by 1% each generation that would be exponential: 1.01 x 1.01 x 1.01 etc... given enough generations even a slow rate gets to unsustainable numbers much quicker than a flat 1M a year.
How early would they have to phase it out? Like in the future, when they get rid of SSA, it would be the X year olds of that day who don’t get it. How old is X? I just don’t see voters allowing SSA to go away ever
There's a billion good reasons to aim for OBA. But we need nothing like a billion Americans to keep SSA solvent. Modest population growth will do the trick.
Population growth literally - not figuratively, literally -- cannot continue indefinitely, though, and the fact that current generations are paying based on past demographic curves makes sustainability thus have aspects that are intrinsically those of a Ponzi scheme. Some manner of transitioning SSA into more of a forced-savings package seems like it's intrinsically desirable inter alia because it makes the solvency of the program no longer dependent on the structure of the demographic pyramid and ties output later in life to output earlier in life. I admit I have no idea what that's supposed to look like (though IIRC Singapore does something kinda-sorta like this vis a vis forced-savings? Can't say I'm familiar with the details of that program, though.)
Disclaimer: I also think that fewer, better (likely genetically engineered) humans with attendant lower ecological footprint and higher per-human resources and capacity is also a much better equilibrium / teleological goal than OBA type thinking.
Australia has such a program. As far as I can tell, it looks pretty much like a mandatory 529.
I prefer a sovereign wealth fund-like approach.
I presume you mean 401(k) rather than 529?
I don't have a philosophical objection to a sovereign wealth fund approach (and I think it probably has significant advantages in certain respects), but I worry it introduces a constant incentive to just raid the fund to increase benefits to present beneficiaries at the expense of long-term solvency (of course, AIUI, in the inverse of this problem the Social Security surplus has been raided to pay into the general fund since forever and thus SS is significantly less solvent than it *should* be). I think we'd need a mostly-apolitical trustreeship of financial technocrats to keep a handle on whatever receipts, investments and disbursements were earmarked for such benefits (something like the Fed but for SS I guess).
"They want to "privatize" it in order to steal trillions and impoverish ordinary Americans, and they know that in order to do that they have to undermine political support for it."
This seems overly rancorous. I'm an ordinary American and privatization would have been great for me personally. On the other hand, I recognize that for many people with less financial knowledge it would be easy to get scammed or just not know what to do. Having a guaranteed pension from the government is reasonable and I think probably for the best, but I don't think its unreasonable to wish you had more control over it.
If we want to realize the benefits of privatization without the moral hazard, the guarantee of unequal outcomes, etc, just change the law to require the SSTF to be invested in a basket of Treasuries and American private-sector bonds and equities.
Then continue paying out on the same progressive basis as before while we see if we can get far enough ahead of the curve on returns to stabilize benefits.
The benefits of privatization were entirely down to enabling proper investment strategy, so rather than opening the can of worms of asking everyone to manage their own government pension, let's just do it sensibly at the macro level.
I thought about that - but a couple of things struck me:
1) Treasury bonds are just paid out by the government right? So how is that fundamentally different than what we're already doing? Is it just increasing the payments?
2) Private sector investment - SSA is _so_ large I worry about any government picked choice of how to invest it. At least individual pension funds - though large - have to pick different things.
What happens if the private sector has a recession and the bonds/equities can't pay out? Do we declare we're just going to print money to make the baseline payment?
When I first thought about it during GWB's term, privatization sounded good to me at a top-level, and not to undermine it's effectiveness but to try to make it _more_ effective.
In the end however, I just couldn't get past the choice of moral hazard/not "secure", but impoverishment was never a goal - more individual control was - it just looks like one that can't exist with the other goals we agree on for Social Security.
That does seem like it would eliminate the moral hazard problem.
Does it overly benefit those indices which are suddenly allowed to take this large selection of investment?
If we wanted to go this route, I'd like to see this divert like 10% of social security investment and see how it goes/pros/cons etc. Ideally big enough to be noticeable small enough that it won't wreck everything if we get it wrong.
I think this is both right and wrong. The SSA will continue to collect funds and be able to distribute them and that won’t change because it is a politically popular program.
However the reality is that the program won’t have enough income to meet its promises for a variety of reasons. This is going to happen right about the time Gen-X is eligible for benefits. Addressing the fiscal problems is going to take hard and difficult choices.
I just have a difficult time getting over the fact that both parties have basically tacitly agreed to not even touch SSA reform until they absolutely have to sometime in the 2030s under a crisis situation because it won't be able to make promised payments. At that point, tax increases and benefit cuts will be larger than if we did them now (or heck, 10 years ago when forecasts for SSA began to show funding would run out).
Yeah, it's frustrating but unfortunately that's just the way Congress and our political system operate - do nothing until the crisis is nigh or actually hits.
The upcoming catastrophe of Social Security has been an ongoing concern for at least forty years and it continues to do just fine, with the occasional tweak. At some point, we should probably admit that our warnings of disaster haven't exactly been on point.
Except we've known, based on demographics alone, that social security would need significant adjustment in the future because otherwise it will be insolvent (ie. it won't have enough revenue to cover expenses). That is already the case now, as the program already has a negative cash flow of around $150 billion/year. The programs are only able to continue at current benefit levels due to transfers from general revenues from the so-called trust fund. Once those run out in about a decade, the program will have an estimated 20-25% shortfall in revenue which will trigger automatic benefit cuts. A 20-25% cut in benefits will be a disaster for many who depend on this program.
And the cash flow problem will only grow over time. Dealing with a negative cash flow of $150 billion/year today and even more than that in a decade will take a lot more than tweaking.
We've heard these "SS will collapse in ten years" many times before. And it's always ten years in the future and like Achilles and the tortoise, we never seem to get there -- it's always receding just over the horizon.
It may happen some day, but given the track record, those predicting disaster should revise their priors and show some humility in their forecasting.
I'm of a similar mind. Relatedly, clearly the political will doesn't exist to tackle this "problem" that may or may not occur in a few decades. I mean, I guess people can fret over something that simply isn't present, but I'd rather not waste the energy. Waiting until we're forced to act seems to me a reasonable path. Because at that point we *will* be able to act. But right now we can't!
As Krugman often notes, a standard Republican argument is "we need to cut Social Security benefits now, otherwise we'll have to cut Social Security benefits . . . later."
It's more like a decade and dealing with it now would be a lot cheaper than waiting. But you're right that the political system "can't" act right now.
I mean... just removing the payroll tax cap (making SS taxes flat instead of regressive) will make the SSTF solvent for another 20-odd years, which is about as far out as one can make meaningful projections anyway.
If we were to, ya know, reform it into a sovereign wealth fund while it's still pretty flush, realistically we can expect to be able to fund current benefits indefinitely as economic growth then works in our favor instead of against us.
I love the idea of a SWF in theory, but I think the US is too big to have one that is meaningful in any way. If you took the current SS trust fund, it would be bigger than the three largest SWFs combined, and the trust fund is that large. (Calling it a trust fund is also entirely silly, if my right hand promises to pay my left hand 50 bucks, I'm not richer or poorer in the process).
There are definitely multiple ways to fix the underlying problem, but they will still be politically difficult and Congress likely won't doing anything until it is forced to.
Like Canada! Who, not coincidentally, has very sure mandatory pension benefits funding despite much worse demographics.
Are Canada's demographics really that much worse? I'll take your word for it, but Canada is badly outperforming the US right now in terms of immigration inflows (something like double America's net immigration rate in recent. years, and many/most of those immigrants are uni grads).
I looked into this and I think you are right; when accounting for immigration Canada working age pop growing faster than ours.
Oh, I meant more in an inverted-demographic-pyramid way. Too many old (SS-eligible) people supported by too few working youth. We're still a long way from China or Japan-level crisis, but trendlines haven't been terribly encouraging. The same people like my peers who think retirement is a myth are often the same sorts who end up not having kids due to being too poor...immigration is a thing, of course, but that's just moving pie slices around rather than making the total pie bigger. Any immigrants we get to move here and pay into SS are emigrants some other place no longer has paying into their welfare system. (Yes, I know it's more complicated than that, it's not really a Ponzi scheme...but.)
Although since you bring it up...I'd probably be happy scrapping everything and just giving out equivalent cash directly. I always feel slightly paternalistic ringing up a foodstamps customer who can pick up as much beans and rice as they can carry, but still have to pay out of pocket for toilet paper. Both are necessities; money is fungible. Ought to be. Not sure how evilly Republican that ranks.
Out of all those things "The Revolution" is the very least likely to save you. Revolutions do not have strong track records when it comes to ushering in utopias and not just burning down whatever already exists.
But aanyways I think if retirement means sail a yacht or golf everyday or some other very expensive hobby very people humans who have ever lived have ever gotten that lucky. If it means spend time with friends playing dominos with friends or taking walks or something then it's much more attainable and basically what old people have always done if they aren't subsistence farmers.
Historically your options were "die young" and "live with extended family, raise grandkids, and have an active communal social life before dying old."
The latter ain't so bad and it never required much money.
Oh, I agree, but have learned that my socialist/Marxist/anarchist (sorry, they all kind of blend together) friends need that sort of false-consciousness hope or they just crumple into total giving-up despair. So I try not to pick straws out of their rafts, given that I'd prefer they keep existing as semi-functional human beings that are fun to hang out with. People need something to believe in, you know? (I've placed my faith in the Heart of <s>the Cards</s> Slow Incremental Capitalist Change, personally, but that's hells a boring and not a trendy identity flair. Things will work out, somehow.)
I think you make a good point about lifestyle inflation and reasonable expectations...out of almost every person I know, I've got a cheaper rent than anyone. But "cheap rent in SF" is still housing-burdened (e.g. costs more than 1/3 of income) for a low-end retail job. The others I know, yeah, some earn more than I do...but some don't, yet pay 50% or even more each month on rent. That...is not very much cushion to eke a retirement out of. Lotsa people grumble about moving cause The Rent Is Too Damn High, but it doesn't actually happen that often vs. complaint rate.
I know this is an economic mistake, which is the whole reason I put up with a shitty job near a dingy apartment, and try not to be tempted by costly city amenities...but...it's hard, man. Like in that mailbag question, I don't wanna only be able to afford to have fun when I'm no longer physically/mentally capable of enjoying it. It's lonely saving for mystical Retirementland when all your peers are out partying instead. Lonelier still once we're all old, and they move cause they're broke, and I don't follow. That's a real fear for me.
I actually ask this much more as a question than as a suggestion: I never understood why people try to live and work a lowish-wage job in a place like SF? Is it family or friend connections? Inertia and the difficulty of starting fresh? The culture of the place or a fear of the culture in Boise?
Again, I'm not saying it's a mistake because I don't have the facts and I can't walk a mile in another's shoes. It's just from an outsider's perspective it seems odd to me. FWIW I live in the rust belt and life is a lot easier here compared to when I lived in LA. And the amenities are not really all that different (but ymmv on that).
Can't speak for anyone else - for weird reasons I don't understand, the vast majority of my coworkers have always been from SoCal - but I was born and raised here. It's all I've ever known in life...not lucky enough to have friends or family elsewhere that'd be worth tearing up 30+ years of roots and habits for. Change is hard, I'm mobility-limited (can't drive), strong hand in Victim Card Poker which makes some locales intrinsically more dangerous than others, very limited resume with no education to speak of, yadda, yadda. Still on my first real job, honestly - checkered employment history, to put it mildly. Took a long time to get out of the NEET trap.
I *used to* have a plan regardless - the company I work for has branches in almost every state, and it's generally not too difficult to transfer, even cross-country. Once upon a time, in the Golden Age, employees were allowed to keep their current wage wherever they moved. So it was a real ladder of opportunity to get hired in one of the high-wage/high COL locations, earn some pay increases + company plaudits, and then transfer to a comfortable low-COL place on now-relatively-kingly wages. Lotsa folks used to do this...get hired in SF, bounce to Montana, buy a ranch or whatever. Sadly, like all Golden Ages, this one also ended...now, your post-transfer wage gets adjusted upwards *or* downwards based on the local minimum wage. So it makes more sense to move *to* SF than *away* from it.
Which is exactly nuts and backwards, as you say. Have yet to work out a new escape plan. SF's too rich for me, and too liberal...it's not the same quirky-left-libertarian place I grew up in, and I don't feel like I fit in/am wanted anymore. But it's hard to just up and leave, too.
"not lucky enough to have friends or family elsewhere that'd be worth tearing up 30+ years of roots and habits for"
Just chiming in that I feel like I'd like to see Matt Y (and economists at large) address this issue more squarely. Every so often Vox puts out something about how Americans aren't mobile enough and everyone needs to be an atomized individual and move to opportunity and whatnot, and I'm like "this all makes sense right up to the point where you assign exactly zero value to intrinsically location-based social capital. Can someone please take the time to put a number on that?"
Yep.
Case in point, even as a (yes, potential at the time as we were fresh out of school) high-SES family unit, my wife and I settled in Philadelphia when coming back/here from China because I had family ties which made settling in and job-hunting possible.
We're here now partly because of that, partly because she's established a locally-rooted career, partly because my work can be remote, and partly because of investment opportunities.
But if we, with $20k in the bank and graduate degrees, would have found a "move to opportunity" approach challenging right off the plane, then I can only imagine how difficult it is for people who don't have either.
> "not lucky enough to have friends or family elsewhere that'd be worth tearing up 30+ years of roots and habits for."
FWIW, as an academic, I've done this a few times (and am contemplating doing it again). It feels hard at first (and is!), but it's also *very* refreshing; you clear away so much built up crap from your life that you just put up with because it's comfortable. I even count some friends in this, who it turns out I can live perfectly fine without.
I kind of think more native Californians in situations like what you describe ought to move to Sacramento. It's relatively affordable, but still in California. And not a bad place to live: very diverse, has an NBA team, etc.
Yes, moving within CA is still a decent easier option, even as the whole state slowly bids up COL due to the densest richest parts being stubbornly NIMBY. Not too long ago, it was still feasible to live in Oakland or Berkeley or whatever and ride BART to work in SF...or Daly City, San Mateo, South San Francisco, etc. for driving. Less so now...plus giving up a 15 minute commute is a hard sell for me, haha. That's a real privilege that I'm gonna seriously miss when I change jobs/move.
But I think I'd rather move out of CA entirely, all things considered. Some parts are at the proper purplish-reddish level of cultural comfort, but they're...pretty empty. I might not be a city girl at heart, but I do like being around a decent number of people. More than a Dunbar Number "everyone knows everyone" size, not quite enough to always get lost in a crowd. (Packed-in-public-transit-like-sardines is too many.)
It's obvious and it goes without saying that you only need share this if you feel like it, but I'm curious enough to ask - what is your personal situation such that much of the country would be dangerous for you, and how much of the country do you think is significantly dangerous? I can't think of any type of person who seems to be in much danger based on their identity around where I live in a pretty typical area of the US. Of course, the major caveat is like I said before I can't say that for sure or truly speak for anyone else if our life experiences are different. So maybe I'm wrong. But that's my feel of the situation.
I guess this is why people frequently put such obvious Identity Politics cruft in their social media bios. Let's draw a couple cards: Transgender Woman, Chinese. The former has obvious safety and legal implications which I won't rehash here. The latter...didn't used to be so much a problem, but after covid, Hmmm. I grew up hearing stories from my parents about their time living in Atlanta before I was born. Cool place, one of the better Southern cities, amazing food, nice folks. Mostly...
But even back then, the race thing was just...you know. There's a different way of living when you visibly stand out in a way that can't be hidden at all, versus mostly fitting into the local phenotype. Part of why I live in SF is to avoid that low-grade daily stress - Asians are the second or third-biggest minority group here, no one gives a shit. It's just nice to be around My People, whether I participate in that culture or not. Unfortunately, most of the Chinese diaspora communities set up shop in what later became high-COL areas, so this is another difficulty. I guess there's Vancouver, but that's international moving, a whole other layer of hassle...
Ultimately I know it must sound like a list of excuses to avoid making the rational economic choice. But these things really are important, and hard to quantify into the unit of caring. There are lower-COL places which have many of the same benefits, in kind if not degree, yet tradeoffs abound. Always. Moving's just harder the more tradeoffs one has to make. (If I'd stayed in New York during college years rather than moving back home, there's a good chance I'd have set my life up there instead...at 18 it's so much easier to just pack up and leave it all behind. Sunk cost fallacy, I suppose.)
avalancheGenesis should of course speak for themselves but not being able to drive would very significantly impair one's ability to do things in like 95% of the US, and is at least arguably dangerous in places that do not have adequate pedestrian infrastructure (which isn't quite 95% of the US, but is still a whole lot of it).
I will add that, as someone from a VHCOL city who is married to someone from another VHCOL city, I do find the whole "just move to the Rust Belt/Houston/wherever!" thing kind of insulting. Most people who live in NYC or the Bay Area or Boston or DC or LA are not there because they need to be close to cool cafes or because they're afraid of evil MAGAs or something. They're there because that's where they're from, or maybe because of work. I don't think moving potentially thousands of miles away from everyone you know in exchange for maybe being able to afford a house is a great life plan for most people.
Not saying that you are specifically making that argument, but this is just a pet peeve of mine! Also part of why I'm a YIMBY.
I think MY’s answer on the establishment clause seriously misses the mark. To participate in Christian school prayer can go directly against the religious teachings of some minority students. This means they would be forced to seek an exemption, which, even if granted, socially isolates them from their peers. This kind of visible marking out of said minority students as different, potentially from a very young age, can’t be simply dismissed as “not a big deal”. Alternatively , those minority students might be tempted to go against their own religious doctrines in order to fit in. A third option is that they will have to withdraw from public school altogether. None of this is in line with pluralism or the logic of the first amendment as understood for decades. It’s a very sad day for America.
In principle I agree fully, but in practice I thought his answer was pretty accurate. I went to elementary school in a small town and I and a couple of Jehovah's Witness kids were the only ones who didn't participate in classroom Christmas, Easter, etc, activities. It was no big deal, and even gave us a bit of superiority over the other kids because they all thought Santa was real, whereas we knew they were just gullible. But don't mistake what I'm saying as support for prayers and other religious observations in public school.
You may have taken it that way, others won’t. We also don’t know how the majority group took it when considering you. I think we’ll agree that the fact that some come out fine (even better off!) with this kind of structural ostracizing hardly justifies it.
"Because assholes have lots of ways of making you feel uncomfortable regardless of the rules, and kind people can make everyone feel included, even if there are crucifixes on the wall."
Just a relevant line from Matt's answer.
That’s hardly the point though. The question is to whom does the public sphere belong? Is this a Christian nation in which everyone else can just hope to do ok because the majority won’t be assholes towards them, or is this a secular nation in which everyone is on an equal footing and people may or may not be assholes individually but the state itself does not take sides?
Strong upvote. In today's world it gets missed a lot that most of the plaintiffs from the great separation of church and state cases from the mid-20th century were not atheists, but devout practitioners of minority religions. If schools are insistent in bringing back Christian rituals of the most common variant, this shit will hit the fan once again.
Kennedy v. Bremerton is still nowhere near a blanket permission for school prayer--the media overhyped it a lot because of the Dobbs background, it wasn't exceptional versus the mine run of other recent SCOTUS religious liberty cases
It’s a step in that direction. We’re debating the principle itself. Why we need the establishment clause anyway and what is the danger in its erosion of any with regards to public schools. I’m aware that we have reached rock bottom of the slippery slope yet, and I hope we never will, but I don’t think it’s crazy to think we may get closer and closer with the composition of this court and the precedents being set in recent years.
Research funding: It is true that overhead charges are high and growing, but that does not mean that "... about a third of all grant money doesn't go toward scientific research."
(*) Universities do actually incur very substantial overhead costs. You could argue that they are not 58%, but they are not zero, or anywhere close to it. To avoid having to list the costs, I will simply ask you to look at how other countries handle this. The US rates are simply not that different from those in many European countries with much more streamlined systems.
(*) Whatever the "fair" percentage is, you need to allow universities some profit margin. This incentivizes administrators to support successful research, and sustains a high level of competitiveness in the system. Remember that the vast majority of proposals are not funded.
(*) The fact that there is a profit margin gives the feds leverage to steer the direction of university research. For instance, some disciplines shrink (e.g. aerospace) and some grow (e.g. AI, biotech), and the US government wants universities to be attentive to its preferences.
(*) An important reason that overhead keeps going up is that the government keeps ratcheting up the cost of "compliance" with federal rules and laws - Title IX, ADA, research on human subjects, etc. The feds do not want to dial this back, and with that being the case, somebody needs to pay for it.
Having said all that, I do think there is a strong case for trying to stop the upwards creep. I would welcome a freeze or a ceiling, but I would want to federal government to compensate for this by doing a very serious overhaul of the regulatory system. This stuff is out of control, in a way that differentiates the US from our competitors. Universities should not be forced to hire legions of lawyers and compliance officers.
Do we have a great Navy? Hasn't the Navy had several ships crash in recent years, the proximate causes of which were all "no one knows how to navigate anymore"?
The Navy's problems are best understood as "rode hard, put away wet". For a hundred years (literally), the big tension between the US Navy and various European powers has been that the USN runs everything ragged while the European fleets largely baby the hardware and so tend to have it in better condition, but less tested.
I think both sides have persuasive arguments here, but fundamentally the USN needs more sailors and more sleep.
long thread here, lotta comments. Pretty clear that Matt owes us a deep dive on the Navy.
I think getting a guest column by bean of SSC / ACX or just directing people to relevant posts on navalgazing.net would also be good options.
Yeah the navy is a fairly poor example. We have a lot of tonnage and firepower but in terms of actual executive competence it's not particularly great.
Maybe an example could be NASA -- its a very cautious and risk averse agency which leads to cost overruns and delays but at the very least they do manage to do very impressive things without failing all the time.
Yes, US Navy needs improvement
Several inexcusable crashes
Fat Leonard scandal
China catching up fast on hulls
Era of unchallenged pre-eminence (since end of cold war) is about to end. We will need more ships and more sailors.
More reason we need one billion Americans.
I guess my question would be, if not us, then who?
It seems entirely plausible that we still have the best Navy -- largely due to spending a ton and specific technical advancements. But also that in relative terms our load over other nations has substantially declined.
I think our relative lead in the Navy is still broadly uncontested at least on a hulls level (we have 11 aircraft carriers. The nations with the next-most are all tied at 2) but the management and staffing (especially for the surface warfare fleet) have a poor rep and low morale relative to their sister branches which leads to serious questions about warfighting capacity even without an actual live conflict (most acutely reified in the Pacific collisions, which AFAICT are symptomatic of constant unreasonable schedule demands and inadequate staffing by the Seventh Fleet as much as any individual failures.)
The narrative (as an outside observer with *far less* information than anyone currently in service) seems to be that the brass for whatever reason are always incentivized to say "Yes, we can do this" to their superiors even as mission demands become ever more intense[1] --presumably because confessing to inadequacies in the fleet under their command is a bad look career-wise -- and then the shit continues to roll downhill with eventually catastrophic consequences. It's also illuminating to look at the general tenor of discussion on the r/navy subreddit vs that of the other branches--there's always going to be something to complain about in military service (or any other occupation) but I think the naval discussion tends to view the organizational dysfunction as a bit more entrenched and impossible to fix, although the most immediate problem for the Seventh Fleet seems to be "too much mission scope, not enough personnel" which is conceptually just a resources problem. Maybe we should start paying people more to be stuck in a relatively small world unto itself away from anyone else for months at a time....
The Air Force is often derided as having a more corporatized, golf-playing leadership (hence "Chair Force") but dang if they haven't gotten pretty good at blowing stuff up when and where we want them to. Probably a better example for MY to point to than the navy at this exact moment in time.
[1] e.g. due to Chinese aggression in the South China Sea.
Ongoing Littoral whatever ship fiasco
But we don’t have much competition
"...we don’t have much competition"
?!?
Did you see the tonnage that the PLAN put around Taiwan the other week? They are absolutely competing, and making no bones about it. We don't have much time to respond, or they'll overtake us.
The problem is more analogous to the UK leafing up to WWI. They had the best Navy, but it was unclear if they could stay big enough to beat Germany everywhere. The Germans were too cautious, but probably could have attacked the brits in the north sea more effectively early on.
China is building for dominance in the South China Sea and we want to keep shipping lanes open everywhere. We definitely have a bigger lift.
Yes we seem overmatched already but hey that makes us number 2 worldwide!
Potentially all these big boats are an outdated liability anyway but I don’t have the expertise to say and doubt we are going to counter China with some new cost effective, status quo busting way of war so we should probably try to step things up
They put a lot around Taiwan for sure, but when Pelosi visited Taiwan we not only sent the USS Ronald Reagan through the Taiwan Strait, but also a smaller amphibious assault ship. This is important because those smaller ships can still carry a lot of planes, but are also smaller targets for China's missiles.
Yes, and that is before considering the Navy’s dork-ed ship building program.
Anyone have any bright ideas on how to improve American's interest in policy? Matt's description of Swiss people as basically knowing the standard arguments for and against a policy, even if they hadn't thought too critically about them, seems almost laughably utopian by American standards.
I was a high school debate coach for a while and it's quite good at getting a certain sort of politically-minded kid to think deeply about policy instead of just horse race stuff and elections, but I've almost never observed it taking a teenager who had 0 interest in politics and turn them into someone who even moderately cares. And we had a number of those kids because they were shoved into our debate class by guidance!
I think "Americans' interest in policy" has likely increased a lot since arrival of the internet and Fox/MSNBC+political chat shows (Colbert, Stewart, etc). This is especially so since social media got going. There's been a lot written about "politics as an avocation" in recent times. Both Matt and his former colleague Ezra Klein have written about this phenomenon, I think.
Sure, some of that additional interest is focused on just the horse-race stuff. But not all of it.
To clarify: I think one strand of thought sometimes raised by popularists is that we might actually be better off if more people were normies.
Nontrivial numbers of Americans can apparently now cogently discuss such engrossing topics as budget reconciliation rules, community rating, or the Independent Legislature doctrine.
America wasn't always like this. It's far from clear on net it's an improvement.
I think that Steve ballmers main philanthropy may be involved in making government figures and programs more transparent? Sounds boring but good maybe? I think pushing progressive donors to fund small issue stuff (how good are trash pick ups and highways and dmv service in different places) rather than big issues (climate change, racism) may help? Get people more aware of worrying about how well the institutions are doing their jobs rather than the bigger picture of what their job should be defined as.
talk about it more, maybe. mail people cards with pros and cons bullet points
I have done a few diets (I’m on one now!) and I sort of think of them like gambling. When I go to Vegas I always set aside some amount of money for “entertainment” and that includes cash for gambling. I spend the money and have fun, I don’t really worry about what I’m losing because I’ve agreed that there is a limit that is acceptable.
When I do a diet I know the odds are low that it will help with all the health things I want. Some of this is due to the actual scientific data behind the diet and some is due to my failure to adhere completely to the rules of the diet. So I don’t expect any diet to be a miracle but as long as it helps me feel a little better I don’t stress about the scale in the morning.
That’s been helpful for me and has led to overall better health in recent years. Through all the diets the only thing that seems to consistently led to losing weight is low carbs and a moderate amount of consistent calorie restriction.