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[Reelya]

The next generation (well, the millenials) is already starting to take over, but it probably will take three or four more cycles before they start hitting leadership positions. That’ll also be about the same time post-millennials start getting elected.

However, i wouldn't pull all eggs in the generational-change basket. The boomers were the flower-children generation, said exactly the same stuff, if you recall. Most millenials and post-millenials have huge eco-footprints and most of their efforts to reduce their footprints amount to merely window-dressing. For example cutting down on plastic bags doesn't really do jack shit when your consumption patterns are largely the same.

Generally there is a shift in attitudes, but it's not correlated to aging directly, it's related to ending up with mortgages and children, and then worrying about whether you'll be taken care of in your old age after that. If there's a divide between Boomers and Gen-X, the divide is because a lot more Gen-Xers never got married and had kids, and are much more likely to be renting rather than locked in with a mortgage. If you do some sort of economic New Deal type thing that makes things economically easier for most people, this won't cut consumption, it will be an upwards pressure on consumption working directly against conservation efforts. So no, generational change isn't going to magically make this easier. There will still be competing pressures of trying to ensure everyone has enough, vs trying to conserve resources.

Consider that the millenials who will be in charge once they're the age of the boomers are not going to be the same type of millenials who are at the forefront of opinion at the moment. This is the pattern you see repeated with each generation.

EDIT:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/news/a-rich-american-household-typically-produces-more-carbon-dioxide-emissions-each-year-from-driving-than-the-entire-carbon-footprint-of-a-poor-household-over-8-months/
This article points out that while rich households produce more total CO2 emissions, the CO2 emissions per dollar income are actually lower. So, income redistribution from rich to poor, while good for GDP growth, and thus the economy, is actually bad news for CO2 emissions. It should be no surprise that things that boost GDP growth are generally bad for the environment. That's not a reason not to improve income equality, but the bad news is that taxes such as a carbon tax are actually regressive since they have more impact, percentage-wise, on a poor person's income than a rich person's.

[wobbly]

I don't think the boomers were ever really the flower children. Hippies were always outnumbered in conservative America. Though I guess you could say the same with Millenials.

[SalmonGod]

I don't think the boomers were ever really the flower children. Hippies were always outnumbered in conservative America. Though I guess you could say the same with Millenials.

Yeah... Boomers like to claim the flower children of the 60's as a collective legacy because the musical culture of the day ended up leaving a fond legacy.  But it's just as disingenuous for them to do that as it would be for every millennial to claim they spent time camping with the Occupy protests.

As for the economic/resource-consumption stuff... the key is capitalism's gotta go.  The structural apparatus which drives everyone into unfulfilling lifestyles of drudgery and then tricks them into believing they can fill the void with products that do nothing to functionally improve their life experience.

[Reelya]

Yep, that could mean just about anything. Are you advocating more like Sweden, or Cuba.

Because Sweden is technically a capitalist country. Even in places like Sweden they have to make sure that they don't give the welfare recipients too much, it has to be less than a reasonable few hours of work will get you, so there is still enforced scarcity to keep the economy ticking over, since it's the employed workers at capitalist companies who make the surpluses that are then used to feed/house those who can't or won't work.

And in Cuba, you work, or else.

EDIT: I'll also point out that what we had before capitalism was no picnic, exactly. you spent your life mucking out the few pigs you own, eating potatoes from the scant bit of land you own. you probably lived with the pigs in your front room, and you got lighting from candles you made with the pig fat from slaughtering the baby pigs you eat for protein, to read some hand-written book if you were really lucky to have that. And you had 17 children because that was the amount you had to have to make sure enough survive long enough to tend you in your old age, which was like 40 or so.

Having ennui because your office job isn't satisfying and the 6000 video games and 10000 movies you have on demand have started to pale, is not capitalism crushing the human soul.

[The Ensorceler]

That classless subsistence farming on land you own thing seems... fairly weird and ahistorical. If you can stick a date and region on that that'd be great. I'm pretty sure it's never been all farmers without an upper class above them. Because, uh, abolishing money/capital movement doesn't do shit if you entrench the class system, you just get feudalism/fascism/degenerate capitalism/USSR "communism". These systems might arrive at their end through different means, but creating an absolute class structure is pretty widely regarded as A Bad Thing (except feudalism, not sure why it gets more romanticizing when it's no different). 'Ending capitalism' is about attacking the opposite, breaking down the class systems.

Similarly, I'm not sure why you think that post-capitalism means people will all stop working. For one, it's fairly well established that people generally like being useful and for another... if nobody works everyone fuckin dies? That pressure exists, no matter the method of transmission. Ideally, though, people would be free not to be *over*worked or abused. Enough productivity to sustain things should be enough, without endless profit- and rent-seeking. This isn't that hard, people are really productive with all the force multiplying tech and specialization built up. There is not at all a need to put everyone on tiny farm lots or whatever.

[Reelya]

Historically, it wasn't the norm under feudalism that all farmers only worked land for the lord:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_Middle_Ages

In a survey of seven English counties in 1279
...
Thirty-two percent of arable land was held by the lord of the manor. The farmers of the manor were required to work for a specified number of days per year on the lord's land or to pay rent to the lord on the land they farmed.

So typically, a lord held about 1/3rd of the land directly, and you work for him a certain number of days, which is part of your rent for your personally allocated land. The main note here is that the lord isn't paying you or feeding you from the land you're working from him, you're expected to feed yourself from your allocated family land, and you may be taxed based on your production. it's not fundamentally different to owning a plot of land under capitalism. You still pay land rates and taxes to the owner of the land - the state. "ownership" is still a lease.

But what I really meant by the "scant bit of land" is that in the worst-case scenario, even the poorest peasant had a small garden plot near their house. It wasn't worth anyone's effort to police what you grow right on the doorstep of your hovel (and if they did, they'd be responsible for feeding you then). if you were poor and you had even a couple of square foot of mud as spare space, you'd be growing something there.

[McTraveller]

I almost think we don't have a good definition of what "poor" means.  In the example above, it seems like the "poor" has a shelter and a small piece of land on which to be able to generate wealth (even if it is a very small amount).

This fits into the discussions about capitalism and socialism and the class divide I think.  My own personal definition of poverty is "inability to obtain, maintain possession of, or generate wealth; or the inability to provide or receive services"  This is a low bar, and it doesn't talk at all about an absolute value of wealth.  That is, I don't make a distinction between only being able to maintain a 100 square foot shack as being poor compared to a 2000 square foot house.  The rationale is that some people only want a 100 square foot shack, and such a thing can be well kept.  It also purposely avoids the concepts of money and debt, although those may be mechanisms which contribute to poverty.

So I look at how policies impact each of those 5 categories:
1. Does a policy make it more or less difficult to obtain durable goods?
2. Does a policy make it more or less difficult to keep a durable good, when you already have it?
3. Does a policy make it more or less difficult to start or continue a wealth-producing activity?
4. Does a policy make it more or less difficult to provide a service?
5. Does a policy make it more or less difficult to receive services?

There are lots of policies that have clear "make it easier or more difficult" distinction. Some are much less clear or convoluted.  Environmental policies are this indirect type - environmental policies today may make it more difficult  (easier) to do things today, but statistically make it easier (more difficult) to do them in the future.

Take this one that I ran into yesterday:  I needed to replace a 10 year old TV that died ("need" here means avoid revolt from my wife and children). The general policy of most stores around here are to charge me $25 to recycle the old one.  Now I talked to the manager and had the fee waived because I bought a new TV from his store.  But what kind of signals are we sending to people to charge them money to recycle this waste? This encourages people to dump.

[Virtz]

Similarly, I'm not sure why you think that post-capitalism means people will all stop working. For one, it's fairly well established that people generally like being useful and for another... if nobody works everyone fuckin dies? That pressure exists, no matter the method of transmission. Ideally, though, people would be free not to be *over*worked or abused. Enough productivity to sustain things should be enough, without endless profit- and rent-seeking. This isn't that hard, people are really productive with all the force multiplying tech and specialization built up. There is not at all a need to put everyone on tiny farm lots or whatever.

It might be because IRL communism (or "USSR communism" as you've named it), where people are not properly rewarded for the work they do, ends up being really shitty and substandard overall because people don't care to work harder and don't understand the value of public property. I know this because I am from a country that employed this approach, created generations of lazy fuckwits in certain state-supported industries, and spawned some bits of wisdom like "whether you're standing or lying down, 2000 is due".

Sure, there's always people who have a work ethic and will try to uphold whatever system is in place, but much like there's always criminals who don't care about your laws, there's also people who will do the bare minimum to sustain themselves if the system allows it, and a system where it's really easy means a lot more of such people, particularly among those that grow up in this system. These people just drag everybody else down, cause how much can you struggle to uphold a community where people don't understand the value of public property even though they greatly benefit from it?

[scriver]

Similarly, I'm not sure why you think that post-capitalism means people will all stop working. For one, it's fairly well established that people generally like being useful and for another... if nobody works everyone fuckin dies? That pressure exists, no matter the method of transmission. Ideally, though, people would be free not to be *over*worked or abused. Enough productivity to sustain things should be enough, without endless profit- and rent-seeking. This isn't that hard, people are really productive with all the force multiplying tech and specialization built up. There is not at all a need to put everyone on tiny farm lots or whatever.

It might be because IRL communism (or "USSR communism" as you've named it), where people are not properly rewarded for the work they do

Pardon, but in your description of USSR communism, you also describes capitalism

[Virtz]

Similarly, I'm not sure why you think that post-capitalism means people will all stop working. For one, it's fairly well established that people generally like being useful and for another... if nobody works everyone fuckin dies? That pressure exists, no matter the method of transmission. Ideally, though, people would be free not to be *over*worked or abused. Enough productivity to sustain things should be enough, without endless profit- and rent-seeking. This isn't that hard, people are really productive with all the force multiplying tech and specialization built up. There is not at all a need to put everyone on tiny farm lots or whatever.

It might be because IRL communism (or "USSR communism" as you've named it), where people are not properly rewarded for the work they do

Pardon, but in your description of USSR communism, you also describes capitalism

Perhaps I should've said "lack of punishment for the work they don't do or do shitty". The sort of sorry work performance rampant in communist times would get you fired in most places in a modern capitalist country. Like regularly-arriving-to-work-drunk levels of disregard for work ethic.

[Doomblade187]

It should be noted that industry is much more efficient now: issues that may have been present with suitable production of quality levels 20 years ago now are less problematic.

[sluissa]

Once you run into the situation where you don't have enough jobs for everyone to do without making up dumb busywork that's not productive anyway, then you're actually better off just letting the lazy people not work. The sorts of people who are going to do the minimum to get by are going to be doing the minimum in whatever job they're doing as well. Might as well just give that job to someone who wants to work.

[Virtz]

Once you run into the situation where you don't have enough jobs for everyone to do without making up dumb busywork that's not productive anyway, then you're actually better off just letting the lazy people not work. The sorts of people who are going to do the minimum to get by are going to be doing the minimum in whatever job they're doing as well. Might as well just give that job to someone who wants to work.

Point is if you encourage this, you'll invite a culture of not bothering to do more, and consequently get more people with zero motivation to ever even try anything. Considering these people would do little other than multiply and make more individuals with a similar lack of motivation, I do not see this being very sustainable in the long run, and once things got really bad economically, it'd be very difficult to get rid of after being ingrained in society for a couple generations. Somewhat like the mindset is still ingrained in some people in former communist bloc countries.

As for pointless jobs, that's usually the result of mismanagement. They didn't start appearing in communist bloc countries because everything was perfect compared to everywhere else in the world, but rather because the governments were notoriously bad at gauging needs. Living standards here were never even close to those of the US or Western Europe.

[PTTG??]

It's not really a choice. We are inevitably going to reach a point where automation replaces more jobs than it generates. This will create a massive class of people with no value to the economy.

It is hard to predict precisely where the dividing line will fall. Maybe teachers will be harder to replace than doctors; maybe lawyers will exist but not engineers, or vice versa. Heck, it may even be that white-collar jobs are easier to replace than labor-intensive blues.

To know how our society treats the economically useless, we need only look at the nearest streetcorner, or under overpasses, or at park benches studded with metal so that it's impossible to sleep on them.

Forget about theories of social justice and equality. Forget about maximizing GDP or even gross domestic happiness. Ask yourself if you think it's worth preparing for a society where you or your children will be cast off as useless at best, a pest to be exterminated at worst.

[McTraveller]

Once you run into the situation where you don't have enough jobs for everyone to do without making up dumb busywork that's not productive anyway, then you're actually better off just letting the lazy people not work. The sorts of people who are going to do the minimum to get by are going to be doing the minimum in whatever job they're doing as well. Might as well just give that job to someone who wants to work.

This kind of makes me wonder what the equilibrium standard of living would be if you forced everyone to have an equal share of society's outputs. What fraction of the population would still be willing to work to increase standard of living?  Or put another way, what is the allowable wealth/income gap to incentivize a sufficient portion of the population to work?

How do you even avoid class divides in the nonworking population, since let's say you were willing to provide them all with say toilets.  Even if you give them all the same model of toilet, some of them will get said toilet earlier than others.  So the "early recipients" will have a higher standard of living than the late recipients.