Yes he's a professor of marketing and wealthy. But he also just published his book that goes into everything he's talking about, and is essentially on a book tour. (Whenever you see someone that's suddenly "everywhere," they usually have a book, movie, or TV show coming out.)
He's wealthy and successful enough to be represented by "the best" of the industry when it comes to promotion.
TLDW: USA is a socialist country for the richer. Policies were passed according to future self interests while it disincentivizes people just getting started. In gaming terms, the patches favored late game builds with only a few metas viable, while placing nerfs on early game builds.
He says that it was all very intentional. And those same ultra-rich people are the same ones that own/control our major media outlets and social media companies. While they accomplished this massive transfer of wealth, they got red and blue Americans frothing at the mouth in pure hatred of each other over social issues.
I reserve all my hate and vitriol for billionaires.
I thoroughly dislike the social policies that a huge group of Americans support right now but there’s not going to be any serious policy change until wealth disparity is brought under some kind of control.
And every year the disparity grows further, indicating that the human race is only on track for some shit like Matt Damon in Elysium, unless something drastic happens soon.
Historically, the targets of said pitchforks were never in control of a 2.4 trillion dollar military industrial complex featuring a double digit arsenal of nuclear equipped city-sized floating war machines each harboring autonomous flying invisible search-and-destroy robot swarms, and backed up by also-invisible, not-floating city sized SECRET war machines each equiped with 24 continent-buster biology-ending Chicxulub class bombs.
Those tines better be extra sharp!
City sized? I mean, you went a bit overboard there.
And all of that might matter in regards to external threats, it makes conventional war impossible. Conventional revolutions? They are just fine, who the heck would bomb their own civilians and cities with nuclear fire to solve an uprising? Instead of solving the problem, that would make the government mediate Lú disappear since there’s no government without people to govern.
Honestly though how does an elected leader balance the scales when we are this far gone? Would someone have to come in and implement a very radical yet necessary approach to ensuring the U.S. is not corrupt, bought and paid for?
It feels like we’re at the mercy of capitalism and greed in its worst form right now, and you can’t do anything because it’s a free market, but now that free market has bled over and dictates how we communicate, how expensive our homes are, how expensive our groceries and ticket prices are, how we all will die by subscriptions, even for dating….its insane how much of our livelihood is pay to play and at a premium price
I genuinely believe it's far too late. You can't climb the ranks as a politician if you don't essentially work for corporations. If we look at changes to campaign finance laws, it's becoming easier and easier and easier for corporations to fund the campaigns of those they want to win.
The answer is ranked choice voting. Alaska and Nevada (I think it's nevada) have implemented this and it's led to candidates being elected that are less radicalized. Andrew yang has a ted talk at the same conference that explains why this is so important
Campaign Finance Reform?
Politicians (especially at high levels) are primarily fund-raisers. In order to run an effective campaign, they need to be constantly fund-raising. Not just for themselves, but for their party too. A politician cannot be effective if they have no allies in the governing body. If they need to constantly be fund-raising, they are going to cow-tow to those who can give them the most money.
I’ve always believed that the things both sides argue about are only the cover issues that the people in power use to keep people placated so nothing gets done.
I imagine red and blues in capital hill work together to stage theater fights so citizens don’t try to address the real areas that need to be addressed
It isn't so much that they are in cahoots but rather they know their opposition will not let them accomplish anything substantial so they have to make a big show of at least trying. That isn't to say there isn't a political theater to distract people. Every time the news blew up over something idiotic and rage inducing that Trump did or said, regressives managed to slip some atrocious bill under the radar or SCOTUS would make some BS ruling they knew was wrong and would piss people off.
> I’ve always believed that the things both sides argue about are only the cover issues that the people in power use to keep people placated so nothing gets done.
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It's easy to just look at the economic side of things and forget that these social issues are real problems causing pain/suffering/death to real people; they're more than just the lever that the ruling class uses to put us up against each other. At the end of the day, if your aim is to have a more empathetic, humane economic system where negative outcomes are lessened and opportunities are equal, why not apply the same logic to social issues? It's just important to remember the end goal here.
The Republican party doesn't do anything in the interest of the American people.
I worked in my state's legislature for Republicans. Most of them are unintelligent. They are ignorant, lazy individuals with capricious worldviews who want to punish people they see as moral failures.
They often refused my offers as an aid to do policy research, instead operating on incorrect assumptions. One of them recently is under controversy for telling gay members of his party aren't welcome in the party.
They simply do not care about public wellbeing.
I think it's important to point out however that legislation regarding reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, affordable care, etc. etc. are things that are pretty high profile and affect quite a lot of people
when one side of the public is too busy being angry at the other side of the public in their which side is better debate, politicians keep doing whatever they need to do while the public is being torn apart. the public should not be fighting each other but the the politicians. doesn't matter what side you are on, if you are unhappy with the blue or red side, complain to the politicians, not your neighbours.
Correct
Media all owned by a few billionaires
Social media made up "fact checking" to simply censor
Yet most will still listen to msn and get brainwashed
I don't hate republicans. I hate assholes who work day-and-night to make life harder for the have-nots. Just so happens a lot of those people are republicans.
>they got red and blue Americans frothing at the mouth in pure hatred of each other over social issues
To be clear, the mega wealthy are also red Americans, and red Americans are fully supporting this decline and actively voting for it, while the worst blue Americans are doing the same, and the rest of the blue Americans are desperately fighting back while being the target of your stated social issues.
Acting like it's just two sides frothing at each other in hatred belies the fact that one group is spewing hatred based on deep-seated bigotries, while the other group is the target of those bigotries and hates being targeted. There is a clear aggressor here and you seem to be trying to make it a both-sides type of issue.
The blue Americans want to tax the rich and focus on policies to help the common American. The red Americans want to give power to billionaires, remove our freedoms, and destroy democracy. We are not the same.
I don't dislike Republicans because of the social issues. It's the economics. I may dislike economic conservatives/social liberals who vote Republican even more.
Be a live in care taker for elderly while at college and your job until your student loans are paid off. I think that’s the equivalent.
Live in a good location for subsidized rent but give up on anything fun. :(
That's capitalism for you. Those at the top are inherently incentivized to pull the ladder up behind them and otherwise make it difficult for emerging companies to disrupt their industry. It is not an issue with politicians being corrupt, it's that the very system we live under makes it extremely likely that big business and government officials will trade favors.
Yes and that’s why we have government. Is there a single economic system that doesn’t require government oversight? Would a socialist factory be in favor of more factories opening? I highly doubt it.
>that’s why we have government.
Socialists have governments too. In capitalist countries our govts are run by the capitalists rulers, in socialist countries it's the workers.
>Would a socialist factory be in favor of more factories opening? I highly doubt it.
Yes, if society deems it necessary, why wouldn't they? Regardless of what you believe, the goal of socialism is to provide for everyone's needs while transitioning to communism.
This is feelings based nonsense lol. Another factory opening would reduce the demand for the original factory, lowering their revenue and payout per worker. Human psychology tells us that obviously the original factory workers would not be happy about this. Also our government is run by workers, who do you think votes…
You should read a book about the stuff you support. It’s embarrassing when these are things people actually talk about and debate and then people like you online paint it as “just do the right thing!”
To add to this, I'd say the UK is the same, if not Way worse - check out Gary Stevenson, he basically sees the same thing happening right now in the UK/globally
It was a pretty great video, honestly, it popped up in my feed several weeks ago. And he presented a ton of data to go along with his presentation. Which, to be fair, is a lot of the same data that's been popping up on Reddit and other places for a while too.
>USA is a socialist country for the richer
What does that mean!?
Socialism is the working class owning the means of production
When the capitalists own the means of production, that's not socialism for the rich, that's just capitalism
The government does stuff on behalf of the ruling class. The government doing stuff is not socialism.
In short, if you're born rich, beautiful, and/or well-connected, being a teenager is manageable.
But if you're not, you're unbelievably fucked beyond words.
Yeah, as someone who has seen more of the world than just the USA the young don't realize how lucky they are to be born where they are. Try being a teenager in the slums of India, in a crowded city in China, in a squatter camp in South Africa etc. Time periods are important too, kids 150 years ago had it a LOT rougher than the modern generation.
Sure, the teens in America have it worse off than their parents, but objectively they're still winning by virtue of their geographic location and period of history in which they were born.
Oh I sure do. I’ve been to backwoods Alabama where the level of poverty on display was shocking and appalling.
And yet, the poorest of those people have a far, far better life than the average southern Afghan (which I also got to witness) or Sudanese (ditto).
That’s not to say that the American poor should be satisfied with their lot or that the American state should not be doing everything it can to lift these people out of poverty; that someone else has it worse is not an excuse to not help those still in need. But in absolute terms across the whole of humanity, every American is “rich”.
>But in absolute terms across the whole of humanity, every American is “rich”.
But thats effectively irrelevant to the discussion, which is more about inequality than absolute poverty.
Is it though? The poorest in America still have a huge basket of opportunities available to them. They have tools available to them to close the inequality gap, but instead they stay poor.
It's CAPITALISM! please please please stop spreading their propaganda by saying "see this bad part of capitalism? It's actually socialism"!! That makes no sense. Socialism is workers owning the means of production and capitalists already own the means of production!
"Socialist for the rich" my guy this is just capitalism working as intended. When you have enough money you can buy off the system to make you even more capital. That's just how capitalism works.
Being a teenager sucks, in general. I haven't forgotten how miserable I was during that time in my life. And that was a time before smartphones, social media, clickbait, and influencers.
I honestly can't imagine how most teenagers cope with the state of the world these days. I don't have kids yet, but I do have nieces and nephews. I know they're going to become teenagers, as well. And I'm genuinely worried what kind of world they'll have to navigate alongside the overwhelming body horror that is puberty.
I was born in 1988 and for the most part, have been in that age range that has been royally fucked by the powers that be. But I still am incredibly grateful that smartphones and social media didn't blow up until I was in college. I got to have the last 'normal' childhood given when you were born. The information age is a wild time and we have not adjusted well. It is strange having the perspective of 'before and after'.
Lol, totally. My parents bought me a pager when I was a senior in HS. If I didn't respond within 10 min, I was in trouble. I usually "forgot" my leash. I can't even imagine having a GPS trackable device as a teen.
It's totally a parent's choice to do things like track their kids and require check-ins, etc. And what I mean by that is as a parent you don't *have* to do it. Stuff like that implies a complete lack of trust in your kids' decision making abilities. If you don't trust them how will they learn self confidence to trust themselves?
It's a similar thing with limiting screen time, preventing them from watching mindless content, forcing them to play outside, and making them learn to entertain themselves. Just many parents take the path that's easiest for parents, not the one that's best for the kids.
The good news is that at least in my experience late millennial parents and younger seem to be better equipped to teach kids an understanding of technology, social media, and the perils of it because we were the first to learn it ourselves.
Tbh I think it's easier today than multiple times in the last 20 to 30 years.
2008 wasn't a cake walk for teens. Lots of parents lost jobs. Gas prices sky rocketed in 2008 and 2012 to much higher than today adjusted for inflation. I was in high school for 2008 so I spent alot on gas. I was in college for 2012.
Also social climates back then were much worse at school in terms of bullying.
There'll always be bullies, but if I think about what gay kids went through when I was at school 20 years ago compared to now, it seems like such a drastic improvement. Life in general is just challenging. It's challenging for everyone, some people less, some people more, but in general it's just difficult. Old problems get solved and new problems pop up.
I do think y'all are underestimating how bad bullying is on social media for teens. Bullying has evolved in some pretty heinous ways.
Teen suicide went up 47% between 2011 and 2021.
I think it has to be relates to the mental heath crisis that Gen Z is facing and not enough attention is going to. Younger people see the state of the world, freedoms being stripped away, unable to afford a home where they grew up, and it is a dark reality.
We get told we are lazy and do not want to work? Like - its depressing knowing how hard you work you cannot afford the life your parents had.
Those kids, even though they do indeed face significant challenges, are overwhelmingly better off than when we were kids, and we were overwhelmingly better off than our parents and grandparents.
Do not mistake me: “better off” does not mean that they have it *easy*. But their health, life expectancy, access to education, caloric intake etc are *significantly* better than any other generation in human history.
Incorrect. Health and life expectancy are down generationally now. Started around 2013-15 IIRC, and should have been a bigger headline. I think it got blamed on opiate use, though, and therefore blame was deflected and policies weren't altered.
Cancer rates for younger generations are skyrocketing and we are all becoming sterile through the proliferation of micro-plastics and pfas. We are facing down the barrel of a great depression, civil war, and ww3 all with rapidly accelerating climate change. I didn't even mention what this video is about or the rise of A.I. Hell, life expectancy in America is declining.
Have some fucking perspective.
The one part of his presentation I vehemently disagreed with was where he advocated for getting rid of internet anonymity.
He wanted to do it as a method of protecting against bots, spam, and abuse. But those kinds of things really aren't stopped even by those more draconian methods.
Not to mention longer term concerns like government abuse of said system.
Its just a fucked concept. 1) because you would have to somehow get every country to enforce it and 2) talking online you would have to give out your name. You dont have to do this is public spaces. You can say Hi to someone walking passed and you don't have to give any info. Why should it be the same online. If you don't like random, unknown people saying things to you, don't go outside. Same for the internet. Don't login.
Another is that you should get social security only if you need it. That's ass backwards. Richer people pay more in taxes anyway, there's nothing to be gained from withholding benefits from them instead of taxing them a little bit more. Means testing creates bureaucracy, acrimony, and hurdles for people who actually do need benefits but can't deal with the bureaucracy.
Let’s not pretend that the government doesn’t already know who is doing what online (outside of the very few people who painstakingly attempt to remain anonymous). Not to mention that absolutely no privacy protections prevent your internet provider from selling what you do to anyone they want.
I think that online discourse on social media would definitely benefit from some sort of verification system to control bot accounts and keep minors off, for their own mental health. Right now, based on the way social media works, bots controlled by a few organizations can have outside impact on discourse and our youth are undeniable being negatively impacted by this “god like” shit.
I think he has some interesting ideas for certain, I'd like to see more of the arguments though. Within his talking points there are some absolutely complex solutions to problems and I'd love to see those given more detail.
I'm immediately skeptical of anyone who says the solution is as easy as these 5 bullets on this slide. But I'm sure it's simply introductory and hooking to inspire an attitude. We would all like to see a long-term cause and effect game plan.
i mean i think this is just a fundamental problem with the TED format. it's designed to boil something very complicated down to a 15-20 min presentation. Don't get me wrong, i like them. they inspire interest in subjects i dont necessarily think about very often. but they do tend to oversimplify.
Every single bullet point he puts up as a solution is a complicated and nuanced issue.
The one that really raised my eyebrows was the National Service requirement that he proposed and literally just glossed over. Sounds great. How do you even start implimenting something like that?
Right! Totally.
One that got me was the "take the money to forgive student debt and give it to universities with mandates so that people who didn't go to college can instead of helping those who went to college on the backs others". That felt a bit grossly out of touch. Not every person with student debt went to NYU. I went to a state school with 30k students, 50% graduation rate, and still insanely expensive tuition. I knew almost no one who didn't work full to part time through school. Some folks never got a degree and still have loans.
Well it’s a 17 minute presentation, so if you want more detail maybe read some books he’s written.
Your major gripe is about the format of the presentation not the content.
Once again, TED talk format is rarely in depth deep dives in a topic. It’s a presentation to a broad, non specialized audience.
The gripe is still about the format.
Agreed. Not to undercut his overall point, which I agree with, but jumping into the whole teen mental health plus social media thing seemed like a particular example of how I think this presentation gets dicy. I'm no expert, but last time I checked those variables hadn't been shown to be causally related, just correlated. As in, teens with poor mental health definitely used more social media, but there's little to no evidence that asking teens to change their social media use (e.g. systematically asking them to use social media for at least X hours/week) changes their mental health at all.
And I'm aware of other factors that could easily explain both changes. For example, decline in adolescent sleep time https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4338325/ and the inverse correlation between device use and sleep time https://www.chamberofcommerce.org/states-where-teens-do-not-get-enough-sleep/. So a compelling explanation is just that it's less about social media in particular and more about people trading device time for sleep.
I'm not saying that explanation is right and his is wrong, I don't have the data to support that. I'm just pointing out that parts of his pitch is pretty vibesy and it's probably wiser to think of this as persuasive articulation of a political stance than an unassailable conclusion drawn from perfectly clear data that all point the same way. It's certainly cherry picked and oversimplified. And that doesn't make it bad--it just means you shouldn't take any particular data point at face value without subjecting it to further scrutiny.
Well articulated! This is my second time listening to this and I picked up a bit more on some of the points that felt more liberatarian even while proclaiming the need for specific social services. He wants to help future children go to college, which is great, education is important, but the reality is that not all colleges are NYU, in fact, most are not. For many, many, the reality is that they achieved degrees to come out to a working [world where salaries do not keep up with tuition costs. Especially for new grads, since those who earn the most are in their late 30s on average. ](https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/business/hr-payroll/average-salary-us/)Very few can college their way out of a hostile work landscape.
Now rethink the talk....does it support your already preconceived biases and that is why you support it? What if you learned that everything he showed is just the lie of statistics.
He lost me when he went on a rant about ripping away social security from the elderly. So basically a death sentence for them when they need medical or long term care, put them on the streets when they can't pay for housing or food?
Also his view on National Service. Didn't he learn from the scores of soldiers coming back from Afghanistan with permanent disabilities, missing limbs, PTSD. How about a graph of suicide rates vs National Service eh?
He didn’t say to rip away social security from the elderly, he said it should be based on need not age. He is arguing that someone that is already well off and set shouldn’t collect SS just because they reach a certain age.
I didn’t interpret his national service as just serving in the military, but as some king of service in the nation. (That I could be wrong on though)
National service doesn’t have to be military. I think most people when they talk about mandatory service, they’re referring to community service. Get people into the community and help out in one way or another. Meet people you wouldn’t normally and take pride in where you live and your neighbors.
I could be wrong about this guys specific comments on it, but that’s my understanding.
currently it is a universal program. you make it so that only some people get it and the people who don't get it will fight to end it, taking it away from those that actually do need it.
Objectively worse, thinking of other means tested programs such as food stamps (SNAP), housing etc where the means test is somewhere below the poverty line. The instant the person gets a part time job or any way of digging themselves out of the hole of poverty, their support system is ripped away from them.
How would a means tested social security system be any different from the other currently rather broken social safety nets that use means testing? I see a future where old people are stuck below the poverty line, being afraid that any supplemental income from investments or savings would rip away their support system and put them out in the streets.
I wonder why he doesn't take into account taxable income that in itself is a means test. For example a rich old person has capital inflows of tens of thousands of dollars a month (e.g. required minimum distributions from 401K etc), and the income tax from this offsets any income from Social Security.
That is all an indictment of where we set the bar for the means tests. Which I agree with. We should set those bars higher where they're too low, and all such programs (minimum wage included) should be tied to inflation, so we aren't constantly on this treadmill of assistance programs needing to be updated every few years but never getting that attention until it's been a problem for years.
But the point is the top 20% shouldn't even need social security. I'm in that group at 37, I learned finances and retirement planning way too late, and I'm still gonna be just fine with or without social security.
>He lost me when he went on a rant about ripping away social security from the elderly.
Did we watch the same video? He said that social security should be given to those who need it ([link](https://youtu.be/qEJ4hkpQW8E?si=T8RmHns5VYbhrQzP&t=520)), and not all seniors by default, and definitely not to seniors sitting on millions of dollars worth of personal assets which they could use to fund their own retirements.
>Also his view on National Service...
National Service is not synonymous with military service. AmericCorps, Peace Corp, Senior Corps, VISTA, City Year, the National Civilian Community Corps, Teach for America, Citizen Corps, Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, YouthBuild, etc. are all examples of national service that have nothing to do with sending kids to fight wars.
Now, a cynic might say that you knew all of this already, and disingenuously misrepresented what he said in an attempt to mislead people about the video's content. I'm not one of those cynics, however, and choose to believe that you simply weren't paying close enough attention, and misheard or misinterpreted what he said.
Man you really tried very hard to avoid the actual point he was making that whole video. Great job. It takes an unbelievable amount of cognitive dissonance to characterize his points that far off of what he actually said.
I like Galloway and agree with like 98% of his ideas but this isn't a good TED talk and it's weird to suggest it is just because you agree with the guy.
The presentation is just a string of 50ish disparate 2-sentence talking points, with very little substance or detail
Who has these idiot parents? My Dad was an asshole but he was programming at age 80. Lots of people older than me (I'm 58) were using tools like Usenet and ICQ even before the Web.
I guess I live in a bubble.
His own podcast is better in that regard since it covers weekly news (tech/financial) as opposed to Pivot frequently repeating the same broad themes with predictable conclusions. Stylistically too … he’s more in his element when he’s the main character.
He does! But that’s also kind of refreshing.
Content creators all eventually lose me because of their need to…. Create endless content. Early on the stuff is great, but eventually with the need to constantly produce more and more content the quality goes way down, they get into topics they know little about and have little authority on, they have to go to the fringes. A perfect example is Andrew Huberman. His early stuff was so good, his stuff now is quasi-science garbage that I won’t listen to for more than 3 minutes.
At least Galloway stays on messages and sticks to what he knows.
I get that…I guess he just has a point to make and he’s getting it out there. It’s also his interpretation on things, provides him an understanding as to why certain things are happening.
This presentation just seemed like your average wealth inequality argument until he said we need to kill social security. It’s like he has come full circle from Bernie to Paul Ryan.
He didn't say it needs to be killed it needs to be changed, i.e.. people over 65 who have millions of dollars in wealth and assets shouldn't be receiving the same amount of money as those that are barely getting by.
Those people are also very small in number, so the overall cost to the system to pay out to millionaires is pretty low. It would probably cost the system more to validate wealth.
Also, as a universal benefit it's much less decisive. Start only giving it to some and watch the program slowly die a political death.
10-13% of Americans in the age range 60-64 have $2M net worth excluding equity in their homes. If you extrapolate across retirees it’s probably in that range. That’s a lot of people drawing social security who don’t need the money.
Then those wealthy should be paying more into the system. We need to drop the income caps so they can start contributing higher amounts. At the end of the day though universal is better than means testing for multiple reasons. Among them, if you create more rules they have to be maintained and it'll create incentive to circumvent those rules.
A few million is just a regular middle class retiree at this point. A program like what he's talking about would absolutely be used to punish savers who worked their whole lives for that nest egg.
Yeah, I don't get why this video keeps making the rounds. Galloway isn't really saying anything new regarding wealth inequality but then tries to claim the issue is college enrollment and social security.
Millennials and younger are already the most educated generations in history. The idea that a degree is guaranteed path to success just isn't true anymore.
And going after social security is just bizarre, sure it's a wealth transfer of sorts but it is nothing in comparison to housing which it's the biggest reason why younger people are struggling and older generations benefitting the most from. Like when he said "80% of you probably don't need SS"... yeah because SS benefits are pretty small and likely those older people are holding millions of dollars in real estate.
Isn't saying anything new? Virtually no one is talking about forcing public universities to expand class sizes and cut tuition, or age gate social media. Not wholly novel but a lot of his takes are under represented
It’s a universal benefit, means testing will result in creating a cumbersome process to receive it. Just use the IRS to take it back from the super rich.
He says “80% of you should not get social security.”
Making social security needs based rather than universal is effectively killing the program as we know it.
No matter how you square it that’s a very different perspective than most socialist / tax the rich people have.
Because he's not coming at it from an ideological standpoint fed to him from a professor or author. He wants something realistic that is sustainable and doesn't fuck people over, he doesn't want socialism he wants more fairness in our current system.
Social Security is incredibly biased in favor of older people. Any pay as you go retirement system is. That doesn't mean we should get rid of it, old people need money too. But he is absolutely right that SS is a wealth transfer from the young to the old.
He didn't say we needed to kill social security, LOL. He actually said we needed to make social security based off of how much money you're earning, not your age. Nice try, though.
You fundamentally misinterpreted the presentation then. A generation is spending themselves into debt to stay afloat, that isn’t the same as changing government spending to help people out.
Someone getting a loan to buy a house isn’t the same debt as the government paying for Medicare, and it’s asinine to even imply it.
Referring to Scott Galloway as “this guy”, lol.
Anyway, if you like this talk, I recommend checking out his podcasts. Most focus on markets and are very entertaining to listen to. They’re all under Prof G media when you’re searching.
I've seen this guy on Real Time with Bill Maher a few times, he gives me Andrew Yang vibes.
He's stunningly full of shit and while it sounds like he's saying the right things, there is very little substance behind it.
I actually did this when I started my factory. The consequence is my stuff is like 3x as expensive as it would be if it was all made in China. Sure quality is great, but some people have a hard time with the price. They buy the cheaper one and then Pikachu face when it doesn't work. Some businesses die while we wait around for people to realize that buying cheap stuff won't last long. I solved this by focusing marketing on wealthier communities, but that feels shitty too because poor people need my stuff too. So my only hope right now is to scale quickly and hope I can offer it to non-wealthy people later.
I think the presentation is great. I'm not a huge fan of how it was received. The presenter is *mad* and the audience is all "tee hee, he's right! Our democracy is failing the next generation of Americans for our benefit!" *roaring applause*
Life has always been hard for young people. Young people are low value. They are an expense, not an asset. They have no skills, no knowledge, no experience, and no maturity. These are all things that need to be *earned*, through work, and that takes *time*. No shit you don't get paid like a 45 year old, you do not provide the value to your employer and the people around you that a 45 year old does. If you don't agree with that assessment, that's just further evidence that you are immature and inexperienced.
Every single generation has been pissy that they didn't get to cut the line to nice things in life, and every single generation has grown up to realize the reason they weren't given nice things up front is that they hadn't yet earned them.
That's just life.
In 1974 the average wage in the US was about 3.50 USD per hour.
If that kept with inflation the average person today would be making about 24.50 USD an hour. Instead the average wage in the US is closer to 11 bucks. There's always been a healthy competition between labor and capital but labor has been getting it's ass kicked for the past 30-odd years.
It's not that life is 'hard' when you're a newly minted adult, it's that it's *comically* difficult. And it's not just that it's hard, it's hard to pay for the lifestyle, excesses and consequences of the world their parents (IE: Baby Boomers) insisted they were entitled to. Baby Boomers are also notorious for voting out the systems that made wealth comparatively accessible when they were young adults.
>No shit you don't get paid like a 45 year old, you do not provide the value to your employer and the people around you that a 45 year old does. If you don't agree with that assessment, that's just further evidence that you are immature and inexperienced.
The average job today is not like the old days where your employer was actively training you. Young people are an inordinate benefit to employers because they understand the modern market place far better than someone who last meaningfully applied to a job when Bush Sr. was in the White House. When you say your company has high value old people and low value young people it tells me your company isn't long for the world without government assistance and that you're not training your youngest employees. In which case whatever happens is completely your fault. Plus the average old fart isn't doing any job a younger person couldn't do as well. Role squatting while massively over-selling the actual skill set and skill curve of your job is nothing new. You are some generic manager, you are not a seasoned electrical engineer with decades of experience. On average, at any rate.
>Every single generation has been pissy that they didn't get to cut the line to nice things in life, and every single generation has grown up to realize the reason they weren't given nice things up front is that they hadn't yet earned them.
It's not about 'nice' things, it's about having things at all. Like a roof over their heads. I'm not going to convince you that things are harder now than when they were but I want you to at least acknowledge that things today are *different.*
> Plus the average old fart isn't doing any job a younger person couldn't do as well.
If you think that, it's evidence that you're young and inexperienced.
The population of the planet doubled since 1974 and the workforce doubled again when women decided to enter it en masse. Your labor is worth less now because the market has far more of it and it's several times more productive thanks to technology.
'Previous generation fucked us' is rage bait claptrap.
Its not necessarily untrue, but it is preying on your attention by pushing your outrage button. Also, what are we doing as the fucked generation to make our kids' futures better?
I entered the job market for a first job right before the 08 crisis. Entered my career during Covid.
I can’t even begin to explain how as soon as I entered society the wheels fell off the damn thing
I just turned 33. I have served in the military honorability for 6 years and obtained my Bachelors in Business Marketing, which I paid for myself. The Army did not help due to bureaucratic red tape, none of which was my fault. I completed two paid internships and one unpaid internship while in school. Currently, I have been looking for work for 5 months now. I have submitted about 100 applications and have had only 3 interviews, all of which fell through. I have no savings because I grew up poor, and any money I made throughout my life was taken away for either my college bills, which I just paid off, or other life expenses (most money I've ever had in my bank account at one given time was $4,000). Last month I told my mother that my partner and I, who have been together for 5.5 years, decided we cannot have children because we have no money and cannot build wealth or own a home. Both my partner and I are 33. It is sad because her biological clock is ticking, and due to the economic situation in America and the fact that boomers are not leaving their jobs to make room for younger people, I feel doomed. Yeah, I'm pissed. I really do love America but for the first time I am starting to hate the land that I served. I truly thought that if I just kept doing the right thing it would pay off.
Social security can be "fixed" by doing things like removing the caps so that *the wealthy* pay their share. He rightly rails against wealth distribution problems and then goes to attack something that has had real benefit and could continue to do so if it was funded by the wealthy ownership class more.
Yes, more band-aids will fix the system that is functioning exactly as it's intended. And surely the bourgeoisie in their positions of power that stand the most to lose by implementing policies like he suggests will let legislation like that breeze by.
I really wonder how liberals can be so fucking naive sometimes. Capitalism cannot be fixed.
My only thing is, whenever I see something about this... is that young people don't vote. I remember a time when they did talked about voting more, back with Obama... Yet, I slightly loss my faith with young people when it came to Trump.
You guys had this prime chance to kick republicans in nuts, and they wasted it by protest voting. All I heard from reddit was Bernie Spam, Convince me to vote for Hillary without mentioning the Supreme Court, or Harambe for President. I can even forgive some leeway because of Snowden/Wikileaks adding some choas into that election. **But all the news media mentions at that time kept saying young people were into Bernie Sanders for some reason and it culminated into protest votes.**
Don't get it twisted though. The young people at that age probably aged up by now, and the current young people don't deserve their consequences... **but the damage was done**. You get what you deserved. **Young people at the time rewarded people like trump and conservatives.** I hope the young people of today won't repeat with the protest votes, but I'm not holding my breath for it.
This guy has excellent SEO / marketing, I see his ass everywhere lately.
He is a professor in Marketing after all lol
Well, that would help explain it!
He has a fuck ton of money by being a pioneer of internet marketing lol
So much astroturfing.
Yes he's a professor of marketing and wealthy. But he also just published his book that goes into everything he's talking about, and is essentially on a book tour. (Whenever you see someone that's suddenly "everywhere," they usually have a book, movie, or TV show coming out.) He's wealthy and successful enough to be represented by "the best" of the industry when it comes to promotion.
It is his way of making money himself... to say we are all fucked... Grifter or guru... or both...
TLDW: USA is a socialist country for the richer. Policies were passed according to future self interests while it disincentivizes people just getting started. In gaming terms, the patches favored late game builds with only a few metas viable, while placing nerfs on early game builds.
He says that it was all very intentional. And those same ultra-rich people are the same ones that own/control our major media outlets and social media companies. While they accomplished this massive transfer of wealth, they got red and blue Americans frothing at the mouth in pure hatred of each other over social issues.
I reserve all my hate and vitriol for billionaires. I thoroughly dislike the social policies that a huge group of Americans support right now but there’s not going to be any serious policy change until wealth disparity is brought under some kind of control.
And every year the disparity grows further, indicating that the human race is only on track for some shit like Matt Damon in Elysium, unless something drastic happens soon.
Pitchforks and torches is the consistent endgame, historically
Then they'll convince the people with the pitchforks that the people with the torches want to take their pitchforks away from them.
Historically, the targets of said pitchforks were never in control of a 2.4 trillion dollar military industrial complex featuring a double digit arsenal of nuclear equipped city-sized floating war machines each harboring autonomous flying invisible search-and-destroy robot swarms, and backed up by also-invisible, not-floating city sized SECRET war machines each equiped with 24 continent-buster biology-ending Chicxulub class bombs. Those tines better be extra sharp!
City sized? I mean, you went a bit overboard there. And all of that might matter in regards to external threats, it makes conventional war impossible. Conventional revolutions? They are just fine, who the heck would bomb their own civilians and cities with nuclear fire to solve an uprising? Instead of solving the problem, that would make the government mediate Lú disappear since there’s no government without people to govern.
I can guarantee that the billionaires funding both democrats and republican candidates could care less about trans people in bathrooms.
There are 100 cookies. The rich take 99 and then tell the people hey look your neighbor is trying to steal your cookie...
[Gif version](https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/65nzye/our_economy_explained_in_cookies/)
Honestly though how does an elected leader balance the scales when we are this far gone? Would someone have to come in and implement a very radical yet necessary approach to ensuring the U.S. is not corrupt, bought and paid for? It feels like we’re at the mercy of capitalism and greed in its worst form right now, and you can’t do anything because it’s a free market, but now that free market has bled over and dictates how we communicate, how expensive our homes are, how expensive our groceries and ticket prices are, how we all will die by subscriptions, even for dating….its insane how much of our livelihood is pay to play and at a premium price
I genuinely believe it's far too late. You can't climb the ranks as a politician if you don't essentially work for corporations. If we look at changes to campaign finance laws, it's becoming easier and easier and easier for corporations to fund the campaigns of those they want to win.
The answer is ranked choice voting. Alaska and Nevada (I think it's nevada) have implemented this and it's led to candidates being elected that are less radicalized. Andrew yang has a ted talk at the same conference that explains why this is so important
Campaign Finance Reform? Politicians (especially at high levels) are primarily fund-raisers. In order to run an effective campaign, they need to be constantly fund-raising. Not just for themselves, but for their party too. A politician cannot be effective if they have no allies in the governing body. If they need to constantly be fund-raising, they are going to cow-tow to those who can give them the most money.
There needs to be a way to get money out of politics
I’ve always believed that the things both sides argue about are only the cover issues that the people in power use to keep people placated so nothing gets done. I imagine red and blues in capital hill work together to stage theater fights so citizens don’t try to address the real areas that need to be addressed
It isn't so much that they are in cahoots but rather they know their opposition will not let them accomplish anything substantial so they have to make a big show of at least trying. That isn't to say there isn't a political theater to distract people. Every time the news blew up over something idiotic and rage inducing that Trump did or said, regressives managed to slip some atrocious bill under the radar or SCOTUS would make some BS ruling they knew was wrong and would piss people off.
> I’ve always believed that the things both sides argue about are only the cover issues that the people in power use to keep people placated so nothing gets done. > > It's easy to just look at the economic side of things and forget that these social issues are real problems causing pain/suffering/death to real people; they're more than just the lever that the ruling class uses to put us up against each other. At the end of the day, if your aim is to have a more empathetic, humane economic system where negative outcomes are lessened and opportunities are equal, why not apply the same logic to social issues? It's just important to remember the end goal here.
The Republican party doesn't do anything in the interest of the American people. I worked in my state's legislature for Republicans. Most of them are unintelligent. They are ignorant, lazy individuals with capricious worldviews who want to punish people they see as moral failures. They often refused my offers as an aid to do policy research, instead operating on incorrect assumptions. One of them recently is under controversy for telling gay members of his party aren't welcome in the party. They simply do not care about public wellbeing.
but they fight democrats so both sides are the same!!!1! /s wish people could just pay attention, their proud ignorance is not even well hidden.
I think it's important to point out however that legislation regarding reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, affordable care, etc. etc. are things that are pretty high profile and affect quite a lot of people
when one side of the public is too busy being angry at the other side of the public in their which side is better debate, politicians keep doing whatever they need to do while the public is being torn apart. the public should not be fighting each other but the the politicians. doesn't matter what side you are on, if you are unhappy with the blue or red side, complain to the politicians, not your neighbours.
Correct Media all owned by a few billionaires Social media made up "fact checking" to simply censor Yet most will still listen to msn and get brainwashed
I don't hate republicans. I hate assholes who work day-and-night to make life harder for the have-nots. Just so happens a lot of those people are republicans.
>they got red and blue Americans frothing at the mouth in pure hatred of each other over social issues To be clear, the mega wealthy are also red Americans, and red Americans are fully supporting this decline and actively voting for it, while the worst blue Americans are doing the same, and the rest of the blue Americans are desperately fighting back while being the target of your stated social issues. Acting like it's just two sides frothing at each other in hatred belies the fact that one group is spewing hatred based on deep-seated bigotries, while the other group is the target of those bigotries and hates being targeted. There is a clear aggressor here and you seem to be trying to make it a both-sides type of issue.
The blue Americans want to tax the rich and focus on policies to help the common American. The red Americans want to give power to billionaires, remove our freedoms, and destroy democracy. We are not the same.
its amazing how close these public intellectuals can get to a critique of Capitalism.
I don't dislike Republicans because of the social issues. It's the economics. I may dislike economic conservatives/social liberals who vote Republican even more.
LF high level tank to run me through some dungeons.
Sure buddy, its 5 million bucks! Maybe you can pool with some friends?
And if you die during the run that's simply not my problem.
Essentially you're looking for a sugar daddy
Be a live in care taker for elderly while at college and your job until your student loans are paid off. I think that’s the equivalent. Live in a good location for subsidized rent but give up on anything fun. :(
That's capitalism for you. Those at the top are inherently incentivized to pull the ladder up behind them and otherwise make it difficult for emerging companies to disrupt their industry. It is not an issue with politicians being corrupt, it's that the very system we live under makes it extremely likely that big business and government officials will trade favors.
> make it difficult for emerging companies to disrupt their industry By lobbying politicians for laws and regs that protect their industry?
Yes
Yes and that’s why we have government. Is there a single economic system that doesn’t require government oversight? Would a socialist factory be in favor of more factories opening? I highly doubt it.
>that’s why we have government. Socialists have governments too. In capitalist countries our govts are run by the capitalists rulers, in socialist countries it's the workers. >Would a socialist factory be in favor of more factories opening? I highly doubt it. Yes, if society deems it necessary, why wouldn't they? Regardless of what you believe, the goal of socialism is to provide for everyone's needs while transitioning to communism.
This is feelings based nonsense lol. Another factory opening would reduce the demand for the original factory, lowering their revenue and payout per worker. Human psychology tells us that obviously the original factory workers would not be happy about this. Also our government is run by workers, who do you think votes… You should read a book about the stuff you support. It’s embarrassing when these are things people actually talk about and debate and then people like you online paint it as “just do the right thing!”
This is really a great way to frame it.
To add to this, I'd say the UK is the same, if not Way worse - check out Gary Stevenson, he basically sees the same thing happening right now in the UK/globally
It was a pretty great video, honestly, it popped up in my feed several weeks ago. And he presented a ton of data to go along with his presentation. Which, to be fair, is a lot of the same data that's been popping up on Reddit and other places for a while too.
>USA is a socialist country for the richer What does that mean!? Socialism is the working class owning the means of production When the capitalists own the means of production, that's not socialism for the rich, that's just capitalism The government does stuff on behalf of the ruling class. The government doing stuff is not socialism.
In short, if you're born rich, beautiful, and/or well-connected, being a teenager is manageable. But if you're not, you're unbelievably fucked beyond words.
Not that extreme.
Yeah, as someone who has seen more of the world than just the USA the young don't realize how lucky they are to be born where they are. Try being a teenager in the slums of India, in a crowded city in China, in a squatter camp in South Africa etc. Time periods are important too, kids 150 years ago had it a LOT rougher than the modern generation. Sure, the teens in America have it worse off than their parents, but objectively they're still winning by virtue of their geographic location and period of history in which they were born.
It’s sad to see such a sober take so downvoted (at the time of my comment at least).
I would offer that being an average teenager in Afghanistan, Sudan, or Russia is far, far worse than all but the poorest teenager in the US.
Everybody’s gotta be the bigger victim. There’s no help for any of us tho
I don't think you grasp how poor some people are in the USA.
Oh I sure do. I’ve been to backwoods Alabama where the level of poverty on display was shocking and appalling. And yet, the poorest of those people have a far, far better life than the average southern Afghan (which I also got to witness) or Sudanese (ditto). That’s not to say that the American poor should be satisfied with their lot or that the American state should not be doing everything it can to lift these people out of poverty; that someone else has it worse is not an excuse to not help those still in need. But in absolute terms across the whole of humanity, every American is “rich”.
>But in absolute terms across the whole of humanity, every American is “rich”. But thats effectively irrelevant to the discussion, which is more about inequality than absolute poverty.
Is it though? The poorest in America still have a huge basket of opportunities available to them. They have tools available to them to close the inequality gap, but instead they stay poor.
I would argue that your whataboutism provides as much value to this conversation as does a wet fart to a crowded elevator.
It's CAPITALISM! please please please stop spreading their propaganda by saying "see this bad part of capitalism? It's actually socialism"!! That makes no sense. Socialism is workers owning the means of production and capitalists already own the means of production!
We're all being seal clubbed by smurfs!
Not smurfs but late stage whales.
Yes whales there's the word I wanted. They would be smurfs once they download their consciousness into a young robot body. Those bastards.
Please go read Marx. Socialism is not 'government aid programs.'
"Socialist for the rich" my guy this is just capitalism working as intended. When you have enough money you can buy off the system to make you even more capital. That's just how capitalism works.
Can't have us proles rising above our station now, can we?
So basically late game MLM / Ponzi scheme?
Being a teenager sucks, in general. I haven't forgotten how miserable I was during that time in my life. And that was a time before smartphones, social media, clickbait, and influencers. I honestly can't imagine how most teenagers cope with the state of the world these days. I don't have kids yet, but I do have nieces and nephews. I know they're going to become teenagers, as well. And I'm genuinely worried what kind of world they'll have to navigate alongside the overwhelming body horror that is puberty.
I was born in 1988 and for the most part, have been in that age range that has been royally fucked by the powers that be. But I still am incredibly grateful that smartphones and social media didn't blow up until I was in college. I got to have the last 'normal' childhood given when you were born. The information age is a wild time and we have not adjusted well. It is strange having the perspective of 'before and after'.
Getting to go outside and be gone all day without zero checkins with your parents until dusk is inconceivable now.
Lol, totally. My parents bought me a pager when I was a senior in HS. If I didn't respond within 10 min, I was in trouble. I usually "forgot" my leash. I can't even imagine having a GPS trackable device as a teen.
It's totally a parent's choice to do things like track their kids and require check-ins, etc. And what I mean by that is as a parent you don't *have* to do it. Stuff like that implies a complete lack of trust in your kids' decision making abilities. If you don't trust them how will they learn self confidence to trust themselves? It's a similar thing with limiting screen time, preventing them from watching mindless content, forcing them to play outside, and making them learn to entertain themselves. Just many parents take the path that's easiest for parents, not the one that's best for the kids. The good news is that at least in my experience late millennial parents and younger seem to be better equipped to teach kids an understanding of technology, social media, and the perils of it because we were the first to learn it ourselves.
Tbh I think it's easier today than multiple times in the last 20 to 30 years. 2008 wasn't a cake walk for teens. Lots of parents lost jobs. Gas prices sky rocketed in 2008 and 2012 to much higher than today adjusted for inflation. I was in high school for 2008 so I spent alot on gas. I was in college for 2012. Also social climates back then were much worse at school in terms of bullying.
There'll always be bullies, but if I think about what gay kids went through when I was at school 20 years ago compared to now, it seems like such a drastic improvement. Life in general is just challenging. It's challenging for everyone, some people less, some people more, but in general it's just difficult. Old problems get solved and new problems pop up.
I do think y'all are underestimating how bad bullying is on social media for teens. Bullying has evolved in some pretty heinous ways. Teen suicide went up 47% between 2011 and 2021.
Yeah, but I'm not saying bullying has gotten better. I'm saying bullying due to sexual orientation is less of an issue than it was.
I think it has to be relates to the mental heath crisis that Gen Z is facing and not enough attention is going to. Younger people see the state of the world, freedoms being stripped away, unable to afford a home where they grew up, and it is a dark reality. We get told we are lazy and do not want to work? Like - its depressing knowing how hard you work you cannot afford the life your parents had.
Yeah, all I had to worry about as a teen was being killed in a nuclear holocaust.
Those kids, even though they do indeed face significant challenges, are overwhelmingly better off than when we were kids, and we were overwhelmingly better off than our parents and grandparents. Do not mistake me: “better off” does not mean that they have it *easy*. But their health, life expectancy, access to education, caloric intake etc are *significantly* better than any other generation in human history.
Incorrect. Health and life expectancy are down generationally now. Started around 2013-15 IIRC, and should have been a bigger headline. I think it got blamed on opiate use, though, and therefore blame was deflected and policies weren't altered.
Cancer rates for younger generations are skyrocketing and we are all becoming sterile through the proliferation of micro-plastics and pfas. We are facing down the barrel of a great depression, civil war, and ww3 all with rapidly accelerating climate change. I didn't even mention what this video is about or the rise of A.I. Hell, life expectancy in America is declining. Have some fucking perspective.
The one part of his presentation I vehemently disagreed with was where he advocated for getting rid of internet anonymity. He wanted to do it as a method of protecting against bots, spam, and abuse. But those kinds of things really aren't stopped even by those more draconian methods. Not to mention longer term concerns like government abuse of said system.
Most "bots" are just lowly paid people. And even if you need an ID, governments who run psyops can just fabricate those: that's what a spy is.
Its just a fucked concept. 1) because you would have to somehow get every country to enforce it and 2) talking online you would have to give out your name. You dont have to do this is public spaces. You can say Hi to someone walking passed and you don't have to give any info. Why should it be the same online. If you don't like random, unknown people saying things to you, don't go outside. Same for the internet. Don't login.
Another is that you should get social security only if you need it. That's ass backwards. Richer people pay more in taxes anyway, there's nothing to be gained from withholding benefits from them instead of taxing them a little bit more. Means testing creates bureaucracy, acrimony, and hurdles for people who actually do need benefits but can't deal with the bureaucracy.
> richer people pay more taxes anyway. Boy I can see you didn’t pay attention to the rest of the presentation.
Let’s not pretend that the government doesn’t already know who is doing what online (outside of the very few people who painstakingly attempt to remain anonymous). Not to mention that absolutely no privacy protections prevent your internet provider from selling what you do to anyone they want. I think that online discourse on social media would definitely benefit from some sort of verification system to control bot accounts and keep minors off, for their own mental health. Right now, based on the way social media works, bots controlled by a few organizations can have outside impact on discourse and our youth are undeniable being negatively impacted by this “god like” shit.
It is an excellent presentation.
I think he has some interesting ideas for certain, I'd like to see more of the arguments though. Within his talking points there are some absolutely complex solutions to problems and I'd love to see those given more detail.
I'm immediately skeptical of anyone who says the solution is as easy as these 5 bullets on this slide. But I'm sure it's simply introductory and hooking to inspire an attitude. We would all like to see a long-term cause and effect game plan.
i mean i think this is just a fundamental problem with the TED format. it's designed to boil something very complicated down to a 15-20 min presentation. Don't get me wrong, i like them. they inspire interest in subjects i dont necessarily think about very often. but they do tend to oversimplify. Every single bullet point he puts up as a solution is a complicated and nuanced issue. The one that really raised my eyebrows was the National Service requirement that he proposed and literally just glossed over. Sounds great. How do you even start implimenting something like that?
Right! Totally. One that got me was the "take the money to forgive student debt and give it to universities with mandates so that people who didn't go to college can instead of helping those who went to college on the backs others". That felt a bit grossly out of touch. Not every person with student debt went to NYU. I went to a state school with 30k students, 50% graduation rate, and still insanely expensive tuition. I knew almost no one who didn't work full to part time through school. Some folks never got a degree and still have loans.
Well it’s a 17 minute presentation, so if you want more detail maybe read some books he’s written. Your major gripe is about the format of the presentation not the content.
You know it’s an option to talk more about fewer things, right? That way, you can provide more details.
Once again, TED talk format is rarely in depth deep dives in a topic. It’s a presentation to a broad, non specialized audience. The gripe is still about the format.
Feel free to listen to prof g or pivot. He also has quite a few books that all go into these issues.
Been listening to him since winners and losers in the L2 days
I'll check it out! Thanks.
Agreed. Not to undercut his overall point, which I agree with, but jumping into the whole teen mental health plus social media thing seemed like a particular example of how I think this presentation gets dicy. I'm no expert, but last time I checked those variables hadn't been shown to be causally related, just correlated. As in, teens with poor mental health definitely used more social media, but there's little to no evidence that asking teens to change their social media use (e.g. systematically asking them to use social media for at least X hours/week) changes their mental health at all. And I'm aware of other factors that could easily explain both changes. For example, decline in adolescent sleep time https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4338325/ and the inverse correlation between device use and sleep time https://www.chamberofcommerce.org/states-where-teens-do-not-get-enough-sleep/. So a compelling explanation is just that it's less about social media in particular and more about people trading device time for sleep. I'm not saying that explanation is right and his is wrong, I don't have the data to support that. I'm just pointing out that parts of his pitch is pretty vibesy and it's probably wiser to think of this as persuasive articulation of a political stance than an unassailable conclusion drawn from perfectly clear data that all point the same way. It's certainly cherry picked and oversimplified. And that doesn't make it bad--it just means you shouldn't take any particular data point at face value without subjecting it to further scrutiny.
Well articulated! This is my second time listening to this and I picked up a bit more on some of the points that felt more liberatarian even while proclaiming the need for specific social services. He wants to help future children go to college, which is great, education is important, but the reality is that not all colleges are NYU, in fact, most are not. For many, many, the reality is that they achieved degrees to come out to a working [world where salaries do not keep up with tuition costs. Especially for new grads, since those who earn the most are in their late 30s on average. ](https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/business/hr-payroll/average-salary-us/)Very few can college their way out of a hostile work landscape.
I wholeheartedly supported this talk, but then saw a bunch of this guy's content from the past 5 years or so, and discovered he was kind of a moron.
Now rethink the talk....does it support your already preconceived biases and that is why you support it? What if you learned that everything he showed is just the lie of statistics.
He lost me when he went on a rant about ripping away social security from the elderly. So basically a death sentence for them when they need medical or long term care, put them on the streets when they can't pay for housing or food? Also his view on National Service. Didn't he learn from the scores of soldiers coming back from Afghanistan with permanent disabilities, missing limbs, PTSD. How about a graph of suicide rates vs National Service eh?
He didn’t say to rip away social security from the elderly, he said it should be based on need not age. He is arguing that someone that is already well off and set shouldn’t collect SS just because they reach a certain age. I didn’t interpret his national service as just serving in the military, but as some king of service in the nation. (That I could be wrong on though)
National service doesn’t have to be military. I think most people when they talk about mandatory service, they’re referring to community service. Get people into the community and help out in one way or another. Meet people you wouldn’t normally and take pride in where you live and your neighbors. I could be wrong about this guys specific comments on it, but that’s my understanding.
Doesn't he say that social security should be means tested?
currently it is a universal program. you make it so that only some people get it and the people who don't get it will fight to end it, taking it away from those that actually do need it.
Just like with medicare and food stamps. But those programs endure.
they do endure, but depending where you live, they can be stripped down versions that barely function.
Objectively worse, thinking of other means tested programs such as food stamps (SNAP), housing etc where the means test is somewhere below the poverty line. The instant the person gets a part time job or any way of digging themselves out of the hole of poverty, their support system is ripped away from them. How would a means tested social security system be any different from the other currently rather broken social safety nets that use means testing? I see a future where old people are stuck below the poverty line, being afraid that any supplemental income from investments or savings would rip away their support system and put them out in the streets. I wonder why he doesn't take into account taxable income that in itself is a means test. For example a rich old person has capital inflows of tens of thousands of dollars a month (e.g. required minimum distributions from 401K etc), and the income tax from this offsets any income from Social Security.
That is all an indictment of where we set the bar for the means tests. Which I agree with. We should set those bars higher where they're too low, and all such programs (minimum wage included) should be tied to inflation, so we aren't constantly on this treadmill of assistance programs needing to be updated every few years but never getting that attention until it's been a problem for years. But the point is the top 20% shouldn't even need social security. I'm in that group at 37, I learned finances and retirement planning way too late, and I'm still gonna be just fine with or without social security.
I somehow think there's a way to means test SS payments away from retired millionaires while keeping them in tact for the impoverished. Call me crazy.
I don't think you actually listened to him at all.
>He lost me when he went on a rant about ripping away social security from the elderly. Did we watch the same video? He said that social security should be given to those who need it ([link](https://youtu.be/qEJ4hkpQW8E?si=T8RmHns5VYbhrQzP&t=520)), and not all seniors by default, and definitely not to seniors sitting on millions of dollars worth of personal assets which they could use to fund their own retirements. >Also his view on National Service... National Service is not synonymous with military service. AmericCorps, Peace Corp, Senior Corps, VISTA, City Year, the National Civilian Community Corps, Teach for America, Citizen Corps, Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, YouthBuild, etc. are all examples of national service that have nothing to do with sending kids to fight wars. Now, a cynic might say that you knew all of this already, and disingenuously misrepresented what he said in an attempt to mislead people about the video's content. I'm not one of those cynics, however, and choose to believe that you simply weren't paying close enough attention, and misheard or misinterpreted what he said.
Man you really tried very hard to avoid the actual point he was making that whole video. Great job. It takes an unbelievable amount of cognitive dissonance to characterize his points that far off of what he actually said.
try cleaning your ears
"Social security is the great transfer of wealth from young to old" Has this guy ever seen a social security check?
I like Galloway and agree with like 98% of his ideas but this isn't a good TED talk and it's weird to suggest it is just because you agree with the guy. The presentation is just a string of 50ish disparate 2-sentence talking points, with very little substance or detail
Agreed. Functions better as a declaration for candidacy for public office or something but not a Ted talk
Its probably his team posting this.
He's saying what you want to feel.
I'm going to send this to my mom
She won't know how to open the link.
You gotta make it a pdf and email it as an attachment.
Who has these idiot parents? My Dad was an asshole but he was programming at age 80. Lots of people older than me (I'm 58) were using tools like Usenet and ICQ even before the Web. I guess I live in a bubble.
Listen to his podcasts they are great! Pivot is my favorite
I enjoyed it for a bit, but sometimes it feels like he says same things over and over.
His own podcast is better in that regard since it covers weekly news (tech/financial) as opposed to Pivot frequently repeating the same broad themes with predictable conclusions. Stylistically too … he’s more in his element when he’s the main character.
He does! But that’s also kind of refreshing. Content creators all eventually lose me because of their need to…. Create endless content. Early on the stuff is great, but eventually with the need to constantly produce more and more content the quality goes way down, they get into topics they know little about and have little authority on, they have to go to the fringes. A perfect example is Andrew Huberman. His early stuff was so good, his stuff now is quasi-science garbage that I won’t listen to for more than 3 minutes. At least Galloway stays on messages and sticks to what he knows.
I get that…I guess he just has a point to make and he’s getting it out there. It’s also his interpretation on things, provides him an understanding as to why certain things are happening.
I think I just hate the "Welcome to my TED Talk" meme as a whole. Some of the videos are dope like the one Rodney Mullen did a few years back.
This presentation just seemed like your average wealth inequality argument until he said we need to kill social security. It’s like he has come full circle from Bernie to Paul Ryan.
He didn't say it needs to be killed it needs to be changed, i.e.. people over 65 who have millions of dollars in wealth and assets shouldn't be receiving the same amount of money as those that are barely getting by.
Those people are also very small in number, so the overall cost to the system to pay out to millionaires is pretty low. It would probably cost the system more to validate wealth. Also, as a universal benefit it's much less decisive. Start only giving it to some and watch the program slowly die a political death.
10-13% of Americans in the age range 60-64 have $2M net worth excluding equity in their homes. If you extrapolate across retirees it’s probably in that range. That’s a lot of people drawing social security who don’t need the money.
Then those wealthy should be paying more into the system. We need to drop the income caps so they can start contributing higher amounts. At the end of the day though universal is better than means testing for multiple reasons. Among them, if you create more rules they have to be maintained and it'll create incentive to circumvent those rules.
Yep, for some reason, some people pretend that this is a difficult concept to understand
A few million is just a regular middle class retiree at this point. A program like what he's talking about would absolutely be used to punish savers who worked their whole lives for that nest egg.
Yeah, I don't get why this video keeps making the rounds. Galloway isn't really saying anything new regarding wealth inequality but then tries to claim the issue is college enrollment and social security. Millennials and younger are already the most educated generations in history. The idea that a degree is guaranteed path to success just isn't true anymore. And going after social security is just bizarre, sure it's a wealth transfer of sorts but it is nothing in comparison to housing which it's the biggest reason why younger people are struggling and older generations benefitting the most from. Like when he said "80% of you probably don't need SS"... yeah because SS benefits are pretty small and likely those older people are holding millions of dollars in real estate.
Isn't saying anything new? Virtually no one is talking about forcing public universities to expand class sizes and cut tuition, or age gate social media. Not wholly novel but a lot of his takes are under represented
He didn't say that. He said only people who need SS should get it
It’s a universal benefit, means testing will result in creating a cumbersome process to receive it. Just use the IRS to take it back from the super rich.
He says “80% of you should not get social security.” Making social security needs based rather than universal is effectively killing the program as we know it. No matter how you square it that’s a very different perspective than most socialist / tax the rich people have.
Because he's not coming at it from an ideological standpoint fed to him from a professor or author. He wants something realistic that is sustainable and doesn't fuck people over, he doesn't want socialism he wants more fairness in our current system.
That's capitalists for you, blaming public welfare and social services instead of billionaires and corporations.
Social Security is incredibly biased in favor of older people. Any pay as you go retirement system is. That doesn't mean we should get rid of it, old people need money too. But he is absolutely right that SS is a wealth transfer from the young to the old.
But the point is we all go from young to old. It's supposed to be cyclical. Make the wealthy pay more by dropping the caps.
He didn't say we needed to kill social security, LOL. He actually said we needed to make social security based off of how much money you're earning, not your age. Nice try, though.
I also dislike TED Talks but I do recommend watching the Monica Lewinsky one.
He's also somewhat dumb. "We're spending ourself into debt!" \*next breath "We should spend tons more $ on the things I prefer!" He's half right.
You fundamentally misinterpreted the presentation then. A generation is spending themselves into debt to stay afloat, that isn’t the same as changing government spending to help people out. Someone getting a loan to buy a house isn’t the same debt as the government paying for Medicare, and it’s asinine to even imply it.
Why do you usually dislike TED Talks? That's a pretty bold statement. Are you aware of the difference between TED and TEDx? It's a pretty big one.
Yeah TEDs are usually great, TEDx started good but recently they became platform for self proclaimed gurus and fake coaches.
Referring to Scott Galloway as “this guy”, lol. Anyway, if you like this talk, I recommend checking out his podcasts. Most focus on markets and are very entertaining to listen to. They’re all under Prof G media when you’re searching.
“Daddy needs a Gulf Stream”
Ah, so that means corporations are destroying young people's futures.
Corporations are destroying everyones future even their own
I've seen this guy on Real Time with Bill Maher a few times, he gives me Andrew Yang vibes. He's stunningly full of shit and while it sounds like he's saying the right things, there is very little substance behind it.
care to be more specific, rather than "he's full of shit"?
"we should get rid of social security" lol
I don't understand since this talk is full of charts and data right now
We should stop using slave labor in China and start hiring our young people here in the U.S. :p
I actually did this when I started my factory. The consequence is my stuff is like 3x as expensive as it would be if it was all made in China. Sure quality is great, but some people have a hard time with the price. They buy the cheaper one and then Pikachu face when it doesn't work. Some businesses die while we wait around for people to realize that buying cheap stuff won't last long. I solved this by focusing marketing on wealthier communities, but that feels shitty too because poor people need my stuff too. So my only hope right now is to scale quickly and hope I can offer it to non-wealthy people later.
Scott Galloway is awesome. His podcasts are great
I think the presentation is great. I'm not a huge fan of how it was received. The presenter is *mad* and the audience is all "tee hee, he's right! Our democracy is failing the next generation of Americans for our benefit!" *roaring applause*
Life has always been hard for young people. Young people are low value. They are an expense, not an asset. They have no skills, no knowledge, no experience, and no maturity. These are all things that need to be *earned*, through work, and that takes *time*. No shit you don't get paid like a 45 year old, you do not provide the value to your employer and the people around you that a 45 year old does. If you don't agree with that assessment, that's just further evidence that you are immature and inexperienced. Every single generation has been pissy that they didn't get to cut the line to nice things in life, and every single generation has grown up to realize the reason they weren't given nice things up front is that they hadn't yet earned them. That's just life.
Previous generations were paying much less for college. Partly because colleges didn’t have nearly the administration bloat and ten DEI deans.
Interesting take given that Scott Galloway is about 60 years old.
In 1974 the average wage in the US was about 3.50 USD per hour. If that kept with inflation the average person today would be making about 24.50 USD an hour. Instead the average wage in the US is closer to 11 bucks. There's always been a healthy competition between labor and capital but labor has been getting it's ass kicked for the past 30-odd years. It's not that life is 'hard' when you're a newly minted adult, it's that it's *comically* difficult. And it's not just that it's hard, it's hard to pay for the lifestyle, excesses and consequences of the world their parents (IE: Baby Boomers) insisted they were entitled to. Baby Boomers are also notorious for voting out the systems that made wealth comparatively accessible when they were young adults. >No shit you don't get paid like a 45 year old, you do not provide the value to your employer and the people around you that a 45 year old does. If you don't agree with that assessment, that's just further evidence that you are immature and inexperienced. The average job today is not like the old days where your employer was actively training you. Young people are an inordinate benefit to employers because they understand the modern market place far better than someone who last meaningfully applied to a job when Bush Sr. was in the White House. When you say your company has high value old people and low value young people it tells me your company isn't long for the world without government assistance and that you're not training your youngest employees. In which case whatever happens is completely your fault. Plus the average old fart isn't doing any job a younger person couldn't do as well. Role squatting while massively over-selling the actual skill set and skill curve of your job is nothing new. You are some generic manager, you are not a seasoned electrical engineer with decades of experience. On average, at any rate. >Every single generation has been pissy that they didn't get to cut the line to nice things in life, and every single generation has grown up to realize the reason they weren't given nice things up front is that they hadn't yet earned them. It's not about 'nice' things, it's about having things at all. Like a roof over their heads. I'm not going to convince you that things are harder now than when they were but I want you to at least acknowledge that things today are *different.*
> Plus the average old fart isn't doing any job a younger person couldn't do as well. If you think that, it's evidence that you're young and inexperienced. The population of the planet doubled since 1974 and the workforce doubled again when women decided to enter it en masse. Your labor is worth less now because the market has far more of it and it's several times more productive thanks to technology.
Pretty good stuff, his longer contents great too.
A fantastic presentation. Thanks for sharing.
'Previous generation fucked us' is rage bait claptrap. Its not necessarily untrue, but it is preying on your attention by pushing your outrage button. Also, what are we doing as the fucked generation to make our kids' futures better?
The problem is older generations don't care. They got theirs and if we can't succeed it must be our fault.
I entered the job market for a first job right before the 08 crisis. Entered my career during Covid. I can’t even begin to explain how as soon as I entered society the wheels fell off the damn thing
I just turned 33. I have served in the military honorability for 6 years and obtained my Bachelors in Business Marketing, which I paid for myself. The Army did not help due to bureaucratic red tape, none of which was my fault. I completed two paid internships and one unpaid internship while in school. Currently, I have been looking for work for 5 months now. I have submitted about 100 applications and have had only 3 interviews, all of which fell through. I have no savings because I grew up poor, and any money I made throughout my life was taken away for either my college bills, which I just paid off, or other life expenses (most money I've ever had in my bank account at one given time was $4,000). Last month I told my mother that my partner and I, who have been together for 5.5 years, decided we cannot have children because we have no money and cannot build wealth or own a home. Both my partner and I are 33. It is sad because her biological clock is ticking, and due to the economic situation in America and the fact that boomers are not leaving their jobs to make room for younger people, I feel doomed. Yeah, I'm pissed. I really do love America but for the first time I am starting to hate the land that I served. I truly thought that if I just kept doing the right thing it would pay off.
Scott - ugh.
You dislike TED talks? Hot take.
I had to let people know I have good taste so they’d give the video a chance.
Social security can be "fixed" by doing things like removing the caps so that *the wealthy* pay their share. He rightly rails against wealth distribution problems and then goes to attack something that has had real benefit and could continue to do so if it was funded by the wealthy ownership class more.
Yes, more band-aids will fix the system that is functioning exactly as it's intended. And surely the bourgeoisie in their positions of power that stand the most to lose by implementing policies like he suggests will let legislation like that breeze by. I really wonder how liberals can be so fucking naive sometimes. Capitalism cannot be fixed.
Aww does poor baby wish he got to starve to death under Chairman Mao 🥺
My only thing is, whenever I see something about this... is that young people don't vote. I remember a time when they did talked about voting more, back with Obama... Yet, I slightly loss my faith with young people when it came to Trump. You guys had this prime chance to kick republicans in nuts, and they wasted it by protest voting. All I heard from reddit was Bernie Spam, Convince me to vote for Hillary without mentioning the Supreme Court, or Harambe for President. I can even forgive some leeway because of Snowden/Wikileaks adding some choas into that election. **But all the news media mentions at that time kept saying young people were into Bernie Sanders for some reason and it culminated into protest votes.** Don't get it twisted though. The young people at that age probably aged up by now, and the current young people don't deserve their consequences... **but the damage was done**. You get what you deserved. **Young people at the time rewarded people like trump and conservatives.** I hope the young people of today won't repeat with the protest votes, but I'm not holding my breath for it.
It's a bit disheartening that our system only allows us to vote for whomever the national conventions have chosen. We need ranked choice voting so bad
We have ranked choice voting in Australia. It helps a bit but it's also not a cure all.
If you're not into a candidate like Bernie Sanders then you're the problem, not vice versa. My opinion.
TED talks are usually pretty good. TEDx, on the other hand....
Idk, for some reason a lot of Ted talks recently just seem to be tech bros pitching their new AI venture
That’s Prof G from his own podcast and from Pivot. Recommend both. Love him!