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This is always true and always has been. Not sure why anyone thinks this is revelatory.

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I don't think it's age, I think it's just the short term immediate gratification part. I think it's becoming more and more common thanks to social media and delivery apps and all this technology that gives people whatever they want right when they need it. I've often called my generation the "shortcut generation" because everyone wants things done right away without putting the work in. Crypto is a way to turn $1,000 into $10,000 in weeks, Ozempic helps you lose weight without exercising, the list goes on and on.

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Is any of this even true outside of politics? In politics we have strong evidence of olds being entrenched.

When it comes to business we have a handful of examples among many thousands of business leaders. Are CEOs as a whole significantly older than before? And if you take it down a few levels, are there really hordes of 75 year olds clogging up the senior manager ranks? It's not like that at all in my experience. I'm sure there are examples of it being true, but it seems like we are building a tower of tenuous connections om a premise that hasn't been proven at all.

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It's an interesting email, but I also thought it was fairly surface-level and not very deep. Focusing on the part that really grinded my gears, saying that building housing and letting in immigrants in the 1980s led to the iPhone and Google is a reach (not to mention the inherent assumption there that both of those are good things, which I think is debatable at best). You could equally say that building housing and letting in immigrants led to the Great Recession and our current path towards a low trust society (which is why our politics are getting worse and worse). It's just a positivism towards some specific actions the emailer liked in the 1980s.

Also, a dynamic economy is one where people can be productive wherever they want/need to live, not one where they need to move to be productive. Having an economy based around a bunch of large cities sucks for families, especially children, and like 65% of the workforce in the country.

The other crazy part about this email is that he didn't bring up Social Security, which is the ultimate example of older voters refusing to do anything to benefit a younger generation in the U.S. 20 years ago, both political parties talked about having to reform SS because it was guaranteed to collapse. It is still guaranteed to collapse, but both parties refuse to do anything about it because older voters would punish them for it, so we have this weird situation where everyone understands that Social Security is unsustainable but people just accept that no one is going to do anything about it.

The actual problem is the Boomers, not that the Boomers are old. They were terrible (and made terrible decisions) in the 60s and 70s, terrible (and made terrible decisions) in the 90s and 00s, and they are terrible (and make terrible decisions) today.

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I wonder if the stagnation of culture (Friends is as relevant today as it was when it first aired) also plays into this

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Nope. I think it's because a whole new generation of people are being exposed to Friends so it's new to them. Similar phenomenon happened in late 80s and early 90s, when shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, the Brady Bunch, Bewitched and the Flintstones were all big in syndication then later spun into movies.

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That picture will haunt my dreams!

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Ehhhh I don't buy it. If you look at age and voting, as sort of a crude proxy for what people want, there's less age polarization than people seem to think, and age polarization really only started showing up in the last couple election cycles in the US anyway. If you look at voting registration, younger people around 30 are the most liberal, but there's another Democrat peak around age 70 and another peak after that at 90. The most R registering people are 50 and 80. It's much more mixed than young dems and old gop.

I was also looking at the recent French election results and there's barely any difference between the youngest and oldest French voters.

If I'm making too much of voting, then maybe I'm missing the point here. But it seems like age polarization should be more extreme if today's theory was everything.

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Maybe both parties have policies that let the Olds hang on to their assets

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Can we get the emailers Substack!

In the immortal (fake) words of Rob Pelinka, this guy is lit.

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Jack Welch is one of the greatest modern villains of the business world.

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As long as he’s ranked just below Kohlberg and Kravis.

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OLG would definitely be taught by an academic economist, but academic economists will frequently teach across business classes. I've seen OLG taught in MBA courses. I think you need to expand your first comment to "or an MBA" and drop the professor aspect. Sometimes MBA students can remember what they learned in school. Sometimes.

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