Heh, I saw the title and the domain, and I thought it was referring to wealth transferred from poor to rich by all the credit card fees that merchants pay that are refunded to well-off cardholders through rebates. Poorer customers do not get lucrative rebates, it they use debit and get none at all.
Keep in mind these charts are almost useless if you're trying to determine how much the typical millennial or gen x person has compared to boomers.
I'd go as far as to say it's misleading at best to portray "The kids are alright" and that "Gen X and millennial heirs are starting from a position of strength", when the charts used to back that up are based on net worth per capita, a very poor metric to use for this. They might as well say "A small portion of the kids, that happen to be in the top ~10%, are alright".
Right, that was egregiously misleading. Well, I'm not sure how misleading it is because the average is a meaningless metric for most people's experience, so probably very.
> by our estimate the amount spent will be smaller still at $8 trillion,* because most households receiving an inheritance are already affluent and likely to save or invest much of what they receive
It's not even a "top few percent" thing. It's an exercise in creative measurement.
A large fraction of the boomers were useless hippies for many years in their 20s so they were living hand to mouth, no assets. Everyone since went to work. The boomers when they did get serious quickly could afford houses got mortgages, putting them in the red for years. Everyone since has had to wait way longer to be in the red like that. So of course when you pause and take a static measurement it looks like generations since are "doing ok" because at whatever point you measure there's more of them banking assets to get to the next step.
While the article doesn't talk much about it, but the math in it implies that most of the wealth will be transferred to the government in the form of inheritance taxes. So yes, the great wealth transfer. Just not in the direction everyone presumed.
80% of the GDP over the next two decades will be siphoning money out of baby boomers (medical care, retirement homes, luxury cruises) before their children see a cent of it. Coupled with AI taking everyone's job, the end result is neo-feudalism where familial dynasties call all the shots.
That kind of spending is included under "retirement spending" in the article. They estimate that substantial amounts go to heirs after that, but mostly among the affluent.
It’s not. If you have older parents today, you can do the math on what activities they’re doing and quickly determine that you’re never going to see a cent from them. My friends all report the same.
I may sound salty but I’m not. I’ve spent enough time on Reddit to know that the real nightmare is when your parents didn’t save anything and can’t still work. Then, you’re obligated to take care of them and they actively take away from both you and their grandchildren (if they didn’t outright block you from being able to have kids in the first place).
Most of us are thankful our parents took care of us and do love them. I recognize that it’s not everyone but I think most kids don’t want to see their parents suffer.
If a parent starts with a home bought by the grandparent and dual income and a lot of money, and end up not having a pension because they spent all the money on holidays and multiple homes and zero investing, would you feel like you need to support them?
I feel constantly conflicted, the previous generation started with way more and wasted a lot more and now we are called in to support them, affecting their grandchildren? I don't think that's ok
People with irresponsible parents often end up feeling less responsibility towards them. People with responsible parents often feel more responsibility towards them. Often, the irresponsible groups are suffering more consequences too, which adds to the bitterness.
Of course there are other permutations, since life is full of so many uncontrollable factors.
Why is it that every time I see the term "baby boomers" used here, it looks like a slur? Is it just ageism or did they do exceptionally terrible things?
Ok but the corporations are ultimately owned by humans who are alive so there is no way around the generational wealth transfer other than destroying wealth.
"Not all households are as dysfunctional as the ones you described".
This comment of course needs to be taken in the context of HN. In the wider world, we have literal tens of millions of people in the United States who are in poverty and experience daily hunger and deprivation.
> Food insecurity is the limited or uncertain access to enough safe, affordable, and nutritious food to live a healthy life. It means people do not know where their next meal will come from or cannot buy enough healthy food because they lack money or other resources
Pretty big gap between literal starving and food insecurity.
My comment didn’t really portray what I’m getting at. Food insecurity is obviously an indicator for financial confidence. I know people can afford food, on top of the fact they will choose to pay for it because they have to. I know people who have chosen to eat and fall behind on rent. The point is, if you’re worried about your meals, you’re not living the rest of your life with confidence. It’s not something to be brushed aside.
I think youre confusing "defacto" job loss and "replacement" job loss.
Defacto job loss is: Your boss thinks you're replaceable with AI, and he fires you then puts the other workers implicitly responsible for your workload, _regardless of AI's capability.
Replacement job loss: AI actually does 100% of your work load.
Defacto jobloss is the insideous love child and will definitely accelerate because the "unwoke" mind virus rich people have that people are all replaceable, useless and "takers" as elon calls it. Workers will put up wiht it because they need a job under neofeudalism.
And that isn't how or why layoffs are happening as someone who has made those calls.
AI is being used as a scapegoat, but a lot of this is just rightsizing of headcount as I've previously mentioned on HN. Right before GPT-4 we were using COVID as that scapegoat in 2023.
What about when you reach retirement age? Will you consider medical care, a new house, or a cruise to be siphoning off of money that presumably belongs to someone else?
The money is theirs to use as they see fit. Maybe they earned it, maybe they inherited it. It doesn’t matter. You make your own fortune in this world, and then you get to decide how to spend it.
I had the same fears but even the boomers sitting on million dollar homes are being called “cash poor”.
You still need an income. You can only refinance so much, and then you’re paying off interest.
If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax. Some people are paying $1500/mo. in property tax. They need a job just to cover it.
You can’t sell the house and cash out because you need that cash to buy the next house without having a huge monthly payment.
It’s not enough to just own assets. They have to be capitalized upon in some way - having a renter, building a farm, storage, or other business with it, and so-on.
But nobody is really doing that. I think boomers thought they would get rich off the real estate and it’s not really happening. All it did was make prices out of reach for the average person.
Super wealthy are buying homes at inflated prices which is interesting and surprising but they’re largely not boomers.
Dynasties calling shots maybe, probably. But what’s new?
> If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax.
This isn't how property tax works in many places (assuming you're talking about supply/demand constraint reasons and not individual property development, e.g. apartment building). There is an overall assessment being raised by the entity (e.g., county), and it is divided pro rata across property owners. In this system, if everyone's property goes up 10x, the amount they pay individually stays exactly the same.
> If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax
If the entire city goes up
10x (without corresponding general inflation), you’ll likely find the tax rate goes down because most places tax property to fund government and few places would quickly swell the city budget by 10x.
> If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax.
That depends on where you live. For example, in California we have Prop 13, which limits how much the assessed value for a home can increase without being sold.
This means that even if your house goes up 10x in value, California will only increase the assessed value for tax purposes by 2% each year.
It's similar where I am - a bank and a realtor might say a home is worth .5M but the tax man still assesses it at around 115K.
I bought my home over 20 years ago and it is worth much more than I paid on the market. Yet the value of the property for tax purposes is only 3K more than what I paid for it in 2002.
Curiously, most homeowners, even recent ones, vote against changing that, because nominal value of the tax would go up for everyone, so we have the status quo.
But the solution I think should come out of the budget -- say, a municipal budget gets $100 today from property taxes, while recent homeowners pay $80 of that. If we just change the assessment rules to make it fair with long-time homeowners, then recent homeowners will pay $90, and long-timers will pay, say, $70. But budget only needs $100, not $160. So we can lower taxes at the same time as equalizing the assessment rules.
If you are of retirement age prop 13 saves you if you own your house and are on a fixed income and not a member of the 5%, because if it wasn’t for prop 13, the local municipalities would continue to jack up your property tax to the moon.
Prop 13 was passed through a statewide initiative process, because at the time the statewide politicians were never going do the right thing for retirees that managed to own a house.
Prop 13 is not necessarily a perfect solution, but since that time the politicians inside California or in other states are by and large incapable coming up with any other solutions that would benefit a larger body/group of people who own or are buying homes.
We've got a pretty good system in Washington for helping retired and disabled people not get taxed out of their homes.
• Applies to age 61+, age 57+ surviving spouse if the person who qualified dies, unable to work due to disability, or disabled veteran with a service connected rating of 40%+.
• Disposable income must be less than 70% of median county income.
• Your assessed value for property tax purposes is the minimum of the actual accessed value and the accessed value when you qualified for the program.
• You are exempted from paying one of the statewide school levies (there are two of them) and from paying "excess levies". Generally, "excess levies" are voter approved levies.
• If your disposable income is less than 60% of the county median household income you also are exempt from regular levies on min($70000, max($50000, 0.35 V)) where V is the assessed taxable value.
• If your disposable income is less then 50% of the county median household income the exemption from regular levies is max($60000, 0.60 V).
In my county those income levels are $65k, $56k, and $46k but are updated every three years and for 2027-2029 will be $93k, $81k, $70k. For a house with a tax of $3600, the tax as you go through those levels would be about $2200, $1900, and $1000 (or maybe it was $2400, $2200, and $1000...it was a while ago that I calculated it and I'm not sure which it was). (For King County, which is where Seattle is, the levels next year will be $101k, $89k, and $76k).
Disposable income is basically all your income, even if it is not taxable, with deductions for various medical things like drugs, in-home care and assistance, Medicare and Medigap premiums, and many others.
If your disposable income goes over the 70% threshold and you lose eligibility but it comes back down after one year and you reapply you get back your original frozen assessment. You can repeat this so you could qualify and get the frozen assessment and the exemptions, then alternate years in which you take a big IRA withdrawal which pushes you over and you pay tax that year based on your actually assessment and with no exemptions, then do a year with the frozen assessment and the exemptions.
Exactly, it’s not enough to just own it. They find themselves tapping into that sweet equity.
You have to do something with the land even if it means improving your home, paving a road, to increase the value above and beyond the market trend - to live off of! Otherwise you’re a buyer (or borrower) again
Correct, you have to own the house outright which is the first step towards financial independence. Next step is having some investments if you’re lucky, fortunate at least a million-two million dollars above and beyond owning your house.
Despite TFA coming from Visa, of all places, I found it to be a read worthy of my time. Basically, inheritances might not be as large as one might suspect, and the all that "inheritance spending lift" might already be happening (my parents are blowing my inheritance).
I might take issue with the conclusion at the very bottom that GenX and Millenials are ahead of Boomers on a capital per-capita basis. That might be true, but (for example) when this youngest-of-them Boomer bought his first house, housing was much more affordable. So it's not like the "kids" are necessarily spending their money on the fabled avocado toast (a dish this Boomer enjoys very much, thank you).
In many places you couldn't even buy "starter houses" like they had anymore. They wouldn't meet modern building codes. When people do manage to buy a house, it will likely be a nicer one.
At least in part, that's because the positional status of "many places" has changed dramatically. We have a growing population with a high degree of internal mobility. That means that places don't stay in a fixed position on the product lineup. Santa Clara County today isn't Santa Clara County in 1990. It's more akin to what Beverly Hills or the Gold Coast were in 1990.
Those places who got rich wrote laws for the whole state in the intervening time. In 1970-whatever if some poor mill town on the outskirts or some exurb didn't want to play by the rich big citys rules they didn't have to. They could allow street after street of garbage starter homes on postage stamps with nary a fuck about muh stormwater. These days they'll be fined by the state, lose their grant funding, etc, etc. if they did that.
It may look nicer, and have more features, but it's probably not built any better. Older homes were built with copper plumbing, plaster walls, solid hardwood floors, wood trim, and plywood subfloors, roof deck, and sheathing.
New homes use PVC or PEX pipes, drywall, OSB (basically glued-up wood chips) instead of plywood, laminate floors, and plastic or styrene trim.
The only things really better today are insulation and wiring.
> New homes use PVC or PEX pipes, drywall, OSB (basically glued-up wood chips) instead of plywood, laminate floors, and plastic or styrene trim.
PEX is better than copper. Drywall is better than lathe and plaster. Modern OSB like Advantech are just superior to plywood subfloors in every metric. Maybe the hardwood floors were better back then in some ways, but engineered hardwood or vinyl planks are superior in many ways over hardwood flooring. Better wear resistance, less shift with moisture/temp, etc.
Most countertops are far superior these days, with wide availability of quartz, granite, etc.
I’d say almost everything is built better at a minimum standard. You could always find poorly built houses back then, but the difference is there wasn’t even any rules often…
The same reason many inferior materials are used in higher end goods: there’s some mystic that its superior for one reason or another, potentially aesthetically, and the higher cost is sometimes a draw by itself. There’s nothing you can’t achieve with drywall that you can with lath and plaster.
There’s no reason ever to use marble over quartz designed to look like marble… but some people do anyways.
I disagree about drywall versus plaster, save for ease of repair. Maybe it's just in most cases you won't encounter the highest quality drywall, nor will the installation be well done and actually last even if, in theory, it could be done well. E.g., my 100+ year plaster is still there and totally fine save in high-moisture rooms, whereas my friend's 20-year-old house has screws or nails starting to pop out of the drywall everywhere.
I was speaking to an architect about this very issue a few weeks ago, and he also noted that there are also acoustic properties to plaster and lathe that make it much nicer for residences (and if you have an old home and can afford it, repair the plaster and don't replace it with drywall).
Although maybe texture and acoustics count as aesthetics to you (same with real wood floors looking far better than vinyl). When it comes to materials used in residences, aesthetics matter to a lot of people.
> whereas my friend's 20-year-old house has screws or nails starting to pop out of the drywall everywhere.
This is a drywall installation issue, though, like you said. Lath and plaster can have the same exact issue with popping. And unlike drywall, lath and plaster has issues with cracking especially if done poorly.
Regarding acoustics, you can easily improve acoustic performance of drywall in many ways. Double layering, acoustic sealing caulk, rockwall in walls, etc. You don’t need plaster to do that.
The only reason I can think that lath and plaster would be superior now is that the floor for how poorly it is done is likely lower, purely because it’s a bit of a lost art.
>you can easily improve acoustic performance of drywall in many ways. Double layering, acoustic sealing caulk, rockwall in walls, etc.
There's a principle-agent problem here. It is hard for a home buyer to verify claims of the existence of the things you list whereas lath and plaster is easy for a non-professional to learn to recognize. Lath and plaster also is better at forming curved surfaces. (I'm a particular fan of coved ceilings.)
Having seen OSB fall apart when it gets wet vs plywood which can delaminate but is still solid wood, I would disagree. OSB works if you can ensure it stays dry.
Not better just faster to put up, all those expensive cheap track homes and luxury apartments going up they are not made or built better not by a longshot.
Faster and cheaper to put up is better! Modern insulation is more comfortable and saves you on utility bills; modern electric is safer and supports more usecases; it's easier to attach things to drywall walls than plaster; etc, etc, etc. "The old ways were better" is rosy retrospection.
> Also, I've noticed newer houses (2000s-present) are airier and have more natural light compared to older (pre-90s) houses.
This depends a bit more on the specific era of the home, rather than just being pre-90s, but it's particularly present in 1970s housing stock. The energy crisis led to a style of home design that favored small windows (energy efficient windows weren't yet really a thing, or at least not widely available at affordable prices) with lower ceilings. After the energy crisis through the 80s things started opening up again, and then improvements in insulation and windows (for two specific features) and improved efficiency in AC units led to a further opening up of home designs (with larger windows, higher ceilings) through the 90s and to today.
At least in my area, the price of the land is a huge fraction of the value of a house.
Imagine a house-sized plot of land costs $250,000. That means a builder can offer buyers a $20,000 building for $270,000 or a $150,000 building for $400,000. And in the latter case, the buyer gets 7.5x the building for 1.5x the cost.
It is a very good read. And my only difference in option is that I think Visa of all places would be very knowledgeable about spending and where it all goes.
They have an absolutely vast amount of information about how money flows in the economy, and an interest in finding out where it will flow in the future, and when.
> That might be true, but (for example) when this youngest-of-them Boomer bought his first house, housing was much more affordable.
I think my fellow millennials are overlooking something in our complaints about housing prices, which is that the positional status of neighborhoods doesn't stay constant. There's a good chance that the neighborhood you fondly remember growing up in was much less desirable in relative terms than it is today.
My wife and I, for example, bought a house 10 years ago. In that time, the value has easily doubled, growing far faster than wages or inflation. But it's also a completely different product today. 10 years ago, we were young parents willing to make a lot of compromises to get a house on the water. Pre-COVID, the commute was 1:15 minutes each way, 5 days a week. The house next door was a tear-down with a tree growing in the living room. The other houses on the street were small cottages from the 1920s. Today, half of them have been torn down, rebuilt, and filled with more affluent neighbors.
If my kids grow up and say, "I have a professional job, why can't I afford a house like you guys did?" A big part of the answer is: we couldn't have afforded to live in their neighborhood at your age. We bought our house in a completely different neighborhood.
>baby boomers are sitting on at least $93 trillion in assets
> $36 trillion in baby boomer wealth will pass to Gen X and millennial heirs over the next 20 years after subtracting liabilities, excluding the top 1 percent of households (the outliers in how they spend their wealth)
Why the fuck would you be allowed to include top 1% in first number but not second? They are outliers, yes, so what?
This is an article about how the 99% will spend all their money and their children will not inherit money. The 1% will not spend all their money. They are not who the article is about.
When certain people are convinced that all wealth and success are only achieved through exploitation, then it's easy to lack empathy and consideration for anyone more wealthy or successful than them.
What is shocking to me is how can so many boomers still have a mortgage? They could buy a house when you could easily get one for <10 years of salary almost anywhere. You basically had to try not to pay off your mortgage, then constantly borrow against it.
>plant to do a Skip gen trip?
I have no earthy idea what this could mean but they just casually drop it in there. Thats how you can tell what social class you were born into.
I had a school friend whom's grandparents were one of these in the list it seems. The bought him a 3bed/bath house in the suburbs. He proceeded to do coke for the next 10 years and be a burnout,.but all good because he still has a nice house to live in while being a detriment to society. Yeah I'm bitter so what?
> I have no earthy idea what this could mean but they just casually drop it in there
It's defined in the paragraph above the image you misquoted:
> Skip-generation trips, where grandparents travel with grandchildren without their parents, are a clear example of how the wealth transfer is not just about money. These trips turn wealth into time together, shared memories and a way to pass down values across generations.
I've seen a lot of people do can put refinances instead of paying the house off. I recall one friend looked at the deed on the new house he bought (10 years ago) for 250k. The previous sale was for 90k, but we could see every refinance over the years, they owed 235k when it was sold. Probably lived a nice life in between with nice vacations but no savings.
My in-laws never had the money to save for retirement, so they got suckered into a reverse mortgage in Florida. They saw it as a way to have some spending money in their old age, but now that they've spent it and they're upside down it's a prison. They want to move to another area, closer to family, but they have no equity, and so no means to get a new place.
I'd imagine that falls into the bucket of a boomer with a mortgage.
> What is shocking to me is how can so many boomers still have a mortgage?
If you have a low-interest mortgage then it doesn't make financial sense to pay it off any faster than you have to. I know many people that carry a mortgage they could easily pay down but choose not to purely on financial optimization grounds.
Yes as long as you actually invest the money you would otherwise be using to pay down the mortgage into something that has a higher return than the mortgage is costing you. This isn't difficult to do, but a lot of people don't do that, they just spend the money.
You said it most live the life of Riley and that’s fine if you have wealthy parents to cover for you most do not. Another area where people squander their money is dipping into their 401(k) over the years.
My parents are not boomers (they're Gen X), but kept their marginal mortgage because the capital they would have used to fully pay off the mortgage could be better deployed in a mixture of investments.
A lot of households have done something similar.
Additionally, not all households bought their first house in their 20s - plenty of households did so in their 30s and 40s.
> They could buy a house when you could easily get one for <10 years of salary almost anywhere
And during that era, you had double digit interest rates [0]
>What is shocking to me is how can so many boomers still have a mortgage? They could buy a house when you could easily get one for <10 years of salary almost anywhere. You basically had to try not to pay off your mortgage, then constantly borrow against it.
These are the same people who sold the industrial economy to east asia because pollution, as if we don't all share the same space rock. Inability to think long term or several steps ahead is kind of their thing.
I was equally stunt, but get this : Visa wants to know how much people are going to spend using their services. This is not a sound socio-economic analysis of the wealth transfer. I think overall few people read this type of report.
Instead, it gives insight on a phenomenon that is expected to be an "event". They show that it's going to be gradual, that it already started. Maybe it is a way to inform potential investors in Visa ? Maybe it is a report intended for the business side customers (i.e. commerces) ? I don't know.
Plus, it gives an interesting insight on how the "_real_" economy is still a topic of research where every discourse seem to be on financial performances. I found it interesting after having a repulsed reaction to what I considered a grossly irrelevant account of socio-economic dynamics of the so called "great wealth transfer" (horrible name), like you.
Gen X and millennials are ahead of boomers on per capita wealth at the same age
This runs counter to the popular media narrative of poor millennials, but it makes sense. Millennials rose a tailwind of surging stock prices since the '09 bottom, fat white-collar salaries (such as in tech, consulting, finance), and surging home pries, buoyed by cheap mortgages from 2010-2022 thanks to 14 years of near-zero interest rates.
Even when taking into account student loan debt, white-collar workers still earn much more compared to in the 70s-early 2000s. 6 figure salaries for white-collar jobs were uncommon even in the early 2000s whereas they are commonplace today.
$100k is and was a historically high salary, especially when millennials were entering the job market (~1999-2018). Inflation adjusted to 2026 dollars, that's $132-200k. Median adult full-time income is $60-72k.
I think every generation would self-report that they had it pretty tough.
I remember my (Boomer) school teacher parents sitting at the kitchen table with an LED calculator adding up their bills and making sure they could make ends meet or getting blocks of government cheese for some reason (that made great grilled cheese, BTW).
Was it 10% easier for them than Millennials? Maybe. Was it 50% or 100% easier? I don’t think so.
Everything that can be done is being done to ensure that white-collar labor transitions from skilled workers to low-cost fungible operators of AI. Even if no further jobs are lost it will be a massive hit to the average salary.
Why do you think it will be low cost operation rather than highly paid specialized talent (but only very few of them)?
If AI becomes a widespread job displacer, I think we’re going to see an amplification of the value of talent. If you think there’s 2x or 10x talent now, you might find there’s 10x or 50x talent with AI.
I think it's reasonable to expect amplification but I am not sure how reasonable it would be to expect sustainable amplification. I feel that AI removes the meaning from work and with that gone we eventually start loosing the talent.
Heh, I saw the title and the domain, and I thought it was referring to wealth transferred from poor to rich by all the credit card fees that merchants pay that are refunded to well-off cardholders through rebates. Poorer customers do not get lucrative rebates, it they use debit and get none at all.
a bank will offer free tablets to new accounts while grinding their existing clientele into the dirt.
So, the rich will keep getting richer? Is that about right?
Keep in mind these charts are almost useless if you're trying to determine how much the typical millennial or gen x person has compared to boomers.
I'd go as far as to say it's misleading at best to portray "The kids are alright" and that "Gen X and millennial heirs are starting from a position of strength", when the charts used to back that up are based on net worth per capita, a very poor metric to use for this. They might as well say "A small portion of the kids, that happen to be in the top ~10%, are alright".
Right, that was egregiously misleading. Well, I'm not sure how misleading it is because the average is a meaningless metric for most people's experience, so probably very.
You’re right but they do at least say this:
> by our estimate the amount spent will be smaller still at $8 trillion,* because most households receiving an inheritance are already affluent and likely to save or invest much of what they receive
It's not even a "top few percent" thing. It's an exercise in creative measurement.
A large fraction of the boomers were useless hippies for many years in their 20s so they were living hand to mouth, no assets. Everyone since went to work. The boomers when they did get serious quickly could afford houses got mortgages, putting them in the red for years. Everyone since has had to wait way longer to be in the red like that. So of course when you pause and take a static measurement it looks like generations since are "doing ok" because at whatever point you measure there's more of them banking assets to get to the next step.
While the article doesn't talk much about it, but the math in it implies that most of the wealth will be transferred to the government in the form of inheritance taxes. So yes, the great wealth transfer. Just not in the direction everyone presumed.
Inheritance tax in the US currently doesn't kick in unless the estate is worth more than 12 million dollars.
Sounds pretty fair to me.
It's can also be circumvented entirely.
80% of the GDP over the next two decades will be siphoning money out of baby boomers (medical care, retirement homes, luxury cruises) before their children see a cent of it. Coupled with AI taking everyone's job, the end result is neo-feudalism where familial dynasties call all the shots.
Isn't that already happening and has happened? This news is a decade late. Last decade we could've said "in the next few years"
That kind of spending is included under "retirement spending" in the article. They estimate that substantial amounts go to heirs after that, but mostly among the affluent.
Bold assessment.
It’s not. If you have older parents today, you can do the math on what activities they’re doing and quickly determine that you’re never going to see a cent from them. My friends all report the same.
I may sound salty but I’m not. I’ve spent enough time on Reddit to know that the real nightmare is when your parents didn’t save anything and can’t still work. Then, you’re obligated to take care of them and they actively take away from both you and their grandchildren (if they didn’t outright block you from being able to have kids in the first place).
> Then, you’re obligated to take care of them
No, you very much are not.
Well, in 3/5 of the United States you are. Look up filial laws. They’re rarely enforced but they’re there.
Well thankfully I don’t live in that broken country.
Most of us are thankful our parents took care of us and do love them. I recognize that it’s not everyone but I think most kids don’t want to see their parents suffer.
If a parent starts with a home bought by the grandparent and dual income and a lot of money, and end up not having a pension because they spent all the money on holidays and multiple homes and zero investing, would you feel like you need to support them?
I feel constantly conflicted, the previous generation started with way more and wasted a lot more and now we are called in to support them, affecting their grandchildren? I don't think that's ok
As a parent I would far rather suffer than see my kids suffer.
As a child of parents who think like this, I refuse to let them.
People with irresponsible parents often end up feeling less responsibility towards them. People with responsible parents often feel more responsibility towards them. Often, the irresponsible groups are suffering more consequences too, which adds to the bitterness.
Of course there are other permutations, since life is full of so many uncontrollable factors.
Believe it or not I’m also a child of parents
So my kids should suffer more than me, and I should suffer more than my parents?
> Most
I’d love to see a source for that.
> I’ve spent enough time on Reddit to know
Please tell me you see the irony in this.
> siphoning money out of baby boomers (medical care, retirement homes, luxury cruises)
This has been happening for a while already.
Why is it that every time I see the term "baby boomers" used here, it looks like a slur? Is it just ageism or did they do exceptionally terrible things?
> the end result is neo-feudalism where familial dynasties call all the shots
I'm going to stick my neck out and say that this is mostly where we are already.
Agree that before the boomers can pass money to their children, our corporate overlords will find a way to hoover that money into their vaults.
Don't think AI will take everyone's job and is actually orthogonal to this entire issue.
Ok but the corporations are ultimately owned by humans who are alive so there is no way around the generational wealth transfer other than destroying wealth.
Not all households are as dysfunctional as the ones you described.
And there's a reason why trust and wealth planning has becoming increasingly common.
And while I am optimistic about AI's capabilities and am by no means an AI Luddite, assuming AI will take all jobs in the near future is ludicrous.
"Not all households are as dysfunctional as the ones you described".
This comment of course needs to be taken in the context of HN. In the wider world, we have literal tens of millions of people in the United States who are in poverty and experience daily hunger and deprivation.
We do not have tens of millions of hungry people unless you're including being a bit peckish before lunch time.
USDA says that 13.7% of US households experienced food insecurity in 2024 [0]. Extrapolate that against population and you get 47 million people.
[0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
EDIT since I can't reply to irish-coffee for some reason: nobody said literally starving, OP said experiencing hunger or deprivation.
You have to read their definitions. The broad 13.7% category includes everyone who was uncertain about being able to afford food.
You have to drill down to "very low food security" to reach the point where someone reports having reduced their food intake, which is a 5.4% number.
Still higher than I'd like! But it's not 47 million people.
That's correct, it's 18.5 million people, which is in the tens of millions
Food insecurity is a bullshit category we invented because actual hunger is basically solved. Yes, it's (obviously) a much bigger category.
> Food insecurity is the limited or uncertain access to enough safe, affordable, and nutritious food to live a healthy life. It means people do not know where their next meal will come from or cannot buy enough healthy food because they lack money or other resources
Pretty big gap between literal starving and food insecurity.
Pretty big gap in quality of life between people who have no worries about their next meal and those who have to stress over every one.
If you make $2000 and your rent is $1800 are you food insecure or rent insecure?
This is a miscategorization imo, food is incredibly cheap compared to any American income or welfare program.
My comment didn’t really portray what I’m getting at. Food insecurity is obviously an indicator for financial confidence. I know people can afford food, on top of the fact they will choose to pay for it because they have to. I know people who have chosen to eat and fall behind on rent. The point is, if you’re worried about your meals, you’re not living the rest of your life with confidence. It’s not something to be brushed aside.
I agree, it should not get brushed aside. Food insecurity is used as a mask for actual problems. It’s atrocious.
I think youre confusing "defacto" job loss and "replacement" job loss.
Defacto job loss is: Your boss thinks you're replaceable with AI, and he fires you then puts the other workers implicitly responsible for your workload, _regardless of AI's capability.
Replacement job loss: AI actually does 100% of your work load.
Defacto jobloss is the insideous love child and will definitely accelerate because the "unwoke" mind virus rich people have that people are all replaceable, useless and "takers" as elon calls it. Workers will put up wiht it because they need a job under neofeudalism.
And that isn't how or why layoffs are happening as someone who has made those calls.
AI is being used as a scapegoat, but a lot of this is just rightsizing of headcount as I've previously mentioned on HN. Right before GPT-4 we were using COVID as that scapegoat in 2023.
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What "shots" are the familial dynasties calling if nobody cares to work? I thought AI replaces prompt engineering
Siphoning money out of…? Really?
What about when you reach retirement age? Will you consider medical care, a new house, or a cruise to be siphoning off of money that presumably belongs to someone else?
The money is theirs to use as they see fit. Maybe they earned it, maybe they inherited it. It doesn’t matter. You make your own fortune in this world, and then you get to decide how to spend it.
not wrong
I had the same fears but even the boomers sitting on million dollar homes are being called “cash poor”.
You still need an income. You can only refinance so much, and then you’re paying off interest.
If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax. Some people are paying $1500/mo. in property tax. They need a job just to cover it.
You can’t sell the house and cash out because you need that cash to buy the next house without having a huge monthly payment.
It’s not enough to just own assets. They have to be capitalized upon in some way - having a renter, building a farm, storage, or other business with it, and so-on.
But nobody is really doing that. I think boomers thought they would get rich off the real estate and it’s not really happening. All it did was make prices out of reach for the average person.
Super wealthy are buying homes at inflated prices which is interesting and surprising but they’re largely not boomers.
Dynasties calling shots maybe, probably. But what’s new?
> If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax.
This isn't how property tax works in many places (assuming you're talking about supply/demand constraint reasons and not individual property development, e.g. apartment building). There is an overall assessment being raised by the entity (e.g., county), and it is divided pro rata across property owners. In this system, if everyone's property goes up 10x, the amount they pay individually stays exactly the same.
> If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax
If the entire city goes up 10x (without corresponding general inflation), you’ll likely find the tax rate goes down because most places tax property to fund government and few places would quickly swell the city budget by 10x.
> If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax.
That depends on where you live. For example, in California we have Prop 13, which limits how much the assessed value for a home can increase without being sold.
This means that even if your house goes up 10x in value, California will only increase the assessed value for tax purposes by 2% each year.
It's similar where I am - a bank and a realtor might say a home is worth .5M but the tax man still assesses it at around 115K.
I bought my home over 20 years ago and it is worth much more than I paid on the market. Yet the value of the property for tax purposes is only 3K more than what I paid for it in 2002.
Curiously, most homeowners, even recent ones, vote against changing that, because nominal value of the tax would go up for everyone, so we have the status quo.
But the solution I think should come out of the budget -- say, a municipal budget gets $100 today from property taxes, while recent homeowners pay $80 of that. If we just change the assessment rules to make it fair with long-time homeowners, then recent homeowners will pay $90, and long-timers will pay, say, $70. But budget only needs $100, not $160. So we can lower taxes at the same time as equalizing the assessment rules.
If you are of retirement age prop 13 saves you if you own your house and are on a fixed income and not a member of the 5%, because if it wasn’t for prop 13, the local municipalities would continue to jack up your property tax to the moon.
Prop 13 was passed through a statewide initiative process, because at the time the statewide politicians were never going do the right thing for retirees that managed to own a house.
Prop 13 is not necessarily a perfect solution, but since that time the politicians inside California or in other states are by and large incapable coming up with any other solutions that would benefit a larger body/group of people who own or are buying homes.
We've got a pretty good system in Washington for helping retired and disabled people not get taxed out of their homes.
• Applies to age 61+, age 57+ surviving spouse if the person who qualified dies, unable to work due to disability, or disabled veteran with a service connected rating of 40%+.
• Disposable income must be less than 70% of median county income.
• Your assessed value for property tax purposes is the minimum of the actual accessed value and the accessed value when you qualified for the program.
• You are exempted from paying one of the statewide school levies (there are two of them) and from paying "excess levies". Generally, "excess levies" are voter approved levies.
• If your disposable income is less than 60% of the county median household income you also are exempt from regular levies on min($70000, max($50000, 0.35 V)) where V is the assessed taxable value.
• If your disposable income is less then 50% of the county median household income the exemption from regular levies is max($60000, 0.60 V).
In my county those income levels are $65k, $56k, and $46k but are updated every three years and for 2027-2029 will be $93k, $81k, $70k. For a house with a tax of $3600, the tax as you go through those levels would be about $2200, $1900, and $1000 (or maybe it was $2400, $2200, and $1000...it was a while ago that I calculated it and I'm not sure which it was). (For King County, which is where Seattle is, the levels next year will be $101k, $89k, and $76k).
Disposable income is basically all your income, even if it is not taxable, with deductions for various medical things like drugs, in-home care and assistance, Medicare and Medigap premiums, and many others.
If your disposable income goes over the 70% threshold and you lose eligibility but it comes back down after one year and you reapply you get back your original frozen assessment. You can repeat this so you could qualify and get the frozen assessment and the exemptions, then alternate years in which you take a big IRA withdrawal which pushes you over and you pay tax that year based on your actually assessment and with no exemptions, then do a year with the frozen assessment and the exemptions.
Should have just said “if value goes up 10x the tax increases” to keep it accurate.
The overall point stands though beyond that nitpick
> I think boomers thought they would get rich off the real estate and it’s not really happening.
It would have if they had paid off their mortgages instead of borrowing against equity, refinancing and taking equity out, etc.
If you still owe 70-80% of your house to the bank when you retire, it's not really an asset.
Exactly, it’s not enough to just own it. They find themselves tapping into that sweet equity.
You have to do something with the land even if it means improving your home, paving a road, to increase the value above and beyond the market trend - to live off of! Otherwise you’re a buyer (or borrower) again
Correct, you have to own the house outright which is the first step towards financial independence. Next step is having some investments if you’re lucky, fortunate at least a million-two million dollars above and beyond owning your house.
Despite TFA coming from Visa, of all places, I found it to be a read worthy of my time. Basically, inheritances might not be as large as one might suspect, and the all that "inheritance spending lift" might already be happening (my parents are blowing my inheritance).
I might take issue with the conclusion at the very bottom that GenX and Millenials are ahead of Boomers on a capital per-capita basis. That might be true, but (for example) when this youngest-of-them Boomer bought his first house, housing was much more affordable. So it's not like the "kids" are necessarily spending their money on the fabled avocado toast (a dish this Boomer enjoys very much, thank you).
In many places you couldn't even buy "starter houses" like they had anymore. They wouldn't meet modern building codes. When people do manage to buy a house, it will likely be a nicer one.
At least in part, that's because the positional status of "many places" has changed dramatically. We have a growing population with a high degree of internal mobility. That means that places don't stay in a fixed position on the product lineup. Santa Clara County today isn't Santa Clara County in 1990. It's more akin to what Beverly Hills or the Gold Coast were in 1990.
Those places who got rich wrote laws for the whole state in the intervening time. In 1970-whatever if some poor mill town on the outskirts or some exurb didn't want to play by the rich big citys rules they didn't have to. They could allow street after street of garbage starter homes on postage stamps with nary a fuck about muh stormwater. These days they'll be fined by the state, lose their grant funding, etc, etc. if they did that.
It may look nicer, and have more features, but it's probably not built any better. Older homes were built with copper plumbing, plaster walls, solid hardwood floors, wood trim, and plywood subfloors, roof deck, and sheathing.
New homes use PVC or PEX pipes, drywall, OSB (basically glued-up wood chips) instead of plywood, laminate floors, and plastic or styrene trim.
The only things really better today are insulation and wiring.
> New homes use PVC or PEX pipes, drywall, OSB (basically glued-up wood chips) instead of plywood, laminate floors, and plastic or styrene trim.
PEX is better than copper. Drywall is better than lathe and plaster. Modern OSB like Advantech are just superior to plywood subfloors in every metric. Maybe the hardwood floors were better back then in some ways, but engineered hardwood or vinyl planks are superior in many ways over hardwood flooring. Better wear resistance, less shift with moisture/temp, etc.
Most countertops are far superior these days, with wide availability of quartz, granite, etc.
I’d say almost everything is built better at a minimum standard. You could always find poorly built houses back then, but the difference is there wasn’t even any rules often…
If drywall is better than lath and plaster, then why is lath and plaster still used today -- in high-end construction?
The same reason many inferior materials are used in higher end goods: there’s some mystic that its superior for one reason or another, potentially aesthetically, and the higher cost is sometimes a draw by itself. There’s nothing you can’t achieve with drywall that you can with lath and plaster.
There’s no reason ever to use marble over quartz designed to look like marble… but some people do anyways.
I disagree about drywall versus plaster, save for ease of repair. Maybe it's just in most cases you won't encounter the highest quality drywall, nor will the installation be well done and actually last even if, in theory, it could be done well. E.g., my 100+ year plaster is still there and totally fine save in high-moisture rooms, whereas my friend's 20-year-old house has screws or nails starting to pop out of the drywall everywhere.
I was speaking to an architect about this very issue a few weeks ago, and he also noted that there are also acoustic properties to plaster and lathe that make it much nicer for residences (and if you have an old home and can afford it, repair the plaster and don't replace it with drywall).
Although maybe texture and acoustics count as aesthetics to you (same with real wood floors looking far better than vinyl). When it comes to materials used in residences, aesthetics matter to a lot of people.
> whereas my friend's 20-year-old house has screws or nails starting to pop out of the drywall everywhere.
This is a drywall installation issue, though, like you said. Lath and plaster can have the same exact issue with popping. And unlike drywall, lath and plaster has issues with cracking especially if done poorly.
Regarding acoustics, you can easily improve acoustic performance of drywall in many ways. Double layering, acoustic sealing caulk, rockwall in walls, etc. You don’t need plaster to do that.
The only reason I can think that lath and plaster would be superior now is that the floor for how poorly it is done is likely lower, purely because it’s a bit of a lost art.
>you can easily improve acoustic performance of drywall in many ways. Double layering, acoustic sealing caulk, rockwall in walls, etc.
There's a principle-agent problem here. It is hard for a home buyer to verify claims of the existence of the things you list whereas lath and plaster is easy for a non-professional to learn to recognize. Lath and plaster also is better at forming curved surfaces. (I'm a particular fan of coved ceilings.)
The new building methods and materials are genuinely better.
(Criticizing OSB and glazing plywood is crazy. They're both just composite wood products. OSB is totally fine for what it's used for.)
Having seen OSB fall apart when it gets wet vs plywood which can delaminate but is still solid wood, I would disagree. OSB works if you can ensure it stays dry.
>OSB works if you can ensure it stays dry.
Plywood is getting to be almost as bad.
The glue changed and got categorucally worse 10-20yr ago.
Not better just faster to put up, all those expensive cheap track homes and luxury apartments going up they are not made or built better not by a longshot.
Faster and cheaper to put up is better! Modern insulation is more comfortable and saves you on utility bills; modern electric is safer and supports more usecases; it's easier to attach things to drywall walls than plaster; etc, etc, etc. "The old ways were better" is rosy retrospection.
In California, a big difference is earthquake retrofitting. Older houses often aren't retrofit until sale, and retrofitting is expensive.
Also, I've noticed newer houses (2000s-present) are airier and have more natural light compared to older (pre-90s) houses.
> Also, I've noticed newer houses (2000s-present) are airier and have more natural light compared to older (pre-90s) houses.
This depends a bit more on the specific era of the home, rather than just being pre-90s, but it's particularly present in 1970s housing stock. The energy crisis led to a style of home design that favored small windows (energy efficient windows weren't yet really a thing, or at least not widely available at affordable prices) with lower ceilings. After the energy crisis through the 80s things started opening up again, and then improvements in insulation and windows (for two specific features) and improved efficiency in AC units led to a further opening up of home designs (with larger windows, higher ceilings) through the 90s and to today.
Yeah, go back to 1950s or earlier and you are into the pre-AC era, houses had big windows, big covered porches, and higher ceilings.
Newer CA homes also tend to do better in fires.
At least in my area, the price of the land is a huge fraction of the value of a house.
Imagine a house-sized plot of land costs $250,000. That means a builder can offer buyers a $20,000 building for $270,000 or a $150,000 building for $400,000. And in the latter case, the buyer gets 7.5x the building for 1.5x the cost.
It is a very good read. And my only difference in option is that I think Visa of all places would be very knowledgeable about spending and where it all goes.
They have an absolutely vast amount of information about how money flows in the economy, and an interest in finding out where it will flow in the future, and when.
They have the data but I wouldn't trust their analysis of it unless they release all the raw data which would be to the benefit of their competitors.
This piece is very much not sourced from payment rails transaction data. It's big demographic and macro data and the sources are all nicely cited
"my parents are blowing my inheritance". Really? It is their money, not yours. I think you mean, "my parents are spending down their savings."
I read that as an observation rather than commentary on who the money belongs to.
I meant when I wrote. I just might not have meant it as seriously as you seem to think.
> That might be true, but (for example) when this youngest-of-them Boomer bought his first house, housing was much more affordable.
I think my fellow millennials are overlooking something in our complaints about housing prices, which is that the positional status of neighborhoods doesn't stay constant. There's a good chance that the neighborhood you fondly remember growing up in was much less desirable in relative terms than it is today.
My wife and I, for example, bought a house 10 years ago. In that time, the value has easily doubled, growing far faster than wages or inflation. But it's also a completely different product today. 10 years ago, we were young parents willing to make a lot of compromises to get a house on the water. Pre-COVID, the commute was 1:15 minutes each way, 5 days a week. The house next door was a tear-down with a tree growing in the living room. The other houses on the street were small cottages from the 1920s. Today, half of them have been torn down, rebuilt, and filled with more affluent neighbors.
If my kids grow up and say, "I have a professional job, why can't I afford a house like you guys did?" A big part of the answer is: we couldn't have afforded to live in their neighborhood at your age. We bought our house in a completely different neighborhood.
>baby boomers are sitting on at least $93 trillion in assets
> $36 trillion in baby boomer wealth will pass to Gen X and millennial heirs over the next 20 years after subtracting liabilities, excluding the top 1 percent of households (the outliers in how they spend their wealth)
Why the fuck would you be allowed to include top 1% in first number but not second? They are outliers, yes, so what?
This is an article about how the 99% will spend all their money and their children will not inherit money. The 1% will not spend all their money. They are not who the article is about.
don’t think of it as a setback, imagine the opportunity
Ag, so it’s not really “eat the rich” but “eat the boomers”.
The article says the exact opposite.
Wealth isn't with boomers: it is with rich boomers, pointing the high mortgage and debt that a lot of boomers have.
And they explain that the wealth is going to stay and be kept by these rich families (which will invest and not spend).
Read about revolutionaries, they really don’t care who they eat. Be prepared to be involuntarily labeled a boomer
When certain people are convinced that all wealth and success are only achieved through exploitation, then it's easy to lack empathy and consideration for anyone more wealthy or successful than them.
it only takes a concerted group to convince the rest (I'm talking about history not virtue).
What is shocking to me is how can so many boomers still have a mortgage? They could buy a house when you could easily get one for <10 years of salary almost anywhere. You basically had to try not to pay off your mortgage, then constantly borrow against it.
>plant to do a Skip gen trip?
I have no earthy idea what this could mean but they just casually drop it in there. Thats how you can tell what social class you were born into.
I had a school friend whom's grandparents were one of these in the list it seems. The bought him a 3bed/bath house in the suburbs. He proceeded to do coke for the next 10 years and be a burnout,.but all good because he still has a nice house to live in while being a detriment to society. Yeah I'm bitter so what?
> >plant to do a Skip gen trip?
> I have no earthy idea what this could mean but they just casually drop it in there
It's defined in the paragraph above the image you misquoted:
> Skip-generation trips, where grandparents travel with grandchildren without their parents, are a clear example of how the wealth transfer is not just about money. These trips turn wealth into time together, shared memories and a way to pass down values across generations.
I've seen a lot of people do can put refinances instead of paying the house off. I recall one friend looked at the deed on the new house he bought (10 years ago) for 250k. The previous sale was for 90k, but we could see every refinance over the years, they owed 235k when it was sold. Probably lived a nice life in between with nice vacations but no savings.
One reason is older homes need repairs. Furnaces, roofs, windows, etc. What to do when faced with $20k in repairs? Borrow it.
Maybe they all got houses when the monthly payments were affordable.
My in-laws never had the money to save for retirement, so they got suckered into a reverse mortgage in Florida. They saw it as a way to have some spending money in their old age, but now that they've spent it and they're upside down it's a prison. They want to move to another area, closer to family, but they have no equity, and so no means to get a new place.
I'd imagine that falls into the bucket of a boomer with a mortgage.
> What is shocking to me is how can so many boomers still have a mortgage?
If you have a low-interest mortgage then it doesn't make financial sense to pay it off any faster than you have to. I know many people that carry a mortgage they could easily pay down but choose not to purely on financial optimization grounds.
Yes as long as you actually invest the money you would otherwise be using to pay down the mortgage into something that has a higher return than the mortgage is costing you. This isn't difficult to do, but a lot of people don't do that, they just spend the money.
You said it most live the life of Riley and that’s fine if you have wealthy parents to cover for you most do not. Another area where people squander their money is dipping into their 401(k) over the years.
My parents are not boomers (they're Gen X), but kept their marginal mortgage because the capital they would have used to fully pay off the mortgage could be better deployed in a mixture of investments.
A lot of households have done something similar.
Additionally, not all households bought their first house in their 20s - plenty of households did so in their 30s and 40s.
> They could buy a house when you could easily get one for <10 years of salary almost anywhere
And during that era, you had double digit interest rates [0]
[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1338105/volcker-shock-in...
>What is shocking to me is how can so many boomers still have a mortgage? They could buy a house when you could easily get one for <10 years of salary almost anywhere. You basically had to try not to pay off your mortgage, then constantly borrow against it.
These are the same people who sold the industrial economy to east asia because pollution, as if we don't all share the same space rock. Inability to think long term or several steps ahead is kind of their thing.
This whole premise is bullshit.
They include the 1% in the wealth calculation, and then exclude it from the wealth transfer to say "see how much taxation is happening?"
If you don't want to include the 1% in the second number, don't include it in the first number.
I was equally stunt, but get this : Visa wants to know how much people are going to spend using their services. This is not a sound socio-economic analysis of the wealth transfer. I think overall few people read this type of report.
Instead, it gives insight on a phenomenon that is expected to be an "event". They show that it's going to be gradual, that it already started. Maybe it is a way to inform potential investors in Visa ? Maybe it is a report intended for the business side customers (i.e. commerces) ? I don't know.
Plus, it gives an interesting insight on how the "_real_" economy is still a topic of research where every discourse seem to be on financial performances. I found it interesting after having a repulsed reaction to what I considered a grossly irrelevant account of socio-economic dynamics of the so called "great wealth transfer" (horrible name), like you.
They also hold disproportionate wealth. It is absurd to arbitrarily exclude them.
Gen X and millennials are ahead of boomers on per capita wealth at the same age
This runs counter to the popular media narrative of poor millennials, but it makes sense. Millennials rose a tailwind of surging stock prices since the '09 bottom, fat white-collar salaries (such as in tech, consulting, finance), and surging home pries, buoyed by cheap mortgages from 2010-2022 thanks to 14 years of near-zero interest rates.
Even when taking into account student loan debt, white-collar workers still earn much more compared to in the 70s-early 2000s. 6 figure salaries for white-collar jobs were uncommon even in the early 2000s whereas they are commonplace today.
Let's not assume that 6 figure salary is close to 999,999. In reality it's closer to 100,001.
And when you factor in inflation and increased housing cost the comparison starts to differ greatly.
Millennials have it pretty tough.
$100k is and was a historically high salary, especially when millennials were entering the job market (~1999-2018). Inflation adjusted to 2026 dollars, that's $132-200k. Median adult full-time income is $60-72k.
I think every generation would self-report that they had it pretty tough.
I remember my (Boomer) school teacher parents sitting at the kitchen table with an LED calculator adding up their bills and making sure they could make ends meet or getting blocks of government cheese for some reason (that made great grilled cheese, BTW).
Was it 10% easier for them than Millennials? Maybe. Was it 50% or 100% easier? I don’t think so.
Everything that can be done is being done to ensure that white-collar labor transitions from skilled workers to low-cost fungible operators of AI. Even if no further jobs are lost it will be a massive hit to the average salary.
Why do you think it will be low cost operation rather than highly paid specialized talent (but only very few of them)?
If AI becomes a widespread job displacer, I think we’re going to see an amplification of the value of talent. If you think there’s 2x or 10x talent now, you might find there’s 10x or 50x talent with AI.
I think it's reasonable to expect amplification but I am not sure how reasonable it would be to expect sustainable amplification. I feel that AI removes the meaning from work and with that gone we eventually start loosing the talent.
And 0 talent by 10 ( or even 50 ) is a fucking 0!
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