Democracy Will Not Survive the Age of Consumption

https://kasurian.com/p/democracy-will-not-survive-consumption

by gniv • 7 months ago

18 11 7 months ago

deaux• 7 months ago

Great read. The consumption angle is one I'd never seen before, but very persuasive.

This framework clarifies a particular hypocrisy in contemporary British politics. The generation that has used its demographic weight to consume the surplus of current producers through triple-locked pensions, healthcare spending that rises inexorably with age, and property wealth accumulated behind exclusionary planning regimes, is the same generation that now drives the populist right’s fixation on migration. Yet the migrant, whatever burden they may place on public services, consumes a fraction of what the pensioner consumes in annual transfers. The young worker paying 40-50% of their income in tax, rent, and student loans is not being impoverished by the asylum seeker or migrant worker as much as they are being disadvantaged by the pensioner who owns their rented flat, by the planning regime that prevents new construction, by the landlord interest that captures housing benefit, and by the financial sector that inflates asset prices while starving productive enterprise of capital.

The only solution to this underlying cause is obvious and one I have been advocating for years now. Votes must be weighted by age, with the minimum voting age getting the maximum weight, down to maybe 20% (exact number is up for calculation) for the oldest person in the country. Otherwise, there is no escaping this problem. The older one gets, the more one is disincentivized to vote for long-term interests for the good of. The youth is the future, and policies are to be for the future.

For what it's worth, I'm nowhere near the minimum voting age, so this isn't a teenager saying "teenagers deserve all the rights". It's an inevitability. I've generally voted against personal interests and for the common good, but the huge majority of people are simply incapable of doing so. Hence if a group whose interest is aligned purely with short-term status-quo maintenance and hoarding becomes too large, there's no recourse. Which is where Europe is at.

There is of course one other solution, which is war. This temporarily resets the ability of many to vote for the common good rather than pure self-interest. This is naturally the "solution" that will be implemented, though unfortunately technology has advanced to such a stage that there's unlikely to be such an "after" period.

paleotrope• 7 months ago

Why not also tie votes to number of children you have? Seems like they would have the most interest in the future.

appreciatorBus• 7 months ago

That assumes they would vote in accordance with the future needs of their children. My experience in local politics around housing leads me to believe that most would not do this. Most would happily take the extra votes, but would vote in their self interest even when it conflicted with their children’s future self interest.

analog31• 7 months ago

Interestingly, persuading young people to vote would have this effect too. You could double the effectiveness of your vote by inviting your friend to vote. Instead, the young are persuaded that their vote won’t matter. Also, making voting generally more effective would help. In my state (Wisconsin) there are only four consequential elections: President, US Senator, Governor and state Supreme Court. Everything else is gerrymandered.

M95D• 7 months ago

However, I wouldn't trust young people, especially the TikTok generation, to be able to properly decide and vote in their own long term interest. (Nor their short term interest for that matter.) Just look at what happend in Romanian elections in 2024-2025.

phillipseamore• 7 months ago

Weighted votes throw secrecy out the window and they also don't allow hedging. I've been playing with the idea of 2x ballots for min_voting_age_years. So voters aged 18-36 will get two ballots in each election and can either do them identical or hedge their bets.

grebc• 7 months ago

Biggest problem: you’re assuming young people aren’t dumb.

kayo_20211030• 7 months ago

A libertarian's authoritarian wet-dream. The post assumes that producers and consumers are disjoint i.e. one is either a consumer, or one is a producer. There's no acknowledgement that it's possible to produce in one context and consume in another, or that last year one produced and this year one consumed. It reeks of a religious argument - the saved and the damned. Even the admission that consumers (freeloaders?) will always exist and need to be treated with dignity smells of an annoying paternalism.

jokethrowaway• 7 months ago

It's easy to argue we don't really live in a democracy. Plenty of laws and regulations go against the majority to favour a few powerful entities (think about copyright laws, healthcare in the US).

That said, the alternative to democracy is not necessary the increasingly authoritarian governments we see around the world. If we gave more power and freedom to the individual and less to the state, we could have more freedom without democracy.

Democracy after all is the dictatorship of the majority on the minority. Why not just have any entity controlling the lives of others?

senectus1• 7 months ago

Provided you treat corporations as states... yeah maybe.

lunatuna• 7 months ago

I’ve had some version of the consumer and producer problem in my head for a while and this is a good articulation of it. I would use Brazil and Venezuela as examples of it where there is a democracy that struggles to keep up with the majorities consumption desires vs its producer ability. Venezuela has since capitulated and unbelievably since I first thought about it been invaded.

Is this just all rent seekers? Is it a tipping point of wealth distribution and economic mobility? Is there a limit to how much imbalance a democracy can handle? Where the floor is on social services?

Enjoyed the essay for kicking up some thoughts.

Democracy Will Not Survive the Age of Consumption

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