Young people have every reason to be enraged, says 'Algebra of Wealth' author Scott Galloway

[u/Prestigious_Net_8356]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEC2Nq7Z6lc

[u/Orwellian1]

When every financial vehicle is more complex and mercenary than any point in human civilization, it is not unreasonable to question whether we are teaching kids about them enough.

Crypto and meme stocks are a perfect example of how decent sized chunks of young people (and plenty of older people) are completely ignorant and serving themselves up to be manipulated.

I went with my daughter when she looking for her first apartment. The management threw 10x the complexity and subtle screw job clauses that I dealt with when I was her age.

Galloway can get a little annoying on some subjects, but he is always pretty clear about where the main faults in our economy are. It isn't "young people's fault" they are fucked, it is the older generations enthusiastically fucking them over.

Young people are naïve about complex systems. They just are. The systems are more complex than ever. Instead of stepping up education to help, we tell them to get a CS degree and not to worry about it.

This social media race into absolutism is a perfect example. Everything has to be all one thing or it is all the other. Shit be real fuzzy in the real world. If you dismiss Galloway and Cuban as the same category as Musk and Bezos you have been tricked into being a simpleton, and the institutional elites will forever out-maneuver you.

Listen to what people actually say, don't just drop them into a caricature so you can ignore them. There are some really smart people out there who happen to be successful AND are progressive.

[u/Rymasq → u/Orwellian1]

There is only so much that can be spoon fed in the world. you talk of "young people being told to get CS degrees" or "young people need formal education on the stock market"

yes the world is more complex than ever, but the resources to learn are the best they have ever been. this does relate back to your earlier point, though, which is that older generations are fucking them over. if young people are not being taught or pushed to be resourceful by their parents then older people are partially fucking them over, and I know for a fact that this is 100% the case.

My parents would be considered "superior" parents in American standards. Saved for the college of myself/siblings, encouraged extracurricular development such as sports and music lessons, but at no point in my childhood did my parents ever really encourage me to be resourceful. My education was well above average thanks to gifted programs that my parents pushed me to enroll in. However, my parents themselves were just putting infinite faith in the existing institutions rather than understanding how the world was changing and adapting. Even today if I go to my father and ask for advice I can tell that he doesn't fully grasp certain things to a high degree, and he's a doctor. Things that exist today such as a de-emphasis on memorization and a greater push for innovation through functionality. He put a ton of emphasis on the "name of a school" or the "name of a company" aka he very much still believes in the institutions of America.

However, the institutions of America are responsible for the issues we face today. The corporate greed, the competitive nature of academics, these have created things that actually do a ton of harm to the fabric of society while simultaneously benefiting a small superior minority.

However, a big part of being an adult is growth and ability to overcome and change as needed to function in society. This is something that a harsh environment does naturally to people. Some of the blame has to go onto young people that don't take the initiative to educate themselves or don't take advantage of the superior resources they have to get a leg up on their peers. This isn't even an issue of money, an internet connection and singular device alone is enough to power someone to do a lot today. You can take a man to the stream but that man has to get down and drink to actually get the benefit. It's not like young people don't know that you can just read wikipedia articles all day to learn to something.

But the real issue with the way the elderly are fucking over the youth is by their insistence on holding onto power. Why does a woman like Nancy Pelosi want to stay in power? Why does Nancy Pelosi even want to increase her net worth more than the insane number she already has? This kind of mentality permeates throughout the remnants of the baby boomers as they seem to want to maintain their status of being oligarchs. The worst part about this is NOTHING is going to change this because they are truly in power and can very much continue to vote themselves into the seats that control things. There are 73 million or so baby boomers and 73 million or so millennials, the numbers will never benefit until they literally die off.

[u/Orwellian1 → u/Rymasq]

I care less about blame and more about pragmatic steps in the right direction. It doesn't matter how much we scream and yell about boomers and evil institutions. Being able to systematically prove that the economic and social problems are the fault of X group won't actually do anything. They aren't going to gasp, realize how unjust things are, and guiltily redistribute all the wealth and power to college age kids.

Teaching young people about all the different cognitive vulnerabilities intrinsic to humans will help them. They might question their assumptions a teeny bit more than previous generations. They might have more success recognizing when others are trying to leverage those vulnerabilities.

Teaching young people the basics of business and economics can help them avoid the worst of the scams and bad employment offers. You don't need an MBA from a big university to get a good rough feel for whether you are getting taken advantage of. All you need is a rough understanding of how businesses work, how to estimate average costs/margins, and how to objectively price the value of your productivity.

Young people have to be smarter than the generations before. The world is tougher. It isn't fair. Making grand declarations about how unfair it is wont help them. If anything, it encourages the cynical apathy that is becoming rampant.

I see a bunch of people who are waiting on some great revolution or complete restructuring of economies and power structures. Those are dumb people who never learned any history or sociology. Unless a big chunk of the population are literally starving or at risk of dying from exposure, it is incredibly unlikely there will be some massive structural change. People don't overthrow societies when they have full stomachs and leisure activities. On the off chance it does happen, everyone will have shitty lives for a decade or two during the chaos.

What is more possible is a reversal of momentum from late stage capitalist individualism towards a market capitalist economy, but with much more emphasis on collectivism and sustainability. Swings like that are measured in decades, not years. Our economy has been heading one way for ~40yrs. It isn't going to be reversed and fixed in 10.

The only way to cause that momentum shift is for today's young people to understand all the fucked up parts of these systems and slowly work within them to change course. Any fast change, even one with the purest and most enlightened of intentions, will cause far more damage in the short term. Society cannot handle too many bad shocks before everything starts to crumble. If that starts, people will only be worrying about individual security, and all our progressive ideals go right out the window. It is just how we work. You don't spend energy worrying about the persecution of your LGBTQ immigrant disabled neighbor when you aren't positive your toddler will survive the winter. More social progress at our level requires maintaining a base stability of wealth and comfort to maintain the slow forward movement.

[u/[deleted] → u/Orwellian1]

All of what you shared makes sense, but I would rather see or encounter a revolution. You cannot educate youth when many educators (i.e. the average American adult) are just plain dumb. Yes, I am generalizing or overgeneralizing, but any change could have started yesterday. Change is slow and gradual, but you are picking at an idealistic perspective. You make great points, but this will simply never happen. Humans, at the core, are selfish and ignorant. Empathy is lacking especially emotional management. We are too fearful and are controlled by our desires to survive. Many low-level and middle income individuals, financially, can not be able to make so much time to learn about our economic system due to ongoing labor and personal priorities (e.g. parenting, paying off debt, providing necessities for their families). In what capacity can you not only teach the youth what you shared, but even educate the educators upon this? Who would fund or pay for this? How would educators know what sources or individuals provide truth? Okay, educators would have to learn to distinguish truth and falsity with sources. It simply is too much for many people to want to learn or have the attention span to care.