E pais e avós, avós e bisavós e por aí vai.

O Noah indicou uma excelente sequência de posts escritos por Jeff Lundy, “a PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego, a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan, and a blogger at The Panhandler’s Guide“. Nas palavras do próprio:

I’ve isolated four main issues with the economic accounting of older generations that I believe leads them to think of us youth as spoiled (and which us youngins’ should remember for when we get older).

Inflation

Inflation is a pretty familiar concept. We all know that things cost “more” now than they used to… Still, despite everyone’s vague sense of increasing prices, few people (in any generation) actually have a strong grasp on what inflation is, or a specific idea on exactly how much things have changed over time.

In it we see how a boomer thinks she’s suffering to give us more than we deserve, when in fact she is giving us less than her parents did, even though she is “better off” than they ever were.

taking account of inflation would probably help older generations to fully account for the privileges they also enjoyed in their childhoods, and in their current lives.

Substituition

Why is Substitution Accounting a Problem for Older Generations?

Discounting substitution is caused by a sampling error: older generations only see the “inexplicable” things that younger generations do buy, but not any of the things that younger generations are no longer buying.

Difusion

In terms of consumer goods, diffusion refers to the process by which innovative goods start out as expensive, and then gradually become cheaper, as they concurrently also become more widespread in the population.

Why is Diffusion Accounting a Problem for Older Generations?

Diffusion creates a problem for older generations because they seem incapable of accounting for its effect when comparing their youth to their children’s youth.

And from this mistake it’s not a long leap to see why they believe our generation – “with all the things we have that they didn’t” – should be eternally grateful for what we have.

Increasing standards

Increasing standards are really just the flipside of diffusion. Diffusion is about how things today that are commonplace would have been luxuries in the past. Conversely, increasing standards is about how “impressive” things today will eventually become commonplace.

By not seeing that increasingly advanced technology also brings increasingly rising standards, older generations often think youths have the advantages of advanced products, without realizing that increased standards now obtain. This leaves them thinking that kids are spoiled, for say, wanting a laptop to go to college; when given today’s environment kids can’t even survive without one (and frankly, if they want their children to succeed as much as they seem to want them to succeed, they should happily give them two).

O Jeff conclui muito bem:

Rather, I offer this post as an interesting comment on how the politics of economics extends more broadly than the “economic” sphere. This exploration of “amateur accounting” shows how economic thinking is entwined in our everyday social comparisons. Similarly, our comparisons with others feed back into our understandings of the economy and its health. How much have we heard lately that the current recession is due to the prodigal spending of the “Me generation” (a judgment about younger generations influenced by our amateur accounting)?