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June 11, 2017|Conservative Party, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Old Age Entitlements, Republican Party, Theresa May, young voters

The Political Economy of the Conservative Party’s Near Defeat

by John O. McGinnis|

Row of tree voting booths

The British election reveals the coming clash between the old and young in much of the West.  The social welfare state naturally creates divisions between groups with immutable characteristics like age as each group maneuvers to get a larger share of money from the state before it runs out.  This sad truth was at the heart of the Conservative Party’s lost majority in the last election.

The young voted almost two thirds for Labour, despite the fact that party was led by Jeremy Corbyn, who was regarded by his own parliamentary party as an unelectable tribune of left wing protest and had as its shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, an open admirer of Lenin and Trotksy. To be sure, the young do not remember the real costs of socialism of either the hard Eastern European kind or the softer British variety.  It would almost contribute to the net happiness of Europe if a member of the old Soviet bloc remained to be a negative exemplar for everyone else.

But even with its compromised leadership the Labour party knew how to exploit the fault line between the old and the young created by the modern welfare state.  Much of the budget of Britain, like other Western democracies, goes to pension and other benefits to the old for which those younger are largely paying. But given longer life expectancy and lower birth rates,  young people fear that they will never get similar benefits, because the well will have run dry by the time they become eligible. Thus, they are energized by the Labour Party’s promise of free college tuition.  That promise can be cashed in now, unlike the illusory ones of state pensions four decades hence.

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November 16, 2014|Economic growth, Federalist Society, Longevity, Moore's Law, Old Age Entitlements

To Be Young Is Very Heaven

by John O. McGinnis|

Last Friday I had the great pleasure of participating in a panel at the Federalist Society’s National Convention with Chris DeMuth of the Hudson Institute, David Weisbach of the University of Chicago Law School, and Judge Frank Easterbrook on intergenerational equity and old age entitlements, like social security. My talk had two parts. I first rejected a common claim about old age entitlements: that they transfer resources from a poor generation to a richer one, because young people today will be less well off than their elders.  I, then, nevertheless showed that old age entitlements as presently structured raised substantial problems for the young and old. In this post I summarize the first part of the speech.

The history of economic growth in the United States suggests that, as they age, the young today will be much better off than the old are today. Since 1950 – less than a lifetime – real GDP per capita in the U.S. has tripled. And economic growth continues, even if the statistics suggest that it is slowing down. But this slowdown is to a substantial extent an illusion, because it fails to fully account for the two greatest ongoing revolutions of our time—the improvements in health care and the exponential increases in machine intelligence that are rapidly expanding throughout the economy.

First, take improvements in health care and longevity: they do not even show up in the GDP. And yet they are massive: as Larry Summers once remarked, it is not at all clear that one would choose to have the health care of 1950 and the income of today rather than the income of 1950 and the health care of today.

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Book Reviews

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

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The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

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Liberty Classics

Rereading Politica in the Post-Liberal Moment

by Glenn A. Moots

Althusius offers a rich constitutionalism that empowers persons to thrive alongside one another in deliberate communities.

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James Fenimore Cooper and the American Experiment

by Melissa Matthes

In The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper defended democracy against both mob rule and majority tyranny.

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Podcasts

Stuck With Decadence

A discussion with Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat discusses with Richard Reinsch his new book The Decadent Society.

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Can the Postmodern Natural Law Remedy Our Failing Humanism?

A discussion with Graham McAleer

Graham McAleer discusses how postmodern natural law can help us think more coherently about human beings and our actions.

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Did the Civil Rights Constitution Distort American Politics?

A discussion with Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell discusses his new book, The Age of Entitlement.

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America, Land of Deformed Institutions

A discussion with Yuval Levin

Yuval Levin pinpoints that American alienation and anger emerges from our weak political, social, and religious institutions.

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