I fell down a rabbit hole chasing these sources, and in the true communist fashion, it is now our rabbit hole :bugs-stalin:

• First, the tweet above.
• The pictures are from Peter Thiel: Capitalism Isn’t Working for Young People (archive.is), which is a recent interview of Thiel.
• The article mentions leaked emails in the byline. Digging around, I think I found the leaked emails on somebody’s substack. I obviously haven’t verified, but you can see the whole exchange.
  • The relevant section on Socialism is a little over half way down

There are many themes that could be developed more here; let me make a few quick points for now:

Nick – I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace Millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.

What I would add to Mark’s summary is that, in a healthier society, the handover from the Boomers to the younger generations should have started some time ago (maybe as early as the 1990s for Gen X), and that for a whole variety of reasons, this generational transition has been delayed as the Boomers have maintained an iron grip on many US institutions. When the handover finally happens in the 2020s, it will therefore happen more suddenly and perhaps more dramatically than people expect or than such generational transitions have happened in the past. And that’s why it’s especially important for us to think about these issues and try and get ahead of them.

One example of such an “iron grip” from my colleague Eric Weinstein: Of the 67 top research universities in the US, 62 have Baby Boomer presidents (three are Silent Generation and only two are Generation X). Today, the median age of these 67 university presidents is 65 years-old… And this is very different from the recent past. Only thirty years ago, in 1990, the median age of these same university presidents was a much lower 52-years old; the older generation did not completely refuse to give up power; and therefore much greater generational diversity was to be found in university leadership.

Or, to take a small but suggestive example from US Presidential leadership: Three Presidents (Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump) were all born within 70 days of one another, in the summer of 1946. These three people were literally at the head of the Baby Boomer class that was born nine months after World War II ended in September 1945. In my mind, they somehow derived much of their power from the self-referential narcissism of the Boomers as this unusually large cohort of people voted for people like themselves and could afford to ignore anyone younger… and again, this iron grip has been maintained for a shockingly long period of time; but it will not be maintained forever.