Gary Becker and Richard Posner debate a timeless question: Will the next generation be better off than their parents’ generation? Becker’s take: “America has always been optimistic about its future. The decline in such optimism during the past couple of decades is understandable, but highly regrettable. The best way to restore this optimism is to promote faster economic growth. That is feasible with the right policies, but will not happen automatically. Even America has no destiny to be optimistic about the future without important redirection of various public priorities.” Posner, meanwhile, offers a slightly different take: “[B]ut I do not think people who are well off do, or at least should, want their children to have higher incomes than they. Parental altruism implies concern for children’s welfare, rather than for children’s incomes per se; and the higher a family’s standard of living, the less likely an increase in that standard in the next generation is to increase happiness.” [%comments]
Will Your Kids Be Better Off Than You?
and 
. You can also watch it on 
I presume technology will continue to advance in coming decades. Today I take for granted that I have no major threat of death from TB, small pox, influenza, cholera and so on. As medical technology advances, even poorer people can benefit.
So without any growth in income, one’s security from disease may improve with time.
We all want social mobility but we mean an escalator moving up in wealth and progress.
But Social Mobility cuts both ways; it also means your kids are as likely to be BETTER OFF as well as WORSE OFF.
I think since the Emergence of the American Century we have had the escalator of wealth and privilege where dreams become reality. Now we are on the decline, and life will be harder, dollars will have to be earned, and we will have to make difficult financial choices and sacrifices.
Welcome to the Chinese Century. And we can battle fate, ignore it, or cooperate at our peril. Go west Young American, keep on going past California.
We will downsize the American Dream. And shrink our Carbon Footprint. Learn Mandarin.
This is a loaded question. What does better off mean?: To have two horses where we only had one?
Can waddle our fat butts in to buy more McDonalds French fries?
To understand more about the Universe? About the world? About other people and cultures?
To have twice as many children or half as many?
To not have to fight meaningless wars for the enrichment of Plutocrats?
Can magically be transported so we NEVER have to life a finger.
Can live in even more luxurious digs?
Can own an IPod which will hold 10,000,000 songs instead of the 14,000 now?
Can own twice as many cars…that go twice as fast?
It’s a tough call. I know lots of people of modest incomes whose living standards are much higher than people who make a lot more money.
Bhutan has their Gross National Happiness policy. Maybe we should look into it.
It’s not that we need economic growth. What we need is a revived sense of community, where people care about each other instead of plugging in their i-Pods to ignore what’s going on around them, doing Facebook instead of reading, and being allowed to get away with being uncaring, selfish brats. Few people now can be assured they will be taken care of by their own families — we’ve farmed that out to the government and immigrant nurses. Do I want my kids to be richer than I? Hell no. I want my kids to know that whatever happens, someone will be there for them. But they also need to know that for this to happen, they have to be there for other people. Money can’t buy that. Only integrity — and in the current political climate, with sniping and idiots and grandstanding, my advice to my kids is to move to a village in Europe, Latin America, or Polynesia as soon as they can. America is on a death spiral that will match the former Soviet Union in 15 years.
Solution to your Kids being Worse off than You:
1. Don’t have kids.
2. Exist in the Bowels of Poverty, Hardscrabble Life and Depravity, that ANY step your children would venture is Forward Progress. Start so low that the only way is up for the next generation. I am talking a piece of rope for a belt, barefoot walk to school in blizzards, and that road kill IS supper. Read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.
3. Put your baby in a basket and leave on Bill Gate’s Front Porch.
4. Teach them to be GLOBAL COMPETITORS, with an Engineering / Science/ Computer Background and Trilingual English/ Mandarin/ and a European Language and a Black Belt in Six Sigma. They should be at home in the World, not just Appalachia. An English Major with an art interest in Tuscany just won’t cut it.
I used to think that Americans as a whole were getting dumber, but now I realize that it’s only that I meet more people every day.
Science can keep us alive longer, but we start getting sick earlier. Money can buy us more and more things, but schools keep getting poorer and poorer. We are safer now than we ever have been, thanks to regulation and government oversight, but we live like toddlers in a play pen without realizing that the sides are becoming too high for us to crawl out of.
As a society we are better off, but as individuals we are not. Our children’s generation doesn’t stand the chance of producing an Emerson, Einstein, or Edison if we can’t collectively throw them off the pier and allow them to learn to swim on their own.
If you assume that technology can continue to improve daily life then our children will live a better , healthier, longer life than we are.
If you remove the influence of technology and restrict the question to the US, then the answer is that decreasing social mobility means that more and more Americans will not live better lives than their parents.
“as” asks if any generation is worse off then its predecessor. I would guess “of course.” How about those who suffered through the Depression rather than the 20s. Or those who lived through the Great Plague. Or how about the generation of the Civil War?
Andrew