Capitalism Isn’t Working for Young People. By Peter Theil and Sean Fischer in The Free Press.
The prophet:
Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist behind PayPal and Palantir, is many things: a center of gravity in Silicon Valley, a boogeyman of the left, a vanguard of the counter-elite, and an early backer of Vice President J.D. Vance.
He’s also someone who sees around bends. In 2020, he wrote a prophetic email to the prototypical millennial company, Facebook, urging executives Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Nick Clegg, and others to take young people’s draw towards socialism seriously. The email has since gone viral in the wake of self-proclaimed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race.
“When 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist,” wrote Thiel, “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.” …
Why the younger generation today leans socialist:
If you graduated in 1970 with no student debt, compare that to the millennial experience: too many people go to college, they don’t learn anything, and they end up with incredibly burdensome debt. …
I think you can reduce 80 percent of culture wars to questions of economics — like a libertarian or a Marxist would — and then you can reduce maybe 80 percent of economic questions to questions of real estate.
It’s extremely difficult these days for young people to become homeowners. If you have extremely strict zoning laws and restrictions on building more housing, it’s good for the boomers, whose properties keep going up in value, and terrible for the millennials. If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist. …
Younger generations are told that if they do the same things as the boomers did, things will work out well for them. But society has changed very drastically, and it doesn’t work in quite the same way. Housing is way more expensive. It’s much harder to get a house in a place like New York or Silicon Valley, or anywhere the economy is actually doing well and there are a lot of decent jobs. People assume everything still works, but objectively, it doesn’t.
Boomers are strangely uncurious about how the world is not really working for their kids. It’s always hard to know how much bad faith there is or how bad the actors are. I think it’s odd that people thought it was odd that I was complaining about student debt in 2010, when even then the growth in student debt was an exponential process. The national student debt was $300 billion in 2000, and it’s now more than $2 trillion. At some point, that breaks. …
If capitalism is seen as an unfair racket of one sort or another, you’ll be much less pro capitalism. So in some relative sense, they’re more socialist, even though I think it’s more just: Capitalism doesn’t work for me. Or, this thing called capitalism is just an excuse for people ripping you off. …
Mamdani?
I don’t think socialism has solutions to these problems. I don’t think Mamdani particularly has solutions. I don’t think you can socialize housing. If you just impose rent controls, then you probably have even less housing, and eventually, it’s even more expensive.
But to Mamdani’s credit, he at least talked about these problems.
So my cop-out answer is always to say: The first step is to talk about the problems, even if you don’t know what to do about them. There’s been a failure of, let’s say, the center left-center right establishment to even talk about them. …
Cuomo did not have a plan for housing. He didn’t even think it was an issue. And of course, he’s been in politics and government for many, many years, so it’s hard not to ask: Why is he going to do something now, if he hasn’t done anything before? …
Revolution?
People are having a lot fewer kids. And so, we have more of a gerontocracy. Which means that if the U.S. becomes socialist, it will be more of an old people’s socialism than a young people’s socialism, where it’s more about free healthcare or something like that.
The word revolution sounds pretty high testosterone and violent and youthful. And today, if it’s a revolution, it’s 70-something grandmothers.