I am not sure any of the "greatest generation" are still alive.
A bunch of them are. It’s only recently that the last of the WW1 veterans died, so a fair number of WW2 vets and their generation are still around, albeit quite elderly.
I really do not know what is going to happen when all these baby boomers need geriatric care.
Robots, at least in Japan. Or young immigrants in the US.
But I’m a boomer who watched my parents spend their last years in a nursing home. Not at all how I want to go. Drive me out to the boonies, leave me with a .38 Special and one bullet.
Meh, it’s too easy to blame the earlier generations for society’s ills. That’s been going on for a long time. I fully expect that millennials will some day receive the wrath of their grandchildren.
Yes, it is too easy to blame them, however, there is a lot to be laid at their feet.
House prices are too unaffordable for the latest generation.
And this has come about by mostly the baby-boomers wanting to keep property values high.
However, the real solution is build houses like the Amish build barns. The community gets together and builds a house. This was actually common not terribly long ago for newly married couples.
My thoughts are that in high school, the shop class is to build your own house. (probably a one room apartment above a garage) Thus, each man becomes a part of the community, and each man knows at least one skill essential for life.
Within a few years, 3D printing might cause the price of housing to drop precipitously.
Keep in mind though that many boomers who may seem to have lucked out and bought houses are really only a paycheck or two away from not being able to make mortgage payments. In millions of cases, it’s really banksters who own the housing stock, not the boomers who are living in them.
That would be easier if the past generations hadn't built a regulatory morass that makes that kind of thing effectively illegal. When I worked as a draftsman ca. 2005-2009, we had two major problems: McMansion Syndrome from clients and city/county code compliance. Our designs weren't unsafe, they were just unapproved. And getting approval is a time-consuming and expensive pain in the ass to keep people employed in pointless jobs.
It was already that way when i worked as an engineer and architect back in the 90s.
Minimum house sizes are actually the worst idea.
If anyone looked forward in time they would see, that there would be no starter homes. But, the desire to keep property values was high, especially among the rich... the ones who were on the county boards.
Mike Oehler designed a great system for building underground houses.
And although it puts standard construction to shame in almost every measurable way, it is "illegal" in most counties.
And, the pain of going through plan check.
These people who are supposed to make sure that everything is up to code
... asks, "Where are the truss calculations?"
"Those are the papers there, stapled to the front of the plans"
Yeah... they were "checking" the plan.
We are going through a minor remodel of our library workspace, and it involved building two non-structural partition walls. There are no doors. The traffic path meets ADA requirements. I worked with our maintenance manager to design and draw the plans. We still needed city (ha, small-town self-importance much?) approvals and inspections. I totally see 3rd-party verification for electricity, plumbing, and structural calculations, but why does it need to be a government bureaucracy? We got by with my hand-drawn plans on a copy of the original blueprints and avoided the expense of hiring an architect, so there's that at least.
If we don't reject the failed ideas of the past, we will. We can't just pass the buck again and rely on nanny state counterfeit society like the last generations did. But that means understanding where they went wrong, and politicians always offer easy answers in exchange for power, and even though those answers are wrong, many find them too tempting.
Some kind of reset is almost inevitable. There’s just no way that the world’s mountain of debt will be repaid. The only options I see are massive defaults or hyperinflation.
Artificial intelligence, automation, and 3D printing suggest that there may be a huge wave of job destruction coming down the pike. I expect that talk of UBI and “helicopter money” will be all the rage, even if governments can’t hope to provide it without risking even faster defaults/hyperinflation. Money creation may need to come from blockchains rather than governments.
That said, there’s plenty of blame to go around. When was the last time someone said “Um, no thanks” to government money? Even Ayn Rand applied for Social Security and deposited the checks.
AI, automation, etc. won't create unemployment. they will change what employment is available on the market, but the economy has been experiencing that since at least the industrial revolution, and the result has been higher wealth production. 3D printing is more hype than practical micro-manufacturing, but it has the potential to decentralize the economy, and that is a good thing.
Oh, I may of course be proven wrong by events, but I think this time is different may finally be the case.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. HP is rolling out 3D printers that can print steel.
Sintered metal is a decent option for many applications, but it has been widespread in industry for ages. Cutting the cost for the home user is great, but I still don't see it as the end of the manufacturing industry.