You can either, as you do, say that your skin-in-the-game is proportional to the amount of time you have in front of you. From that perspective it seems fair that children should have biggest say in shaping long-term policies.
Or you can say that your skin-in-the-game factor is proprotional to how much you’ve already invested in the status quo. If you’ve spent 50 years working towards a goal it seems unfair that a 16-year old know-nothing should be able, on a whim, to throw all of that away.
Does having children whose future you care about also count as skin in the game?
Unclear. There’s a lot to unpack, because we don’t know the 1. narcissism or 2. epistemic competence distributions across parents. I.e., we can’t expect that what parents’ say are in their kids’ interests actually share their kids’ interests (either through willful misdirection or through earnest mistakes).
Or you can say that your skin-in-the-game factor is proprotional to how much you’ve already invested in the status quo. If you’ve spent 50 years working towards a goal it seems unfair that a 16-year old know-nothing should be able, on a whim, to throw all of that away.
I don’t mean to guilt-by-association dismiss this, but it strongly reminds me of the property/land interpretation of SITG-suffrage.
The risk of 16 year old know-nothings throwing things away on a whim is measured against the risk of bad “tradition is the democracy of the dead” / “most insolent of tyrannies is to govern from beyond the grave” scenarios. Which equilibrium is worse, a civilization unable to cooperate across lifetimes (because kids constantly throw everything away and start over, reinventing wheels and repeating mistakes), or one where adults only inherit agency at age 70 and by then all they care about is the same stuff the previous 70+ cohort cared about? I think “epistemically defer to the elderly when it seems wise to do so” is a more beneficial heuristic than “we owe the elderly deference for the sacrifices they made before I was born”, and if we’re going to bet on the distribution of how responsibly we expect these heuristics to scale, I’d much rather bet on the former.
we don’t know the 1. narcissism or 2. epistemic competence distributions across parents
or across non-parents, or old people, or teenagers, or any other group. If we think we CAN measure them well, we should just measure them and set voting standards for individuals, not age-based demographic groups (though I’d be fine with a combo: everyone can vote between 25 and 65, and anyone who passes the competence/non-narcissism/whatever threshold can vote regardless of age).
SITG-suffrage
Not familiar with the term, and Google doesn’t show anything that looks relevant on the first few pages of “SITG” suffrage. I assume this is the theory “landholders are the only ones with standing to care about the land, and they happen to be the rich and powerful” idea. If you don’t mean to guilt-by-association an argument, then please don’t do so.
I dispute the assumption that 70-year olds only care about the same things that the previous cohort did, and not about the things they cared about as 60-year-olds. That caricature is at least as bad as saying 16-year-olds care about the same things that all 16-year-olds have cared about forever (sex/freedom/unearned respect/bad music). I’d argue there’s more truth in the latter, but not enough truth to make a valid argument.
I’d also like to point out that dotards select themselves out of voting by not having spare energy to participate. The young and stupid/naive have no such selection mechanism.
SITG-suffrage
Sorry, by this point OP and I had established “right to vote weighted by stake” as a concept, using the words “skin-in-the-game”, so SITG was an acronym for skin-in-the-game, and suffrage referred to right to vote.
Parents are different from any other group in my comment because I was referencing Richard Kennaway’s question “Does having children whose future you care about also count as skin in the game?”
There are two opposing ways to think about it.
You can either, as you do, say that your skin-in-the-game is proportional to the amount of time you have in front of you. From that perspective it seems fair that children should have biggest say in shaping long-term policies.
Or you can say that your skin-in-the-game factor is proprotional to how much you’ve already invested in the status quo. If you’ve spent 50 years working towards a goal it seems unfair that a 16-year old know-nothing should be able, on a whim, to throw all of that away.
Both this comment and its parent were helpful to me fleshing out my understanding.
Unclear. There’s a lot to unpack, because we don’t know the 1. narcissism or 2. epistemic competence distributions across parents. I.e., we can’t expect that what parents’ say are in their kids’ interests actually share their kids’ interests (either through willful misdirection or through earnest mistakes).
I don’t mean to guilt-by-association dismiss this, but it strongly reminds me of the property/land interpretation of SITG-suffrage.
The risk of 16 year old know-nothings throwing things away on a whim is measured against the risk of bad “tradition is the democracy of the dead” / “most insolent of tyrannies is to govern from beyond the grave” scenarios. Which equilibrium is worse, a civilization unable to cooperate across lifetimes (because kids constantly throw everything away and start over, reinventing wheels and repeating mistakes), or one where adults only inherit agency at age 70 and by then all they care about is the same stuff the previous 70+ cohort cared about? I think “epistemically defer to the elderly when it seems wise to do so” is a more beneficial heuristic than “we owe the elderly deference for the sacrifices they made before I was born”, and if we’re going to bet on the distribution of how responsibly we expect these heuristics to scale, I’d much rather bet on the former.
or across non-parents, or old people, or teenagers, or any other group. If we think we CAN measure them well, we should just measure them and set voting standards for individuals, not age-based demographic groups (though I’d be fine with a combo: everyone can vote between 25 and 65, and anyone who passes the competence/non-narcissism/whatever threshold can vote regardless of age).
Not familiar with the term, and Google doesn’t show anything that looks relevant on the first few pages of “SITG” suffrage. I assume this is the theory “landholders are the only ones with standing to care about the land, and they happen to be the rich and powerful” idea. If you don’t mean to guilt-by-association an argument, then please don’t do so.
I dispute the assumption that 70-year olds only care about the same things that the previous cohort did, and not about the things they cared about as 60-year-olds. That caricature is at least as bad as saying 16-year-olds care about the same things that all 16-year-olds have cared about forever (sex/freedom/unearned respect/bad music). I’d argue there’s more truth in the latter, but not enough truth to make a valid argument.
I’d also like to point out that dotards select themselves out of voting by not having spare energy to participate. The young and stupid/naive have no such selection mechanism.
Parents are different from any other group in my comment because I was referencing Richard Kennaway’s question “Does having children whose future you care about also count as skin in the game?”