Boomers: The Evil Generation!

[Hygro]

Most boomers suck.* There was even a good Twitter thread explaining exactly why, but I would have to dig deep to find it.

*Except Mike Gravel. #GravelGang

Gravel is not a Boomer.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Gravel is not a Boomer.

That's okay, most of the things boomers are being excoriated for weren't done by boomers either, so it fits the pattern.

 

[Lexicus]

I think you have the cause and effect here backwards; those narratives were pushed on people as a result of the Reagan revolution, they weren't the cause of it.

What I'm talking about started ten years before the Reagan Revolution. The Powell Memo is from 1971. I would argue that the capitalist counterrevolution started even before the end of the sixties.

Can you think of an economy that managed that period of time with macro-policies you think were obvious? I mean, I'm understanding that a lot of the macro were understood. But, keep in mind, the 70s were a wild time, bonkers in a way that we are just not familiar. So, which countries adopted those policies, and how did the indicators turn out? Were they successful enough that they didn't get discarded? And, upfront, I will probably not credit petro-states all that much. I mean, there's a right way to do a petro-state, obviously, but it's also kind of obvious that sitting on a pile of exportables makes it easier to have any specific policy 'work'.

I don't understand the questions. I'm simply saying that supply-side economics was a return to 19th-century orthodoxy, not some new idea that gained power because no one understood macro. In the 19th century they really didn't understand macro - didn't even get the composition fallacy, and thought that analysis applying to the individual applied to the whole economy. Supply-side economics more or less returns us to that intellectual footing. But sadly supply-side economics is hardly the only manifestation of the return of 19th-century thinking in economics.

The economic policies that you are presenting as some sort of boomer conspiracy against you poor little youngsters were inflicted on the boomers, not by them.

Go back and read more than one of my posts in this thread, and you'll see you've completely mischaracterized my position here. I've never presented these economic policies as anything but a conspiracy of capitalists against everyone else.

Disclaimer: I did engage in some generational rhetoric at the start of the thread, but only because the cool kids were doing it, not because I actually believe it.

 

[El_Machinae]

It was obvious, but nobody successfully migrated post World War II with the obvious idea? See what I'm saying?

 

[Lexicus]

See what I'm saying?

Nope. I haven't used the word "obvious" or the phrase "obvious idea" so I really don't, sorry.

 

[adcarrymaokai]

Gravel is not a Boomer.

Welp, that's why he is cool.

 

[metalhead]

What I'm talking about started ten years before the Reagan Revolution. The Powell Memo is from 1971. I would argue that the capitalist counterrevolution started even before the end of the sixties.

Oh, I'm sure it started in the 1930s, as FDR was trying to get the various elements of the New Deal passed. The ideas are not new. "Capitalism is under siege by leftists, enabled by academia and the media." That's an old tune. What matters is when it actually broke through. Reagan's almost-win in 1976 and then sweeping victory in 1980 really kicked off the actual work. He enabled the Chamber of Commerce types to take over in earnest.

 

[Lexicus]

Jimmy Carter was already deregulating stuff and claiming he would run government better than a business. But I actually think that the period when this stuff becomes hegemonic isn't under Reagan, but under Clinton.

 

[metalhead]

Jimmy Carter was already deregulating stuff and claiming he would run government better than a business. But I actually think that the period when this stuff becomes hegemonic isn't under Reagan, but under Clinton.

That's where the blame comes into play. See, it's not just that people voted for Reagan in 1980, or even in 1984. It's been 40+ years now, and this idea that government is bad and shouldn't spend money to help people have better lives became something people believed in and defended. I don't think it's just Boomers you blame here, but they came to power in the 1990s and are still there running things this way last I checked.

This has been their governing ethos, on both sides of the aisle. Even Obama, whose idea to fix health care was to have government actually try to fix health care the absolute minimum possible amount. That didn't come about by accident.

 

[Ajidica]

Jimmy Carter was already deregulating stuff and claiming he would run government better than a business. But I actually think that the period when this stuff becomes hegemonic isn't under Reagan, but under Clinton.

In fairness to Carter and deregulation, many aspects of the US economy benefited from deregulation that no longer acted in the consumer's interest (or indeed anybody's interest).
For example, the ICC was mandating (under political pressure) that small Appalachian towns where the coal mines were all shutting down be serviced by multiple railway companies that had been overbuild during the height of the coal boom. That deregulation devolved into abuse of monopolistic power and disregard for public interest doesn't mean that the concept of deregulation was flawed.

 

[Traitorfish]

Mechanically, you can't. Probably the better word there is mathematically. This is a US centric point, but just on sheer numbers it can't work out. My parents were supported in their retirement by somewhere around nine prime earning years workers. I'll likely be supported by about one and a half. Maybe less. No matter how much 'forced labor' is imposed on them (just like it was imposed on me) there is no way they can provide the six digit annual income my parents enjoyed.

That only tells us that the labour and resources will not be provided by individual descendents, but by younger generations collectively. Older generations have earmarked for themselves a portion of the future product of humankind, and they are collecting it from younger generations who have no particular say in the matter. It functions as extraction, as, if you'll excuse the hyperbole, a sort of temporal colonialism, by which the 2020s are placed in hock to the 1980s.

For the record, I don't think this is wrong in itself. You provide for old people, you provide for children, you provide for sick people: that's, like, caveman-ethics. It wouldn't be a decent society if we didn't. But the means by which this has been achieved, and the sense that these means will not be available to the younger generations when they in turn become old (as indeed it is not available to large parts of the older generations) is a source of tension. It's not enough to say "but the rules so we can do it" and expect that tension to dissipate.

People may be just relabeling things to sound differently, but income and wealth inequity certainly function like classes. Marxist terminology does come across as dated and tired. Income inequality is more easily understood by regular folks and more likely to provoke a desire for change. Either way we have an imbalance that needs to be addressed. Maybe I don't spend enough time on college campuses.

The problem is that whilst many politicians think that we have achieved a meritocratic society too many people are aware that we have not. Things have improved and are still improving but not as fast as in the past. It would appear to me that the slowing in improvements is linked to the belief that a meritocratic society has already been achieved. People are generally "happy" when they see improvements and the politicians acknowledge that more are required but they will not like it when the politicians say that there are no improvements to be made.

I think you're both missing the point a little. It's not whether a meritocratic market society can genuinely be described as "classless", that such a society has been achieved, or even that a lot of people actually believe we have achieved it. It's that politicians evidently act on the belief that the public tend to regard distinctions of class as basically unfair or unjust, whether or not they're particularly enthusiastic about any socialist program, and if we assume that politicians are not completely feckless- an extremely charitable gesture in the current climate, I will grant- we can reasonably infer that this reflects actual public attitudes.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

That only tells us that the labour and resources will not be provided by individual descendents, but by younger generations collectively. Older generations have earmarked for themselves a portion of the future product of humankind, and they are collecting it from younger generations who have no particular say in the matter. It functions as extraction, as, if you'll excuse the hyperbole, a sort of temporal colonialism, by which the 2020s are placed in hock to the 1980s.

For the record, I don't think this is wrong in itself. You provide for old people, you provide for children, you provide for sick people: that's, like, caveman-ethics. It wouldn't be a decent society if we didn't. But the means by which this has been achieved, and the sense that these means will not be available to the younger generations when they in turn become old (as indeed it is not available to large parts of the older generations) is a source of tension. It's not enough to say "but the rules so we can do it" and expect that tension to dissipate.

I'm certainly not supporting "but the rules so we can do it." I'm also thinking that the whole "younger generations collectively" as if it solves the numbers problem is off the mark. It was always younger generations collectively. My parents didn't die until their baby boomer offspring were sliding into retirement ourselves. It took boomers in their gigantic numbers plus our offspring in their peak earning years to provide for them in the style to which they were accustomed. There is, mathematically, no way that all the subsequent generations put together can provide for boomers the way my parents were provided for. It isn't "a sense" that those means aren't available to boomers, it's a fact.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

My sister and her firstborn son lived with my mother for several years (and my mother did a lot of babysitting of my infant nephew) until my mother fully retired and moved out to Vancouver Island, living with her dog and cat (the first time in her whole life, as she told me, that she lived in a home where she was the only permanent human resident).

I had that experience in 2007. It felt incredibly lonely and weird at first, but now I've gotten used to it to the extent that I can't fathom sharing my living space with other humans (it's enough that I hear other people moving around their suites nearby and out in the hallway). Cats I don't mind; there's enough room for both Maddy and me to have privacy when we want it. But humans? No, thank you.

Sure, the number of men cooking in the kitchen is increasing, as women aren't stay at home moms anymore. I cook more meals than my wife does, but she's still the better cook. The article even states most women still say they are a better cook than their partners (the 'trend' is merely a 5% increase of men being the better cook....20-25%). It's unclear if the 'gastrosexual' is a significant group, just that it's growing in size.

My dad was an excellent cook. He didn't do fancy, but it was good-tasting. When one of the jobs you've held is a cook in a logging camp, the food had better be good or you don't last long.

Few people carry on campaigning about things after their twenties and when new challenges come to the fore they leave those to the younger people. Will you change your focus to the next challenge, few people from any generation do.

Oh? Then I must be imagining all those politicians and protesters I see on TV and read about on the news sites who are older than 30 (some well into their 70s and up). For that matter, I must be imagining that I exchanged emails yesterday with a reporter who decided to accept my suggestion to do a story on special ballots for the coming provincial election.

I definitely have no plans to leave new challenges to the younger people. Younger people can't fathom some of the challenges older and disabled people of all age groups face, so unless they know someone in that situation, they tend not to care.

In fact, I just finished filling out the online municipal census, and one of the questions was about primary mode of transportation. There's a considerable difference between regular transit and disabled transit, yet the census question ignored the issue of disabled citizens. This is going to give the city planners misleading information as they plan a one-size-fits-all transit system that will be useless to the disabled populace of this city.

In Canada, with $1,000,000, I can permanently retire.

Of course it depends on where you want to retire. In Vancouver, $1,000,000 will barely buy a shack, whereas in other areas it will buy a mansion with money left over.

Based on my current situation, $1,000,000 would take care of me for over 40 years (mind you, my current situation is likely to worsen).

 

[El_Machinae]

Nope. I haven't used the word "obvious" or the phrase "obvious idea" so I really don't, sorry.

Okay. Remember that I said that I don't blame people for falling for trickle down economics. At least, not back then.

 

[metalhead]

Okay. Remember that I said that I don't blame people for falling for trickle down economics. At least, not back then.

Trickle down was never really the issue. In fact there is ample evidence that restoring supply-side access to capital in the early 1980s by purposefully plunging us into a recession was integral to the good economy we enjoyed for the next 2 decades.

The issue was that people were duped into believing that wealthy people and corporations would act more in their interests than labor unions and government - unions because they were corrupt and lazy, government because it was byzantine and incompetent. I was a small child at the time and have no idea how such stupid ideas gained such widespread acceptance. All I can do is posit that the people of the time were predisposed to believing such obvious nonsense, for reasons that are probably not very good.

And while I'm here, let me throw the Boomers a bone - the Xers and Millennials have a lot to answer for with our equally stupid belief that tech companies would make the world a better place if we just let them do their tech stuff completely untouched by any oversight whatsoever. That's brought us to the brink; I can only hope maybe we're learning from that mistake and the next era will be one of reform, rather than of fascism.

 

[El_Machinae]

People buy at their mortgage cost. As the cost of interest fell, the prices would rise. We also increased the share of our income we put into our mortgages (especially later, when housing looked like a foolproof savings instrument). So, it is a twofer.

Boomers shouldn't be jealous of today's mortgages. The odds of their prices rising with ownership aren't the same.

 

[AmazonQueen]

So why did the price of housing rise.

I think it may be partly due to to people being willing to spend more money on it.
When there was only one paycheck houses were priced accordingly. As women increasingly entered the labour market there was more money to spend on housing which drove up the cost.

Also in the UK the provision of social housing has been much reduced. Housing prices rose steadily in the 60s and 70s (my dad, Silent Generation, bought his 1st house for something like £2500) but they have risen much faster than incomes in the last 30-40 years. Millenials may be surprised to know that this has adversely affected many Boomers as well.

 

[Lexicus]

In fact there is ample evidence that restoring supply-side access to capital in the early 1980s by purposefully plunging us into a recession was integral to the good economy we enjoyed for the next 2 decades.

If this means what I think it means, if you want to know who is peddling economic ideas that are destroying the prosperity of the country, go look in a mirror.

 

[rah]

15 years ago I had 100s of resumes for each open position and could be picky and low ball away. Now there are almost more openings then people to take them and I can't be as choosy and must offer more money. I would think the current crop of graduates would appreciate this situation. (but will admit we're often looking for more experience. )

 

[metalhead]

If this means what I think it means, if you want to know who is peddling economic ideas that are destroying the prosperity of the country, go look in a mirror.

I'm curious what you think it means.