“Peter and I have had a number of conversations about what we expect the world to look like in 2030 so we can plan and position our future work accordingly. One theme we've discussed is that many important institutions in our society (eg education, healthcare, housing, efforts to combat climate change) are still run primarily by boomers in ways that transfer a lot of value from younger generations to boomers themselves. Our macro prediction for the next decade is that we expect this dynamic to shift very rapidly as more millennials + gen Zers can now vote and as the boomer generation starts to shrink. By the end of this decade, we expect more of these institutions to be run by and for the benefit of millennials and younger generations. I would bet we'll even see a millennial president within the next few cycles by 2032. This outlook for the future puts our current tone and positioning in stark contrast and has convinced me that we should shift the center of gravity in our messaging to be more focused on millennials…
[W]hen 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, 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. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.
What I would add to Mark's summary is that, in a healthier society, the handover from the Boomers to the younger generations should have started some time ago (maybe as early as the 1990s for Gen X), and that for a whole variety of reasons, this generational transition has been delayed as the Boomers have maintained an iron grip on many US institutions. When the handover finally happens in the 2020s, it will therefore happen more suddenly and perhaps more dramatically than people expect or than such generational transitions have happened in the past. And that's why it's especially important for us to think about these issues and try and get ahead of them.
One example of such an "iron grip" from my colleague Eric Weinstein: Of the 67 top research universities in the US, 62 have Baby Boomer presidents (three are Silent Generation and only two are Generation X). Today, the median age of these 67 university presidents is 65 years-old... And this is very different from the recent past. Only thirty years ago, in 1990, the median age of these same university presidents was a much lower 52-years old; the older generation did not completely refuse to give up power; and therefore much greater generational diversity was to be found in university leadership.
Or, to take a small but suggestive example from US Presidential leadership: Three Presidents (Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump) were all born within 70 days of one another, in the summer of 1946. These three people were literally at the head of the Baby Boomer class that was born nine months after World War II ended in September 1945. In my mind, they somehow derived much of their power from the self-referential narcissism of the Boomers as this unusually large cohort of people voted for people like themselves and could afford to ignore anyone younger... and again, this iron grip has been maintained for a shockingly long period of time; but it will not be maintained forever.”
A couple of items - kudos for taking this on, Tom! Generational studies are a great interest of mine.
However like commenter Janis I too feel that the boomers as a whole are not viewed accurately by the younger generations, and have become a convenient punching bag and scapegoat - yet boomers were exploited, manipulated, and used as unwilling cannon fodder. Boomers had much the same relationship with the older generations as the younger generations do now with them.
Also, GenX is no longer “young”, when the youngest of them is pushing 45. (BTW, Musk, Thiel, and much of Scumbag’s cabinet are GenX and Millennials, sticking it to their own generations!)
This is really rooted in class war, which has been going on for centuries and which every generation has been affected by-including boomers!
But this is a good starting point to discuss these things further so thank you!
I’ll be back after work to add more - this 68 year old “boomer” is working til 70, in large part due to financial reasons. We did not all retire at 59!
I’m not a boomer, but it’s seeming more likely that I’ll be vilified by my kids for having a particular birth date, much like this piece vilifies hundreds of millions of seniors, rich and poor alike. Not surprisingly it comes at a time when fewer and fewer adult children feel it’s their responsibility to help care for an ailing parent.
This resentment towards the elderly is growing substantially right now, particularly among both the far right and left. It’s ugly. It’s also ultimately self-destructive and short-sighted. The future paints us all as monsters.
I’m totally with you. The elderly used to be respected, but now they are reviled. It’s nothing short of tragic. I’d love to read your piece if you could link it.
I think the role Federal government has played in creating many problems is more the issue than baby boomers just living their lives trying to get by. And while both parties have plenty of blame, it is mostly Democratic policies. The housing problem started with the subprime mortgage crisis when banks were coerced by govt. to give mortgage loans to people they knew would never be able to repay and the role of FannieMae and FreddieMac. Then Covid shutdowns put an end to any recovery that was happening. College tuition skyrocketed when the Federal government expanded the student loan programs. Colleges had all this federal money now flowing in and no longer needed to keep prices down. Administrative jobs skyrocketed, they added all these really expensive extras to attract students and a lot of worthless degrees. Now you have young generations wanting to expand government role in everything because they think government is the answer to all their problems but it’s not. It only makes things worse, history has shown that over and over. It’s past time to reduce the size and scope of government, not increase it.
I see the same problems that you and others are diagnosing. I think your point about a spiritual vacancy is really the truth here. We need a mentality shift and to reassess our morality in an era of population decline, because the intergenerational tension is too much.
I’ve been thinking about it lately and have tried to outline it, maybe in a way that is compatible with the note you end your excellent piece on?
Bravo. It’s very sad that the United States, which is supposed to be such a hub of innovation, instead just prioritizes innovative ways to allow more and more of the future we put on the casino wheel. Rather than innovating to support the living systems and infrastructural systems that allow the whole thing to exist in the first place.
“Young people are confronting rising costs of living and weak job creation at the same time political authority is concentrated in aging elites with little space for renewal.” We need term limits. That said, staffers and lobbyists are all driving the donations to deliver the deeds that they need, not always the elected office holders who may be unfamiliar with the fullness of presented legislation’s impacts.
“One side clings. The other spins. Both are terrified to stop.” Well said. The question we are not philosophizing is: so what’s the living for?Shouldn’t we shoulder and mentor each other, not silo in status and unsee each other as foreigners to our fast lane youth or slow lane refusal to learn from each other?
We’ve siloed and let go, not familiarized and optimized each other’s energy and wisdom.
Your insights are well delivered in a world eager to live, but not questioning or understanding the depth we could co-create that would be a gift, not a gamble.
I’m totally with you—the way out of this mess is not through hatred and caricature, but love and authenticity. It’s very easy to condemn from afar, it is very hard to do so up close.
Though what I have presented is very troubling, hope springs eternal as humanity has gotten itself out of some pretty tight, terrible jams before. All I know is that to fix something, you have to understand it. These words were my attempt to do just that; God willing we will live into the answers soon enough!
I’m really tired of baby boomers getting blamed for everything. It’s much more complicated than that with many factors contributing to the problems today, mostly government policies to blame in my opinion. Many baby boomers started out in life with a lot less than people have today. We lived in run down homes with no air conditioners and one working car per family but were taught to work very hard and that education was very important. We didn’t go on several extravagant vacations a year. Some people did very well in life but that’s because they worked like 80 hour a week and took chances in life. Too many people don’t want to work today and they are incredibly spoiled and entitled.
I didn’t write this to condemn or blame, just to comment. I agree that entitlement and apathy are cancer to meaning and flourishing and represent a huge problem in younger generations.
You wrote something interesting: “mostly government policies to blame in my opinion.”
This is exactly my point regarding the vicious cycle: as birth rates get lower, society ages. As society ages, politics serve an older electorate. As politics serve an older electorate, the youth pay the bill. As the youth pay the bill, birth rates get lower. And so it goes.
But it sounds like you’re blaming a generation for basically being born. Look, the government knew for many years that a catastrophe was coming when all the baby boomers started retiring and kept putting off any fixes and here we are at the edge of the cliff and no one is talking about it. A depression worse than the Great Depression is looming. This time the US will fare so well
That’s exactly my point. “As society ages, politics serve an older electorate. As politics serve an older electorate, the youth pay the bill. As the youth pay the bill, birth rates get lower. And so it goes.” The government is not separate from its people; it does not exist in a vacuum. It is of and by and for the populace (at least nominally). Its current geriatric makeup means laws are written by those who won’t live long enough to face their consequences. The can just gets kicked down the road until it ricochets right into the face of the young. We are now here.
I’m not blaming, just observing based upon data and (in)action.
I don’t think older populations are being served at all. The people able to retire younger worked very hard to get to that point. In fact too many grandparents are raising their grandchildren because their kids are selfish POS or drug addicts or in prison. I see that one a lot. Many elderly are having to try and find a part time job in their late 60s and 70s just to get by. Nursing homes are terrible and there won’t be enough very soon. Your article contributes to antagonism towards elderly instead of compassion and caring that those people deserve. Just my opinion.
No problem. I didn’t mean to be like attacking you lol. I just see the blame everything wrong with the country on baby boomers thing over and over these day but it’s not that simple. In fact many of the very successful baby boomers would be willing to work into their 70s if it meant keeping a depression from happening, if it would help their kids and grandkids.
Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel understood this years ago: https://www.techemails.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-peter-thiel-millennials
“Peter and I have had a number of conversations about what we expect the world to look like in 2030 so we can plan and position our future work accordingly. One theme we've discussed is that many important institutions in our society (eg education, healthcare, housing, efforts to combat climate change) are still run primarily by boomers in ways that transfer a lot of value from younger generations to boomers themselves. Our macro prediction for the next decade is that we expect this dynamic to shift very rapidly as more millennials + gen Zers can now vote and as the boomer generation starts to shrink. By the end of this decade, we expect more of these institutions to be run by and for the benefit of millennials and younger generations. I would bet we'll even see a millennial president within the next few cycles by 2032. This outlook for the future puts our current tone and positioning in stark contrast and has convinced me that we should shift the center of gravity in our messaging to be more focused on millennials…
[W]hen 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, 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. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.
What I would add to Mark's summary is that, in a healthier society, the handover from the Boomers to the younger generations should have started some time ago (maybe as early as the 1990s for Gen X), and that for a whole variety of reasons, this generational transition has been delayed as the Boomers have maintained an iron grip on many US institutions. When the handover finally happens in the 2020s, it will therefore happen more suddenly and perhaps more dramatically than people expect or than such generational transitions have happened in the past. And that's why it's especially important for us to think about these issues and try and get ahead of them.
One example of such an "iron grip" from my colleague Eric Weinstein: Of the 67 top research universities in the US, 62 have Baby Boomer presidents (three are Silent Generation and only two are Generation X). Today, the median age of these 67 university presidents is 65 years-old... And this is very different from the recent past. Only thirty years ago, in 1990, the median age of these same university presidents was a much lower 52-years old; the older generation did not completely refuse to give up power; and therefore much greater generational diversity was to be found in university leadership.
Or, to take a small but suggestive example from US Presidential leadership: Three Presidents (Clinton, Bush 43, and Trump) were all born within 70 days of one another, in the summer of 1946. These three people were literally at the head of the Baby Boomer class that was born nine months after World War II ended in September 1945. In my mind, they somehow derived much of their power from the self-referential narcissism of the Boomers as this unusually large cohort of people voted for people like themselves and could afford to ignore anyone younger... and again, this iron grip has been maintained for a shockingly long period of time; but it will not be maintained forever.”
A couple of items - kudos for taking this on, Tom! Generational studies are a great interest of mine.
However like commenter Janis I too feel that the boomers as a whole are not viewed accurately by the younger generations, and have become a convenient punching bag and scapegoat - yet boomers were exploited, manipulated, and used as unwilling cannon fodder. Boomers had much the same relationship with the older generations as the younger generations do now with them.
Also, GenX is no longer “young”, when the youngest of them is pushing 45. (BTW, Musk, Thiel, and much of Scumbag’s cabinet are GenX and Millennials, sticking it to their own generations!)
This is really rooted in class war, which has been going on for centuries and which every generation has been affected by-including boomers!
But this is a good starting point to discuss these things further so thank you!
I’ll be back after work to add more - this 68 year old “boomer” is working til 70, in large part due to financial reasons. We did not all retire at 59!
Thanks for the kind words! I was very hesitant to kick the hornets nest and now I’m getting stung in private, haha.
Have you written about this? If not, you should as you have salient points.
I originally titled this “The Three Gs of Global Decline: Gerontocracy, Generational Conflict, and Gambling” - perhaps I should’ve stuck with that.
Thanks! I do have more to add here and perhaps I will work something up to post as my first Substack article!
Much more interesting than “just” writing about the horrid political situation right now even though this topic is related.
I’m not a boomer, but it’s seeming more likely that I’ll be vilified by my kids for having a particular birth date, much like this piece vilifies hundreds of millions of seniors, rich and poor alike. Not surprisingly it comes at a time when fewer and fewer adult children feel it’s their responsibility to help care for an ailing parent.
This resentment towards the elderly is growing substantially right now, particularly among both the far right and left. It’s ugly. It’s also ultimately self-destructive and short-sighted. The future paints us all as monsters.
I wrote a piece about it fairly recently.
I’m totally with you. The elderly used to be respected, but now they are reviled. It’s nothing short of tragic. I’d love to read your piece if you could link it.
https://woolery.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-old-people-aka-young?r=ba1ue
I think the role Federal government has played in creating many problems is more the issue than baby boomers just living their lives trying to get by. And while both parties have plenty of blame, it is mostly Democratic policies. The housing problem started with the subprime mortgage crisis when banks were coerced by govt. to give mortgage loans to people they knew would never be able to repay and the role of FannieMae and FreddieMac. Then Covid shutdowns put an end to any recovery that was happening. College tuition skyrocketed when the Federal government expanded the student loan programs. Colleges had all this federal money now flowing in and no longer needed to keep prices down. Administrative jobs skyrocketed, they added all these really expensive extras to attract students and a lot of worthless degrees. Now you have young generations wanting to expand government role in everything because they think government is the answer to all their problems but it’s not. It only makes things worse, history has shown that over and over. It’s past time to reduce the size and scope of government, not increase it.
I see the same problems that you and others are diagnosing. I think your point about a spiritual vacancy is really the truth here. We need a mentality shift and to reassess our morality in an era of population decline, because the intergenerational tension is too much.
I’ve been thinking about it lately and have tried to outline it, maybe in a way that is compatible with the note you end your excellent piece on?
https://open.substack.com/pub/theslowpanic/p/the-debt-of-the-living?r=bwndg&utm_medium=ios
Bravo. It’s very sad that the United States, which is supposed to be such a hub of innovation, instead just prioritizes innovative ways to allow more and more of the future we put on the casino wheel. Rather than innovating to support the living systems and infrastructural systems that allow the whole thing to exist in the first place.
“Young people are confronting rising costs of living and weak job creation at the same time political authority is concentrated in aging elites with little space for renewal.” We need term limits. That said, staffers and lobbyists are all driving the donations to deliver the deeds that they need, not always the elected office holders who may be unfamiliar with the fullness of presented legislation’s impacts.
“One side clings. The other spins. Both are terrified to stop.” Well said. The question we are not philosophizing is: so what’s the living for?Shouldn’t we shoulder and mentor each other, not silo in status and unsee each other as foreigners to our fast lane youth or slow lane refusal to learn from each other?
We’ve siloed and let go, not familiarized and optimized each other’s energy and wisdom.
Your insights are well delivered in a world eager to live, but not questioning or understanding the depth we could co-create that would be a gift, not a gamble.
I’m totally with you—the way out of this mess is not through hatred and caricature, but love and authenticity. It’s very easy to condemn from afar, it is very hard to do so up close.
Though what I have presented is very troubling, hope springs eternal as humanity has gotten itself out of some pretty tight, terrible jams before. All I know is that to fix something, you have to understand it. These words were my attempt to do just that; God willing we will live into the answers soon enough!
I’m really tired of baby boomers getting blamed for everything. It’s much more complicated than that with many factors contributing to the problems today, mostly government policies to blame in my opinion. Many baby boomers started out in life with a lot less than people have today. We lived in run down homes with no air conditioners and one working car per family but were taught to work very hard and that education was very important. We didn’t go on several extravagant vacations a year. Some people did very well in life but that’s because they worked like 80 hour a week and took chances in life. Too many people don’t want to work today and they are incredibly spoiled and entitled.
I didn’t write this to condemn or blame, just to comment. I agree that entitlement and apathy are cancer to meaning and flourishing and represent a huge problem in younger generations.
You wrote something interesting: “mostly government policies to blame in my opinion.”
This is exactly my point regarding the vicious cycle: as birth rates get lower, society ages. As society ages, politics serve an older electorate. As politics serve an older electorate, the youth pay the bill. As the youth pay the bill, birth rates get lower. And so it goes.
But it sounds like you’re blaming a generation for basically being born. Look, the government knew for many years that a catastrophe was coming when all the baby boomers started retiring and kept putting off any fixes and here we are at the edge of the cliff and no one is talking about it. A depression worse than the Great Depression is looming. This time the US will fare so well
That’s exactly my point. “As society ages, politics serve an older electorate. As politics serve an older electorate, the youth pay the bill. As the youth pay the bill, birth rates get lower. And so it goes.” The government is not separate from its people; it does not exist in a vacuum. It is of and by and for the populace (at least nominally). Its current geriatric makeup means laws are written by those who won’t live long enough to face their consequences. The can just gets kicked down the road until it ricochets right into the face of the young. We are now here.
I’m not blaming, just observing based upon data and (in)action.
I don’t think older populations are being served at all. The people able to retire younger worked very hard to get to that point. In fact too many grandparents are raising their grandchildren because their kids are selfish POS or drug addicts or in prison. I see that one a lot. Many elderly are having to try and find a part time job in their late 60s and 70s just to get by. Nursing homes are terrible and there won’t be enough very soon. Your article contributes to antagonism towards elderly instead of compassion and caring that those people deserve. Just my opinion.
I think that’s why this is such a thorny, complicated issue. It is so easy to generalize, and then you find the exception that proves the rule.
I originally titled this “The Three Gs of Global Decline: Gerontocracy, Generational Conflict, and Gambling” - perhaps I should’ve stuck with that.
No problem. I didn’t mean to be like attacking you lol. I just see the blame everything wrong with the country on baby boomers thing over and over these day but it’s not that simple. In fact many of the very successful baby boomers would be willing to work into their 70s if it meant keeping a depression from happening, if it would help their kids and grandkids.