Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Did Baby Boomers Break America? (time.com)
"Automation taking jobs is only one symptom of a larger problem," argues an anonymous Slashdot reader, sharing a link to this excerpt from Steven Brill's new book Tailspin, which seeks to identify "the people and forces behind America's fifty-year fall -- and those fighting to reverse it." The excerpt has this intriguing title: "How Baby Boomers Broke America."
As my generation of achievers graduated from elite universities and moved into the professional world, their personal successes often had serious societal consequences. They upended corporate America and Wall Street with inventions in law and finance that created an economy built on deals that moved assets around instead of building new ones. They created exotic, and risky, financial instruments, including derivatives and credit default swaps, that produced sugar highs of immediate profits but separated those taking the risk from those who would bear the consequences. They organized hedge funds that turned owning stock into a minute-by-minute bet rather than a long-term investment... Regulatory agencies were overwhelmed by battalions of lawyers who brilliantly weaponized the bedrock American value of due process so that, for example, an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule protecting workers from a deadly chemical could be challenged and delayed for more than a decade and end up being hundreds of pages long. Lawyers then contested the meaning of every clause while racking up fees of hundreds of dollars per hour from clients who were saving millions of dollars on every clause they could water down...
As government was disabled from delivering on vital issues, the protected were able to protect themselves still more. For them, it was all about building their own moats. Their money, their power, their lobbyists, their lawyers, their drive overwhelmed the institutions that were supposed to hold them accountable -- government agencies, Congress, the courts... That, rather than a split between Democrats and Republicans, is the real polarization that has broken America since the 1960s. It's the protected vs. the unprotected, the common good vs. maximizing and protecting the elite winners' winnings... [I]n a way unprecedented in history, they were able to consolidate their winnings, outsmart and co-opt the forces that might have reined them in, and pull up the ladder so more could not share in their success or challenge their primacy.
Brill argues that the unprotected need things like "a realistic shot at justice in the courts," writing that instead "the First Amendment became a tool for the wealthy to put a thumb on the scales of democracy." And he shares these statistics about the rest of America today:
As government was disabled from delivering on vital issues, the protected were able to protect themselves still more. For them, it was all about building their own moats. Their money, their power, their lobbyists, their lawyers, their drive overwhelmed the institutions that were supposed to hold them accountable -- government agencies, Congress, the courts... That, rather than a split between Democrats and Republicans, is the real polarization that has broken America since the 1960s. It's the protected vs. the unprotected, the common good vs. maximizing and protecting the elite winners' winnings... [I]n a way unprecedented in history, they were able to consolidate their winnings, outsmart and co-opt the forces that might have reined them in, and pull up the ladder so more could not share in their success or challenge their primacy.
Brill argues that the unprotected need things like "a realistic shot at justice in the courts," writing that instead "the First Amendment became a tool for the wealthy to put a thumb on the scales of democracy." And he shares these statistics about the rest of America today:
- For adults in their 30s, the chance of earning more than their parents dropped to 50% from 90% just two generations earlier.
- In 2017, household debt had grown higher than the peak reached in 2008 before the crash, with student and automobile loans staking growing claims on family paychecks.
- Although the U.S. remains the world's richest country, it has the third-highest poverty rate among the 35 nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development...
Has he identified the source of a societal malaise? Leave your own thoughts in the comments.
And is Brill's thesis correct? Did baby boomers break America?
Baby boomers: The transistor. The laser. The internet. Manned moon landings. Manufacturer to the world.
Millennials: Facebook. Twitter. Selfies. Selfie sticks.
The root of all of these problems is that bribery is legal in the US. I would imagine that we have probably the most corrupt government in the modern world. Make bribery illegal again, and most of these problems would (eventually) go away, because we'd have a government that represented the citizens again.
I don't respond to AC's.
Is it? Here's $1 million if you'll change your opinion.
Not all boomers were involved in the financial frauds and messes. Those did indeed cause trouble, should have been blocked as illegal right away.
However, our government has been lousy at catching abuses, at least as far back as the 1800s. Hear of the "robber barons" of that time? The term was not spuriously given.
Boomers have contributed in many technical fields, for example, and without those contributions the state of computing and microelectronics would be far back of where it is. But to understand that you do need to know a little history.
It should be noted that the push to get EVERYONE able to buy a house came from government, and that broke down the finance rules that kept the sharks out, leading to the takeover by so many fraudsters (of many ages). As I recall this started in the Clinton administration, but effects were not instantly obvious. To really screw things up takes a computer, and to totally gefuck the world takes a government.
Most of us did the best we could with what we had to work with. I hope you do the same, and your children will complain. And so it goes across generations, the way it always has.
First up: The generational split is kind of a cheap division of humans in general. Few splits are really good though - but the artificial grouping on vague birth year ranges is particularly a weak way to draw meaning. Like, zodiac-level weak.
Even what we DO commonly believe about generations is largely about misunderstanding them. The whole "baby boomers were hippies" notion was largely based on statistical exceptions - sure, you could point to groups of hippies, but they largely did NOT represent the group's popular view.
All that said - sure - the net effect of a glut of children, who largely grew up believing more conservatively than their Roosevelt-era parent generation - is largely a negative in economic terms.
They took a nation that was able to produce large amounts of industrial-scale capability, and basically sold it for a large number of houses and cars (1980s), and now are at the stage where they are no longer economically productive, but instead are both voting to reduce social medical care, while using extensive amounts of medical care.
It's basically a triple whammy on the very system that enriched them. That's on average though - and largely the reason we got Trump - basically the old/white group was the dominant contributors.
So, they erroneously get credit for progress they largely didn't actually support, then vote against their self-interest, while stripping the nation of resources. Yeah - for an arbitrary group, they kind of aren't that helpful on average.
Actually it was the extreme postwar naivete of "the greatest generation", the generation that fought world war 2.
They broke the world in an attempt to build a better, non-violent world for their children --- the baby boomers, who grew up to be a bunch of assholes.
Oh the BITTER irony.
There's just one thing that broke America: Hubris.
The belief that America is the greatest, best, top, first, you-name-it broke it beyond repair.
Hubris always turns a champion into a loser, from sports to finance to politics.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The blame is not on an entire generation, but on select individuals of that generation. The one-percenters, no matter what the age, are still the culprits.
The Western world used to plan for generational time periods. Companies were set up with the intent of providing a regular profit over time, slowly increasing, but overall being reliable producers.
Back in the 70s, some people started to decide that they could start selling bits of these to make a fast buck, so you could buy a company, split it up into components, and sell bits of it for more than you paid for it. Voila, instant profit, and it'd only take a year.
Then investors started to want these immediate gains more and more. So more of the regular reliable producers were split up.
That put the regular producers up against the profit margins of the breakers, and many were written off as being "not profitable", making it tough to get loans to continue operating, meaning they had to sell up (which went to the breakers to get bits sold off at profit to financiers).
Investors getting used to the fast money only started to look at the immediate future. Can they make money in the next year? If yes, then all's shiny!
Very very few people in the West are now asking the question "Where do we see ourselves in 50 years?". If you're not asking yourself that question, you can easily find yourself on a path that looks rosy for the next few years, but with a huge drop that you just don't see coming. Or by the time you do, there's sod all you can do about it; the inertia of all the short termist vision catches up with you.
Instant gratification isn't a long term strategy.
I was born at the end of the baby boom, we came of age in the late 70's and early 80's, when the country was going through a backlash against the counterculture and political tumoil of the late 60's and early 70's. Gone was the optimism and hope for a better world replaced by greed. Everyone was trying to get MBA or Law degrees. Engineering, science, the arts? Most people we're interested. As my age group entered the workforce and started and gained experience they only seemed to care about making money, and as much money as fast as possible. And remember, it wasn't only Wall Street. The whole Dot Com boom was awash from get-rich-quick speculative investing from the Boomers and managed by the late boomers. The whole cynical stupidity of the browser wars was driven by assholes to make the web into electric metaphors for things that the Boomers knew how to monetize.
The visionaries behind the Web were outgunned by the banal greed of Bill Gates who is a classic Robber Baron, who is now in the stage of life where he is trying to buy redemption with good deeds. And even then, his good deeds are making him money. I've heard this from a number of NGOs who have worked with his foundation. They don't give unless they can get. And then we had the fake hippie Steve Jobs who helped spark the PC revolution and then spent the last half of his life doing everything in his power to crush it and turn general computing devices that could be customized and extended to fit you into consumer electronics that forced people to do things the way that Jobs wanted you to do.
For every Woz there were a hundred or more Jobs. Woz and those like him, Steward Brand is an early boomer, Linus is a later boomer but they are the rare exceptions that prove the rule. So yeah, the late boomers, we really did and do suck.
There are a variety of policy and market reasons for the transfer of wealth from young to old.
---
* One reason for the age-based increasing income increasing inequality is the transfer of wealth and purchasing power from the society at-large to existing asset holders, who are typically older. And this is done via monetary policy.
Monetary policy is about trying to bring about prosperity via manipulation of the money supply. The net result of monetary policy is the transfer of purchasing power from one group to another. For example, inflation doesn't involve a transfer of money, but it makes a saver poorer and a debtor less poor by changing the purchasing power each one has, by changing the value of the currency. One uses monetary policy to stoke or reduce inflation. Or QE - Quantitative Easing. It was printing money to buy bonds (government debt and mortgage debt). The printing of money has some side effect - it is not consequence-free. The recipients of that money firehose were made wealthier. And the asset bubbles which resulted also made existing asset holders (physical (e.g. real estate) and financial - stock market went from 11K (2011) to 25K (2017) in six years) wealthier.
Governments through the ages have always wanted easy, controllable, predictable prosperity, but in reality achieving prosperity is much trickier and chaotic. It requires first the correct intelligence, temperament and values of the population. Then the population interacts with the natural world and creates legal and physical and security infrastructure. Then, more chaotic, is the creation of items that people value (not merely to satisfy speculative demand (which is quite volatile), like items to gamble on, but things that will satisfy consumption demand (which is more persistent) - demand to consume those items, both goods and services and perhaps non-speculative financial products). And then the march of technology to continue to improve social welfare and the standard of living. And then through some luck, that value and purchasing power must be distributed in some semi-equitable way to the population so that it can consume those things they value.
That's complicated and volatile and not guaranteed. Manipulating the money supply is much simpler. Prosperity through the stroke of a pen. Unfortunately, if it were possible, Haiti or Sierra Leone could become prosperous in short order. Obviously, that will not happen. But manipulating the money supply and the value of the currency to bring about prosperity has been a siren song for policy makers and leaders over the millennia. And the side effect today has been the transfer of wealth from young to older.
---
* Also, straight up preying on the young by using them as pass through entities for government money firehosed to the education sector. The young get stuck with the debt, and education costs escalate because they're being paid by our rich Uncle Sam. Yet we all see the reports on how much wealthier those with degrees are versus those without.
---
* Next medical costs and insurance. There are both policy and market-based reasons for this.
---
* Then, offshoring of manufacturing and intellectual property - offshoring of the production of value. Again both policy and market-based reasons for this.
---
* Finally, we're on the dawn of a new industrial revolution, with software automation. The effect is the same as what happened with the industrial revolution - one person could create a much larger amount of product because of technology. To summarize, it was the "consolidation of the production of value."
---
So - the net result of all of these factors? Young people are f-cked.
Linus is a later boomer
Linus Torvalds was born in 1969. He's Gen X, not a Boomer.
I think I'm the first to post this here, so here goes a very brief (and therefore not strictly accurate) account of what's happening...
Marx (Karl, not Groucho) and Engels predicted this in their books Das Kapital, 1876-1894. They understood the nature of capitalism in that is was a very effective system for increasing wealth inequality, i.e. it helps the rich to get richer by making the poor poorer, by exerting continuous downward pressure on earned income (wages, salaries, and contractual work) and producing ever more extreme mechanisms for the wealthy (owners) to accrue increasing control over capital for their own benefit.
Baby boomers, millennials, the gig economy, precarious employment, anti-union legislation, political and legal corruption, environmental degradation, unhealthy and dangerous working conditions, immoral and illegal wars, racism and police brutality, etc., are all symptoms of capitalism working as it is supposed to. Nothing's broken. This is how our chosen economic system works by design.
The "Golden Age of Capitalism", post WWII until the mid-1970s, was the result of massive wealth redistribution, e.g. tax payer funded public infrastructure building that created millions of jobs, rapid expansion and subsidy of further and higher education, and progressive taxation, whereby the the richest paid the highest rates of taxes in order to fund govt. infrastructure projects, education, etc., starting from after the Great Depression, which itself was caused by massive wealth inequality. In other words, the USA enjoyed a brief period of unprecedented economic prosperity because it adopted a form of socialist policies known as Keynesianism.
What did I miss?
BTW, this guy made a whacky film that runs through the central concepts modern life as we experience them today. It's dense, covering a lot of ground in a very short time, so worth using the pause button while you think through what he's presenting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
So you're fucking lucky, actually paying into a retirement fund at 31 and being able to retire at 70. As a boomer, there was promises of pensions, that went away after some rich fucking punk bought out the business, went into massive debt and used the pension fund as collateral. The workers are the last to get payed in a bankruptcy and lots of boomers are now old and homeless due to young fucking MBA's and such leveraging the system to suck up pension funds.
When you pay into a pension fund for most of your life and it is gone, there is no 401k to fall back on. And this blaming a generation because the 0.1% do what they've always done is bullshit, all my peers, boomers, are facing the same thing as retirement looms, promised pensions that are gone and suckered into paying into pensions instead of savings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The people who broke America were mostly Baby Boomers, but that is not to say that all Baby Boomers are responsible. It was mostly banksters, lawyers, politicians (see previous), etc who happened to be Boomers.
Milton Friedman was a brilliant economist, the same can't be said of you if you actually think he could cause this even if he tried. What people like yourself always fail to comprehend is why the US doesn't have that kind of economy anymore, or why we even had it in the first place, why it isn't coming back, and why it was a total fluke to begin with.
It's very simple: Germany started two world wars, which caused European countries to blow up each other's infrastructure, and later, after being pulled into a war we didn't ask for, the US had to cause further destruction. Japan decided to destroy Asia's infrastructure, then they thought they could destroy our navy, but it didn't work, and so in order for us to eliminate their offensive capability we had to carpetbomb all of their manufacturing capability. And then USSR simply made the economic blunder of the millennium: they adopted communism.
What all of this lead up to was that now the rest of the world was hopelessly dependent upon us since we were the only country left with a large scale infrastructure to build what they needed. That's what created all of those jobs that are now gone. Eventually the rest of the world (except Russia after the fall of the USSR, as well as the Warsaw pact countries who were forced into communism) had a competent infrastructure, and since they were still poor, they could offer labor services at a lower price. So guess what happens? We start seeing those jobs go away, and they won't ever return. Instead we got something far better: A very high tech, high skilled economy, and our median income is presently the highest ever at $59k. This means that half of the country makes that amount or higher.
So your can stop pretending you know economics, and you can stop trying to blame somebody for this, let alone pin it on one economist for no particular reason.
Life is objectively, scientifically going downhill
Not true!
Just look at the hundreds of millions of people in China who are doing very well, now. The same applies to India and most of the rest of Asia. All you are seeing is equality taking place.
There are two ways to equalise a society. You can either raise everyone up to the level of the best, which is expensive, resource-intensive and broadly unsustainable. Or you can push everyone down to the level of the lowest. Both result in an "equal" society - one where the range from the lowest to the highest is reduced. (Excluding the ultra-rich, as they will never be subject to the pressures of "ordinary" people).
What globalisation has done is to make the flow of capital, knowledge and goods into a two-way street. Americans and some Europeans became wealthy (i.e. income above the global average) because they were better at the high-value, knowledge-driven stuff - leaving the commoditised, low value stuff to the RoW. It is pretty obvious to all who care to look, that this is no longer the case. China has the world's best supercomputers, many countries have space programmes, AI will blossom in the far-east as their governments aren't hobbled by funny western ideas of "privacy" and can make huge datasets of personal information available to their corporations. Transport costs are so low that goods can be made whereever it is cheapest.
The only thing that has declined is the west's ability to meet its level of entitlement.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
No. This was no more correct the first 50 times someone tried to alter history by passing this off.
WW2 ended in 1945. In the 1950's, Germany was already the second largest economy. A decimated, war torn country with no industry doesn't give you the second largest economy in the world. Germany's rebuilding took very little time considering the impact of the war, and the drain of intellectual value foisted on them by the US and UK governments; it took years, not decades.
Japan took that second spot in 1968. That's 23 years to rebuild everything they lost, and become the second largest economy in the world. Between 1955 and 1973, they averaged 9% growth per year. That would be phenomenal for any country, much less one recovering from the impact of the war.
This notion that US industries simply had no competition for decades is simply very wrong, and even a brief look at actual history shows that.
Coming out of WW2, we gave veterans the GI Bill. Hundreds of thousands of people could now go to college who would never have been able to without that assistance. In 1956 the US would start the interstate highway system, which would be critical to moving goods around (and fundamentally change our entire commercial supply system). And in 1961, Kennedy would give the country a direction with a decree to go to the moon.
We had the newly educated masses, the means for transportation, and a path forward. The innovation to come from that in electronics, material science, and miniaturization is what propelled the advances that most people today take for granted, everything from telecommunications to food preservation.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Not a baby boomer, but if the summary given is accurate, this whole book is full of more B.S. than even Piketty was pitching.
Baby boomers aren't much for deregulation and the other statistics given are just as stupid. One example: The U.S. has the third-highest poverty rate? Not in any absolute sense. If you use the World Bank's poverty threshold of $1.90/day PPP, basically nobody in the U.S. is under the poverty rate unless they refuse any help at all from anyone. If you take the U.S. centric threshold of household poverty, then you can be poor in the U.S. and still 2.5 times as rich as the median world household.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
No, the baby boomers didn't create all the problems of the world.
I agree, it was the Greatest Generation.
No, it wasn't their fault either. They were set up by the people who profited from the war. Once they were all traumatized from killing each other, people are easy to manipulate, anything is better than war. The Baby Boomers were traumatized by their parents who came back from war, so they were easy to manipulate too. After that it was all advertising which keeps the trauma response in place whilst giving us the illusion of freedom.
We're all to blame because we're too fucking stupid to see we are being manipulated.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It's you who needs a lesson. Reaganomics is what ruined America. He cut the top tier tax rate from 72% to 23% and raised taxes three times on the middle class, under the name of trickle down. He also cut corporate tax rates to the point where some companies like GE pay no taxes at all, and most of the big companies pay a smaller tax rate than teh average American does. The GOP has been repeating this pattern year after year, until the top 2% of Americans have over 50% of the wealth. The richest have seen their income increase 300% (not a typo) since Ronnie while the middle class, the engine that drives the country, has seen their income essentially stay flat, allowing for inflation. The economic records bear this out. To compound this, the middle class is now heavily in debt and paying more and more interest on borrowed money, just to stay afloat. Remember this fact: Back in the days of Eisenhower, before Ronnie gave the country away to the rich, the middle class could afford to live on a single income, own a new care, have a nice house and send their kids to college and still live comfortably. And this fact: When Clinton was in office, he raised taxes on the rich and left office with the first in decades budget surplus. When Bush came in, he promptly gave that surplus away to his rich friends, rescinded the tax breaks for the rich, and the country went back into debt again. So you want to blame somebody, blame the GOP. Want to fix it? Then return the tax rates to that of Eisenhower and the country will be out of debt in 12 years. There is no reason in the world why a person should be making more than a million per month, and expecting not to pay taxes on it. But don't be blaming the boomers or some economic theory, when reality and the plain stark facts explain it very clearly. The GOP, the party of the put America in the economic trouble it is in right now.
Republican leadership = Idiocracy