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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?
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.
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.
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.
Baby boomers: The transistor. The laser. The internet. Manned moon landings. Manufacturer to the world.
None of these things were done by Boomers. Boomers were the generation born from 1944 to 1964. The oldest were in grade school when the transistor and laser were invented. They were in high school when the space program was launched.
Baby boomers: The transistor. The laser. The internet. Manned moon landings. Manufacturer to the world.
The first commercial silicon transistor was produced by Texas Instruments in 1954. This was the work of Gordon Teal, a man born in 1907. He was not a Baby Boomer.
The first laser was built in 1960 by Theodore H. Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories. Maiman was born July 11, 1927. He was not a Baby Boomer.
ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet, was started in 1967. The first message was sent in 1969. The very youngest of the Boomers worked on it. However, the majority of that work was done by older generations.
Same goes with the manned moon landings. The majority of the work was done prior to 1969, the year of the first landing. The last moon landing was 1972. Neil Armstrong was born in 1930. He was not a Baby Boomer. Most of the work done to get us to the moon was done by non-Boomers.
As for "manufacturer to the world", I'm not sure what this is. Again, manufacturing peaked in the US prior to the time Baby Boomers controlled the majority of businesses.
It would make more sense if you gave Boomers credit for Apple and Microsoft, the two companies responsible for the PC computing boom and the smartphone.
Millennials: Facebook. Twitter. Selfies. Selfie sticks.
Zuckerberg is a millennial. So yes, Facebook is their creation.
The co-founders of Twitter are all Gen-X.
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.
If you are alive now you have better housing, a better car, better global travel, better communications, better access to information, better health care.
Neither of my grandparents had a college degree. But they raised three children and had a house with a large yard before they retired. And then after they retired they moved down to Florida and had a house with a swimming pool. Myself, I have a PhD and work about 50 hours a week as a clinical genomics software developer and I'm just breaking even living in a little one-bedroom apartment with my wife and daughter.
When I was boy wondering whether I'd be able to support myself financially, I would take comfort in the idea that, if worse came to worse, I would be OK with working an honest 9-5 at McDonalds to support myself. But, these days, even if you can manage to get a job at McDonalds, which is by no means guaranteed, you won't earn anywhere enough to support yourself - let alone a family. And, these days, on the subject of healthcare, even a relatively minor illness can wipe you out financially.
So, in terms of things that matter, such as feeling economically secure, I'm not really sure that I'm all that much better off than my grandparents (or parents).
I had a friend years ago who was depressed. She was tall slim attractive, high salary, highly educated not a drug addict or gambler or anything. I suggested she go to live in India for 1 year and it would have solved her depression for life.
Maybe she was depressed because she had lousy friends who would dish out boatloads of sanctimonious advice when they should have just shut up and listened with caring and compassion. :)
Right you are.
There was a sharp disconnect in the economy start in around 1972 when worker's wages suddenly (and permanently) became completely disconnected from productivity, which it had tracked for decades. At that time the oldest boomers were still in the 20s. The rigging of the economy for the benefit of corporation and the plutocracy was well established by the early 1980s, this was done by men who were all from that so-called "Greatest Generation". Things were rigged against the boomers from the time they entered the job market.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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.
That doesn't sound right, but I don't know enough about the Civil War to dispute it.
Na, just kidding.
South Carolina
A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.
Mississippi
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin
Louisiana
As a separate republic, Louisiana remembers too well the whisperings of European diplomacy for the abolition of slavery in the times of annexation not to be apprehensive of bolder demonstrations from the same quarter and the North in this country. The people of the slave holding States are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery.
Alabama
Upon the principles then announced by Mr. Lincoln and his leading friends, we are bound to expect his administration to be conducted. Hence it is, that in high places, among the Republican party, the election of Mr. Lincoln is hailed, not simply as it change of Administration, but as the inauguration of new principles, and a new theory of Government, and even as the downfall of slavery. Therefore it is that the election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property and her institutions—nothing less than an open declaration of war—for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and. her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized
If ordinary Americans want better lives for themselves then they need to take a hard look in the mirror and resolve to be better people: more honest, more generous, and with much more integrity.
Having been to other countries, Americans are plenty honest, generous and upstanding. I've met maybe 3 Americans lie or act disrespectfully towards me, out of thousands. Most of them go out of their way to help.
The problem is, none of those attributes actually make anyone wealthy. Do you ever wonder why "making an honest living" is synonymous with not being rich? If anything, Americans are too naive and trusting. Just by being told "I'm going to bring back jobs", half of the country votes for Trump. Nevermind that he's a billionaire who could not possibly understand what poor folks go through, or the fact that the only thing of note that he did so far was giving himself a tax cut.
I'd say that it's based even deeper - the concepts that have been designed by economic "experts" where mantras like "just in time", "warehousing of resources is bad" and ponzi-like retirement schemes have been built where the next generation has to pay for thd retirement of people born before them, even if they live longer. The retirement issue is one of the main problems for Greece. And that started already with people born in the 40's.
Subprime loans is not just part of the 2008 crisis, that was just the tip of an iceberg. Foreclosures are used without realizing that the banks ends up with the short end of the stick in way too many cases.
Healthcare only available for those that can afford it resulting in people not able to afford it to become an economic burden for society.
Cost of living in some areas has become so high that people need food stamps even if both family members have a job just to be able to raise their kids.
Education that's ridicuously expensive.
Inefficient and aging transport systems in cities where people waste many hours commuting - and that's eating up productivity. Add to it the misdirected idea that if it's getting harder for cars to get through people will use public transportation and the local trafgic situation will be safer - at the cost of lost man-hours. Now there's even talk about that the main transit roads in the cities damages the social life and causes particles impacting health - all while apartments are built just beside these transit roads.
City planning where areas of living is well distanced from areas of work forcing people to use cars or buses. And there's no point in moving since then the spouse will suffer the same problem.
Devices that are use and throw away - like mobile phones that are junk once the battery fails. And manufacturers that also maximize their profits on repairs. Cars is one example - the profit is maximized on the aftermarket side, the vehicles may even be sold at a loss. A lot of things also are getting more and more impossible to repair since they are built on specially designed parts - like batteries - that become impossible to get after a few years.
Taxes imposed on money not in circulation, like your house, that are raised just because you make improvements on the house with already taxed money. Or if you sell your house or apartment - then there are taxes too, which keeps people from moving even if they want, so old people sit there in a large house even though they could be fine in an apartment just because it's actually too expensive to move.
The value of a company is calculated on the short term profit of the company, not on the investment in future development. So companies can show short term good profit by firing their research&development teams, but effectively they are gutted and zombies. Internal invoicing schemes are also harmful - it's a misdirected idea on chasing costs that generates more cost. A lot of companies also look at projects to take care of the development, but in many cases those projects are set up in a way where you win each battle but lose the war.
Overly detailed specifications and solutions selected because they look good instead of being most efficient - or even fulfill the personal whim of a politician are also part of the problem. Like making a bridge that looks nice but is so low that shipping is constricted.
Overall - hate the bean counters that are short-sighted and only look at immediate profits as well as politicians looking to build monuments of how good they are.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
"Yep commutes are bad, but that's fixable by living somewhere where your commute goes against the general flow of traffic. It's what I do."
Apples to oranges. While you can be tactically right, you can't be statistically right (which is what matters here): there's no way the "average you" can go against the general flow of traffic. Things get more difficult, even at the individual "you" level, once you happen to be married.
"Actually, loans in general are the reason housing prices are so unreasonable"
Completely right, and the reason why universal basic income would be such a terrible idea.
"This still happens to this day in every country where people don't take out mortgages"
And where's that country where people don't take a mortage to buy their home, may I know?
"Move to a place that doesn't have insanely high cost of living"
Again, something impossible at the average level, even more impossible when you are married, in a world where the two members of a couple need to work to make ends meet. The most you can get at is an eternal game of cat-and-mouse but then, money moves much more quickly and with less pain than people, so it's a game people is doomed to lose.
"Where you live paycheck to paycheck in New York, San Francisco, or LA, you won't have to do that in any city that is at right around 100 on the cost of living index"
I don't live in USA but then, I moved to my country's "capital city" which also can be compared like "New York / everywhere else". Do you think I moved just for fun? Yes, cost of living at my native town is quite lower than that of capital city but, then, I can make a meagre income at capital city that at least allows me living paycheck to paycheck; my native town is absolutely cheaper, but relatively more expensive, since I wasn't able to take home even a paycheck to paycheck income there.
If you think of it that's *exactly* why cost of living at capital city is higher. Again, what might be a solution for yourself, doesn't and can't scalate.
"The value of a company is calculated on the short term profit of the company, not on the investment in future development [...] then I'd have to give you a negative score on your understanding of accounting and finance"
No, I think I will have to give *you* a negative score on your understanding of accounting and finance. Just like in the case of living wages, money can move more quickly than -in this case, corporate strategies, which means jumping ships becomes a sustainable strategy for investors. That even was almost a "sport" back in the eighties: you can invest on dismantling a company, grab the short term profits (short term being days/weeks/months, not seconds, as it is today), and then move your money to the next company. Rinse and repeat and you'll get a whole trade market thinking about their next quarter at best because, otherwise, you won't get a dime of traders' money.
"If Apple sold off their iphone business segment to raise their short term profit, do you really think the value of their stock would increase in the short term, at all?"
It, of course, would depend on those pesky little details, but that's exactly what happened when Nokia sold their phone business unit, so yes, that can be not only thought, but backed with data from real world.