Economics Explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkJlTKUaF3Q
I think a lot of people here generically call out the boomers, but many may not be truly informed on the absolute severity and impact the boomer generation has had in regards to various socioeconomic predicaments for younger generations.
It’s a long story of exploitation, hedonism, greed, and incompetency.
Where should we begin? How about when the boomers were becoming college age. Not many boomers (relative to Gen Xers and Millennials) graduated college — only about a quarter (25%), relative to about a third of Gen Xers, and 40% of Millenials. So surely their life styles must have been troubled in a very competitive job market and unable to find barely sufficient compensating jobs to pay for living expenses as someone without an education in today’s world, right? Not even close.
While Millenials will have to go over a decade of saving in order to just afford a down payment on a starter home (likely built over half a century ago), what was it like for the boomers? Well, let’s think about Boomer Bob. Boomer Bob wasn’t academically inclined. Boomer Bob, with an IQ 75 who barely passed grade school, was able to perform a job that afforded him a new house, new car, wife, and 2.5+ kids all in his early to mid-20s.
Let’s go back to college for a second, because that’s another important point. You know how Boomers like to act like they’re champions of capitalism and completely shunned socialism? Well yeah, that’s actually bullshit. They went full circle as a generation, voting in for socialist policies that gave tuition subsidies, when college was already 150%+ cheaper (yes, even when accounting for inflation) in that day and age. Then as they grew older, what did they do? They said fuck spending on educational expenses and how socialism is evil. The irony in this all? Boomers are literally the primary beneficiaries of the largest socialist program in the US today — primarily through Medicare and Social Security. Anytime a boomer talks to you about how socialism is bad, ask them if they’ve rescinded receiving benefits for SS and Medicare — if not, they’re a hypocrite.
There’s another caveat to this too. Boomers were not expected to go to college — perhaps only so for more upper class/upper middle class families. Competition to get into top colleges and college in general was far significantly lower. This trend is continuing today. Just look up a decent ranking university’s Class of 1999 accepted student profile. There’s a very high chance they wouldn’t have been accepted in the mid-2010s given the increased push for college degrees to be a necessity, which has driven up academic competition to the stratosphere.
Why is this relevant? Because guess which generation pushed for the notion that everyone needs to go to college that’s caused constant increased pressure in competition in academia (as well as higher educational costs)? Yep, it was the boomers.
Not only did they push for the notion, they are actively enforcing it despite the fact it wasn’t a requirement for their generation to do as such. How? Well, guess who runs the head of HR departments at basically all companies around you? Does the phrase ‘Bachelors required; Masters Preferred’ sound familiar? Well yep, that came from the boomers top-down enforcement. It doesn’t matter if the job is something you could have literally done with the intellect and work capacity you had as an 8th grader — YOU NEED a degree to do an entry level position that is not relevant to anything you learned in college.
Furthermore, let’s look at housing. We see boomers constantly talk about how Millenials and Gen Z are just lazy and that’s why they can’t afford a house. The reality? In 1980, the median price of houses was $65,000 — the median income at the time was $24,720.
Per 2021, it’s 430k (almost 7x as much) for the median price of house and $55,477 for the median income.
Speaking of saving, you know how boomers love to say they were so good at saving and are frugal? Well yeah, that’s another lie. The reality is they were horrible with managing finances and had a spend, spend, spend attitude towards everything. In fact, this is the very reason why a bunch of boomers who should have been retired by now haven’t. Despite living through a time of tremendous market and economic growth, they failed to even follow the most basic investing/saving principles for retirement — which if they had, they would have had a splendid, luxurious retirement to say the least.
There’s another caveat to this. With boomers not retiring, this causes a log jam in career progression and stagnates the career growth of everyone below them. This is part of the reason why many people have struggled with career and wage stagnation over the past 10-15 years.
There’s another aspect to this all too — one that goes beyond the socioeconomic implications, but even the cultural/spiritual zeitgeist of the nation and its values. What do I mean by this? It was the boomer generation that was the catalyst that catapulted the hyper-individualism we see today. The boomer generation pushed rugged individualism and hedonistic consumerism and materialism over community and family.
Perhaps the most selfish and catastrophic thing the boomers have done to society is there complete manipulation of the housing market, making it seen as a private asset to be traded on an open market, rather than a first-world essential necessity of shelter that should be accessible and affordable. You ever notice how boomers always go on and on about how they bought their first house out of high school, and that millenials and Gen Z can’t afford one because they are just lazy? Well yeah, that’s also something directly caused by the boomers. The boomers overwhelmingly have voted for restrictive, dubious zoning laws that have created artificial housing shortages that drive up the price of their housing in which they purchased for 200-400% less when they bought the house.
Another related caveat to this is boomers never really had to worry about homelessness to the degree younger people do nowadays. How so? Well due to high socioeconomic mobility and low housing/renting costs in their day, it didn’t really matter if you got laid off or fired. I remember reading a Redditor talk about his parents getting by simply being waiters/waitresses. So let’s say you had a fairly decent job and got laid off, you’re actually not shit out of luck, because income inequality/Gini coefficient variance was not nearly as high back then — so in reality, you really just needed to get another job to supplement the lost income. Why is this relevant? Well, in today’s world, if you’re a highly educated working professional, but something happens in your respective industry that causes it have a downturn — well, now you’re a bit shit out of luck, because you won’t be able to easily find another job in order to replace lost income, and circle back to the point of unaffordable housing and cost of living (doubly so if you live in a high cost of living city where many of these professionals reside).
Even for boomers who aren't complete out of touch, like NYU Professor Scott Galloway — it’s so easy for him to just tell Zoomers to just ‘do better’ and practically give the 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' advice. Meanwhile, he probably wouldn’t have even gotten accepted into UCLA for the accepted class of 2000, nor would he be able to land a role at a top investment banking financial institution with a 2.7 GPA from UCLA — yet he did in his age, which just goes to show you how truly out of touch he is with the level of inter-individual and aggregate of academic and professional competition there is nowadays relative to his generation.
I’ll end on one final point — just a little though experiment. Political polarization is at its absolute highest in modern history of the United States, yet what is the is one thing that both non-boomer conservatives and non-boomer liberals can agree upon?
It’s that the boomers overall have had a catastrophic impact on the future generations of this country.