How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America
“The boomers inherited a rich, dynamic country and have gradually bankrupted it."
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Everyone likes to bash millennials.
We’re spoiled, entitled, and hopelessly glued to our smartphones. We
demand participation trophies, can’t find jobs, and live with our
parents until we’re 30. You know the punchlines by now.
But is the millennial hate justified? Have we dropped the
generational baton, or was it a previous generation, the so-called baby
boomers, who actually ruined everything?
That’s the argument Bruce Gibney makes in his book A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America.
The boomers, according to Gibney, have committed “generational
plunder,” pillaging the nation’s economy, repeatedly cutting their own
taxes, financing two wars with deficits, ignoring climate change,
presiding over the death of America’s manufacturing core, and leaving
future generations to clean up the mess they created.
I spoke to Gibney about these claims, and why he thinks the baby boomers have wrecked America.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Who are the baby boomers?
Bruce Gibney
The baby boomers are conventionally defined as people
born between 1946 and 1964. But I focus on the first two-thirds of
boomers because their experiences are pretty homogeneous: They were
raised after the war and so have no real experience of trauma or the
Great Depression or even any deprivation at all. More importantly, they
never experienced the social solidarity that unfolded during war time
and that helped produce the New Deal.
But
it’s really the white middle-class boomers who exemplify all the awful
characteristics and behaviors that have defined this generation. They
became a majority of the electorate in the early ’80s, and they fully
consolidated their power in Washington by January 1995. And they’ve
basically been in charge ever since.
Sean Illing
So how have they broken the country?
Bruce Gibney
Well, the damage done to the social fabric is pretty
self-evident. Just look around and notice what’s been done. On the
economic front, the damage is equally obvious, and it trickles down to
all sorts of other social phenomena. I don’t want to get bogged down in
an ocean of numbers and data here (that’s in the book), but think of it
this way: I’m 41, and when I was born, the gross debt-to-GDP ratio was about 35 percent. It’s roughly 103 percent now — and it keeps rising.
The boomers inherited a rich, dynamic country and have
gradually bankrupted it. They habitually cut their own taxes and borrow
money without any concern for future burdens. They’ve spent virtually
all our money and assets on themselves and in the process have left a
financial disaster for their children.
We used to have the finest infrastructure in the world. The American Society of Civil Engineers thinks there’s something like a $4 trillion deficit
in infrastructure in deferred maintenance. It’s crumbling, and the
boomers have allowed it to crumble. Our public education system has
steadily degraded as well, forcing middle-class students to bury
themselves in debt in order to get a college education.
Then of course there’s the issue of climate change, which
they’ve done almost nothing to solve. But even if we want to be
market-oriented about this, we can think of the climate as an asset,
which has degraded over time thanks to the inaction and cowardice of the
boomer generation. Now they didn’t start burning fossil fuels, but by
the 1990s the science was undeniable. And what did they do? Nothing.
Sean Illing
Why hasn’t this recklessness been checked by the
political system? Is it as simple as the boomers took over and used
power to enrich themselves without enough resistance from younger
voters?
Bruce Gibney
Well, most of our problems have not been addressed
because that would require higher taxes and therefore a sense of social
obligation to our fellow citizens. But again, the boomers seem to have
no appreciation for social solidarity.
But to answer your question more directly, the problem is
that dealing with these problems has simply been irrelevant to the
largest political class in the country — the boomers. There’s nothing
conspiratorial about that. Politicians respond to the most important
part of the electorate, and that’s been the boomers for decades. And it
just so happens that the boomers are not socially inclined and have a
ton of maladaptive personality characteristics.
Sean Illing
It’s interesting that Ronald Reagan is elected right
around the time that boomers become a majority of the electorate. Reagan
himself wasn’t a boomer, but it was boomers who put him into office.
And this is when we get this wave of neoliberalism that essentially guts
the public sector and attempts to privatize everything.
Bruce Gibney
Right. Starting with Reagan, we saw this national ethos
which was basically the inverse of JFK’s “Ask not what your country can
do for you, but what you can do for your country.” This gets flipped on
its head in a massive push for privatized gain and socialized risk for
big banks and financial institutions. This has really been the dominant
boomer economic theory, and it’s poisoned what’s left of our public
institutions.
Sean Illing
So what’s your explanation for the awfulness of the boomers? What made them this way?
Bruce Gibney
I think there were a number of unusual influences, some
of which won't be repeated, and some of which may have mutated over the
years. I think the major factor is that the boomers grew up in a time of
uninterrupted prosperity. And so they simply took it for granted. They
assumed the economy would just grow three percent a year forever and
that wages would go up every year and that there would always be a good
job for everyone who wanted it.
This
was a fantasy and the result of a spoiled generation assuming things
would be easy and that no sacrifices would have to be made in order to
preserve prosperity for future generations.
Sean Illing
I’ve always seen the boomers as a generational trust-fund
baby: They inherited a country they had no part in building, failed to
appreciate it, and seized on all the benefits while leaving nothing
behind.
Bruce Gibney
I think that’s exactly right. They were born into great
fortune and had a blast while they were on top. But what have they left
behind?
Sean Illing
Something that doesn’t get discussed enough is how
hostile so many of these boomers are to science. It’s not hard to
connect this aversion to facts to some of these disastrous social
policies.
Bruce Gibney
This is a generation that is dominated by feelings, not by facts. The
irony is that boomers criticize millennials for being snowflakes, for
being too driven by feelings. But the boomers are the first big feelings
generation. They’re highly motivated by feelings and not persuaded by
facts. And you can see this in their policies.
Take this whole fantasy about trickle-down economics.
Maybe it was worth a shot, but it doesn’t work. We know it doesn’t work.
The evidence is overwhelming. The experiment is over. And yet they’re
still clinging to this dogma, and indeed the latest tax bill is the latest example of that.
Time after time, when facts collided with feelings, the boomers chose feelings.
Sean Illing
What’s the most egregious thing the boomers have done in your opinion?
Bruce Gibney
I'll give you something abstract and something concrete.
On an abstract level, I think the worst thing they’ve done is destroy a
sense of social solidarity, a sense of commitment to fellow citizens.
That ethos is gone and it’s been replaced by a cult of individualism.
It’s hard to overstate how damaging this is.
On a concrete level, their policies of under-investment
and debt accumulation have made it very hard to deal with our most
serious challenges going forward. Because we failed to confront things
like infrastructure decay and climate change early on, they’ve only
grown into bigger and more expensive problems. When something breaks,
it’s a lot more expensive to fix than it would have been to just
maintain it all along.
Sean Illing
So where does that leave us?
Bruce Gibney
In an impossible place. We’re going to have to make
difficult choices between, say, saving Social Security and Medicare and
saving arctic ice sheets. We'll have fewer and fewer resources to deal
with these issues. And I actually think that over the next 100 years,
absent some major technological innovation like de-carbonization, which
is speculative at this point, these actions will actually just kill
people.
Sean Illing
I hear you, man, and I’m with you on almost all of this,
but I always return to a simple point: If millennials and Gen Xers
actually voted in greater numbers, the boomers could’ve been booted out
of power years ago.
Bruce Gibney
I think that’s fair. But given how large the boomer
demographic is, it really wasn’t possible for millennials to unseat the
boomers until a few years ago. And of course there are many issues with
voting rights. But that’s not a complete excuse.
More than voting, though, millennials have to run for
office because people have to be excited about the person they’re voting
for. We need people in office with a different outlook, who see the
world differently. Boomers don’t care about how the country will look in
30 or 40 years, but millennials do, and so those are the people we need
in power.
Sean Illing
I guess the big question is, can we recover from this? Can we pay the bill the boomers left us?
Bruce Gibney
I think we can, but it’s imperative that we start sooner
than later. After 2024 or so, it will get really hard to do anything
meaningful. In fact, I think the choices might become so difficult that
even fairly good people will get wrapped up in short-term self-interest.
So if we unseat the boomers from Congress, from state
legislatures, and certainly from the presidency over the next three to
seven years, then I think we can undo the damage. But that will require a
much higher tax rate and a degree of social solidarity that the country
hasn’t seen in over 50 years.
That will not be easy, and there’s no way around the fact
that millennials will have to sacrifice in ways the boomers refused to
sacrifice, but that’s where we are — and these are the choices we face.
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