What if every generation – apart from the Boomers – is screwed?
The post-Boomer future is unlikely to be as bright as post-Boomers imagine
“I don't want to freak you out, but I think that I may be the voice of my generation – or at least a voice of a generation.”
Hannah Horvath/Lena Dunham
Unlike Lena-Hannah, I’ve never flattered myself that I’m the voice of my generation.*
But I have, on occasion, attempted to be a voice for my generation. And, indeed, for all the post-Boomer generations. Even though I long ago reached the age where I find young people (i.e. anyone under 45) either incomprehensible, ridiculous or annoying.
Perhaps my highest-profile act of generational advocacy occurred almost 16 years ago when the Fairfax/Nine weekend papers published an article of mine predicting members of my generation – long cockblocked by the Boomers – would finally start moving into positions of power.
It took even longer than expected, but that has now happened. The Boomers, with some notable exceptions, have exited stage left, and it’s primarily my age cohort that now has its hands on the levers of power.
Do I imagine that, with the Boomers increasingly out of the way, post-Boomer generations can finally secure a larger slice of the pie? A pie our self-regarding Boomer overlords have spent the last 50 years hogging?
Well, yes, that’s precisely what I have spent many years – nay, decades! – fondly imagining.
Unfortunately, it’s probably not going to happen.
How Boomers screwed the economic pooch
The Boomers ‘won’ and history is written by the winners.
The standard narrative is that the pre-1946 world was grey, grim, and so socially conservative as to be near theocratic. Then – mirabile dictu – the Boomers arrived to “change the world, man” and make everything groovy.
This narrative will often play out on the letters page of newspapers whenever a post-Boomer has the unmitigated gall to so much as gently suggest that Boomers may have embraced, shall we say, something of an ‘I’m alright, Jack, bugger you’ approach to policymaking and future planning. (Deranged housing markets are the best-publicised example, but you don’t need to look hard to find many other instances of naked generational self-dealing.)
The Boomers' parents and grandparents – those benighted squares who endured two world wars and a prolonged, savage economic downturn – handed their children a world in pretty good nick, all things considered.
At the very least, they bequeathed much more communitarian, cohesive, stable and egalitarian societies.
But the Boomers chose to sell the family silver and party with the proceeds. They spent decades cutting their taxes, borrowing against the future and pumping up the price of housing because it was in their economic interests to do so. There are no free lunches in life, so all those ‘snowflake’ post-Boomers are now picking up the tab.
This brings me to the latest Quillete article from the ever-insightful Joel Kotkin.
Kotkin is a Boomer but one of the small minority capable of a clear-eyed appraisal of the meagre patrimony his lot are handing to future generations.
You should read Kotkin's excellent analysis regardless of which generation you identify with.
But if the stats Substack provides are anything to go by, less than five per cent of you will click on the link, so let me convey the most vital points.
Cold comfort from Kotkin
Here’s how Kotkin gets the ball rolling:
As the old men strut on the world stage, they have left the next generation an almost unfathomable $91 trillion debt load, essentially forcing higher interest rates along with the threat of higher taxes and service cuts. Even in authoritarian countries, the younger generations are getting increasingly restless. And in the West, fewer than 10 percent of Americans under thirty think the country is headed in a good direction.
In most leading countries—the US, China, Japan, the UK, and the EU—a clear and widening divide has opened up between the different age cohorts that will alter our politics, arts, culture, and social norms in the decades ahead. This process is being propelled by demographic shifts unprecedented in modern history. For the better part of a half-century, populations have been expanding and getting richer. Now, we live in an era of flat and even negative population growth, and a shrinking middle class in virtually every middle- and high-income country.
Kotkin then provides a litany of facts that will be uncontroversial with everybody except members of his own generation.
· There are many reasons to want to get rid of the Boomers—my own generation. An aging population requires a working generation that can help foot a nation’s bills and support the elderly. We Boomers were able to do that for our parents, but younger people today may lack the resources
· Compared with their parents, young people today are more likely to have a future with no substantial assets or property. A Deloitte study projects that Millennials (Americans born 1981–96) will hold barely 16 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2030
· Boomers have greatly benefited from the economic progress made over the past 50 years. Property-led wealth accumulation has made a fifth of Boomers paper millionaires, something not likely to be repeated in the next generation.
· Being the wealthiest generation in history does not make people more willing to sacrifice for future cohorts. In America, the UK, and Europe, Boomers may skew right-wing but few seem to want to cut back on the welfare state, particularly their own pensions. Positions on pensions and retirement long championed by the Left have now also been adopted by leading figures on the New Right, from Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen to Geert Wilders. They may often be hostile to immigration, but Boomers nevertheless support welfare for migrants, as long as their pensions remain untouched.
· Taking on the Boomers while they are still so numerous and wield disproportionate voting power is political madness. Trump, like his New Right European counterparts, defends senior-oriented transfers, and he still holds an advantage among this group, who vote at almost three times the rate of younger generations.
Kotkin makes several more attention-grabbing observations.
· Gen Xers now skew conservative – whatever ‘conservative’ means nowadays – and American Gen Xers are disproportionately pro-Trump. But like the Boomers, otherwise fiscally conservative Gen Xers are curiously inclined to exempt age pensions – and, I would assume, health funding – from their broader hostility to ‘Big Government’
· Millennials are both less entrepreneurial and much more progressive than Gen Xers
· Zoomers seem to hate both their smugly self-righteous Millennial older siblings and the elderly Gen Xers and Boomers. (Being young people, I assume they lump everyone over 35 into the same generation)
But let’s not get distracted.
The wealth-transfer dog may not bark
Defensive Boomers will often observe that post-Boomer generations will eventually inherit all their money, so, really, what’s all the fuss about?
However, as Kotkin observes, the Great Wealth Transfer may not end up involving an especially great transfer of wealth.
Let me start with a nightmare scenario that even Kotkin isn’t bleak enough to entertain.
There are still some things money can’t buy, eternal life being one of them.
But if you’re wealthy, what is the scarcity good you most desire? Let’s just say there’s no shortage of middle-aged-plutocrat coin flowing into ‘radical life extension’ technologies.
An immortality elixir is unlikely to materialise anytime soon. But the youngest Boomers are only 60. Imagine that a pricey product hits the market that can radically slow the aging process. Let’s say you can take a pill at 65 that will retard the undeniable (shout out to Joe Biden!) physical decline that everyone starts to experience in their seventies.
How much would you be willing to pay for such a pill? If you were a Boomer – maybe one of the ones who likes to laugh it up with your mates about ‘Spending the Kids' Inheritance’, might you not be inclined to sell the family home to buy said pill?
Kotkin confines himself to making a point Anglosphere politicians desperately dance around. If the Boomers are to be kept in the style to which they have become accustomed over their decades-long retirements, there are currently only two realistic options.
They can ‘eat their house’ – that is, sell the family home to fund their retirement, especially the final, labour-intensive and hideously expensive stage of it. This will mean their heirs’ dreams of (belatedly) entering the property market will be crushed.
Alternatively, an ever-shrinking group of working-age taxpayers can keep funding an ever-growing group of asset-rich – and if Kotkin’s stats are anything to go by, frequently income-rich – retirees. (Is it just me, or do Boomers not seem to be experiencing the cozzie livs pain the rest of us are?)
At present, most of these retirees are Boomers. But early-stage Gen Xers are also now approaching what are likely to be unprecedentedly long-lived retirements.
Class politics now is generational politics
There is nothing unusual or even necessarily concerning about older generations being wealthier than younger ones. The point is the Boomers have enjoyed a material abundance that their parents could only have dreamed of and which subsequent generations can only glare resentfully at.
The hardening attitudes of either Boomers or post-Boomers are unlikely to change much at this juncture. Kotkin concludes his article by outlining the political conflict this is already generating.
Please note, things can only possibly get worse, barring some yet-to-arrive Great technological/economic Leap Forward.
Generational politics will likely accelerate alienation and polarisation. Faced with hard economic prospects and pummelled by inflation, many seem poised to embrace radical change. Indeed, recent surveys suggest that Zoomers, the face of the demographic future, are the most disillusioned generation…
These sentiments could be decisive in November and in ways not generally anticipated by political operatives. Overall, according to a recent Harris-Harvard poll, barely a third of voters under thirty identify as liberals, while half described themselves as moderates or conservatives… Like their American counterparts, Europeans under thirty are also shifting to the right, including to formerly fringe parties like the German AfD. In the last French presidential election, Marine Le Pen gained almost 40 percent of the youth vote, while Italy’s New Right prime minister Giorgio Meloni ranked first among younger voters. At National Review, Andrew Stuttaford has noted that, among voters under 25, the AfD won more votes than the Greens,
Like their American counterparts, Europeans under thirty are also shifting to the right, including to formerly fringe parties like the German AfD. In the last French presidential election, Marine Le Pen gained almost 40 percent of the youth vote, while Italy’s New Right prime minister Giorgio Meloni ranked first among younger voters. At National Review, Andrew Stuttaford has noted that, among voters under 25, the AfD won more votes than the Greens…
As long as the stairway to opportunity and advancement is blocked, the new generations will likely embrace a kind of politics, on both the Left and Right, marked by anger and alienation. Bombast and appeals to national greatness offered by Boomer autocrats do not answer the call of the future. Older generations need to think about how to give up some of their own prerogatives as they ask ever more of the young to sustain them on their long inevitable march towards oblivion.
Like I keep saying, we live in exciting times.
*If I had to nominate a ‘voice of a generation’ writer for Australian Gen Xers, it would be John Birmingham, author of He Died with a Felafel in His Hand. If you’re a nostalgic Xer – or a youngster who wants to read some eye-boggling accounts of a time when impecunious uni students, aspiring artists/writers, welfare recipients, taxi drivers, backpackers and other ne’er-do-wells were able to afford inner-city terrace houses in inner Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane – you may like to purchase the special 30th anniversary edition, “now with incriminating footnotes”.
Birmingham also has a Substack that’s also well worth checking out.