Boomers

[ursus arctos]

This is a very telling stat

By the time the Baby Boomers hit a median age of 35, their generation owned 21 percent of the nation’s wealth. As of last year, Millennials—who will hit an average age of 35 in three years—owned just 3.2 percent of the nation’s wealth.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Yup.

[DCI Harry Batt]

When I think of my coming-of-age years, "aloof sneering" isn't the first description that comes to mind, probably in part because I didn't grow up in a big metropolis.

This is irony, right?

[Hot Pepsi]

This appears to be the best place to put this link by David Brooks. It's not just about Boomers but the social convulsions that have affected the US since the 1960s and led to the precarious place its in now. It's long piece but well worth your time.

I'm pretty skeptical of Brooks in general, but he's probably right about this. But we've been here before, haven't we?


I feel all the things he's talking about. I feel very disconnected and even adrift and don't really know how to fix it. And yet, my friends who have married and have families don't seem to be, on average, better off. A lot of them seem to be even more stressed than I am and are more cut off from the wider community. Brooks also wrote a piece about the perils of relying so much on the nuclear family, as US society has done.

But a lot of that might just be the midlife crisis. I recently read that statistically, men's saddest point - for a lot of reasons - is at age 47. I'm 47.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

I've posted this before, but this lecture by David Willetts (of all people) seems to cover a lot of the problems. The issue isn't that there isn't a large degree of inequality between people born between 1945-1965. It's the intergenerational inequality that is staggering, and the various ways which this fucks people up. And the key to it is that essentially taxation and public spending has changed over time to suit the needs of that particular generation, at the expense of everyone else by and large. It's not that there is anything particularly unique about baby boomers other than there's so many of them that every political party is always trying to give them their way.