Blame it on the Baby Boomers
WANT to own your own house? One Australian economist has the answer for youngsters struggling to get on the property ladder – ditch brunch. Property developer Tom Gurner, 35, was asked on Australian TV how he amassed a $460 million (€308 million) fortune.
‘When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 [€17] and four coffees at $4 [€3.60] each,’ Gurner said on the show. ‘We’re at a point now where the expectations of younger people are very, very high.’
Referring to the current property crisis, Gurner went on to claim it would be solved when Millennials inherit ‘huge wealth’ from older, ‘Baby Boomer’ relatives. Gurner’s comments promptly went viral and hammered home one simple point: the tension between Millennials and their elders shows little sign of abating.
As the mantle gets passed from one generation to the next, a little bit of tension is always to be expected. Pop culture gets lost in translation through the generations, while some have a harder time passing the torch to a more dominant demographic. Baby Boomers — those born between 1946 and 1960, so named after the population spike after WWII — reckon their successors have never had it so good. Generation X — those born between 1961 and 1981 — are wary of the digital natives essentially born using and controlling the world’s technology. And Millennials — those born after 1982 — are angry because previous generations have left the world in a state.
But it’s only in recent times the actions of the Baby Boomers, many of whom are now cruising into retirement, have come under scrutiny. Journalist Daniel McConnell observed of the Irish boomers: “Unlike the generation that went before them, and the generation after them, the boomers were the generation that have benefited most from the two greatest forms of personal wealth — property and pensions. As a result, I and my generation are paying higher taxes, working longer hours for less reward, will enjoy far less job security, will have to make do with much poorer pensions — all to pay for their good time.”
AND now, American author/venture capitalist Bruce Gibney, himself a Gen X-er, has likened the Boomers’ collective behaviour as sociopathic. In A Generation Of Sociopaths, Gibney argues the boomer generation — the first, historically, to rebel en masse against their parents — are marked by rampant egoism and a shocking lack of empathy for younger, and future generations.
They have racked up debt, fired through natural resources and slowed economic growth, he notes. Among the charges levelled at the boomers (and he writes mainly about the subset of white, middle-class US Boomers) is that in acting in their own interests at the polling station, they have failed to protect the interests of their children and grandchildren. Indeed, several reports have already made note that the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, and Brexit, was propelled mainly by boomers.
‘Younger generations have not been treated fairly, but they don’t have the voting strength to overcome the boomers,’ Gibney notes. ‘Brexit seems to have been a phenomenon led by older people… it was not clear why Brexit would be a good idea for anyone, but the longer term consequences will be borne by the young.’
There are a couple of factors Gibney says could have shaped the Boomer generation. After WWII, the US enjoyed much prosperity, and this led to a couple of seismic shifts. Among them was the assumption held on the part of many Boomers that if you worked hard, you would automatically reap rewards. Also, amid such prosperity, Boomers were conditioned to think of societal progression in a linear age; that things get better for every passing generation. In Ireland, social and population changes happened at different points, yet cultural change spilled into society. Those who came of age in the 1960s had, wrote columnist Mary Kenny, been ‘infected’ with the mentality of the boomer generation.
What such societal factors resulted in, notes Gibney, is a generation that has experienced a ‘particularly prolonged childhood’: ‘In the early 19th century you went to work in the factory or carry logs as a child, and while I don’t think these are good things, there has been a prolonged adolescent culture for Boomers that arguably never ended.
They formed a cohesive identity, and there was an early consumerist culture that coincided with that. These people have higher self-esteem, but tend to be more rebellious and messy, both in the literal sense and in their approach to their own affairs,’ he says.
Of course, it could be hypothesised that this galvanised sense of social focus has turned them into a massive political force. And this is something future generations could well learn from.
‘Yes, this is what makes them effective: they are united around one big thing, and it allows them to be super cohesive,’ surmises Gibney. ‘Gen X and Millennials, meanwhile, are a more diverse group, with a high immigrant component, and with such a diversity of viewpoints and issues, this can make them less effective (as a voting entity).’
It hasn’t been all bad, of course, and many great things happened on the Boomers’ watch — they managed to effect plenty of social change in relation to feminism and civil rights. Gibney, however, isn’t so sure.
‘Boomers like to present themselves as very progressive, but if you look at when the civil rights movement (the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1965), the median Boomer is only two years old,’ counters Gibney. ‘When the Clean Air Act is passed (in 1963), it happened before most Boomers were able to vote.’