Across 367 interminable pages of bitching about Boomers, author Bruce Cannon Gibney does one thing well: he manages to sound exactly like a Boomer. Snarky, overconfident, often wrong yet never in doubt, and simply relentless. You can practically hear the author loud-talking over you as you read.
Gibney also seems to lack a sequential memory for his own arguments. It's quite striking to see an author lambast Boomers for never saving any money (Chapter 4), but then just two chapters later make an extended argument about the Boomers' skill at acquiring inflation-sensitive assets, even describing them as the savviest generation "since Weimar." Another example: after claiming Boomers are unwilling to tax themselves to furnish funds for education, the author notes in a footnote just two pages later that the United States spends more tax dollars per student than any other advanced country. And my favorite example, dealing with Vietnam: the author directly claims Boomers were a militant generation that was hungry for war during the mid 1960s, yet later he blames them for being a generation of draft-dodgers.
There are many self-contradicting claims like these throughout A Generation of Sociopaths, to the point where it's concerning to see the author's lack of awareness of his own book. Readers are left scratching their heads: "Hold on: you just said this to make that point, but now you're saying the opposite to make this point... don't these things cancel each other out? And don't you even remember what you just wrote a few pages ago?" One gets the feeling of being lectured by a smug and legalistic dude who will say anything--including self-contradictory things--to make his case. To a man with a hammer everything is a Boomer.
Ultimately, after hundreds of pages of reaching, hard, to dunk on Boomers, this author achieves the impossible: The reader, incredibly, develops sympathy for them! It reminds me of this video mocking geeks sleeping out in costume for a Star Wars movie premiere: it's supposed to be funny, but the mocker just looks like an angry bully, and you start rooting for his victims.
Look, Boomers as a generation, whether they like to hear it or not, have largely drained and indebted the country and have made things much harder for the generations to follow. But when you hear an Xer or a Millennial complain about Boomers being the worst, most self-absorbed generation in history, ever!!!1! recognize that this complaint is ironically Boomer-like. After all, claiming that living behind the Boomers is really that bad is about as self-centered and self-absorbed as the generation you're complaining about. It's the same sin.
It's also worth noting, now that thirteen years have passed since this author wrote the initial essay that led to this book, that there aren't nearly as many Boomers around anymore. Now, more and more, the leaders of this increasingly incompetent country are us, Generation X and Millennials--and soon enough, Gen Z. It's not for us who follow to bitch and moan. We are now increasingly in charge of things. It's for us to shut up and pick up the pieces.
[Readers, you know what's coming: a friendly warning to read no further. What follows are just my notes and critiques--and I've already wasted enough of my time writing them. I'd hate to waste still more of your time reading them. Remember Brandolini's Law!]
Forward:
xi: Our author starts with a haymaker right in the first paragraph. "For the past several decades, the nation has been run by people who present, personally and politically, the full sociopathic pathology: deceit, selfishness, imprudence, remorselessness, hostility, the works. These people are the Baby Boomers, that vast and strange generation born between 1940 and 1964, and the society they created does not work very well."
xii: The author anticipates a common Boomer reaction, NOT ALL OF US ARE LIKE THAT. [Maybe we can use the acronym NABALT here.]
xii: Gibney is perplexed, asking, "why isn't 21st century America doing vastly better?"
xivff: Already it's clear the author has a coastal elite's incomprehension of Trump's appeal to flyover country.
xix: The author cites a tagline from an essay he wrote in 2011: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."
Introduction:
xxiiff: Standard discussion here of how the typical middle class family can't afford the elements of the middle class life: a house, cars, college, vacation, healthcare, etc.
xxv: Still more standard complaints about the 1% getting all the wealth and welfare gains; noting also that Boomers will still be cushioned with their trillions of entitlement dollars; most of the country still seems wealthy and prosperous but it is largely illusory since it's been levitated with debt, both personal and government. The author claims government debt is "a primary Boomer tactic to ensure their benefits flow while expenses pass to others... And at some roughly coterminous point, the Boomers will be dead and the problem will belong to someone else. That someone else, of course, is statistically likely to be: you."
xxviff: The Boomers' sociopathic need for instant gratification, which pushed them to equally sociopathic policies, causing them to fritter away an enormous inheritance, and when that was exhausted, to mortgage the future. [The author also makes very clear that when he refers to Boomers he means white and always native born, just in case this wasn't clear...] Discussion of the definition of sociopathy, quoting the DSM etc, Boomers are mixed bag of good and bad as individuals but as a generation they are distinctly sociopathic per the author, and their "villainy expresses itself to the mundane depredations of tax policy and technical revisions to the bankruptcy code." [An interesting pair of examples here the author chooses to use, one can't help wondering why he chose them, and why put it this way so early on in the book.]
xxviii: Boomers' "private behaviors congealed into a debased neoliberalism, the sociopathic operating system that has dominated Boomer politics, Right and Left, for more than three decades." Emphasizing consumption, deregulation without thought, permanent deficits.
xxxi: "It depends what the meaning of the word 'is' is": the author uses the famous example of Clintonian lying as a typical example of Boomer sociopathic deceit, as Clinton "could not even manage an honest conjugation of "to be."
xxxii: The author admits up front that "much of the evidence is necessarily circumstantial." [If I were a betting man at this point in the book, I'd bet that nearly all of his evidence will be circumstantial... It's easy to imagine a perfect world and impugn the world you have by comparison.]
Chapter One: The View From 1946
3: Good example of this author's rose-tinted backwards-looking glasses: "in the three decades following World War II, it would have been ridiculous to pose the question, as Ronald Reagan would when seeking the Presidency in 1980, 'Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?' The answer was yes, always and emphatically." [This actually isn't entirely true if you count the 1970s-era inflation, unemployment and natural resource shortages, etc. Also history always has periods where people are not better off than they were four years ago: think about panics of the 1890s, the 1907 crisis, the severe depression of 1919-1920, and obviously the Great Depression, while it is true we had a a series of very good decades after World War II.]
4: "Boomers have always thought of themselves as special, and nothing about their childhoods provided any evidence to the contrary." The author then contrasts the Boomers' life of ease with the suffering of the Soviet Union, Germany, Japan and the UK after World War II. [Thus the boomers are to blame for everything including things that happened before they were born apparently]
9: "Shambolic" appears to be the author's favorite word: he uses it almost as much as "the."
11: The author doesn't understand how post World War II debt was "paid down"... it wasn't paid down, it was inflated away. Further I don't think he understands what happened when Reagan cut tax rates in the 80s based on his conclusion that high marginal tax rates produced extraordinary tax receipts, this guy sounds much more economically blind than he really should be as a private equity guy.
Chapter 2: Bringing Up Boomer
13ff: 1957's Leave It to Beaver, which the author considers to be an anthropologically rigorous portrait of Boomer childhood.
14ff: Discussion of John Locke's theories of childhood; then Dr. Luther Emmett Holt, author of The Care and Feeding of Children, the 1894 bestseller citing how children were not to be indulged; then to the rise of Dr. Benjamin Spock and the "permissive parent."
16ff: Now we've moved on to scatological topics: the author addresses defecatory schedules and how Dr. Spock indulged letting a child poop when it wanted to (otherwise it would become neurotic and anal retentive) whereas Freud warned, as the author puts it, "that indulgent toilet training would lead to an anal-expulsive personality, one that proceeded from literal to figurative incontinence, personalities of messiness, disorder, and rebelliousness (e.g., the Boomers)." Weird and odd to say this.
17ff: The author's various reasons for Boomers pathologies: everything from Dr Spock's permissiveness, to bottle feeding rather than breastfeeding, lead paint, to the television; here there's a long and quite frankly uninsightful discussion of the cancerous aspects of televised programming, nothing new to any reader.
22ff: It's interesting to think about this author's complaints about Boomer generation television: yet who on television today is actually still a Boomer? Jim Cramer? Sure, but everybody knows that you make money off Jim Cramer by doing the opposite of whatever he says. No one takes him seriously. Boomers like Katie Couric haven't been on TV in years. Rachel Maddow was an Xer, and her replacement Alex Wagner is a young Xer, born in 1977. Show me a Boomer on TV and I'll be happy to blame them, but this guy doesn't seem to know who's on TV any more.
23: Social comments on the failure of the fairness doctrine, he seems to blame Boomers here for being too conservative, but if anything the fairness doctrine has moved totally to the left such that the media is now totally captured by left-leaning politics.
Chapter 3: Vietnam and the emerging Boomer identity
27: "No survey of the Boomers can be complete without revisiting the Vietnam War and its upheavals, which defined early adulthood for all save the youngest Boomers." [Again it's worth considering who duplicitously started Vietnam, who foolishly escalated it: those were "Silents" and "Greatest" generation members! But wait, I thought these were the idealized generation that this author celebrates? One of the more phony conflicts ever ginned up by the military industrial complex--which by the way was also created before the Boomers were out of grade school by these same supposedly superior generations the other looks longingly to.]
28: In a sentence that is guaranteed to make everybody mad, including Boomers, the author calls Vietnam "nothing special."
30: It's clear that this author never read David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, he would have had a markedly different view of Vietnam--especially Kennedy's involvement in it--if he had.
31: The author argues that while this was a mid-grade proxy war, again, "nothing special," the Boomers made it into the worst thing that ever happened.
34ff: So far this chapter is all over the place. Boomers are terrible because of Vietnam (even though it wasn't Boomers that started it or lied about it or expanded it); Boomers take credit for Vietnam being the worst thing that ever happened; the author directly claims Boomers were the most militant generation that was hungry for war during the mid 1960s; and yet he also argues Boomers draft-dodged. Furthermore our country was divided over it (because of Boomers) and that's bad for some reason. So were Boomers for it, or against it? Which is it? I can't help but think of John Kerry's famous quote about the Iraq War "I was for it before I was against it"--this author appears to blame Boomers for likewise being for the Vietnam War before they were against it.
36ff: Criticizing William Westmoreland, the general with his constant "victory is imminent" claims: interestingly he was born in 1914, and certainly not a Boomer.
37: The author cites Boomer hypocrisy that the young and better-educated who were in favor of the war had no expectation that they would be serving. Note the logical inconsistency here, you can have an opinion about a war (everyone has opinions about everything) but not be responsible for that war. The people responsible for the war are at fault, not the people who have opinions one way or the other about the war.
38: Per the author Boomers gamed the system, favoring the war and using techniques of deferment to get out of it and then changing their opinions to against the war once it became clear that more and more of them would be drafted. He notes also that the draft system was exploitative and hurt disadvantaged groups. Meaning, somehow, that Boomers were even more hypocritical as a result. Weird logic here.
42: This author really likes to fit things into his filter: the conscientious objector option should have been more appealing to Boomers but... "For sociopaths, however, CO was among the least desirable options, because it required sincerity, effort to secure the deferment, and some form of alternative service." For the man with a hammer everything is a nail...
44: Re: comments on army discipline here, I'd be extremely curious to know if this author has any direct context for military service or military history, or context for the difference between drafted vs volunteer military forces. I suspect not. But either way, in his eyes, Boomers remain sociopathic!
48: The author talks about 1973 after the Paris Peace Accords, when America "cut and ran" (his phrase). Again, who, precisely, cut and ran? Was it Boomers? No: it was the military and political leadership--none of whom were Boomers. Some strangely incontinent logic here on Boomer protests here too: The author also criticizes Boomers because their protests died away as the war wound down, but then he is strangely incontinent in his logic as he next argues that Boomer protests if they did help end the war, then subsequent protests would have negatively influenced the peace process; so either we can criticize Boomers because either they had an effect or they didn't. But the author concludes "Either way the Boomers didn't acquit themselves well." Hammer, nail.
50: The author blames Boomers for the US government not accepting sufficient Vietnamese refugees, and specifically blames Jerry Brown (then governor of California) for protesting attempts at resettlement. But again Boomers did not make up the political leadership then: Jerry Brown is not a Boomer! He was born in 1938.
50: Finally, the author concludes that Vietnam gave Boomers a final lesson that "they could get away with their misdeeds" and that they could have "consequence free sociopathy."
Chapter 4: Empire of Self
52: On the Boomer "counterculture" which the author blames on left ("antiwar, antistate, anticonformity") and right ("a rebellion against a big government and a regulatory welfare orthodoxy"), which makes little sense. This chapter appears to be a blanket criticism of Boomer improvidence, drugs, sex, rebellion, all stuff everyone already knows.
56ff: The author also is beginning to appear no less self-absorbed and solipsistic than the Boomers he criticizes: can you really blame sexual excesses on Boomers? What about the 1920s (either the US or Germany), 18th century France... instead the author cites a 1968-era film that showed the first celluloid breasts. What?
59ff The author considers Boomer sexual "transgressiveness" and gratification as sociopathic.
60ff Divorce: basically Boomers didn't make it easy but they took advantage of it too much per the author. See for example this incontinent passage: "Easier divorce was certainly a social good--and one pioneered by earlier generations, not the Boomers. The frequency with which Boomers resorted to divorce, however, proved alarming and generationally unusual. It suggested some combination of growing impulsivity about entering a union, unwillingness to expend the effort necessary to make relationships work, and perhaps a fundamental incompatibility between an antisocial Boomer culture and the state of matrimony which, after all, is a society of two." [What a strange and ill-thought out argument: Easier divorce is good, but because the Boomers overused it, it's not good that they overused this thing which I just said is good. Does the author happen to know what level of divorce meets his test for being non-antisocial?]
63: Citing Boomer deficits in self-control (beyond sexual and marital) to include "saving money" another thing that is "impossible" for the Boomers.
64ff: Now the author moves on to the most overt example of deficits in self-control: the obesity epidemic, which the author also blames on Boomers.
66ff: Evidence-free section here about Boomer narcissism, including claiming that using electronics at the dinner table is more of a Boomer than a millennial habit, asserted with no evidence beyond a footnote to a random article.
Chapter 5: Science and Sentimentality
71ff Now we're blaming Boomers for eliminating "reality and reason." This chapter cites all kinds of examples of American stupidity: increasing illiteracy in domains like science, declining STEM degrees, attributing all of it to Boomers.
72: It's astonishing to read this sentence: "The Boomers were the first modern generation to harbor really negative feelings about reality and science, and their success in undermining these goods has been tremendous." This is asserted with no evidence, just arm-waving, and ironically in a chapter blaming Boomers for disposing of reason! Interesting lack of self awareness...
75ff Various symbols of science and wondrous progress from prior generations, ranging from the Eiffel Tower to the Land Grant University system passed in 1862, the various world's fairs, Thomas Edison, Skyscrapers, etc., all of which are now replaced by "the forces of anti-empiricism" which according to the author come in "flavors": religious and natural.
80ff Boomers are antiscience because they somehow caused R&D spending on non-defense science to decline from a peak in 1966 of 6% to around 3% for most of the 1970s; The author here also plays cite-a-study and cite-a-poll to come up with lots of examples of Boomers being stupid, ignorant, oblivious, sociopathic.
83: It sounds like the author actually does not understand the term heliocentrism in the context of the history of science, as Copernicus wasn't technically right either with his heliocentric model: after all, the sun is not the center of the universe either, just as the geocentric model isn't correct. It's interesting to read a book where the author cites how scientifically ignorant boomers are while making what looks like to be a fundamentally basic scientific error. Also note the hilariously specious footnote here on page 83 which discusses the lack of scientific understanding of Americans. "However, Europeans tend to defer to elites somewhat more than Smericans, and this neutralizes some of the effects of scientific illiteracy."
85: "Having deposed empiricism, the Boomers were free to seek new sources of truth, and these they located in feelings, a commodity not in short supply during the age of Aquarius." The evidence the author offers to support this assertion is usage of the word "feel" (which allegedly grew dramatically in the mid-60s), plus the debut of the mood ring, also the usage of the word "true" declined. The author cites Google searches using Google Ngram here in the footnotes.
85ff: The author criticizes Boomers for not sufficiently obeying their elites. Note this opinion is radioactively obtuse now, after we've seen what our elites did to civilization with the COVID pandemic.
91ff: Also note here where the author criticizes Boomers for their religious choices--and in this case, oddly enough, following their religious elites too much.
Chapter 6: Disco and the Roots of Neoliberalism
96: "It's hard to take the disco decade seriously."
98: "Neoliberal doctrine serves as the operating system of Boomer dominance and is so pervasive and damaging that it requires a chapter of its own. Many of the American policy calamities of the past decades have, as their animated source, some perverted fragment of neoliberal doctrine." Boomer liberalism as free market a la carte. Discussion of true liberalism, followed by neoliberalism.
104: Judging from the comments here about the Bretton Woods exchange system and the fixed exchange rate for gold at $35 an ounce it's appears this author has no idea that FDR seized Americans' gold in the 1930s.
108: Striking comment here about how Boomers "joined the capitalist class," were savvy in how they used inflation policy, but yet a couple of chapters ago, didn't the author argue that Boomers were improvidents who never saved?
112: Another good example of an incontinent argument: "Early deregulation was generally good especially when accompanied by vigorous enforcement of other standards--it's one thing to deregulate the price of a plane ticket, it's another thing to abolish the Federal Aviation Administration." No one abolished the FAA, not even Boomers.
114: The author's discussion of the Laffer Curve is embarrassing here, he exposes himself as innumerate. He also blames Boomers, somehow, for electing Reagan.
Chapter 7: The Boomer Ascendency
116ff: "If the Boomers had been just another generation, their sociopathy would be merely lamentable, but demographics and history granted Boomers the power to reshape the nation in devastating ways." Here he criticizes Boomers for bending political power to meet their life cycle needs (although technically speaking we have to admit that this is literally what democracy is). The author also notes that Boomers decided that they wanted to keep all their old age benefits; Boomers might take sides in the culture wars but this is one thing that they all agree on, at the expense of everyone else.
119ff On granting the vote to 18-year-old Boomers, an age where they didn't have the maturity or the civic knowledge to vote appropriately.
124: It's also the Boomers fault that the drinking age was reduced to 18 (just like the voting age), although this political change couldn't possibly have been done by the Boomers alone.
125 The author describes Boomers "colonizing the political landscape"--a really good turn of phrase. Then he discusses how even as they start to die off and are a less populous generation, the survivors can still form blocs, use filibusters, vetos, etc to stop new legislation and maintain their programs.
Chapter 8: Taxes
132: This chapter discusses the manipulation of taxes to serve Boomer generational ends which involved "constantly adjusting specific tax policies to favor the interests of Boomers as they moved through their financial life cycles, lowering income taxes during periods where Boomers labored for wages, reducing capital gains taxes as Boomers became stockholders, and limiting and even briefly abolishing estate taxes when Boomers expected to inherit. When Boomers perceived tax hikes to be in their interests, some rates (like Social Security and Medicare taxes) were allowed to rise, though only enough to benefit Boomers, many of whom can expect to retrieve more from the system than they put in, before the system falls apart as the Boomers die off."
133ff Discussion of tax history, hikes and cuts, from Reagan on.
151ff: Judging by the conclusions this author makes about the government's stable share of GDP regardless of where tax rates are (see chart on p 151), he concludes that it's just shifting the burden around, he's doesn't seem to be aware of how tax rates impact economic activity and the incremental economic decisions of taxpayers.
152: He also appears not to understand the money-printing component of government spending; also he exhibits basic confusion here between income and wealth while talking about "the rich"... Also he never addresses the "limit the rapid formation of new rich" component of tax policy (income taxes act as a limiter on big shifts of economic power by limiting the creation of new rich people).
Chapter 9: Debt and Deficits
155ff: Debt typically was at 50% of GDP from 1950 to 1980. If this guy was upset with our debt levels and debt to GDP ratios when he wrote this book in 2017, his head must be exploding now...
162: Standard discussion here on there is no social security trust fund, etc.
172: Blaming Boomers for running up corporate debt levels too; I'd say this is the least of the things to worry about these days.
173: Strange criticisms here of various Boomer politicians, ranging from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders to Marco Rubio for being impecunious and struggling with debt when objectively all of these people are incredibly wealthy; this author could have made a much more powerful argument like citing the unbelievable investing returns of Congressional rep and senators who can freely trade as government insiders! Hence fortunes like those in Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren, etc.
The latter third of this chapter really has nothing to do with Boomers directly
Chapter 10: Indefinitely Deferred Maintenance
177ff Here the author frames the fact that the United States is not investing in its infrastructure, considering it as a metaphor for Boomers' impulsivity and squandering of resources; also Boomer sociopathy. Boomers "grew up in a country that had the world's greatest infrastructure, they now run a nation where infrastructure ranges from frustratingly backward to downright unsafe."
[I wonder if a more interesting question (more interesting than just blaming everything on Boomers) would be to ask why does infrastructure go through these cycles of neglect to the point where when an Empire actually goes through collapse to the point where in some civilizations people lose indoor plumbing. Further, where might we be on this spectrum right now, what inning? This author openly describes poisoned water, Flint Michigan, the fact that LaGuardia airport looks like a third world airport, etc.]
179ff The author makes an unnecessary and self-evident argument for having good infrastructure and having public goods; repetitive statistics on poor quality of roads, bridges, etc.; on the fact that we don't have train service to and from wherever this guy thinks we should, etc.
186ff On defense spending (which this author considers infrastructure): the author claims the Boomers "squandered their martial inheritance." Strange that he argues that the Boomers decided not to invest in the military when military spending is objectively very high, despite the fact that we are not at war. Also worth noting that if you look at the US performance in our last few conflicts one might not think much of the return on all that spending.
190ff On the vastly higher cost and time involved in building anything; major skyscrapers, bridges, etc. [A pretty depressing quote here about how the original San Francisco Bay Bridge took three years to complete for $1.4 billion in today's dollars while the replacement of just the eastern span took eleven years at $6.5 billion dollars (again in today's dollars so the comparison is fair), and it required immediate repairs and has ongoing problems.]
191ff Blaming Boomers for NIMBYism; Boomers are acting out a "degraded version" of Jane Jacobs' efforts against Robert Moses.
191-2: This author is unabashedly confident that his views on what we should do for the greater good are true and accurate, I guess he just doesn't see the irony.
Chapter 11: Boomer Finance: The Vicious Cycle of Risk and Deceit
194ff: "Boomers have engaged in a campaign of deceit... to offer consoling fictions to the population they govern" including "disingenuous financial dialogue essential to maintaining the expropriations necessary to fund the Boomers insatiable consumer appetites." He blames the Boomers for using various misleading labels to constrain political debate and all the electorate like law and order, or crisis management; "Boomer lies are systemic."
195ff The author appears to think that the generations before the Boomers used only accurate statistics, enacted appropriate regulation, etc., and that with the Boomers it's devolved into massive deregulation, deceitful Wall Street products, financialization of everything, off-balance sheet accounting, etc. We hear all about Enron, the S&L crisis, the LBO wave; even Boomer Carly Fiorina comes under fire for Hewlett-Packard's (admittedly) stupid acquisition of Compaq.
202ff: Deregulation, elimination of Glass-Steagall; systematically blaming Boomers like Chuck Prince of Citigroup and Ken Lewis of Bank of America, Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase [with Dimon at least--setting aside his cluelessness about Bitcoin--he was the only one who ran a bank competently through the financial crisis... despite being a Boomer], see also Boomer Hank Paulson who was in the Treasury during the crisis, etc.
203: Some errors here that the author should know better than to make: claiming that the SEC relaxed bank capital requirements, that's not even close to the relevant agency.
208ff On "monetary manipulation and generational expropriation"; the author is upset at the size of the Federal Reserve's unprecedented $3.5 trillion dollar expansion of its balance sheet ... I can't imagine what the author thinks now about the Fed's balance sheet now! The author wishes the Fed would use its margin requirement rules (which hasn't used for decades: current margin limitations play very little role in stock market volatility nowadays); this section now jumps to proforma accounting which has nothing to do with the Fed; also Boomers are blamed for the increase of the P/E ratio of the stock market making stocks now "too expensive" just in time for Boomers to get old and begin liquidating. [But wait, remember the author claimed improvident Boomers never saved?] Comments on the explosion in the price of housing as Boomers expanded housing subsidies, mortgage tax subsidies and house sale tax exclusions during their lives. Note also that the Fed intervened during the housing crisis to the benefit of Boomers [I think this is actually unlikely to be accurate: Boomers probably would not have been not the bulk of home buyers acquiring NINJA loan financed homes, although I haven't looked at specific data on this]. Note that there's no discussion here from the author (a private equity finance guy and thus a Cantillon insider) on monetary inflation policy, which harms everyone.
Chapter 12: The Brief Triumph of Long Retirement
215ff: The long retirements of the Boomers were a historical anomaly: it used to be that only the rich could retire; various numbers on income needed to retire, most of which is specious, it appears this author never actually spent much time thinking about "retirement math"; old age benefit programs probably start to run out seriously in the mid-2030s just as median-age Boomers die off--and when it's too late to really be able to cut Boomers benefits.
220: Pension plans as false friends, they're largely underfunded with overly optimistic return estimates; this is yet another example of Boomer deceit; standard self-evident discussion about how the PBCT doesn't have enough money to satisfy all unfunded future pension liabilities--that's because that's not what it's for.
225: Unintentionally amusing blurb here mocking the old book Dow 36,000, remember this book was published in 2017. [Would you like to to take a guess what the Dow Jones Industrial Average is right now, as of Feb 15, 2024? It's at 38,467.31.]
226ff: Returning to entitlements like Medicare and Social Security again: a semantic debate or whether it's "welfare" or not; also a pointless discussion about who gets more than they paid in depending on the generation; rehashing now the worsening economics of the Social Security cash flows as more and more Boomers leave the workforce, again everyone knows this. And yet again another discussion of the fact that the trust fund is not a real thing, we've already covered the subject back in Chapter 9.
230ff: In a section where the author offers his fixes for Social security, he spends most of his time bitching about how Boomers want to get what their gets what's theirs and how Boomers are not in all interested in or would consent to any fix... and then he offers the least creative solution possible (although it is at least a solution): a combination of cuts in benefits and increases in taxes.
233ff: Repeat discussion here, except now it's about Medicare and how Boomers can get all the Hep C treatments they want (because they partied too hard when they were young, the author snarkily claims), and they can get these treatment regardless of the cost, expropriating the funds from the rest of the system. Weird footnote here on page 235 about cryogenics; how Medicare is doomed, will be facing multitrillion dollar shortfalls, it will consume a tenth of GDP in 50 years, etc.
Chapter 13: Preparing for the Future
240: A "once upon a time" discussions on how the US used to care about the environment (until the Boomers came along); this is sort of a weird notion too, although the author makes a point lionizing Teddy Roosevelt and the Clean Air Act which was passed pre-Boomer; also Nixon creating the EPA; the author attributes waning environmental efforts to Boomers.
242: Note the footnote citing "environmental hypocrite Al Gore": see the complicated way he obtained land paying him oil extraction royalties; likewise the extraordinary amount of carbon he puts out with his private jetting around the planet and his gigantic mansion; global warming is "a problem compounded by Boomers like Gore" with their unrestrained consumerism.
244: Boomers don't believe strongly enough in anthropocentric climate change.
252ff: Boomers limit biotechnology research, they stopped stem cell research. Also a strange discussion here of AI and an even stranger footnote about the the author's believe that Skynet taking over the world is "a non-zero possibility."
Chapter 14: Detention, After-School and Otherwise
258ff: On how Boomers both degraded schools and swelled up prisons, making them both "mechanisms of mass containment and deferred liability." The author cites declining SAT scores and another declining academic metrics overlapping perfectly with the period Boomers took these tests [Ah, but who were running the schools, funding the schools, and running the municipalities that paid for the schools at this time?? The author repeatedly fails to see this--and to him it's still the Boomers' fault.] Boomers unwilling to tax themselves to furnish funds for education [although two pages later the author notes and a footnote the United States spends more per student than any other advanced country!!]; physical decay of schools and their infrastructure.
270: The for-profit education industry is also the Boomers' fault. Boomers also taking up all the tenure-track jobs in academia, leaving just crappy adjunct teaching positions for everyone else.
272ff: Also the explosion of student debt, which burdens everyone except for Boomers, is also somehow the Boomers' fault [!] and the author offers a rather tortured and indirect "reason" for this: that "the Boomer economy is so inadequate to the task of providing good jobs."
275: The rapidly growing prison population is also the Boomers' fault because they favored ever stricter laws, they loved law and order; Boomer police forces grew [wait, is this the cause of the crime or a response to crime? Anyway, I thought Boomers didn't want to invest in any public goods?]. The author is careful to note that Boomer white collar offenders are never prosecuted. See also private prisons which have Boomer executives; the author notes the irony of how Boomers protested "the pigs" during the Vietnam war but have created a police state within the same generation.
Chapter 15: The Wages of Sin
282ff This is a chapter starts by discussing Boomer ostentatiousness, that they are luxury voyeurs, this despite the author's previous assertions that they were impecunious and improvident; the author also believes that "In the 1950s, rich Americans knew better than to flaunt wealth." [But he never did take his perspective back to, say, the teens or twenties which were as ostentatious as any Boomer era. See also some profound ostentation even in the 1930s from the many wild stories of John Scarne's autobiography.]
284ff: On the fact that GDP growth has stagnated, that there's an output gap with the economy; this is also the Boomers' fault; Boomer extraction of wealth from other generations helps explain this according to the author.
296ff: Growth in monopolies and oligopolies under the Boomers; a decline an antitrust regulation, the growth of megafirms.
Chapter 16: The Myth of Boomer Goodness
301: Interesting quote here opening Chapter 16: "It would be gratifying if the Boomers admitted their mistakes wholesale and ceded power to other groups." [I wonder if this quote reveals more about the author than about reality, there are lots of things we all want that will never happen, that can never happen. What can be gained by going around demanding reality be other than it is?]
301ff This chapter is about how Boomers see themselves as good people who do not need to explain themselves, do not need to apologize, that they're special, and that they're more moral and generally more deserving as a result. The author even admits he himself was fooled into believing the "good people" propaganda of the Boomer generation.
306ff: Criticizing Boomers for limitations to voting rights--which, according to the author happened in 2013 thanks to Boomer Supreme Court justices; this portion of the chapter is pretty weak, author doesn't give a lot of concrete examples of how voting rights were limited and he has a strange obsession with reversing the laws that do not allow felons to vote.
310ff Blaming the existence big money politics on the Boomers; their use of corporate donors.
314ff: Blaming any kind of court decision that the author doesn't like on Boomers: the author uses his availability heuristic to think of all kinds of court decisions that appall him, he then blames those decisions on Boomers because most judges are Boomers during this time.
316ff Another example of "illusory goodness" of Boomers is how they don't pay women equally; although note due to Boomers women got much more access to the workforce and it's kind of unusual to consider it unfair to say that Boomers are responsible for unfair pay that they are paying themselves.
317ff Continued list of sins of Boomers: they're not sufficiently in favor of LGBT rights, they're not sufficiently in favor of racial intermarriage [these seem just like strange things to be blaming Boomers for, the author comes off as totally obsessed with Boomers. I think you could very easily make the exact opposite case here: that Boomers presided over a period of immense tilting towards rights for marginalized groups. The author also will grudgingly admit that some major advances in equality for disabled persons occurred under the Boomers watch, but just wait! The author blames Boomers anyway because George W. Bush broadened the definition of "disability" which diluted the benefits to truly disabled people, according to this author. Again this is just incontinent and obsessive.]
323ff Blaming Boomers for warlike behavior, referring to our recent "endless wars" period.
Chapter 17: Price Tags and Prescriptions
327ff Here's where the author gives his "solutions" for fixing Boomer America. Unsurprisingly it involves taxing and spending much much more on projects the author wants; the author does not seem to see the irony here of his generation and generations to follow spending other peoples' money on things they think are important, when he just spent an entire book lambasting Boomers for spending tax money on the things Boomers wanted. The bill for this, according to the author, is $8.65 trillion up front with $1.17 trillion in ongoing (I guess he means annual) costs. Spending on infrastructure, refilling pension gaps, spending more even more on the military, spending $1.5 trillion on education and [predictably] spending a trillion dollars on climate; also fixing Social security, etc. taxing estates much more aggressively; overt rationing of healthcare. [There is a tremendous quantity of words in this chapter, it is a word salad with very little specific, practical or even plausible ideas.]
Afterword
348: This chapter is actually somewhat disturbing, he talks about deposing Boomers using metaphors like putting heretics to the sword [see the note for page 350 below]; this is quite a strange and downright creepy chapter.
349: Another absolutely strange quote right here that sounds like something right out of the Goebbels handbook: "Part of my goal throughout has obviously been to establish Boomers as a highly culpable Other, one whose deposition might lead to some real good. Boomers really are different, as they often and proudly remind. They do not share other generations' values and do not behave in ways that accord with America's better conceptions of itself. They are Other, even, in their own ways, enemies of state and society."
350ff: The author, weirdly, brings up the Cathar heretics in Medieval era Church history, arguing that the Boomers are similarly heretics and further suggesting that they should all be put to the sword because of their heresy [!] A couple of sentences later the author writes, "not all boomers are sociopaths, and not all of them deserve to be condemned."
364: Finally, a shockingly oblivious quote here in the author's acknowledgments: "Even after decades of Boomer neglect and hostility, no bureaucracy is as committed to making a nation as transparent to itself as the American bureaucracy."
To Read:
Simon Schama: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
David Mamet: The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture