The generation game

John,
This reads pretty well to me. Not quite sure what the point is though. Why not just condemn “generationalism” as we do any attempt to stick a label (often meant to be derogatory) on a large and diverse group of people.

What mattered more than the occasional deaths and breakups was the survival of the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and other megabands. Having started out as teenage rebels (sometimes with judicious adjustments to their official ages) these 1960s icons maintained their position at the top of the rock world as they went from their 30s into their 40s and 50s.
…
By the 1970s, when the later baby-boomers were in their teenage years, countercultural events like Woodstock had been replaced by the mass-market stadium rock of bands like Grand Funk Railroad

What you missed here is the punk caesura. For a while, around about 1978-9, the market for soft rock & prog rock went through the floor; acts like ELP and Peter Frampton went from solid cultural dominance to niche status in a matter of months. For a while it really did look as if punk had changed everything; only the most adaptable of the old rockers – Bowie, Robert Fripp, Bill Nelson – were going to survive with any kind of credibility, and even they were never going to be as cool again. Speculatively, we read the process back into rock history – there’d been a big clear-out of pre-hippie acts in 1967-8, surely, to say nothing of the original rock’n’roll revolution in 1957 – and waited eagerly to see what 1987 would bring.

Then the music industry regrouped, and the rest we know. Everything would always be the same again.

aepxc I think this understates the importance of the cohort effect. Age determines how solid (or how flexible) one’s perspectives are. Generations determine the experiences that defined the foundations for those perspectives.

You’re misunderstanding JQ here. As he points out age also determines experiences: getting ones’ first job, major promotion, children, grandchildren, retirement, etc.

Watson, you could not be more wrong. I was born in 1965 (and appalled to find out that some consider me in Gen Jones!). Nuclear annihilation was a major fear of my generation when we were young. And while it’s true we didn’t “duck and cover” as portrayed in that 50s civil defense film, we did have air raid drills in elementary school where we would file out into the hallway, face the wall, get on our knees and elbows, tuck our heads in and cover them with our hands. Scared the shit out of me. This fear was omnipresent – I don’t know anyone my age who didn’t routinely have nightmares about nuclear war – and massively increased when Reagan took office (“We begin bombing in five minutes” ha ha ha).
As for films, please see The Day After, Threads, WarGames, all from the early 80s. And post apocalyptic film was a well developed genre by then: A Boy and His Dog, Mad Max, etc.

Any conversation on generations is incomplete without discussing what a hash the Baby Boomers have made of the generational compact that linked our society together. By making promises and engaging funding obligations that will be impossible to fulfill, they have placed my generation in a highly tenuous situation. They could have not made the promises or they could have chosen to spend public money more wisely and maybe even raise taxes. But they did neither. They’ve tried fad after fad with education but haven’t managed to improve schools or the environmental factors necessary for true education to thrive. They told us to go to college and get an education and encouraged us to take out ridiculously large loans because “it was worth it”. And yet how many of us are unemployed or underemployed?

At the same time the number of retirement homes exploded, responding to their demand to not have to take care of their parents. They patched it up a bit with Medicare, but that’s about the extent of their obligation to the elderly who have gone before.

Forget fears and music and other arbitrary cultural identifiers. The American generation raised after World War II is the most narcissistic and egotistical in the history of the world.

This all seems exactly right to me. I am going to simply replace my own similar but less well worked out thoughts on the subject, with this post.

An interesting implication is that generations are not of equal length and also not exhaustive. Not everyone’s in one. Very distinct, life-changing widely shared events occur rarely and irregularly. If there was one in your 16-25 window, that’s your generation. If not, you aren’t a member of any particular generation. Or at least, less prominent defying events mean less well-defined generations.

Wars are the obvious generation-making events, as JQ says. The Depression presumably one. I like to think of the generation of “1968” the way Spain had its generation of 1898. I don’t think there’s been anything close to that in recent decades. Though in Europe, at least, it’s possible a generation-making event is happening now.

I doubt this way of looking at things will catch on. Our culture prefers as riptide categories, for whatever reason.

The late 70’s moment was a much more optimistic one.

Jesu Christe. You really, truly, honestly don’t know anything about anything, do you?

(Sorry for that, John…but come on. Every. Single. Thread.)

In the 1950’s and 1960’s there was the Berlin crisis, the Korean war, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and no mechanisms for coexistence. The Doomsday Clock advanced during the 1950’s due to superpower problems: during the 1970’s its advance was driven by peripheral countries. I do not think the US and Russia were going to go to war over Kashmir. The Reagan escalation may have made things more unstable: I doubt it because the status quo had largely solidified and become acceptable to both sides. Proxy war was not going to escalate at that point, and Russia was not going to start a war, with US conventional forces at parity with Russian forces in Europe towards the end of that decade.

As for optimism: the economic situation of the 1980’s is as JQ pointed out very different for different people. Certainly the glam rock and Madonna performances, with their array of wealth, signify a social difference from the image of the prog rock band as operators of their instruments. I’ve got no idea what the difference is (escapist fantasy in the 1980’s vs. enlightened rationality in the 1960’s) but it has something to do with society.

I’m surprised to see so many people taking exception to Watson’s comments on the dating of the fear of nuclear annihilation. I was born in 1962, and my sense was that the feeling of the inevitability of a nuclear war had faded by the time I was in school, replaced with an anxious hopefulness that we could probably avoid it.

There was a lot of anti-nuclear sentiment, pressure for disarmament, etc. — my friends staged anti-nuc “die ins” at university. But I associate the extreme pessimism with a slightly earlier time — I have the image of a crewcut guy in a jacket and skinny tie, parked with his poodle-skirted date, pleading, “Come on, baby, we could both be dead tomorrow!” By the time I was a teen, no one was using that line.

No one was building their own bomb shelters, and the fading civil defense signs on public buildings seemed like a holdover from an earlier generation. We did have disaster drills in school where we crouched in the hallways. But I grew up in tornado alley, so we figured it was just for that.

Another cohort distinction I have always made, is between those old enough to have “grown up” during the Nuclear-Winter/M.A.D. period of the cold-war, but not old enough to really remember anytime before that. Assuming this means they were between 5-12 yrs old, within the period between deployment of SLBC-MIRV’s ~1972 and the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this cohort is those born between ~1967 and ~1977. This “Generation X” grew up being told from an early age that they would never have the chance to be adults because the world would end first.

This describes me and my age-mates to a T, and I was born in 1950, so I don’t think identifying “those born between ~1967 and ~1977” as special in this regard makes much sense.

The fear that we were all going to die in a nuclear war was a primary shaping force in my childhood. The first thing I remember reading on my own (this is not to say that it *was* the first thing, but the fact that it’s the one I remember is the point) was a terrifying Civil Defense pamphlet that outlined the effects of exposure to radiation from a bomb. That would have been in the mid-fifties; I’m sure my parents never meant me to see it, or realized I could already read well enough to take it in. I have a vivid memory of thinking, on the day JFK was killed (I was 13), that now it was coming: that cold hard fear in my belly that we were all going to die shortly.

So yes — playing the game of dividing people up into generational groupings may be a fun intellectual pastime, but it doesn’t make much sense when you look at it more closely. All the nasty generalizing about “boomers” drives me crazy for that reason; hiding amongst the hippies when I was in college there were still people who wanted to be in ROTC, and conversely nowadays, there are “boomers” in the Tea Party and “boomers” who think the Occupy movement is just a drop in the bucket of what we really need to be doing.

Those born around 1965 or so (I was born in 1966) are the right age to have been living with their parents when draft registration was reinstated, so it seems possible that there was more anxiety about Cold War global politics than there had been a few years earlier.

The era of Nuclear angst, really ran from the early fifties to the late 80’s, so it took in more than one of what we call “generations”, but which are more accurately described as cohorts. Maybe the experienec of the younger cohorts of this era was a bit different, my cohort (b1952) had already lived -and I think moslty discounted this fear by the time the younger cohort was experiencing it. Perhaps the differing attitude of the next older cohort makes the experience different.

What we haven’t discussed here is whether there is a political seachange coming, as older cohorts die off, and younger (presumably more liberal) ones get the vote. For all the talk about demography being the future, I have serious doubts, the aging of each cohort affects its attitudes. We thought the baby boomers would usher in an era of liberalism -yet many are now tea-partiers.

Omega Centauri: “What we haven’t discussed here is whether there is a political seachange coming, as older cohorts die off, and younger (presumably more liberal) ones get the vote. For all the talk about demography being the future, I have serious doubts, the aging of each cohort affects its attitudes.”

Not really – this is largely an urban legend (often found accompanied with a fake Winston Churchill quote). Rather, people tend to form their political views relatively early in adulthood and change them only slightly as they age. And in many cases, those changes are actually in a liberal direction. These political views are often formed in large part by the zeitgeist of the era.

Omega Centauri: “We thought the baby boomers would usher in an era of liberalism yet many are now teapartiers.”

The Baby Boomers were never really as liberal or monolithic a group as media portrayals indicate. They were always about evenly divided between Democratic/liberal and Republican/conservative views, and this continues to be the case. What you are probably thinking of as “baby boomers” in the Tea Party context is actually in large part a previous cohort, the Silent Generation (born 1925-1945). This is the “keep your government hands off my Medicare” crowd. Too young to fight in WWII, too old for Vietnam. With the exception of early childhood (where some of them went through the Depression), they basically lived a charmed life, entering the job market when wages were skyrocketing far faster than inflation, even for workers with only a high school diploma. And if they did want to go to college, it was usually cheap or free. They bought houses when they were dirt cheap and interest rates were low, and got to sell them at far higher prices once they moved into their empty-nest phase. But, like most people, they convinced themselves that their success was all their own doing (nothing to do with the New Deal and Keynesianism!) As soon as they were done with the universities, they voted to de-fund them for the next generation. They gladly accepted two-tier labor deals that would screw over younger workers. They voted for Ronald Reagan. They outsourced jobs and jacked up credential requirements, forcing their successors to work harder for lower pay than they ever had. No wonder the Republicans think they can pull their “over-55” switcheroo with Medicare; the Silent Generation has been willing to sell out their children and grandchildren every other step of the way.
Of course I am generalizing here, but if you want to blame one generation, don’t blame the boomers or the Greatest Generation, blame the in-between group that basically got to have their cake, eat it too, and then make damn sure no one else could get a bite.

Two minor points:

Generations (ISBN 0-688-11912-3) (1991), the book by William Strauss and Neil Howe, is perhaps the outstanding work of nomothetic history by Americans in the past half-century, although that may not be saying much. Worth a read, IMHO.

Music – I remember walking through a college campus one recent September, hearing a song from my college days playing, wondering what my reaction would have been if I’d heard a 1928-vintage recording coming from the frat-house window in my freshman year.

Partial explanation is that, roughly by 1965, the technology of magnetic-tape recording reached ‘good-enough’ level, such that most popular music recorded earlier _sounds_ ‘dated’, but good stuf from the Beatles onward is still ‘on the playlists’

I think there was one significant ‘generation gap’, caused by the various disruptions and excitements of World War 2. First, for several years, daddy was not home to beat the kids, mommy was in the factory, terrific and terrifying events were happening, and the children that were born and passed their early years in this environment (‘War Babies’ in ad biz/pop soc lingo) were unusually rebellious (for instance, Bob Dylan and Mario Savio.) Secondly, the big war and its horrors inspired a lot of reproduction once it was over, and we got the Baby Boom under conditions of weakened patriarchal authority and dull, cautious conservatism. As the first War Babies hit adulthood, in the early 1960s, they started making trouble, which attracted younger people and offered political opportunities to activists, producing a definite gap or jump in popular culture. Of course, this led to a kind of marketing and commerce, which enshrined the notion of a ‘generation’ as a selling tool even though the sacred gap is now long in the past. That is, the notion of a succession of highly distinct generations (or cohorts, if you like) is an artifact of media and advertising, whose first job is to sell themselves, not a reflection of anything more substantial. The last distinct act of the Boomers seems to have been to elect Ronald Reagan and his ‘new morning in America’, which set us on a pretty steady downhill path already contemplated in the 1970s. I don’t see any significant gaps or jumps since the first famous one.

28: First time voters and 20 somethings* voted for Reagan more than the boomers, which has consistently been the most liberal loyal Democratic cohort in the last century.

*Like Obama

If you were white and working class and in high school in the 1950s, and you were reasonably studious, you were told you could go to college if you were exceptional. Lots of “good kids” did not go to college. In the 1970s or 1980s, you were told you would go to college unless you hung out with the wrong crowd and as a result didn’t do your homework (except that you were also told that you would go to a state school at best, regardless of your grades and SATs, because they weren’t giving scholarships to white kids anymore). That is a big difference, but not obviously gender-related.

The Jackson 5, I see, started in 1964, and music of similar sorts was established enough to seem a good thing for filler on Scooby Doo and more prominently in Josie and the Pussiecats and such.

There was a Jackson 5 cartoon, and an Osmonds cartoon. The De Franco Family were on a lot of Saturday morning kiddie shows I think… Tiger Beat was founded in 1965.

Josh G. 08.17.12 at 5:33 pm:
‘… Reagan was elected by the Silent Generation, not the boomers. This is the same group that spearheaded the “tax revolt” in California and later nationwide, and that today forms the Fox News demographic and the backbone of the Tea Party. …’

Back in the day, the ‘Silent Generation’ were supposed to be the people who were born in the late 1920s or the 1930s and whose war was the Korean War. I don’t know if that’s who you’re talking about. These people would be in their 80s for the Tea Party, which doesn’t accord with the pictures I’ve seen. I don’t know about Fox News. I’ve heard that the median age of a Fox News fan is 66, which is pretty Boomerish, but I have no idea where the figure came from or how reliable it is.

As for Reagan, the demographic analyses I’ve been able to uncover in a not too diligent search indicate that Boomers voted more strongly for Reagan than any other cohort, although older cohorts were pretty close. In 1980, those 30-44 at the time of the election voted for Reagan 54-37, with the remainder going mostly to Anderson. This tranche also was the most populous (31% of the population) so it looks pretty significant.

What makes me associate Reagan particularly with the Boomers is the combination of vacuous utopianism, religiosity, and feckless individualism in his campaign, which, it seems to me and others (Mark Lilla, for example), descend pretty directly from the cultural politics of the Sixties, in of course a fairly diluted and sterilized form.

I take it we’re talking exclusively about the US here, since e.g. the fall of the Berlin wall was of course the major event in the lives of many people in central and eastern Europe.

That said, I think the major difference between the generation X/Y and the boomers has been the declining power of grand narratives.

Anarcissie: “Back in the day, the ‘Silent Generation’ were supposed to be the people who were born in the late 1920s or the 1930s and whose war was the Korean War. I don’t know if that’s who you’re talking about.”

I am basing my classification on Wikipedia’s definition, which is that the Silent Generation consists of people born between 1925 and 1945. Other sites give slightly different definitions; some say 1927-1945 (which would exclude anyone old enough to fight in WWII), others say 1925-1942. Even though there might be some quibbling about the years at each end, this group still holds up well as a discrete cohort. Yes, some of these people were of age to fight in Korea (though far from all: that war ended in 1953, so anyone born after 1935 was too young to have ever seen action there). According to Pew Research, the Silent Generation “has held relatively conservative views on social issues and the role of government for most of their lives”, and this has intensified in recent years.

Anarcissie: “ These people would be in their 80s for the Tea Party, which doesn’t accord with the pictures I’ve seen. I don’t know about Fox News. I’ve heard that the median age of a Fox News fan is 66, which is pretty Boomerish, but I have no idea where the figure came from or how reliable it is.”

The youngest members of the Silent Generation would be 66 years old now, the oldest of them 83. The average Fox News viewer is 65 years old. For Rush Limbaugh, it’s 67, and for Bill O’Reilly the median viewer age is 71. Yes, there is some overlap with the older Boomers, but to a large extent that is an illusion because the Boomers’ demographic group is so much larger – even if there are a higher proportion of Silents, you’ll still see quite a few Boomers there. But it is the Silents who are the hard-core conservative base, with the most retrograde views of all. And they’re not being replaced.

Anarcissie: “As for Reagan, the demographic analyses I’ve been able to uncover in a not too diligent search indicate that Boomers voted more strongly for Reagan than any other cohort, although older cohorts were pretty close. In 1980, those 30-44 at the time of the election voted for Reagan 54-37, with the remainder going mostly to Anderson. This tranche also was the most populous (31% of the population) so it looks pretty significant.”

I saw the same numbers you did, but again, that’s not Boomers for the most part, it’s Silents. Members of the Silent Generation would have been age 35 to 55 for the 1980 election. The polling results (scroll down to “Voter demographics) don’t break down exactly along these lines, but as you note, the 30-44 age bracket voted heavily for Reagan. Younger voters (18-21) were the only group to go for Carter (44% Carter, 43% Reagan, 11% Anderson), with those in the 22-29 age bracket tied. (And keep in mind this was in a really bad election for Democrats overall, with pretty much everyone seriously disappointed in Carter in some way.) The Greatest Generation doesn’t get off the hook, either, with the 45-59 age group (some Silents, mostly Greatests) going 55-39 for Reagan, and those 60 and older going for Reagan by a slightly smaller margin.

But one thing is clear from all the data: the newer cohorts tend to be more liberal, and it’s not just because they are currently young (as noted above, Silents were *always* conservative). One odd exception, from Pew’s poll (and this contradicts my anecdotal observations) is that older Boomers tend more Democratic than younger Boomers. But boomers are less conservative than Silents by a significant margin; Generation X is more liberal than boomers; and Millennials are the most liberal and community-minded of all. This is why the Republicans are so obsessed with suppressing voter turnout. It is literally the last gasp of a dying ideology. They have no future.

Is it unusual, or is this kind of mismatch the norm? It makes sense that a particular technology would go through a sort of logistic S-curve progression, with an early exponential phase and a later plateau once the practically feasible stuff has been done. But there’s no particular reason that different technologies will do this at the same time unless they feed directly into one another.

It seems to me that science fiction is the way it is because, when the genre was solidifying, transportation was going through an exponential boom. But it hit the logistic shoulder sometime around 1970.

About Gen-Xer fear of nuclear war: I strongly suspect that in the 1980s, that particular fear was politically compartmentalized. I was a liberal nerdy son of US Democrats, I read Carl Sagan and Douglas Hofstadter and supported Walter Mondale, and I was scared out of my mind of nuclear war. But many people my age say the notion barely impinged on their consciousness at all.

Also, concerning scientific change, I wouldn’t make too much of the relative stasis in fundamental physics. Fundamental physics is kind of unusual, as sciences go.

Compare with astronomy, which has had mind-boggling progress over the past 20-30 years (to the extent that the best evidence for fundamental physics beyond the Standard Model actually comes not from physics experiments but from astronomy), or all the things new computing technology has enabled in biology.

JW Mason: “It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the difference between the present and the recent past is smaller now than it’s been at any point since the 18th century. I don’t know why so many people insist that things are changing faster than ever.”

Maybe because they are. One difference is that we are destroying things, more than building them. If you use novelties as your milestones, the crescendo of the Second Industrial Revolution from the 1880s to the 1920s will seem to have kept a much faster pace. For our time, to measure the pace of change, you need to tally what is disappearing.

And, related to that difference is that we are past the end of a system, past the end of the system created during the Great Depression and World War II. We understand everything in the categories and metaphors of that by-gone era. If the cast of your play is dead, their character development may indeed seem stunted.

Just to take a cultural example, the sexual revolution of the 1960s, with its related feminism and gay liberation, have moved with astonishing speed. It is true that feminism’s liberal political agenda dates back at least to the emergence of abolitionism, after the Great Reform Bill, Victoria and the abolition of the international slave trade. Respect that time-scale, and the sudden collapse of female castes in employment since 1980, is a remarkably rapid change, the acceptance of homosexuality a galloping change.

JQ correctly notes the rapid advances in computing and communication, but wrongly asserts stasis in everything else. There can be no stasis in everything else, in the circumstances. If the form of things has been retained at all, it is illusion. Cellphones are telephones; email is postal mail by another route. Meanwhile, one vast apparatus after another is collapsing. And, in front of us, the massive task of changing completely the energy basis of our whole industrial economy, while coping with ecological catastrophe.

Yes, people project change into progress, drawing trendlines with a straightedge, and, sooner or later, are mistaken. It doesn’t work that way.

They’ve totally changed the way my kids’ generation thinks about connectedness, planning ahead, all kinds of things.

That isn’t stated very clearly. What I mean is that my kids and their friends think about connectedness and planning ahead in a way that is completely foreign to me.

Its drifting off topic discussing the rate of technological adavance. But fir a a very clear to me of reality versus expectations, wath 2001 a Space Odessy. The expectation of advances in space technology were stunning, we haven’t done even 1% of it. Yet aside from its mental breakdown, the computer tech displayed in the movie is frankly abyssmal.

And clearly we are starting to run into the issues brought up by The Limits to Growth at an accellererating rate. Until a few years ago it was easy to dismiss it, now it seems like its going to hit us like a ton of bricks.

Not all tech advances were for the better. Think of the sophistication of psychological marketting techniques -especially as they’ve been deployed by bigmonied interests with their own agendas to promote.I don’t share Josh’s optimism that todays reactionary Republicanism is a dying breed. They’ve largely succeeded in creating an environment where the side with the most billionaires has a huge advantage, and that means they can have political success far beyond the polling results of their policies.

Chris, London Calling sold two million copies for CBS Records. Complaining about “the big record companies” ruining music is misplaced: they will sell any music that will make them money, just like they sold rock in the 1960’s, and gangsta rap in the early 90’s. There was nothing about punk that prevented its commercialization and obsolescence.

Complaining about “the big record companies” ruining music is misplaced: they will sell any music that will make them money

No, they will sell you what they have, and what they have is dependent on the decisions of managers. That is why payola existed. This remains a good read and Tommy Mottola remains a music executive.

I have thought recently that we will look back on this era of computer technology and compare it to certain aspects of the technology of ancient Rome or Greece. Just as Hero of Alexandria did amazing work with pneumatics, but could think of no use for it other than the make impressive temple displays – because if you wanted work done, you got slaves to do it, and really impressive temple displays (doors opening “magically” when the alter fire was lit) helped keep the slaves in line. So today we have such impressive ability to process information, and most of it is used to track every users keystroke for marketing purposes.

Transport has been improving, technologically, even though we don’t have jetpacks or supersonic passenger aircraft. Specific fuel use (fuel used per tonne/km) has gone down considerably even as speeds have remained the same. The exterior differences between a 1960s aircraft and a 1990s aircraft are visually minor, and their top speeds are comparable, but the latter uses a lot less oil per passenger km.

Of course, the average passenger or airline employee doesn’t see any of this as progress because the benefits accrue exclusively to airline management. Passengers see shrinking seat sizes, declining service, and abusive staff. Employees see wage cuts, pension theft, and passengers who are hostile because they have been pushed to the breaking point. Management gets to walk away with everyone else’s money even as their companies go bankrupt. There is progress, but the benefits are being skimmed off by a class of rentiers.

I think this small story is the story of progress since the 1980s in microcosm: human technological capabilities have expanded the scope of what’s possible to the point that the average standard of living is rising but none of the benefits reach individuals as anything beyond trinkets. Progress for the median person now consists of getting technological glass beads–such as iDevices and LCD TVs–while the full benefits of technological advancement accrue to the already wealthy and the definition of basic human dignity is being repeatedly redefined downward towards serfdom.

Substance, have you ever been unable to find a particular kind of music because no record company had it to sell?

Yes. Here you go.

…I stand corrected: it was well-established by 1970, but global standards were established then. Which I guess makes my point all the more strongly.

Materials technology is in an innovation-explosion. I think that this, crossed over with biotech, nanotech, genomics and computation is going to cause a technological change more rapid and profound than almost any other. We are going to be semicyborgs in perfect health. You won’t be a generation, baby, you will be a Model.

Re #71:

Umm, my college students certainly know what newspapers *are*, even if most read [most of] their papers online. And, like JQ, I cannot understand how a move from one kind of lightbulb to another is any sort of sea change.

Of course, I could be simply suffering from insomnia.

JQ @ 72, ChrisTS @ 74,

That’s the issue. Yes, LED’s are a source of photons in the visible range, same as oil lamps and incandescent light bulbs.

But no, the difference is qualitatively equal or greater. Whale oil and incandescence are something you can figure out, over time, by fiddling and tinkering and engineering. LEDs required people to discover quantum physics, conceive of how to apply it to charges in a semiconductor, then run it through a lab, then engineer it to commercial usability, then continue engineering it for use in e.g., car headlamps, DVD players, light bulb replacement, laser pointers, optical communications links, medical and scientific imaging sensors, etc, all in say, 50-70 years. It is a sea change of monumental proportions, because LEDs are much more than just a better light bulb.

It is a sea change of monumental proportions, because LEDs are much more than just a better light bulb.

This will sound s bit harsh, but in the context of this discussion I find this and the similar arguments above pretty insane. When you flip a switch and a light comes on, no one cares what happens behind the walls–oops, the same thing is happening behind the walls–no one really cares what the technology in the bulb is, no one cares about the pyramid of physics, engineering and technology it took to produce it; IT’S LIGHT! I can see! A newly-wired house a hundred years ago that through some miracle had LED bulbs rather than incandescent would have the same living characteristics except for … better light bulbs.

I agree that the litany of technological progress behind the scenes is impressive. I think it is all part and parcel of the early stages of a massive change that is likely to lead in time to something like Lee Arnold’s semicyborgs. There are a number of applications that have come out of the mix of technology mentioned which have already had significant impact on our lives (as mentioned above, communications/computing/medical treatment), but lighting is not one.

And then I’m going to turn around on myself and say that while it’s fun to think about all that technology-and-change stuff, the really important stuff has already been mentioned by several commenters, and it isn’t that; in fact it turns the technology into just another mechanism for what’s “really” going on:

Bruce W @50 or so: Meanwhile, one vast apparatus after another is collapsing. And, in front of us, the massive task of changing completely the energy basis of our whole industrial economy, while coping with ecological catastrophe.

Omega Centauri @56: Not all tech advances were for the better. Think of the sophistication of psychological marketting techniques -especially as they’ve been deployed by bigmonied interests with their own agendas to promote.I don’t share Josh’s optimism that todays reactionary Republicanism is a dying breed. They’ve largely succeeded in creating an environment where the side with the most billionaires has a huge advantage, and that means they can have political success far beyond the polling results of their policies.

Hidden Heart @59: Bruce Wilder@50 nails the element I couldn’t nail down earlier: the speed with which so much good is being taken away from most of us.

We (“we” — almost all of us) are being slowly and mostly invisibly turned into channels for the funneling of money to an ever smaller number of people. No aspect of life is safe from a process of commercialization that allows someone to skim money off the rest of us. It’s not just technologically dazzling trinkets, it’s clean water, seed stock, etc. etc. See, e.g., for-profit colleges, which Doonesbury has been skewering for the past two weeks.

But I don’t have to tell anyone here about this process.

astronomy, which has had mind-boggling progress over the past 20-30 years

See, this is the sort of thing that people are constantly saying, but is just completely wrong if you take a few minutes to think about it.

Yes, it is amazing cool that it’s now possible to measure wind speeds on extrasolar planets.. But no one can seriously think that progress in astronomy in recent decades is anything but trivial compared with comparable periods in the previous 100 years.

Think about it: Between the mid 19th century and mid 20th century, basically everything taht we know about the large scale structure of the univverse was discovered. When Lord Kelvin claculated a maximum age of the Sun on the order of 100 years in the 1860s (on the grounds that its only possible heat source was the gravitational energy from its formation), that was the best science of the time. Nothing was known of the composition of stars, of the age or large-scale structure of the universe, the existence of galaxies beyond the Milky Way, the life cycle of stars, the structure of space-time, etc. Does anything discovered in the past 30 years compare with any of that? I don’t think so. If you took a standard account of the large-scale structure of the universe from 1900 and compared it with one from 1950, almost everything would have to be fundamentally revised. What important claims from a popular astronomy book from, say, 1975 wouldn’t still be accepted as basically true today?

Yeah, that would be about the biggest one. Which really makes my point.

JanieM — Outstanding comments! Thank you.

Tying this “diversion” back to the OP:

While, as I said earlier, the ascribing of “character” to successive generations, in a generational version of astrology, is clearly silly, I do think there’s something to be said for political and economic anacyclosis — long cycles tied to generational change, the dynamics of economic, political and institutional development, and related to the experiences and mythologies, which grip generations.

It is hard to understand the British responses in the 1930s to German descent into fascism and re-armament, without reference to the shared disillusion of the generations, which had experienced the preceding World War, and told themselves certain stories about that (ranging from anti-nationalist pacifism to stab-in-the-back), and it is also hard to understand the American and Western response to communist expansion in the 1950s and 1960s, without the shared experience of the Kennedy-Nixon generation in the fruits of appeasement. The experience, and the myths used to explain that experience (and there were always a range of such ideas, some of them opposed in a static dialectic, which divided people into political tribes — a sometimes important detail) were very powerful.

It seems to me that for the baby boomers (and their children), the experience of technological change, and expectations about technological change, are important mythologies, affecting our political dynamic. For someone like Paul Krugman (or myself), science fiction, moon landings, and novelties like color television or electric toothbrushes or various kitchen appliances, actually did contribute to a mythology of “progress”. And, it is interesting to me, that for someone, like Tyler Cowen, it can seem plausible to suggest that we are living though a period, now, of technological stagnation (when, objectively, that’s not true).

It is certainly true that by comparison to the linear projections of a 1960s optimist, things have not progressed quite as one might have hoped. That’s hardly evidence, though, for the hypothesis of technological stagnation.

JP Stormcrow: “When you flip a switch and a light comes on, no one cares what happens behind the walls . . .”

My great grandparents went to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where the daily miracle was the lighting of the entire exposition area, by Westinghouse’s A/C current. It was a deathblow to Edison’s D/C system. My great grandparents’ home, at the time, had gas light, and the first attempt to wire the house for electric light was accomplished, by threading wire through the pipes and replacing the existing fixtures; so the change, initially, seemed small enough. Harvey Hubbell’s plug-in-socket system and the ubiquitous porcelain base, pull-chain light socket followed very quickly, though. The Edison system of electric utilities, aided by the formation of General Electric in 1892, were not much inhibited by the switch to A/C, and went on to drive expansion of the New Economy of the 1920s. It was the changes in expected returns on electric generation and distribution investments, which was the “real” microfoundation of the stock market crash of 1929. Political struggles over public power generation projects, and schemes for rural electrification had great prominence in the 1920s and 1930s. The passing of generations had something to do with the ability of Milton Friedman to spin out tales in the 1960s, deprecating the achievements of the Tennessee Valley Authority, as part of his project of laying the ideological groundwork for dismantling the New Deal.

In one sense, “no one cares”, but in another, people do care, but the focus of their care changes. The Tea Party, believe it or not, has actually been quite exercised lately about energy efficiency regulations, which are effectively aiding the obsolescence of the incandescent lightbulb, by eliminating the higher wattage (aka most inefficient) bulbs. The imminent demise of the Postal Service is a real political issue, tied both to technological change and to the financialization of the economy (See JanieM @ 80, 2:27 pm).

The anxieties engendered by a very rapid rate of change, rendered invisible in some mythic frameworks (“where’s my flying car?”), are a very real part of our politics. There’s a lot of stress associated with this stuff. That the Kodachrome film that recorded my childhood is no more, is trivial on one level, but mystifying on another. People still go to the drugstore to have their prints “developed”, when there is no development. The iMusic store has been gradually raising the price of a song from a standard $0.99 toward $1.29; that’s basically the same order-of-magnitude price, as existed, when that price was financing a vast infrastructure of brick-and-mortar recording studios and vinyl or CD disc manufacturing and stores and radio stations, etc., distributing and promoting and all the rest. It’s a fair indication of how large has grown the rentier interest, that the price has not fallen to a $0.10 or less; acknowledging, also, that a vast grey market infrastructure also exists, where the price is $0.00, contributing to the general anxiety associated with the sense of living in a society amid an institutional structure, which is deeply corrupted. This intuitive sense of deep corruption feeds back into the Right’s criticism of “entitlements”.

If you are part of the generation, which came to political consciousness during or after Reagan, I think your credulousness takes an entirely different shape. I have no idea, what young people today are doing with the whole college-at-the-price-of-life-long-debt-peonage thing. That’s a development, which has come along with such rapidity, that its full implications are largely lost on generations, like mine, when a college education was, basically, a gift.

It’s a dwarf planet, large but representative of a population of things orbiting the sun that’s distinct in a bunch of ways from the population of larger things also orbiting. It’s not even the largest member of the population currently known to us; that’s Eris. And this is another example of the kind of change I mean.

But the question isn’t just, is this a change, or is this a big change? It’s, is this a big change compared with changes in the past. Yes, we know about a new class of Kuiper Belt objects now. But compare that with discovery of the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud in the first place.

I’m repeating myself here and will desist.

I am counter-baffled at people not getting Bruce’s points, so let me try to draw out one implication.

I grew up in a household with a TV (then two TVs), phone, stove, and so on, and insofar as I live in a home that still has these things, some parts of my life haven’t changed much at all. In others, a lot. My father, like many men who were veterans of World War II, could fix a great many things in and around the house. He could adjust hoses and belts, rewire, and so on and on. None of his children have anything like that much control over the things we live among, not because we’re disinterested, but because none of us have the tools or knowledge to work on industrial-scale integrated circuits and the like.

Our relationships with our things is similar in a lot of ways to what it was when we were growing up…as long as they work. But when they break, or when we wish to adjust them to our particular wishes, we’re screwed. The choices of others elsewhere took away a whole category of ethical options from us. And among my younger friends, there is literally no concept of “major repair” for a very large fraction of the devices, furnishings, etc. they use every day. They live in a world where you can’t lash a lot of things together in a kludgy way and struggle on, you can only get things working just about perfectly or failed dead. It’d surprise me if this has no consequences for which political lies they fall for more easily than I do, and which they see through and resist better than I do.

Or here’s another one, that will start off sounding purely aesthetic but isn’t. Many of my younger friends have never been in new construction in a public or commercial place that has really good ceilings. They live with big barns that have the ductwork, light fixtures, etc hanging openly or with shoddy suspended ceilings. I think this has some costs to them.

First, there’s the physical stress of vibrations and the like, and exposure to bugs and their detritus, dust, and so on. Very likely there are a bunch of carcinogens over their heads all the time in these places, but since there’s no push to prevent cancer comparable to the push to cure it, we generally can’t know.

Second, the aesthetic deprivation has a socio-political consequence. They are likely to see beautiful ceilings (and walls, and ornamentation, and such) only in old buildings. Some of them aren’t really interested in any of that when they’re in such places. Some like it and wish it were still done, and are vulnerable to decline narratives about which new/outside element is responsible for no longer letting the powers that be properly decorate their chosen places. (In reality, of course, it’s the powers that be not giving a shit, but it takes young observers some time to fully get that.)

All these things add up.

=== Bruce Wilder at 8:38: “And, more to the point, computation and communication is at the core of technology as an economic phenomenon—it is not some peripheral element, isolated from the rest, like, say the invention of glass making in the classical Roman period. The modeling and control of every production process is affected, and, consequently, every institutional structure built around those production processes is vulnerable to re-structuring. And, they are being re-structured, very rapidly. Michigan and Ohio. Hello!?” ===

I dunno, Bruce. On the one had, having introduced the Internet and what followed from it to several manufacturing organizations in the 1990-2005 period I understand what you are referring to.

OTHO, my last three jobs have seen me engaged in building, modifying, or maintaining the sort of data-transform-data systems that any data processing guy from 1965 would understand perfectly well – because all those wonderful, on-line, realtime-view-of-the-business systems we installed from 1995-2005 now need increasing amounts of intermediation and glue to hold them together. Turns out when you make every machine on the Earth intelligent and give it the ability to talk directly to every other machine – to speed up the process and “make it more efficient” – the end results is the old exponential communication paths diagram/problem. Worked great when some were doing it to a limited extent, but now that everyone and everything is doing it and demanding instant results available on the web site /right now/ it doesn’t seem to be working so well.

There’s also a limit to how much data and information human beings can process and use, and IMHO we passed that limit around 1998 and are now into a counterproductive region. Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3, and Excel were productivity enhancers (if used correctly); Excel 2007 with the ability to handle 1 million rows not so much. Similarly I have yet to see an organization whose productivity was actually enhanced by the Blackberry; while we peck away to one another real engineers and real machinists in the PRC are doing actual work and taking our future livelihoods away from us.

Cranky

I think one major generational change in Western countries has been the decline in racism among the young, probably due to the collapse of the colonial empires. Let me give an example. A while ago, there was a poll here Holland of the form “Could a person from minority X be a suitable Prime Minister?” (forgot the exact Dutch wording, but you get the gist, it was a proxy measure of prejudice). Happily, if you are white, you hardly have to worry if you are Christian or atheist, straight or gay, male or female. Approval ratings would be above 80%, for society as a whole. For ethnic minorities the picture was mixed, intolerance higher and rising monotonously with age. While there is no cut off point, no cohort which is substantially more racist than the next, I found the views of over-65’s genuinely striking: I pretty much expected overwhelming disapproval of muslim Prime Ministers, large disapproval of black Prime Ministers, but the fact that a small majority of over 65-s would even reject a Jewish Prime Minister was a big surprise. I thought anti-Semitism was pretty much dead in the broader society, but apparently it is still enjoying retirement. A majority of under-18’s by contrast, would be happy with a Prime Minister from any minority; they are the only age group in Dutch society of which a small majority can imagine voting for a Muslim Prime Minister.

So, while we are stereotyping generations, I would say that from an anti-racist standpoint, the older they are, the worse they are.

Speaking of bad generations, does anyone understand the background of the Europeans who caused WWI, bolshevism, fascism and WWII? This might just be the result of age old traditions of imperialism, war and atrocity meeting modern technology, but there seems to be some total madness in the water, affecting people born between 1850 – 1890. (Of course, nearly causing nuclear holocaust or being in the process of global ecocide is insane too, but the second-half-of-the-nineteenth century cohort seems special)

If anyone in 1970 had predicted the developments in transport as of today, no-one would have believed them

I disagree – Boeing was working on the 737 and 747 and Airbus had just been set up. Preiictors assumed Concorde was the future, but a lot of people were building the one that turned up.

Akshay: “Speaking of bad generations, does anyone understand the background of the Europeans who caused WWI, bolshevism, fascism and WWII? This might just be the result of age old traditions of imperialism, war and atrocity meeting modern technology, but there seems to be some total madness in the water, affecting people born between 1850 – 1890.”

I don’t think this generation of Europeans was any worse than the ones that immediately preceded it. Europe spent most of the 19th century committing genocidal atrocities abroad, and the first part of the 20th century committing many of the same atrocities at home. The location may have changed, but the underlying actions did not. The World Wars, fascism, and Leninism/Stalinism were the imperialist chickens coming home to roost. Note how Hitler justified his aggressive wars and genocides by claiming that the victims were non-white, and thus implicitly “lesser breeds without the law” who could be treated any way that white Europeans wanted.
(Of course, 19th-century Americans were not much better than Europeans, what with slavery, the genocide of the Native Americans, the various unprovoked thefts of territory from Mexico, and the Civil War.)
People can’t seem to let go of the idea that the 19th century was somehow more “civilized” a time than 1914-1945, and lots of popular histories put forth this notion, but that’s only true if you are only counting white people.

Josh G: Reconstruction much? US blacks lost ground from the end of Reconstruction onwards, and in many ways the civil rights movement was only restoring what the situation as of 1866 was in many Southern states.

One of the big differences is probably the loss of radical politics: 1973 marks the end of the New Left, and nothing really replaces it.

We have had a young guy (mid-twenties) working on our house. He likes to listen to music on his phone while he works.

The other morning he was listening to “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, a song that is nearly 50 years old.

Very few people in the 1960s would have chosen to listen to the popular music of 50 years earlier. Even the old fogies didn’t go back much further than the Swing Era.

I think Bruce has the better sense of the real mechanisms behind what we used to think of as progress. To me it looks as though we’ve blinded ourselves to the pace of change by freezing the cognitive categories we use to interpret it, in some cases — see the Tea Party’s politics, or Wolfgang Schäuble’s economics — by means of an effort of the will verging on the hysterical.

This won’t do. It won’t do at all. I don’t know whether we’re approaching a wall, or a cliff, but it’s clear enough that we need a new way of thinking about our situation, one that reformulates the comfortable categories we imagine to be permanent, and applies those reformulations while we still can. Can we do that as fast as we’ve adopted cloud computing, or finance capitalism? Probably not, but the need to get on with it ASAP isn’t really a matter of opinion any longer.

both Eric Hobsbawm and David Frum say the same thing—that the only really revolutionary changes of recent times have been in sexuality and the sexual division of labor.

Hobsbawm, ‘The Age of Extremes’, p.289: “The most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of [the twentieth] century…is the death of the peasantry” [in the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries, he means].

The most dramatic and far reaching change of the 21st century, in the advanced capitalist countries, will be the reconstruction of a modernized peasantry with neo-liberal characteristics.

Tributary economic systems designed to enrich rentiers are perhaps the most stable social relations in the history of large scale social organization. The trend away from peasantry in the 20th century will prove to have been an aberration. What is happening now in terms of declining living standards, rising inequality, and the revocation of political voice for the 99% is a reversion to the mean of the trend of history.

Uncle Kvetch @ 61:
The jetpack you were promised is available from a company in New Zealand: http://martinjetpack.com/

@Watson Ladd:

Looking at rising spread between labor share of income and productivity it’s fair to say that the re-emerging peasantry is making things that are being stolen from it.

The new peasant will not have his/her crops taken at swordpoint. He/she will instead have no choice but to work for rentier-managers who will refuse to pay him/her anything more than a shrinking fraction of the increasing marginal value of his/her labor while other rentiers employ advancements in the technologies of control to extract as much of his/her wage as possible. What is being stolen from him/her is the marginal value of his/her labor (in the first case) and the value of his self-determination (in the second case).

Akshay: “Speaking of bad generations, does anyone understand the background of the Europeans who caused WWI, bolshevism, fascism and WWII? . . . Many Europeans born between 1850 – 1890 suffered Future Shock. But I don’t see the psychodynamics which would then lead to joyfully sending of[f] your young to the trenches.”

European civilization has its origins in the fusion of Vikings and Franks in Normandy and Anjou in the 9th and 10th centuries. A marauding class of heavily armed warriors adopts the motte and bailey castle as its “technology”, for an economics of pillage and extraction from the peasantry. There’s no stable equilibrium for such a destructive political order, but it settles onto a dynamic path, using law to legitimate its seizures in its core territory, while expanding outward in crusades and conquests. William the Conqueror creates in England a garrison state, dominated by a small landed “aristocracy” of bandits and gangsters, speaking a foreign language; within a century, Henry II is legitimating the royal house and building a legalistic system, confirming both the monarchy and the ruling class, as hereditary; a bit over 300 years after the Conquest, Henry Bolingbroke is willing to address his subjects in English, and distinct nation-states are beginning to emerge in what evolves from a dispute within the common class of Norman-French lords into a Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Four hundred years after the conquest, Henry Tudor puts an end to the “bastard feudalism” of the Wars of the Roses, and begins running the state like a profit-making business, expanding the ranks of the titled nobility by an order of magnitude; his son, seizes the lands of the monasteries and churches — no longer needed as a buffer against the predations of a nobility now pacified at home — and creates a landed gentry. Meanwhile, the feudal ruling classes of Europe have discovered a New World, Africa and Asia, and begin a process of world conquest, well-suited to their inherited role as a military caste, in uneasy alliance with a mercantile bourgeoisie.

The old, international and familial feudal order’s reactionary traditionalism and authoritarian stupidity does sometimes conflict with the aspirations of the new, urban bourgeois’ ambitions for a rationalized nation-state dedicated to commerce. A series of internal European conflicts begins, with the seventy year Dutch Revolt against the Hapsburgs, followed by the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the often revolutionary Napoleonic conquest of Europe, all of which have as a theme the overthrow of the feudal order and its hereditary ruling class. But, the hereditary ruling class of landed aristocrats manages, against the odds, to win the Napoleonic Wars, and to establish for itself a Concert of Europe, and a kind of truce with the commercial interests of the industrial revolution. The emerging bougeouis nation-states of Europe will support the creation of Empires as playthings for their feudal overlords, and at least some semi-enlightened overlords will endorse liberal reform to satisfy the leading capitalists and the middle classes, that social and economic progress is in prospect.

Hereditary, landed aristocracy condemns most of Europe to government — particularly military and imperial government — by greedy, vicious, incompetent and frequently irrational fools, who frustrate efforts at liberal reform and exclude most of the population from participation in political affairs. The repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain, against the opposition of the landed aristocrats, who benefit from tariffs on imported wheat, is only accomplished against the background of a million Irish peasants starving to death, while their lords export grain; the rising German middle classes won’t fare as well, in their struggles for bread, against their Junker overlords. Leopold’s rape of the Congo, in the finest feudal tradition of trading blood for treasure, will eventually embarrass the Belgians, but the Czar will never feel embarrassed by his Cossacks.

World War I looks, on the surface perhaps, like an international conflict between industrialized nation-states, but it was, in fact, a consequence of years of jockeying in “The Great Game” between feudal Empires, led by hereditary aristocrats of a military caste, who, simply, had no idea what an “industrialized” war would look like, how to conduct such a war, or even what purpose of war, might rationally be achieved. The irrational corruption of the Italian elite before the War is simply indescribable. The French military’s resistance to rationality was as well-revealed in the Dreyfus Affair, as in their arrival on the front in bright blue and red uniforms and their anachronistic adoption of Frederick the Great’s motto: “l’audace l’audace toujours l’audace”. The Germans, Russians and Austrians had developed plans to mobilize mass armies, but not the means to control them, once set into motion. Many seemed to think the war a grand occasion to put on a fancy uniform and ride a horse!

The First World War brought that feudal aristocracy and its Empires down. The incompetence of the generals and the wastage of lives did what 70 years of socialist and anarchist rhetoric had failed to do, and made revolution. (Ironically, the Russian Revolution, alone, managed to remake the Russian Empire, in the end.)

The aftermath, the institutional rubble, across much of Europe, left many people feeling unmoored, and many governments, like that of Weimar Germany, lacking legitimacy, amid ideological conflicts, which were so broad and deep as to be incommensurable. Fascism was the irrational counterpart of super-rationalized communism in this boiling soup, while the centrists and liberals offered only a palsied, passionless muddling through; fascism sought social and psychological security for population lost in collapse of a thousand-year order, in whatever references it could cobble together, from half-remembered slogans, traditions, rituals and loyalties. War had been the central ritual and function of the political order of Europe for a millenium; World War II was just the compulsive re-enactment of a bad habit.

Way back in comment 10 and on the original topic, Chris engaged is some of the boomer-bashing which is so poisonous to the political discourse. It doesn’t matter that much whether “generations” are actually significant sources of character. If people believe in “generations”, then they exist as a political fact.

And I want to underline what Josh G. pointed out, the boomers did not elect Ronald Reagan, they were, in fact, the only cohort that did not go for him. T he myth of “the boomers gave us Reagan” is usually argued with a basis similar to that Anarcisse used: elementary arithmetic error. Anarcissie elaborations are also confused. Boomer culture was “individualistic” is seeking maximum freedom of personal behavior; Reagan was anti-individualistic in this sense. In fact, Reagan was the original hippy-basher, building his career and threatening to provide the protesters with the bloodbath he wanted. A woman recent wrote a history of the war on drugs, treating it as a war on black people. I saw her on MSNBC proclaiming it a mystery that said war actually predated the crack epidemic she regards as its pretext. That is because the hippies have been elided from this history. The original target was white boomer dope-growers, especially in Humboldt county. And equating boomer utopianism and religiousity with anything in Reagan philosophy is possible only if you define those terms so generally that they can;t mean anything as specific political markers. Reagan was the reaction of the older generations against the boomers. \

As for Chris comment, let’s look at some facts that may be relevant:

1) Medicare came into effect in 1966, the year the world’s oldest boomer turned 21. That means that boomers have been paying into it their entire working lives to support older generations that had not.
2) The high deficit course we are on, and the neoliberal policies that have created much of our problems, were created by Reagan and the Congresses of the early 80s. Few boomers there. Mr. World’s Oldest Boomer turned 40 in 1985, and very few Congressmen are ever below 40.
3) In the early 80s, Reagan and Greenspan increased social security taxes to fund the boomer retirement, which was a problem visible decades off. Since these taxes were hitting the boomers early in their careers, and continued throughout, this was a class, not generational, redistribution.
4) The boomers took political power in the 90s and produced 3 of the 6 budget surpluses the US has seen since WW2.
5) As JQ notes above, one of the worst problems of a downturn is that it has a permanent effect on the population that is trying to start their careers during it. This is one of the great problems of the millennials now: they are coming of age during the worst economic period since WW2, and one can expect a permanent effect on their life prospects. The second worst period after WW2 was the 1970s. The bad times really got rolling in 1973, when the boomers were 14-28 years old; just about the same age as the millennials now.
6) Following a trend that started in the 1970s, the elderly have had for some time now a larger share of the national wealth than ever before. If the boomers are so disrespectful to their elders, and so solely responsible for everything that has happened, how can this be?
7) As for the growth of nursing homes, this is because our capacity to extend life increasingly exceeds our capacity to extend good health. Go to a nursing home, and ask how equipped you would be to care at home for most of the denizens. I have experience caring for the elderly and it is no joke. Those bedpans have to be changed 24 hours a day. You say you have a job to go to? Quit it. My spam says you can make lots of money at home though.
There are other respects in which the boomers did have it quite good. College was basically free for them. It cost Gen X something, and is costing the millennials a lot. Many of them got to buy homes while they were still cheap, before housing price inflation flew past general inflation starting in the early 80s. So did the generations before them, however, and boomer homes were often of new innovative forms like mobile homes and condos, which were just getting going in the 50s and 60s.

It is not boomers who have screwed the younger generation, it is Republicans, to an extent conservative Democrats, and to an extent changing circumstances.

Martin Bento: “This is one of the great problems of the millennials now: they are coming of age during the worst economic period since WW2, and one can expect a permanent effect on their life prospects.”

Indeed this is true. It shouldn’t be surprising that Millennials are more skeptical of capitalism than older generations, since the Invisible Hand has basically been bitch-slapping them for their entire lives. It will be interesting to see how American politics changes when “socialism” is no longer a dirty word. Millennials have little reason to want to preserve the status quo, and seem to be largely immune to the appeals to racism and religious fanaticism that the Republican leadership currently uses to short-circuit the brains of older whites.

Janie, John, thank you very much.

Josh, what will be interesting to me is whether they generate better ways of thinking about socialism and capitalism.

Today is 20th anniv. of the Mexican Default. I read two articles on the era and was shocked at how prescient the tale is. So much of the focus recently has been on the past hot money crisis in Japan, I hadn’t heard much correlation of hot money and the Latin American debt crises . The more obvious lesson might be the troubled proscription doled out from the IMF and lack of moral hazard applied to the culprit, the banks.

“Mexico owed over $50 billion, 90% to foreign private creditors – primarily US, Japanese and British banks. These banks had gone on a lending binge during the 1970s using the profits oil exporting countries had deposited with them from the oil spike. American overspending, notably on the Vietnam War, was recycled as debt to the rest of the world and, to help this, controls on international movements of money were dismantled.”
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/economics/2012/08/thirty-years-mexicos-default-greece-must-break-sadistic-debt-spiral

“For Mexico read Greece. For American, British and Japanese banks recycling the 1970s windfall profits of oil producers to sub-prime Latin American governments read US and European banks pumping out cheap credit to sub-prime mortgage holders.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/aug/19/eurozone-latin-america-debt-crisis-1980

@Cahokia

Interesting. There was a conference on in London recently on this topic (scroll down to ‘Learning from Latin America: Debt crises, debt rescues and when and why they work’ from the link below and there are a series of papers attached – Bertola and Ocampo go over the territory of your links in more detail – nb I know nothing on the Latin American debt crisis etc so apologies if this treading over old ground)

http://americas.sas.ac.uk/events/videos-podcasts-and-papers/

I know this is of topic so I won’t say anymore on it!

Not off topic at all ; I read him as saying it was all the fault of the nonamillenials. Talk about a narcissistic and egotistical generation!

James, I was responding to Chris argument that the boomers did wrong by the previous generations. As for the growth in Medicare spending, the obvious solution is to bring medical expenses in the US in line with other industrial democracies by either socializing it directly or implementing single payer for all, something of that sort. All of these approaches produce documentably much better results per cost than the US approach. Medicare is more efficient than private insurance, and the Veteran’s Administration, straight-up socialized medicine, is more efficient than Medicare. So the problem is not Medicare, and if your proposed solution is any form of abolishing, limiting, or privatizing Medicare, you are advocating making the problem worse. The result will be one or both of 1) making health care costs an even greater share of GDP, just not paid by the government, but that is not what you are claiming to be concerned about and 2) producing worse outcomes, which would amount in effect to the famous “death panels”, choosing to let some people die, or empowering the market to so choose.

The reason I co-credited Greenspan with the SS tax increase is that he headed the commission that designed the plan. I don’t think anything hinges on this.

The key technologies that enabled the boom of the 90s came from boomers. These include: the Internet itself, the personal computer, computer networks generally, the original killer apps of email, usenet, and the Web, graphical user interfaces, object-oriented programming, digitized media, digitized media manipulation, computer games, and computerized 3D animation, In 20 years, the boomers took us from 1970: IBM mainframes running programs written in brain-dead languages like COBOL and RPG that you programmed by punching holes in cards, to 1990: personal computers everywhere, networked if desired, with graphical interfaces (all Macs, Amigas, and Atari’s; PCs were transitioning), the Internet in place and available to the public (through things like the Well), email, online social interaction (usenet, bulletin boards), 3D animated films (though not yet major productions), computer games, pretty much all the materials of what we have now. I think that is much more impressive technically than the progress since, despite the fact that vastly more capital has gone into the industry in the last 20 years than the 20 before. The last 20 years have been chiefly refinement and monetization of the innovations of the preceding 20.

It’s true that Gen X did most of the implementation, and therefore made most of the money – for itself (though only a small group) and for the tax man. And implementation is not nothing. But once all these pieces are in place, how much genius does it take to transfer commonplace institutions like bookstores, auctions, and stock brokerages to the new medium?Yet that’s Amazon, ebay, and etrade – some of the biggest success stories of the 90s.

@126
;)

I gotta admit to being really curious about what it was Steve Sailor@129 said … damn!

I was born in the first wave of boomers. The key event as far as I can remember was the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb in 1952. I lived almost as far as it possible to get from America and Russia without living in New Zealand- we didn’t have electricity or telephones, our cars had been built before the war, our wirelesses were powered by 10 kilo battery packs- but and I remember discussion about it quite clearly. The heavy hand of doom hasn’t lifted since. You can see the difference between the early boomers and the later ones in my family, because of improvement in my younger siblings’ nutrition meant they grew taller, had better teeth and are all long sighted even now, which I think is an important and ignored factor. But they are not smarter. I was the first of my family to go to University-in my mid 20s-and had a work history more like the Gen Jones., and it never occurred to me until I read some of the comments that the reason I am poor is because I mixed up my generations. I would have thought Norwegian Guy knew what a peasant was, given they existed in the economy of his home country until after WWII. Maybe he is a city person and isn’t aware that there is a class of small farmers who make a living off a few acres and a couple animals and subsidies from his taxes. As for Bruce Wilder’s history of Europe from 900 AD, I would make the point that England was the best administered state in Europe in 1066, that’s why William the Bastard could employ Anglo-Saxon officials to conduct the Domesday census. For an aggressive and militant class the Normans survived about 100 years in England, and the administrative capabilities of the state were relatively unaffected by the interlude. This administrative competence was something I suspect the Romano-Britons preserved of the old Roman Empire against the Angles, Jutes and Saxons. The key to the rise of the West is the Royal Navy, another example of British administrative genius, guaranteed sea trade routes were open for all against almost all interlopers. Trade and Empire flourished, to the good of all. British and American power was based on trade, mainly centred on Britain, who invested vast sums in the Americas. The interwar period (WWI to WWII) was a period of pacifism and power politics. To harp on my theme the Royal Navy became a shell of its old self during the disarmament years following WWI, at US insistence, as the US built up its fleet, with no will to use it. It took Pearl Harbour to bring the US actively into WWII-a counterfactual history of no Pearl is interesting to contemplate- more than two years after Europe went up, and it is only about ten years ago that Britain paid off the last of her Lend Lease debts, to the last penny. And for James I believe it was on Reagan’s watch the US went from net lender to the world to net borrower from the world. As far as I can see no surpluses since, although Clinton got close. The glitch was a couple of v. expensive wars since Clinton’s presidency: one a war to satisfy a President’s vanity, the other, current, a war of more importance. But I suppose it is possible to rewrite the history of the Vietnam war as that of a President’s vanity too. Perhaps that is the problem, we don’t have any moral wars any more, or rather, wars for a higher purpose than poking your tongue out at your Dad who fluffed his war.

Global oil production per capita peaked in 1978 or 1979.

Global population growth peaked (in absolute number of persons) in 1989.

Global urbanization passed 50% in 2008.

In 2012 China will emit about as much CO2 as the USA and EU-27 combined. Its per-capita emissions are now higher than those of Italy or France.

If the last 40 years look static maybe it’s because the observers’ immediate surroundings aren’t where the changes are happening.

As for 2030, progress in medical technology is proceeding so rapidly, it is to impossible to say where costs will land up that far out, and it will partly depend on whether we are willing to relax IP standards. Teleomere repair, for example, has already reversed aging in laboratory rats genetically predisposed to rapid aging. This could change the whole nature of the equation, drastically reducing the health care needs of the aged, while also making retirement even less viable.

In any case, the millennials are a generation comparable in size to the boomers, so the ratio of workers to retired will improve again after worsening for a while. Meanwhile, if the basic dynamics do not change, we will have the same issue with millennial retirement.

Tim, at the time, I think it was probably good, but regardless, I was responding to Chris charge that boomers had bankrupted the nation with their profligacy. As for those well-established in careers before times got hard, here in the US unemployment started getting bad in 73. The oldest boomers were 28 then, so I don;t think that’s the majority. A lot of attacks on boomers, like that of Anarcissie above, seem to rely on arithmetic confusion about who exactly we’re talking about. As for Beckett, a lot of his charges seem similar to the vague ones made against boomers here, but they don’t stand up very well here, largely because they rely on the premise that boomers are the ones who created all this conservatism, which is not what the exit polls show, especially not in the 80s and 90s ( they’ve gotten a bit more conservative lately). Was it different in Britain? DId Thatcher get more boomer than silent votes?

Great, great post. But I wonder if it’s worth distinguishing multiple different types of generational commentary.

One, as you said, seeks to define a generation in terms of common behavior and shibboleths. And I think there’s a strong argument for saying that this sort of attempt is largely futile in recent years as lifestyles just diverge so dramatically among older people.

Another type of generational commentary, however, seeks to define a generation in terms of a particular way of viewing the world and issues–and I think there’s a less solid argument for invalidating this sort of commentary. There’s a very solid divide in how political issues–particularly terms like “communism” and “social welfare”–are viewed by different generations, and I think this is a clear function of a common set of world events/concerns of their early adulthood.

until it was superseded -> until it had finally been entirely superseded

Tim, I think the fair benchmark to measure boomer support of Thatcher would be relative to other generations, not absolute support. I also agree that holding the boomers to a higher standard because of the standards set in their youth would be a reason for other generations to avoid youthful radicalism, least they set a moral standard they could not later live up to.

JQ: c – Yes, the summary used ‘generation’ instead of repeating that I had started out talking about a certain segment, 60s progressives/radicals (as in the earlier comment the link to which – https://crookedtimber.org/2012/08/11/the-grandfather-clause-repost/#comment-425286 – I messed up above.

b – yes, but (an ad hominem, since I readily agree I should not have accepted the invitation to slide into talking about whole generations) I would guess that the same could be said for height differences between generations, say; that does not make them unreal.

a – indeed, and basically the data is nowhere near being detailed enough to identify who voted against labour incumbents or for conservative ones (in marginal seats, and all the other peculiarities that need to be thrashed out in disproportional systems); nor even to identify boomers very effectively; still less to pick out the cohorts, and yet even less the particular demographic, I had been talking about. Not only that, but it’s not electoral behaviour – defections to the SDP, say – that’s the complaint made by Beckett – rather, it’s behaviour as politicians and union officials.

Barry – yes, there is not much left, or rather there wasn’t supposed to be much, certainly in population terms, to start with.