Have the Baby Boomers Ruined Society?

Introduction.

The author is a young energetic historian who has entertaining and insightful ideas. His exuberance on occasion leads him astray, he can be too pessimistic, and he should be more cautious in his prophesizing. I should make such a criticism, in my early 20's I came to the conclusion that society would fall off a cliff a few decades after I had died. I might die tonight. It is going to be a close call because present indications are I have many years left in this decaying container. 

Generation names explained

The Lost Generation                 born 1883-1900. 

The Greatest Generation           born 1901-1924. 

The Silent Generation               born 1925-1945.

Baby Boomer Generation         born 1946-1964. 

Generation X                            born 1965-1980. 

Generation Y                            born 1981-1996. 

Generation Z                            born 1997-2012.

Generation Alph                       born 2013-2025.

Talking About My Generation

The litany of complaints Whatifalthist  makes about baby boomers arises from a jaundiced and pejorative laden perspective. He even quietly admits that @33.00. Nonetheless he makes some important observations. 

One Book is not Enough

The author states much of the material for the video is drawn from A Generation of Sociopaths by Bruce Cannon Gibney 

I've been there. Captured by a book or an idea I felt compelled to share the message with the world. Typically I am emotionally invested which should be a warning sign of losing objectivity but I'm human god damn it. I'm not going to read the book because the title alone makes me suspicious. Criticism is easy, creativity is almost impossible. 

The emergent generations are almost wasting their time being preoccupied with the failings of the Boomers. They won't listen, and the ones that do listen have been listening for years if not decades but typically don't hold the reins of power. 

Gen Z, Millennials etc are right to gripe about how the Boomers have to some extent stolen their future. The only solution is to displace those in power, to take hold of the reins and build a better future for themselves. Good luck with that, armchair experts and all that! It is a gargantuan task that will require decades of work. Hop to it. It is your only hope because Boomers are doing it for themselves. 

Exuberant Claims about Boomers

He makes a series of claims about Boomers that are either over the top or just plain wrong.

• @19.09 Boomers think there is no value in life. The death penalty has mostly disappeared. Modern medicine keeps people alive that even just 20 years ago would have long been dead. Modern society invests far more in the welfare of children than any other society. 
• @18.52 The Boomer world is about pleasure being the reason for existence? Yet Boomers built the most creative and vibrant technological world in all of human history. They didn't do that by smoking pot and getting laid. 
• @19.49 "You struggle to find many good Boomer intellectuals." The problem could be that the low hanging fruit has been picked and the really difficult problems remain untouched. There are good Boomer intellectuals out there but their voices are drowned out by the influencers, clickbait, bloggers and vloggers that are more a part of his generation than the Boomer generation. Ironically the title of the video by WhatifAltHist is clickbait because Boomers haven't ruined society. Give 'em time. 
• @20.21 Boomers don't believe in abstract concepts!? Fiat money, rule of law, constitutions .... . 
• @33.49 He is right about that the lack of a coherent moral and philosophical reference frame. That's not unique to boomers, Nietzsche warned us about the problems of a post Christian society and we still have not found an answer to that. Nor will his generation. We have to get past the idea that that the world and our place in it can be logically articulated. Most if not all moral and philosophical reference frames are challenged by reality. Don't worry about it. That's easy for me to say because I'm a consequentialist so am more concerned with outcomes than the coherency of a particular philosophy or ethical framework. 

Boomer's Special Status

Whatifalthist @10.30 disparagingly states boomers consider themselves historically discontinuous. Perhaps the Boomers have a point:

• The two world wars are unique in their scale and devastation of land and people. 
• The atomic threat is the first time in history human beings became capable of planet wide annihilation. 
• The Boomers were the first generation which could be exposed to the ideas and structures of various cultures through mass and rapid communication mediums. 
• Colonialism met the enemy in the Boomer generation and was a practice that probably existed ever since hominids began walking upright and realised it is much easier to dominate each other than the environment. 
• The fights for social justice began in the generation before the Boomers but the Boomers not only sustained that they expanded upon it. Whatifalthist acknowledges that but has the annoying habit of adding "but [insert praise neutralizing qualification here]". 
• The Boomers were the first generation to take the issue of mental illness seriously. The development of the first antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs in the 1960's, the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, and the famous experiments of Szasz and Rosenhan paved the way for a much more humane approach towards those with mental illness. 
• It was also the Boomers that fought for a greater acceptance of people with disabilities whom were all too often institutionalized and kept out of sight, out of mind. 
• The Bretton Woods Agreement(1944) paved a new way for international economic management. 
• The abandonment of the gold standard and the creation of fiat money. All that glitters is not gold and while fiat money is not without problems the gold standard was unsustainable. We are way overdue for another Bretton Woods because fiat money+interest+fractional reserve=intrinsic inflationary pressure. 

Of course absolute discontinuity is not possible but the post WW2 generations saw sweeping changes that made life in second half of the 20th century fundamentally different and better than in the first half of the century. The change in society and how people live in advanced nations after WW2 possibly exceeds the changes in most of human history. Mass communication, mass transport within and across countries, tertiary education, huge migration waves, huge leaps in health care, massive declines in global poverty. That is extraordinary. 

There is another discontinuity that annoys some people. The intellectuals of the modern era are not novelists, essayists, historians and philosophers. It is scientists who are now regarded as our great intellectual hope for a better future. That is a grave mistake. Historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and essayists can contribute a great deal to the intellectual caliber of a country. I have more faith in those disciplines as guides to the future than Science.  

Compare and Contrast the Generations

Quickly:

• Boomers did not start WW1& 2. 
• The Boomers did not expect the peons to work 70 hours a week, 6 days a week with no sick leave, pension, or holidays.
• The Boomers did not ruthlessly suppress colonies seeking independence and have thoroughly repudiated colonialism.
• Capital punishment was common even up to the start of WW2.

The list is perhaps instructive because it seems Whatifalthist  is looking back to some golden age where Christianity provided the seemingly coherent and consistent philosophical and moral bedrock that is essential for a functioning society. I reject the premise because being a consequentialist I don't want to waste my time in a Sisyphean endeavour of creating such an idealistic worldview. 

My concern is how people behaved not their belief systems. In that regard I accept his argument that in today's world too many people equate pleasure with contentment. Pleasure is transitory and emotional, contentment is an ongoing state of mind arising from ... oh I don't know I'm only content when I have a project oh how I need a project wait a minute wait a millennium Whatifalthist makes an important point.  

Boomer Economic Narcissism

Whatifalthist's criticism of Boomer narcissism is very relevant in the economic realm. A good example is the 2018 Australian election. The Australian Labor was supposed to walk that in, all the polls pointed to an easy victory. The Boomers cost the ALP the election. The ALP went into that election with 3 signature policies that impacted the Boomer wallet: changes to negative gearing, capital gains, and franking dividend taxation. The biggest impact of these policies would have been in the housing market. The ALP won the 2022 election in spite of bleeding votes to The Greens and some independents. The ALP made it very clear there was no chance of reintroducing those 2018 policies. So when the author states that boomers are narcissistic and "want everything now"(@6.16) in the economic realm he has a point. 

Don't expect Baby Boomers to challenge the status of financial markets and economists because their investment portfolios depend on the economic status quo. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." (Upton Sinclair). Difficult! Much more than that. 

There are baby boomer intellectuals all too aware of the follies of their generation but with rare exception they are not economists so don't get the attention they deserve. The younger generations are the way forward but having grown up in an environment created by Boomers it will take decades for Baby Boomer influences to wash out of society. I'm not confident we have decades. It's not that society will collapse but rather history suggests we now have a number of troubling indicators that are clear warning signs our culture is heading in the wrong direction. Economic indices loom large.

It is no co-incidence that the promotion of neoliberal\libertarian\magic market economics became prominent in the 1980's, just when the Boomers were taking over the reins from the previous generation. The economist Galbraith nailed it:

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

If only Boomers would lose their religion. While the Boomers have rejected traditional religion they have forgotten that religious style cognition is deeply embedded in our bodies. Some might even argue it is intrinsic to our cognition and evolutionarily "implanted" which is why religion is so pervasive. I don't accept that argument but I acknowledge we have innate tendencies that very much can lead us in the wrong direction. There are attempts to address that problem. Steven Pinker's recent work, Rationality, is high recommended. Much earlier and at a much more technical level, is the famous Tversky and Kahneman(1974) analysis of common human foibles. 

One of the strongest factors mitigating against religious belief is formal education. Education should teach us how to think. Criticisms that modern education is more about indoctrination than teaching reflect a misunderstanding of human learning. Indoctrination is a necessary pre-requisite to learning. Expecting students to work it all out and hence reinvent the wheel just plain dumb. Formal education, even if only by accident than design, equips the individual with the cognitive tools that enhance the ability to discern truth from falsehood. Creativity remains mysterious despite what de Bono wrote.

The Boomers were the first generation to loudly and proudly repudiate Christianity. Boomers like to think they are not religiously inclined. Yet no other generation has been so enamoured by the conceptually and empirically bankrupt domain of economics. The ASX moved .1% today! The markets responded blah blah blah. Here's our resident expert to blah blah blah. We hear this in most news reports. They prophesize the future of various economic indicators so badly that their predictions are worse than chance. That is, their concepts bedevil their predictions. The principal metric, the dollar, is a variable, a unit of exchange and a measure of wealth. Nuts. Boomers love this stuff. 

We buy indulgences and are sanctified by conspicuous demonstrations of wealth (indulgences were form of payment in the middle ages that "washed away" sins and was an important driver of the Reformation movement led by Luther), the central banks and thinktanks are where the theologians investigate the eternal and ethereal mysteries of capitalism, the stock exchanges are where the religion is practiced, the economists and economist journalists are the imams, rabbis, and priests of our age that must keep us consuming(orders from on high). Consumers are the lowest on the pecking order, their behavior hopefully manipulated by interest rates, talking heads, and taxes.

Modern economics is replete with deep-seated problems that will not solved by Boomers because Boomers are the primary beneficiaries of modern economics. Which leads us to the two most troubling aspects of Boomers and oddly barely touched upon by Whatifalthist.  

Huge and Dangerous Baby Boomer Mistakes

Rising Wealth Inequality

I sympathize with his lament that baby boomers are dangerously ignorant about history, philosophy, and understanding the dynamics of their own culture. Boomers are more preoccupied with the financial pages and the views of economists. The pretense being that we're in the safe hands of economists and those who believe them. If that continues society will most certainly be ruined. 

The increasing wealth inequality is a serious threat because history demonstrates time and again that huge wealth inequality is a driver of societal collapse. IQ declines have been documented since at least the 1980s. There is no clear explanation for that decline but the modern media emphasis on simple sentences and messages, catchphrases taking precedence over analysis, clickbait, and a preoccupation with entertainment over information, are part of that problem and may well be the major cause of the IQ decline. There will not be an idiocracy because the IQ decline is most probably in the lower half of the distribution. Hopefully, and sadly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, the IQ decline is in children who are raised by poor parents who neither the time nor inclination to read to their children, to discuss various subjects with them, and often have difficulty financing their further education. That isn't just about IQ, one of the worst pieces of luck a person can experience is being born into a poor family. 

The Boomers Botched Climate Change ... 

The COP 27 is wrapping up. 27 years of addressing climate change and very little has been achieved. We are already locked into 1.5 degrees, more probably it is going to be 2.0 degrees plus. 

If the climate scientists are to be believed we most certainly don't have decades to spare. I accept there is a problem. I don't accept the proposed solutions and I am suspicious that the risks are being overstated. 

How can a single individual assess the veracity of a scientific conclusion that is the result of decades of analysis, data gathering, modelling on the fastest supercomputers, requiring expertise from geologists, mathematicians, physicists, meteorologists, systems theorists, hydrologists and whatever other disciplines are involved? That fact doesn't completely negate criticisms of current climate science but in the very least it should make us extremely cautious about undertaking the role of devil's advocate. If you're looking for criticisms of climate science don't trust journalists, vloggers, bloggers, and influencers. There are plenty of highly qualified people who are critiquing the science. At least with those people we can have some confidence that their backgrounds better equips them to critique climate science. 

I'm more in the Freeman Dyson camp (I cheated, he was regarded as the world's most intelligent man). I accept that the climate is warming but do not accept that we must completely eliminate carbon based energy. At some point in the future we must do that but renewables are not the solution. I am not entirely in his camp. He was very old when the climate change debate arose and even the smartest man in the world will experience saddeningly high rates of fluid intelligence loss. 

One analysis I recently came across argued that for every square metre of a gas powered plant we will need 73 square metres of renewables. Then there is the storage problem and while for decades there are many attempts to create economically viable storage it has happened yet. Renewables+storage can work in some countries but the storage issue remains a huge barrier. 

The quality of the debate has become too parlous. Some argue we must go nuclear because it will provide cheap energy. That isn't true, a modern nuclear power plant while meltdown proof(we sincerely hope!) is at present costing ~30 billion US dollars, takes over a decade a build, and may not turn a profit for 30 years from the beginning of construction. That's not cheap but I have a cunning plan: the government builds the plant and accepts the cost as a sunk cost. 

If I had the power in my country Australia I would initially go for three government funded and run nuclear power plants. We have good locations to avoid tsunamis and catastrophic earthquakes(hence only needing protection against the Aussie "she'll be right mate" attitude); and plentiful uranium. That's a lot of money but with the proposed tax cuts costing an estimate 254 billion AUD perhaps we could find the money except of course the Boomers will protest because it will hurt their wallet. 

The nuclear option has risks but relying on renewables plus storage is a far bigger risk because if that fails we're stuffed. Additionally some countries, particularly in northern Europe, Asia, and Canada, will have no choice but to go nuclear. At least with nuclear power plants we would have energy to spare that could be used for carbon capture technologies, desalination plants, and the geoengineering. I'm a big fan of geoengineering which is why the Greenies drive me nuts. Nature doesn't know best, we do. 

Baby Boomer Cry Babies

Baby boomers love to complain about Millennials. The obvious is lost on them. The Millennials are products of parents raised by baby boomers and live in a world created by baby boomers. Conservatives in particular like to express the view that Gen Z and Millennials are sick puppies\snowflakes\ effete\dandies in constant need of positive strokes. It is true Millennials have higher rates of anxiety\depression. That could be a function of:

• Increased acceptance and openness about mental illness.
• Less self-medication because they are drinking less, smoking less, and using illicit drugs less
• They were raised by Boomer raised parents, of course they're f**ked up!🤣
• Bowlby's "principal caregiver hypothesis" might in play here.  
• The Boomers were confronted with nuclear annihilation but Millennials are confronted with more proximate problems that the Boomers never faced like uncertain employment, skyrocketing housing costs, flat wages, unpaid work, wage theft, and needing higher standards of education at much greater cost than Boomers because way back then University education was very cheap if not free. A distal threat, like nuclear war, is something we can push to the back our minds but whether or not we get a paycheck this week is right at forefront of our cognition. That is much more stressful. 

I have some sympathy with the criticisms of some modern movements. The demonisation of anyone who steps over a certain moral line is just another form of conformism and discrimination. J. K. Rowling receiving death threats because she twitted that trangender women are not women is an example of that. The concept of "safe spaces" in universities is ridiculous. If a person is threatened by an idea the problem is with the person not the idea. The Black Lives Matter movement destroying various statues was a step too far. If I applied the same standard I'd feel entitled to tear down a great many things.  

Conclusion

It is still possible that the Baby Boomers will be our downfall. Their refusal to address the energy\carbon\methane challenges of the 21st century alone could be catastrophic. They make all the right sounds about doing something but are not doing anywhere near enough. 

The refusal to address rising inequality demonstrates ignorance of history and civilisational collapse. If you have the perseverance nay machoistic disposition Piketty's Tome, Capital, provides a laborious, languorous, tedious, over explanatory style of the risks associated with inequality but if you do manage the read the whole of Capital you'll be able to survive any catastrophe the Boomers may send your way. 

I would like to live another 20 years(won't happen) just to see how Whatifalthist  matures in his analyses and understanding of the human condition. I don't think his head is in the right place, at least not yet, but his heart certainly is. Good luck to him.