Whiny entitled baby boomers
Something struck me in a book I was reading last week that stuck with me over the week-end and is tumbling around in my brain.
Baby boomers are mad because their standard of living - and expected retirement - is not nearly as great as their parent's was.
The flailing around takes many versions, but generally "the rich should pay more taxes" is the ( Read more... )
Baby boomers are mad because their standard of living - and expected retirement - is not nearly as great as their parent's was.
The flailing around takes many versions, but generally "the rich should pay more taxes" is the ( Read more... )
Take capitalism, for example. Capital is typically something that you build up over time, it's your savings put to work for you. If you're saving for your old age you put 10% aside during your working years so that someday when you're too infirm to labor you can live off the rents generated by that capital. That capital, in turn, provides funds to purchase machines that let the younger laborers capture and transform their energy. As they don't have capital they're happy to use the money saved up by the old people.
But capitalism has changed. I'm not educated enough on financial issues of the second half of the 20th century, but my guess is that it's related to closing the gold window in 1971 and the subsequent bouts of inflation. It's no longer enough to get an adequate return, now you have to speculate to get a return that will beat inflation. Speculation leads to the ever-increasing bubbles, which leads to things like catastrophic run-ups in the price of oil.
The speculative financial instruments were started by the Greatest Generation; they're the ones that invented mutual funds (where owners no longer attend board meetings to bitch slap management run amok) and they're the ones still sitting on Treasuries paying 0% interest because they're still alive at 87 and the government can get away with that sort of behavior when it's old old old people running the show.
Baby boomers seem primarily to be pissed that they don't get as good a deal as their parents, but it was their PARENTS that set up the disasters that are now befalling us.
Reply
Fuck em all. Gen X or the Slacker Generation or whatever you want to call us did better than either the Baby Boomers or The Greatest Generation simply by not doing much of anything. We didn't advance anything but, unlike either of those generations we didn't make the world a considerably worse place to live in (not that we have had the chance to do anything. The Baby Boomers outnumber us so much that their votes and interests have carried everything since 1972.)
Reply
Reply
Reply
Something else happened in 1971. Domestic oil production peaked. Every recession since then has been preceded either by energy costs consuming more than 4% of U.S. GDP or oil prices doubling in a year. The worst recessions have been heralded by both simultaneously, including the most recent one (or two, if we're heading into the second part of a double dip).
As for going off the gold standard, that didn't help, but I'd think it was more a response to what domestic peak oil was causing than a cause.
Reply
But one thing seems clear to me: the enormous amount of energy transformed in the last century (that produced the goods that made us rich) came from burning a depletable resource. In other words, we were all living off the principle of the trust fund we were given.
It's going to suck when we have to live on what we can actually transform ourselves.
Reply
Leave a comment