Young versus old: the politics of generational envy
[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan.”]
I’ve seen it for years and years and years online: the idea that the Boomer generation has screwed the younger ones. It’s often advanced by 40-somethings or younger, who feel insufficiently flush with cash and that the world hasn’t rewarded them in the manner they think they deserve. The idea that previous generations struggled and that many still struggle (I have friends my age with little savings, for example) is brushed aside. And the opinions of older people are shrugged off with the dismissive, “Okay, Boomer.”
It’s not unusual to wish that the Boomers would die already. Just shuffle off this mortal coil so that the young can get the spoils. And this is usually said with no sense of shame whatsoever.
I’ve seen most of this in the comments sections of blogs and MSM articles, as well as on social media of many kinds. It’s said not with humorous tolerance but powerful hatred and envy. But envy has now become perfectly okay, a kind of badge of virtue with “microlooters” and the like.
Now the New York Times is getting into the act:
The New York Times on old people:
“It is not ageist to ask whether older people should be required to give more to younger Americans… Older Americans favor restrictions on immigration… there is a correlation between age and resistance to policies to halt the overheating of the planet… impose age ceilings on political offices… Older Americans own much of the most desirable real estate… It is not ageist, finally, to impose policies to transfer jobs, houses and wealth down the generational chain.”
Yale law professor Samuel Moyn, whom I interviewed once, always seemed generous and reasonable, even when our politics differed. But unless it’s an elaborate meta-joke, the above column and forthcoming book Gerontocracy in America: How the Old are Hoarding Wealth and Power in America advance some of the most intellectually vicious ideas I’ve ever seen. The Godwin’s Law factor alone is a shocker.
Moyn observes that people of years have accumulated money and influence and contrives to end the “tyranny of the old” by having “the elderly divested of political power, wealth, and property,” because reasons. The title of the Times piece, “Older Americans Are Hoarding America’s Potential,” carries the obscene lefty connotation that no one really owns anything and the elderly, by dint of living too long to begin with, and having a generally shitty quality of life compared to the young, and voting incorrectly/selfishly (hilarious, in the context of open scheming to seize their savings) and wasting resources “playing for time” for “another day, month, or year among loved ones” makes them lousy stewards of what the author unironically calls “our inheritance,” i.e. their homes and bank accounts.
That’s by Matt Taibbi, who is 56 years old. Young to me, but not young.
Moyn’s work doesn’t surprise me at all – there’s a huge market for this sort of thing, based on the ideas I’ve seen widely disseminated online. Taibbi is absolutely correct that this is part of an attack on private property, based on the idea that one can decide who should own what and how much, and act accordingly by confiscating the goods of the supposedly non-virtuous.
NOTE: I’ve written on this topic of inter-generational rage before, but at the moment I can’t find the piece. But this post is somewhat relevant to the topic.
NOTE II: I saw the movie Zorba the Greek in a movie theater when it first came out in 1964. I was young, and I didn’t like it and have never looked at it again. But various scenes have stuck with me, and not in a good way. So, this one comes to mind. Of course, the people confiscating the dead woman’s goods here actually are dirt-poor, and they are of all ages and not just young. The deceased woman wasn’t exactly what you’d call rich, either. So the parallel isn’t very good, although the envy impulse is there. Here’s the scene, and watching it now it seems even more chilling than I recall:
This trend is going to become even more pronounced as Medicare and SS continue to consume ever-larger portions of the federal budget on the way to fiscal perdition.
It’s not just a question of envy, of course. It’s the collective failure of older people to have had enough children when they were young, so that their needs would have young people available to provide for them, that will be the real problem in the next thirty years.
And it is, unfortunately, collective, it does not matter if I personally had 12 children, although odds are I personally will be better off for having had them. The problems with the economy as a whole will still be there.
Envy is, in and of itself, a terrible thing. It’s the psychological “sin” that poisons the mind. The second worst thing about this topic, is the logical error and short-termism of zero-sum thinking. That thinking suggests that there is a fixed “pie” and if you get more, that means I get less.
Capitalism, and the advancement of human society really, is about building and growth.
Another interesting dichotomy in thinking on this topic, is the historical focus on human longevity and more recently, its reverse. So there are the classics, the hunt for the fountain of youth, the legend of the holy grail, The Picture of Dorian Gray, etc.
Some of our tech titans, like Peter Thiel (I think), have lamented that this traditional interest in longevity seems to have faded away to some extent, and in some circles is replaced with the idea that the old are merely a burden on the younger generations, particularly with socialistic healthcare systems like the one in the UK. Any advancements in medical research that lead to increased life spans, can be seen as a mistake, or misguided research spending.
*sigh*
For myself – I am, if you stretch the definition like a rubber band — a very late Boomer. 1954, came to maturity/voting age in the Seventies. I caught New Math and disco in the neck, and have felt like I have spent my life cleaning up after the enormous main bulge of Boomers. Sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, the enthusiastic trashing of just about every convention there was, which made the US relatively stable, secure, a nice place to live if you weren’t rich … in fact, were barely middle-class. It was a good place before they got to it, and a wreck after they moved on, like the circus parade through town, leaving piles of manure and trashed streets in their wake.