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How baby-boomers ruined the world

Natale Labia
By Natale Labia
2 Apr 2024
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Stereotypes of millennials are usually not flattering. However, a series of new studies now show that their predicament is not of their own making and that many of the problems faced by those born after 1980 – such as youth unemployment, the cost-of-living crisis, crippling student debt and unaffordable housing – are a consequence of those who came before them.

Thanks to the baby-boomer generation, millennials are the first in the history of humanity to be worse off than those who came before.

In “A Generation of Sociopaths – How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America”, Bruce Cannon Gibney argues that by refusing to make the most basic (and fairly minimal) sacrifices, they have bequeathed their children a mess of epochal proportions. 

Boomers did not address climate change when they could, gutted public investment in social programmes that would have benefited their children and grandchildren, and ushered in a new era of economic precarity that left their descendants poorer and more anxious. 

To paraphrase Philip Roth, they ensured “socialism for us and capitalism for everyone else”.

Through government programmes such as social security and other entitlements, they ran up huge debts that are now absorbing the taxes paid by millennials. 

With the US and many governments continuing to run eye-watering budget deficits to fund such benefits for the elderly, at far higher interest rates than before, it remains unclear how sustainable it all is.

“Because the problems Boomers created are growing not so much in linear as exponential terms, the crisis that feels distant today will, when it comes, seem to have arrived overnight.”

Generational inequality leading to social tension


Similarly, Jill Filipovic, in her book “OK Boomer, Lets Talk”, explains what she sees as the root of the intra-generational tension: millennials are leading worse lives than their parents did, and Boomers are to blame. 

Data show that, as Filipovic puts it, “life at 30 for your average Millennial looks close to nothing like as good as life at 30 did for the average Boomer”.

Baby-boomers’ true political legacy, she argues, was the Thatcher-Reagan revolution of the 1980s. 

This was a consolidation of benefits for the elderly, the lowering of taxes, and the shrinking of the social safety net for the young and disadvantaged. All this has resulted in ever greater generational inequality. 

Studies in Australia and the UK show worsening livelihoods and social discontent for the youth, particularly in the decade after the financial crisis. 

A report compiled by economists at the Resolution Foundation has laid out the extent to which Britain’s millennial generation (defined here as people born between 1982 and 2000) are worse off than previous cohorts were at the same stage of life. 

The authors found that millennials born in the late 1980s earned, on average, 8% less at the age of 30 than their counterparts from Generation X did at the same age (Generation X is defined as people born between 1966 and 1981). 

The audit also found that the typical weekly pay of graduates aged 30-34 fell by 16% in real terms between 2007 and 2023.

According to research from the House Buyer Bureau, UK house prices are currently sitting at 8.8 times the average earnings. This is an all-time record, and has more than doubled since the 1970s.

In Australia, the latest Scanlon Report, which maps social cohesion, says that almost half of 18- to 42-year-olds – that is millennials and Gen Z – said they were “just getting along financially”, and the same amount believed the things they do in life are worthwhile only a little or only some of the time.

South Africa among the most extreme


This discontent is extreme in South Africa. 

The structural inequalities left over from apartheid, which continue to benefit white Boomers, mean that young people of colour – particularly women – face an almost impossible set of challenges.

South Africa’s generational wealth inequality – alongside its racial and gender inequalities – results in an unholy trinity of social divides. 

With the SA Reserve Bank looking to keep interest rates at their highest for 15 years, first-time home ownership is more difficult than ever. 

Credit card and student debt payments for indebted young people have spiralled. Public education and healthcare has disintegrated, with just under half of children who enrol in Grade 1 making it to Grade 12, and only 28% of people aged 20 or older completing high school. Youth unemployment is at a simply terrifying all-time high of 49.83%. 

Of course, not everything can be blamed on one previous generation. 

One should not equate inadequate progress with total failure. The Boomers didn’t create a perfect world for their children — but they didn’t inherit a perfect world from their parents, either.

Boomers should not be blamed for the inadequacies of successive ANC governments, even if most of the politicians themselves are indeed from that generation. 

However, there can be no doubt how difficult the current malaise of generational inequality, high house prices, high cost of living, high debt and stagnant wages makes life for the young. 

Combined with existential issues such as the climate crisis and collapse of the global order, this means that for those born after 1980, it is hard to have any hope at all. 

Former Greek finance minister and Marxist economist Yanis Varoufakis has simple advice: “There are two kinds of young people. The sensible ones who try to adapt themselves to the world around them, and the mad ones who try to adapt the world to their own ideas of how it should be.”

“Be mad,” he says. DM

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