Counter-point: It's 100% about generational wealth, and how out of touch the rich are from the poor. I'm one the eldest Millennials. When the eldest of the Boomers were my age, their generation...
Counter-point: It's 100% about generational wealth, and how out of touch the rich are from the poor.
I'm one the eldest Millennials. When the eldest of the Boomers were my age, their generation collectively had 20% of the nation's wealth. The Millennials have 3%.
Notice how none of this generational tension is directed at X? They were sitting ~10% at this age marker...so they didn't get hit with the quite the same level of generational poverty, but they're definitely more sympathetic with our plight.
So when Millennials see articles about how we're irresponsible and lazy for being poor, well..it pisses us off.
'Ok Boomer' is a perfectly valid retort to the older generation being obscenely out of touch.
Aren't you applying an overly broad brush to a huge group of people though. Just because the average baby boomer was significantly wealthier than the average millennial at the same age, doesn't...
Aren't you applying an overly broad brush to a huge group of people though. Just because the average baby boomer was significantly wealthier than the average millennial at the same age, doesn't mean there aren't a huge group of poor older folks. Wealth is concentrated in a J curve across almost every demographic, baby boomers included.
It gets worse in a lot of European countries: Today's retirees in their mid-70s and beyond are getting public pensions based on their birth years that subsequent generations can only dream of. And...
It gets worse in a lot of European countries: Today's retirees in their mid-70s and beyond are getting public pensions based on their birth years that subsequent generations can only dream of.
And those old pensioners are complaining about it because they feel they deserve more, even though almost all of them are getting way more in payouts than the whole value of their pension contributions and all the acquired wealth gain from those through all the years: They're getting a huge, undeserved net payout.
(Medicaid / medicare in the US pale in comparison)
The generational conflicts are real. All the way down into local politics, where questions concerning investments in either good schooling for youth, or investments in care for the elderly in elderly populations are the billion dollar political issues.
Then there's the climate crisis, both globally and locally.
There's the cost of education ( even worse in the US).
In a post-pandemic labor market (after the 2008 financial crisis and lost generation of youth there) there's also the conflict between old, experienced people who are making some fields impossible to gain entry to.
There are many more real generational conflicts.
The discontent goes both ways. In social issues it's often the old that feel the youth are being unreasonable. Old people generally also dislike the parts of society that are geared towards digital participation becasause they are at a disadvantage there.
It's not a one-way street where old bad, youth good, but generations just not being in the same page or being able to talk to each other. In many places, that's also a political divide where people don't agree on the basic descriptions and facts regarding how society is and the state of today should be viewed. Society is changing more quickly now than ever before, so the year when you were born matters more now than before as more things have changed between a parent being born and their kid.
If there is more absolute stuff of worth today, why should the proportions be skewed to older people? If current trends continue, future generations will own nothing of value in absolute terms.
If there is more absolute stuff of worth today, why should the proportions be skewed to older people? If current trends continue, future generations will own nothing of value in absolute terms.
Why should it matter? As long as younger people have enough, does it really make a difference if elderly people have more proportionally? Of course lots of younger people don't have enough, but I...
why should the proportions be skewed to older people?
Why should it matter? As long as younger people have enough, does it really make a difference if elderly people have more proportionally? Of course lots of younger people don't have enough, but I don't think that is unique to any generation, and if my assumption is true, than this percentage should be less than or equal to what it was for Boomers however many years ago.
If current trends continue, future generations will own nothing of value in absolute terms.
Shouldn't they have proportionally less, but an equivalent or greater amount absolutely? Although I don't think current growth trends are really sustainable.
We're just going to stop here, because they don't. Millenials are living with their parents at a higher rate. They own homes at a lower rate. They are starting families later, with their primary...
Why should it matter? As long as younger people have enough
We're just going to stop here, because they don't. Millenials are living with their parents at a higher rate. They own homes at a lower rate. They are starting families later, with their primary concern being having the wealth to support another. They have less health insurance, they have less assets, less savings, and a million other indicators.
We seem to have different definitions of "enough". Do you have reliable access to shelter? Do you have reliable access to adequate food and water? Are you relatively safe from assault, theft,...
We seem to have different definitions of "enough". Do you have reliable access to shelter? Do you have reliable access to adequate food and water? Are you relatively safe from assault, theft, murder, etc.? Do you have disposable income and free time to spend on yourself and your hobbies? Are cheap and widely available medical interventions cheap and available to you (think penicillin, aspirin, antibacterial ointment, bandaids, etc.)? Then you have enough. Arguably most Millennials have enough by this metric. The things you mentioned basically don't matter to me. I don't think the marginally better quality of life enjoyed by Boomers is a valid reason for antipathy towards them.
Many of these metrics were better satisfied during the age boomers grew up, despite it being nearly 50 years ago. This should be surprising given that we are living in a more technologically...
Many of these metrics were better satisfied during the age boomers grew up, despite it being nearly 50 years ago. This should be surprising given that we are living in a more technologically advanced age, lowering the cost of some of these.
To assume that your lifestyle and what you need to be happy are true indicators for everyone else in a generation is absurd. Furthermore, markers of how 'advanced' a society is or how 'nice' a life can be are hardly markers that are widely contested. Just because you don't care to own a house or care about savings or access to good health insurance doesn't mean that a large portion of people also share your opinion, or that you can't measure whether a society is adequately distributing wealth by measures such as this.
What point are you trying to make here? That you are incredibly stoic and others needs, wants, and desires are childish or unfounded? What does that have anything to do with an objectively measurable decrease in quality of life and distribution of wealth and resources?
I guess I see things like home ownership, not living with parents, higher net worths, etc., as essentially luxuries. I also would like to own a home and not live with my parents, and I think...
I guess I see things like home ownership, not living with parents, higher net worths, etc., as essentially luxuries. I also would like to own a home and not live with my parents, and I think having these things would probably make me somewhat happier, but I don't think there is any valid sense in which I am entitled to them, or that my difficulty in acquiring them can be said to be indicative of an objectively poor quality of life. Maybe for someone owning a Ferrari is absolutely necessary for them to be maximally happy. Does the fact that it's harder for them to afford one than it was for their parents really demonstrate that they have it worse than they did? Does it really matter objectively?
I believe the reason you see them as luxuries is because you feel like these are limited or scarce resources. This is the lie that capitalism has been selling us for ages; before capitalism it was...
Exemplary
I believe the reason you see them as luxuries is because you feel like these are limited or scarce resources. This is the lie that capitalism has been selling us for ages; before capitalism it was the elites who sold this idea to peasants with tales of divine providence. This lie is the older generations being extremely resistant to giving up any wealth or paying back what was paid to them.
I do think it's admirable to be appreciative of what you have, and even more appreciative when you do get access to these luxuries, but the idea that they are luxuries is a lie that's sold to us so that the rich can continue to have absurd luxuries at the expense of everyone else.
I also think it's a bit unfair to compare the idea of having a car at all to owning a Ferrari (however the analogy does hold up in that the average millenial family has a magnitude less of wealth than the average boomer and Ferrari's are about a magnitude more expensive than your normal car). There is a distinct difference, however, between a nicer version of the same thing, and having access to the thing entirely. Both of these metrics are lower for millenials than they were for boomers when they were the same age as millenials are today.
Objectively speaking, how difficult it is for anyone in a particular generation to afford something should decrease over time as technology makes it more affordable and easy to afford these things. New technology is expensive. Old technology is cheap. The fact that it is becoming harder to afford certain things is proof of problems of inter-generational wealth distributions.
I believe that there is value in striving for economic equality. If there isn't then who gets to decide what enough is? If there is value in having a society with small wealth differences, then...
Why should it matter? As long as younger people have enough, does it really make a difference if elderly people have more proportionally?
I believe that there is value in striving for economic equality. If there isn't then who gets to decide what enough is? If there is value in having a society with small wealth differences, then today's wealth inequality is unjust (not only the generational differences).
I don’t know in terms of ethics what the proportion should be. I was asking what your reasoning is as you seem to have a conclusion on this. The current trend is for younger generations to have...
Shouldn't they have proportionally less, but an equivalent or greater amount absolutely?
I don’t know in terms of ethics what the proportion should be. I was asking what your reasoning is as you seem to have a conclusion on this.
The current trend is for younger generations to have lower earnings and accumulated wealth over their lifetimes, proportionally than preceding generations. In fact it seems, like at current trends, future generations are going to have negative wealth (i.e. debt). I think that’s not a sustainable or desirable outcome, so I’m trying to grok where you’re coming from.
This, so much. The disproportionate rise in housing prices and stagnation of incomes means that it's much harder to hit a 20% down deposit to get an average mortgage. I'm one of the lucky...
found that millennials have virtually no real estate wealth now at a time when Boomers were quickly building equity.
This, so much. The disproportionate rise in housing prices and stagnation of incomes means that it's much harder to hit a 20% down deposit to get an average mortgage.
I'm one of the lucky Millennials. I had an FHA loan that I was just able to refinance to a traditional mortgage. I'm now paying $150+ less a month, and will be paying off the mortgage sooner. All because I only had $15,000 in the bank as an initial deposit on the loan when I wanted to move into a 3 BR house paying a lower monthly than a 3 BR apartment.
Abolish down payments, credit checks, and mortgage insurance. The fact the bank can repossesse the property for non-payment should be more than sufficient.
For that matter, ban landlords. Their meddling has turned every property purchase into a bidding war so everyone can charge higher rents and driving up cost of housing across the board.
To be fair, the obsession with home ownership is a uniquely American thing. There are other ways to compound capital, and certainly there is no reason to believe that the real estate market is...
To be fair, the obsession with home ownership is a uniquely American thing. There are other ways to compound capital, and certainly there is no reason to believe that the real estate market is always going to increase in value over the long term.
If you were to take those downpayment savings, and put them into other investments along with the difference between your mortgage + misc payments - equivalent rent into those investments, you very likely may die before your owned home equity exceeds the latter, if at all.
Now, millennials are also incredibly underinvested in other areas, so it doesn't really make it any better, but I don't think home ownership should be the main metric.
I don't really consider having to live with your parents or not being able to live out out some unsustainable middle class fantasy lifestyle to be legitimate grievances. Most Millennials are still...
I don't really consider having to live with your parents or not being able to live out out some unsustainable middle class fantasy lifestyle to be legitimate grievances. Most Millennials are still better off than almost any generation in history, even if their quality of life is slightly worse than that of Boomers. That's all that matters to me.
That's not a very good benchmark. Any generation born into an industrialized society is going to be better off than almost any generation in history. That's no excuse to ignore the real and...
That's not a very good benchmark. Any generation born into an industrialized society is going to be better off than almost any generation in history. That's no excuse to ignore the real and distributing trends that indicate a reversal in the economic forces that brought us here in the first place.
The article is well-intentioned, but the hard numbers about generational wealth make it clear that millennials don't have the same advantages that boomers have had. Until "Ok Boomer" (which came...
The article is well-intentioned, but the hard numbers about generational wealth make it clear that millennials don't have the same advantages that boomers have had.
Until "Ok Boomer" (which came from Gen Z anyways), the "generational hate" has been pretty one-sided. Like, what power do millennials have over boomers such that they should care? Boomers have held most of the wealth and power.
Digitalization. Anything that requires doing something online, or is easier, faster or cheaper online. There are huge advantages there, that I've leveraged at work to get ahead of older folks who...
Like, what power do millennials have over boomers such that they should care?
Digitalization. Anything that requires doing something online, or is easier, faster or cheaper online.
There are huge advantages there, that I've leveraged at work to get ahead of older folks who don't spreadsheet, code, make fancy presentations, run digital meetings, do things remotely -- the list is endless; it's about a modern, digital mindset.
I literally made four older workers redundant by automating the tasks they'd been doing in my company.
The results are more accurate because there are no mistakes, misinterpretations, typos, fudged figures. Just raw data, formulaically categorized. These four people suddenly aren't the important, senior folks who were necessary to do high level analysis. They're at the bottom of the hierarchy, ruthlessly usurped from near the top.
One of their primary duties is answering the phone and talking to older customers who can't manage their services in the online portal. That has to be humiliating. They're lucky they weren't just laid off, thrown out of the whole sector as obsolete.
I have an older employee whose job is attending meetings on my behalf so I don't have to be there, but get the cliffnotes afterwards to save me time. I mean sure he represents the whole department to other departments, but has no authority to do or commit to anything. He's close to twice my age.
There are also huge advantages in daily life from taking advantage of modern, digital thinking.
What scares me is that a lot of young people don't seem to put time into developing these skills they'd benefit hugely from.
This is also only true within the subset of younger generations that actually know how to use a computer. There's likely a near-equal proportion of Millennials and Gen-Z that also don't know how...
There are huge advantages there, that I've leveraged at work to get ahead of older folks who don't spreadsheet, code, make fancy presentations, run digital meetings, do things remotely -- the list is endless; it's about a modern, digital mindset.
This is also only true within the subset of younger generations that actually know how to use a computer.
There's likely a near-equal proportion of Millennials and Gen-Z that also don't know how to use a computer beyond connecting it to the WiFi and launching a browser.
Ultimate attributional error is worth thinking about. I don’t like the way this is framed, though, because the question asked is if generations can be held responsible for the future. Who is...
Can entire generations actually be in charge and held responsible of the future? Or is this idea an ultimate attribution error, where we ascribe the actions of few powerful ones to a wider (and much less powerful) group?
Ultimate attributional error is worth thinking about. I don’t like the way this is framed, though, because the question asked is if generations can be held responsible for the future. Who is responsible for the present? If we concede that any subsets of living humans do bear responsibility, then it logically follows it must be the older generations. Nobody is about to make the illogical leap that those who are not old enough to affect social or economic policy could be the ones responsible. That is, the arrow of time and our basic understanding of causality precludes, say, those born outside of some sliding window of time from having been capable of affecting certain changes through policy or collective action. Now, of the subsets of those born at the appropriate times for blame to be a possibility, one still has to consider whether laying that blame makes sense—and I think that’s where the ultimate attribution errors come into focus.
But, there is another issue worth separating. I think a lot of antipathy from younger people towards their elders in the present stems from a sense that while it’s likely true that a very small section of boomers truly had a hand in the decisions that affected the present status quo, the consensus is that a disproportionate number of boomers are not sympathetic to the issues that subsequent generations are facing. That generalized lack of sympathy is abrasive, and can be misinterpreted by boomers as millennials or gen z blaming them, when the blame brush isn’t really being applied. That is, younger folks might be more endeared to their elders if their elders spent at least a little effort trying to appreciate the issues that are currently at hand, even if they didn’t directly or intentionally have a hand in them.
I honestly think most of the animosity between generations can be explained by the generic inequality growth charts: Wage growth and related charts Price change of various products over the last...
I honestly think most of the animosity between generations can be explained by the generic inequality growth charts:
I think boomers really just grew up in a more (economically) equal world their upper relatives built during the great depression. This means more of them were middle-class and led good comfortable lives, which is the kind of person who can vote for conservatives (or in the case of the US, vote for social conservatives/racists who 'also happen' to be economically conservative) and not feel the consequences until much later. This means that boomers, being disproportionately conservative, are disproportionately to blame, but the problem is conservatives, no matter what their age is.
Conservative mindset: "Everything is fine for me, so we shouldn't change anything at all because it might negatively impact me in some (possibly trivial) manner"
Conservative mindset:
"Everything is fine for me, so we shouldn't change anything at all because it might negatively impact me in some (possibly trivial) manner"
It was kind of a shorthand of your post, a soundbite that sums up why the conservative mindset is so incredibly toxic, regardless of the specifics. I see conservative mindset deeply ingrained in...
It was kind of a shorthand of your post, a soundbite that sums up why the conservative mindset is so incredibly toxic, regardless of the specifics.
I see conservative mindset deeply ingrained in even my Democrat friends, and I consider that quite disturbing.
Counter-point: It's 100% about generational wealth, and how out of touch the rich are from the poor.
I'm one the eldest Millennials. When the eldest of the Boomers were my age, their generation collectively had 20% of the nation's wealth. The Millennials have 3%.
Notice how none of this generational tension is directed at X? They were sitting ~10% at this age marker...so they didn't get hit with the quite the same level of generational poverty, but they're definitely more sympathetic with our plight.
So when Millennials see articles about how we're irresponsible and lazy for being poor, well..it pisses us off.
'Ok Boomer' is a perfectly valid retort to the older generation being obscenely out of touch.
Aren't you applying an overly broad brush to a huge group of people though. Just because the average baby boomer was significantly wealthier than the average millennial at the same age, doesn't mean there aren't a huge group of poor older folks. Wealth is concentrated in a J curve across almost every demographic, baby boomers included.
It gets worse in a lot of European countries: Today's retirees in their mid-70s and beyond are getting public pensions based on their birth years that subsequent generations can only dream of.
And those old pensioners are complaining about it because they feel they deserve more, even though almost all of them are getting way more in payouts than the whole value of their pension contributions and all the acquired wealth gain from those through all the years: They're getting a huge, undeserved net payout.
(Medicaid / medicare in the US pale in comparison)
The generational conflicts are real. All the way down into local politics, where questions concerning investments in either good schooling for youth, or investments in care for the elderly in elderly populations are the billion dollar political issues.
Then there's the climate crisis, both globally and locally.
There's the cost of education ( even worse in the US).
In a post-pandemic labor market (after the 2008 financial crisis and lost generation of youth there) there's also the conflict between old, experienced people who are making some fields impossible to gain entry to.
There are many more real generational conflicts.
The discontent goes both ways. In social issues it's often the old that feel the youth are being unreasonable. Old people generally also dislike the parts of society that are geared towards digital participation becasause they are at a disadvantage there.
It's not a one-way street where old bad, youth good, but generations just not being in the same page or being able to talk to each other. In many places, that's also a political divide where people don't agree on the basic descriptions and facts regarding how society is and the state of today should be viewed. Society is changing more quickly now than ever before, so the year when you were born matters more now than before as more things have changed between a parent being born and their kid.
Are Millennials actually worse off in absolute terms? I would assume 3% of today's wealth is at least equal to 20% of the wealth of 45(?) years ago.
If there is more absolute stuff of worth today, why should the proportions be skewed to older people? If current trends continue, future generations will own nothing of value in absolute terms.
Why should it matter? As long as younger people have enough, does it really make a difference if elderly people have more proportionally? Of course lots of younger people don't have enough, but I don't think that is unique to any generation, and if my assumption is true, than this percentage should be less than or equal to what it was for Boomers however many years ago.
Shouldn't they have proportionally less, but an equivalent or greater amount absolutely? Although I don't think current growth trends are really sustainable.
We're just going to stop here, because they don't. Millenials are living with their parents at a higher rate. They own homes at a lower rate. They are starting families later, with their primary concern being having the wealth to support another. They have less health insurance, they have less assets, less savings, and a million other indicators.
We seem to have different definitions of "enough". Do you have reliable access to shelter? Do you have reliable access to adequate food and water? Are you relatively safe from assault, theft, murder, etc.? Do you have disposable income and free time to spend on yourself and your hobbies? Are cheap and widely available medical interventions cheap and available to you (think penicillin, aspirin, antibacterial ointment, bandaids, etc.)? Then you have enough. Arguably most Millennials have enough by this metric. The things you mentioned basically don't matter to me. I don't think the marginally better quality of life enjoyed by Boomers is a valid reason for antipathy towards them.
Many of these metrics were better satisfied during the age boomers grew up, despite it being nearly 50 years ago. This should be surprising given that we are living in a more technologically advanced age, lowering the cost of some of these.
To assume that your lifestyle and what you need to be happy are true indicators for everyone else in a generation is absurd. Furthermore, markers of how 'advanced' a society is or how 'nice' a life can be are hardly markers that are widely contested. Just because you don't care to own a house or care about savings or access to good health insurance doesn't mean that a large portion of people also share your opinion, or that you can't measure whether a society is adequately distributing wealth by measures such as this.
What point are you trying to make here? That you are incredibly stoic and others needs, wants, and desires are childish or unfounded? What does that have anything to do with an objectively measurable decrease in quality of life and distribution of wealth and resources?
I guess I see things like home ownership, not living with parents, higher net worths, etc., as essentially luxuries. I also would like to own a home and not live with my parents, and I think having these things would probably make me somewhat happier, but I don't think there is any valid sense in which I am entitled to them, or that my difficulty in acquiring them can be said to be indicative of an objectively poor quality of life. Maybe for someone owning a Ferrari is absolutely necessary for them to be maximally happy. Does the fact that it's harder for them to afford one than it was for their parents really demonstrate that they have it worse than they did? Does it really matter objectively?
I believe the reason you see them as luxuries is because you feel like these are limited or scarce resources. This is the lie that capitalism has been selling us for ages; before capitalism it was the elites who sold this idea to peasants with tales of divine providence. This lie is the older generations being extremely resistant to giving up any wealth or paying back what was paid to them.
I do think it's admirable to be appreciative of what you have, and even more appreciative when you do get access to these luxuries, but the idea that they are luxuries is a lie that's sold to us so that the rich can continue to have absurd luxuries at the expense of everyone else.
I also think it's a bit unfair to compare the idea of having a car at all to owning a Ferrari (however the analogy does hold up in that the average millenial family has a magnitude less of wealth than the average boomer and Ferrari's are about a magnitude more expensive than your normal car). There is a distinct difference, however, between a nicer version of the same thing, and having access to the thing entirely. Both of these metrics are lower for millenials than they were for boomers when they were the same age as millenials are today.
Objectively speaking, how difficult it is for anyone in a particular generation to afford something should decrease over time as technology makes it more affordable and easy to afford these things. New technology is expensive. Old technology is cheap. The fact that it is becoming harder to afford certain things is proof of problems of inter-generational wealth distributions.
I believe that there is value in striving for economic equality. If there isn't then who gets to decide what enough is? If there is value in having a society with small wealth differences, then today's wealth inequality is unjust (not only the generational differences).
I don’t know in terms of ethics what the proportion should be. I was asking what your reasoning is as you seem to have a conclusion on this.
The current trend is for younger generations to have lower earnings and accumulated wealth over their lifetimes, proportionally than preceding generations. In fact it seems, like at current trends, future generations are going to have negative wealth (i.e. debt). I think that’s not a sustainable or desirable outcome, so I’m trying to grok where you’re coming from.
This, so much. The disproportionate rise in housing prices and stagnation of incomes means that it's much harder to hit a 20% down deposit to get an average mortgage.
I'm one of the lucky Millennials. I had an FHA loan that I was just able to refinance to a traditional mortgage. I'm now paying $150+ less a month, and will be paying off the mortgage sooner. All because I only had $15,000 in the bank as an initial deposit on the loan when I wanted to move into a 3 BR house paying a lower monthly than a 3 BR apartment.
Abolish down payments, credit checks, and mortgage insurance. The fact the bank can repossesse the property for non-payment should be more than sufficient.
For that matter, ban landlords. Their meddling has turned every property purchase into a bidding war so everyone can charge higher rents and driving up cost of housing across the board.
To be fair, the obsession with home ownership is a uniquely American thing. There are other ways to compound capital, and certainly there is no reason to believe that the real estate market is always going to increase in value over the long term.
If you were to take those downpayment savings, and put them into other investments along with the difference between your mortgage + misc payments - equivalent rent into those investments, you very likely may die before your owned home equity exceeds the latter, if at all.
Now, millennials are also incredibly underinvested in other areas, so it doesn't really make it any better, but I don't think home ownership should be the main metric.
I don't really consider having to live with your parents or not being able to live out out some unsustainable middle class fantasy lifestyle to be legitimate grievances. Most Millennials are still better off than almost any generation in history, even if their quality of life is slightly worse than that of Boomers. That's all that matters to me.
That's not a very good benchmark. Any generation born into an industrialized society is going to be better off than almost any generation in history. That's no excuse to ignore the real and distributing trends that indicate a reversal in the economic forces that brought us here in the first place.
The article is well-intentioned, but the hard numbers about generational wealth make it clear that millennials don't have the same advantages that boomers have had.
Until "Ok Boomer" (which came from Gen Z anyways), the "generational hate" has been pretty one-sided. Like, what power do millennials have over boomers such that they should care? Boomers have held most of the wealth and power.
Digitalization. Anything that requires doing something online, or is easier, faster or cheaper online.
There are huge advantages there, that I've leveraged at work to get ahead of older folks who don't spreadsheet, code, make fancy presentations, run digital meetings, do things remotely -- the list is endless; it's about a modern, digital mindset.
I literally made four older workers redundant by automating the tasks they'd been doing in my company.
The results are more accurate because there are no mistakes, misinterpretations, typos, fudged figures. Just raw data, formulaically categorized. These four people suddenly aren't the important, senior folks who were necessary to do high level analysis. They're at the bottom of the hierarchy, ruthlessly usurped from near the top.
One of their primary duties is answering the phone and talking to older customers who can't manage their services in the online portal. That has to be humiliating. They're lucky they weren't just laid off, thrown out of the whole sector as obsolete.
I have an older employee whose job is attending meetings on my behalf so I don't have to be there, but get the cliffnotes afterwards to save me time. I mean sure he represents the whole department to other departments, but has no authority to do or commit to anything. He's close to twice my age.
There are also huge advantages in daily life from taking advantage of modern, digital thinking.
What scares me is that a lot of young people don't seem to put time into developing these skills they'd benefit hugely from.
This is also only true within the subset of younger generations that actually know how to use a computer.
There's likely a near-equal proportion of Millennials and Gen-Z that also don't know how to use a computer beyond connecting it to the WiFi and launching a browser.
Ultimate attributional error is worth thinking about. I don’t like the way this is framed, though, because the question asked is if generations can be held responsible for the future. Who is responsible for the present? If we concede that any subsets of living humans do bear responsibility, then it logically follows it must be the older generations. Nobody is about to make the illogical leap that those who are not old enough to affect social or economic policy could be the ones responsible. That is, the arrow of time and our basic understanding of causality precludes, say, those born outside of some sliding window of time from having been capable of affecting certain changes through policy or collective action. Now, of the subsets of those born at the appropriate times for blame to be a possibility, one still has to consider whether laying that blame makes sense—and I think that’s where the ultimate attribution errors come into focus.
But, there is another issue worth separating. I think a lot of antipathy from younger people towards their elders in the present stems from a sense that while it’s likely true that a very small section of boomers truly had a hand in the decisions that affected the present status quo, the consensus is that a disproportionate number of boomers are not sympathetic to the issues that subsequent generations are facing. That generalized lack of sympathy is abrasive, and can be misinterpreted by boomers as millennials or gen z blaming them, when the blame brush isn’t really being applied. That is, younger folks might be more endeared to their elders if their elders spent at least a little effort trying to appreciate the issues that are currently at hand, even if they didn’t directly or intentionally have a hand in them.
I honestly think most of the animosity between generations can be explained by the generic inequality growth charts:
Wage growth and related charts
Price change of various products over the last 20 years
Labour wage share since 1948
Wealth owned by top 0.1% vs bottom 90%
I think boomers really just grew up in a more (economically) equal world their upper relatives built during the great depression. This means more of them were middle-class and led good comfortable lives, which is the kind of person who can vote for conservatives (or in the case of the US, vote for social conservatives/racists who 'also happen' to be economically conservative) and not feel the consequences until much later. This means that boomers, being disproportionately conservative, are disproportionately to blame, but the problem is conservatives, no matter what their age is.
Conservative mindset:
"Everything is fine for me, so we shouldn't change anything at all because it might negatively impact me in some (possibly trivial) manner"
Yes, conservatives are bad. I'm not sure what your point is?
It was kind of a shorthand of your post, a soundbite that sums up why the conservative mindset is so incredibly toxic, regardless of the specifics.
I see conservative mindset deeply ingrained in even my Democrat friends, and I consider that quite disturbing.