Within the last week or so there seems to have been an explosion of yattering over “ok boomer.” Over the last few years in various parts of the internet there was a self-righteous meme pushing “gas all boomers.” Yeah. This never made it to the MSM, I suspect because it was just too extreme for the MSM to publicize. But now we have the MSM allover this milder “ok boomer” meme, now a big deal. I think I have an original view of this,that the “gas all boomers” is an idealistic millennial view, reflecting their boomer parents. This new milder meme reflects the view of the Gen-Z group, \
My view is that the former nastier “gas all boomers” meme was from the idealistic millennials, strongly rebutting their boomer parents, We failed them, and them wanted us gassed for our failures to deliver for them, especially in the Great Recession, which in their view at least of several years ago, was our boomer fault, although that is a pretty weak argument.
But now w come to this milder meme of “ok boomer,” how polite. Word is that this is coming from Gen-Z sources, a groups younger than the angst-ridden millennials., who seem to have come up with the “gas all boomers” meme that went nowhere.
Obviously younger generations in the US have reasons for being unhappy. The US economy, along with the world economy, is slowing down. Both the milllennials and the Gen-Z group face higher college costs and housing costs than their predecessors. That the boomer gen is responsible for this outcome is a highly unreasonable view.
The middle portion of the millennials have indeed been big victims of the Great Recession, and will for the rest of their lives have lower incomes the MSM, was just too shocking, while arguably idealistic hard core in its formulation
But the new less shocking “ok boomer” meme is coming from the new rising Gen-Z gen. Most commentary has lumped them in with the millennials, but this is crap. They are following the “ironic” meme of their parents, the supposedly loser Gen-X, with their irony.
So indeed that is this new “ok boomer” meme that is ironic, coming from the Gen-Z gen, following their Gen-X “ironic’ parents. This contrasts with the hard line millennial “gas all boomers” view, ironically following the idealistic view of their boomer parents.
Barkley Rosser
Just an normal reaction by different generations. As in,
“Don’t trust anyone over 30.”
As a boomer, I have to say, we were the worst generation. Probably just because there were so many of us and human nature being what it is, there is this herd instinct that is carried to absurd extremes in a large herd. Yep, we sucked. Sorry about the carnage. Hope you do better.
SW,
Agreed. We sucked.
I blame television.
Wrong target!!! Current conditions are the fault of us Silents!!! We are on our last legs and too weak to defend ourselves. Even if the Boomers are getting old too, there are just too damn many of them and they are well armed.
Kevin Drum has spent a lot of time shifting blame to the silent generation.
I have trouble seeing why a failure by the boomers to hold their own elders to account as they destroyed the world is any better.
Communication aside, at least there are people alive who are engaged with the problem and tired of the apathy and bullshit of those who came before.
The silent generation was and is trash. They missed WWII and then we’re “too old” for the cultural wave the boomers had. Nobody cared about them……so lets hump the bourgeois…at least gen x was a little smarter.
Every generation has good and bad, and somehow humanity continues.
I basically find all these efforts by so many to blame specific generations for anything seriously flawed. For one thing, at any given time more than one generation is in charge, so if one does not like a particular thing in current society (or maybe past society), it is basically false to blame a specific age group somehow for what it is, although I certainly understand the envy by many younger people of many things boomers had cheap that are not cheap now.
So, to take two things that I see being blamed on boomers, consider the national debt and the high cost of college. The national debt as a percent of GDP basically declined from the end of WW II until around the mid-70s and then began rising again after Reagan got elected, although it declined for awhile during Boomer Clinton’s presidency. Reagan of course was a Greatest Gen person, and when he was elected in 1980, most tail-end boomers were still too young to vote, although by his reeletion in 84 most of them were old enough to vote. But offhand it looks to me like the Greatest Gen and the Silents had as much imput, if not more, into electing Reagan as the boomers, who, after all had debt-reducing Clinton in there. But somehow, boomers are respoinsible for the national debt.
College costs are an especialy sore point, and in my post I made it clear I support doing something to lower them, although I am not sure precisely what. The boomers certainly did have way lower costs than current students do, and this as a source of inter-generational envy/jealousy is certainly understandable. But if we ask wh ois respoinsible for those costs rising, I am hard pressed to answer. They started rising faster then inflation shortly after the 60s, meaning a lot of late stage boomers were already paying more than the early stage ones, with basically the Greatet Gen in charge of college admins back then. The rise has simply contiued until very recently, with it no longer going up faster than inflaion the last cuople of years. It would seem that Greatests, Silents, Boomers, and maybe very recently evren Gen-Xers have all had a hand in generating this excessive rise, and those of us still around (not many Greatests left at this point) need to get together to do something about it. But try8ing to pin this on any one generation seems simply off-the wall.
Barkley:
What, no Baumol’s Cost Disease? There should be a way to control some of this cost unaffiliated with instructing. I think too, we sure charge a lot of interest on student loans when we are trying to have them arrive in the economy, be productive, and pay taxes to support my old a**. You would think after 10 years if the cost is not paid off, we could spare a write-off expense. There is a balance to be had here between more productive people with increasing salaries paying taxes and generating demand.
Bert Schlitz
What years did you serve in Vietnam. I was there in 1967. Missed Tet.
dilbert:
Maybe your dates are a bit off. Tet came _4 months before I left for Marine Boot Camp in April 1968 unless you mean you served in a war and was there for the Tet offensive? I am a bit confused by your answer . . .
Not sure how tongue in cheek this all is. But in my view “generationism” is every bit as obnoxious as racism or misogyny (or misandrony for that matter). Treating a very large and diverse group as though they are somehow all clones is just off. Very off.
Ageist or not, SG/Boomers have been in charge longer than any generation before them. They have lived dramatically longer than most generations, and many of the Boomers are retiring later from all jobs because of social security changes. Even those who are retirement age often just don’t retire, particularly in politics.
How many people under 30 are in the house of representatives (minimum age 25). How many Americans think it would generally be a good idea to have anyone under 30 in the house of representatives?
Trump started his presidency older than any president had ended his term except for Reagan (who ended with severe mental debilitation), and the top three candidates in the Democratic camp are all over 70 already, after long careers.
At some point, those generations are responsible just by virtue of the fact that they have been in charge this entire time. You can’t pass the buck when you’re the only one in the circle of power.
run75441
May June 1967
Study of battle damaged vehicles.
I watched TV about Tet in Saigon and it seemed all the places I did business at got shot to shit.
Every generation has these squabbles. And, by the way, every generation seems to default on much government debt and install a new monetary regime.
But, it is no big deal. The new monetary regime is generally a bit of an improvement, a technology upgrade and makes up for about half the default.
We are in the process now with a world wide debt repudiation. A little default, a little upgrade and we be fine.
In case anybody didn’t understand my point above – put the blame where it belongs, with REPUBLICANS. What generations they belong to is irrelevant.
I wish to note that among the various things that unhappy young people blame boomers for, there are widely varying decisionmaking processes, although that may not matter to some unhappy young people.
So on the serious problem of way-too-high college costs, this is extremely hard to pin on anybody, much less a particular generation. The decisionmaking on this is massively decentralized and an ongoing annual affair. So very many people have been involved with the greater than inflation rate increases in those costs over the last half century, certainly not just boomers. it looks like maybe this above inflation rate rise has stopped, but it does need to be reversed. But blaming boomers for this looks just stupid, frankly.
OTOH, we have the supposed Social Security crisis, which many young people, most actually believe in. Boomers are getting their SS and they will get none, sob! But regular readers here know this is a bunch of baloney, and our leader in pointing this out, Dean Baker, is not even here. In the last few days, even Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has made this point, citing something anybody who knows about “Rosser’s Equation” (yes, mine) knows about: that even under the worst case scenarios, retiring millennials et al will get higher SS benefits in real terms than current recipients. But almost none of them knows this.
Then again, at least with regard to decisionmaking, this has been much more centralized, with the last major change in the system being in 1983 with the Greenspan Commission, that passed Congress and the WH with bipartisan support. The joke is that raised fica and retirment ages so that “the baby boomers will pay for their own retirement,” although actually the awful boomers paid for the retirements of those who managed to retire before 1983, mostly a bunch of spoiled Greatests, a lot of them, and Silents were in on that decision to stick the boomers with it.
Barkley:
Thank you for your comments. Besides you, is there something to back up your last sentence?
That was possibly the dumbest bunch of bafflegab I’ve read in over a year. This is the reason for the okboomer meme:
https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/the-115th-congress-is-among-the-oldest-in-history/175/
This stupid mob of ineffectual neoliberal boomers who are “leading” the “left” in this country from behind.
Signed,
GenX’er
Eric:
Spare me the “neoliberal” BS. If you wish to make the House more responsive, the Congressional Districts should be made smaller than the average 700,000 size. It is then, no representative would be able to ignore large percentages of a district’s population beliefs or interests as Alan Collinge (Student Loan Justice Org.) is discovering as he canvases politicians on student loan debt relief. The House would then begin to represent by population and not by whether they are rural or urban.
In the Senate, it is far easier to change. It does require the largest generation to get out and vote though. When candidates begin to see Millennials and other younger generations are a force to be reckoned with, candidates will pay attention to the new up and coming voters. Neither does this mean protesting a lack of desirable candidates by voting for Libertarians, Greens, Communists, etc. in national elections as was done in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio and at historically high levels. That protest only resulted in what we have today in the presidency while your interests languish in the legislature due to a minority support in the upper level of the legislature blocking everything else.
Term limits and or a popular vote does not fix the issue of which you speak.
baby boomer activist.
Oh, ok. I’ll spare you the neoliberal bs … just because you say so. But, ahem, from what authority do you speak?
Here’s an authority that thinks “ignoring the neoliberal bs, is itself, bs.
Agree with you on most everything else; however, that doesn’t change the sentiment and reasoning behind my original comment. And it doesn’t change the fact that the original post is just a bunch of myopic #okboomer bloviating.
Have a seat dad.
The authority of which I previously spoke, but forgot to link:
My authority? BS psych/MS bioregional planning & community design/JD
Run,
I was being sarcastic when I used the “spoiled” term on the Greatests and the Silents, who were certainly running Congress and the White House in 1983, not the boomers or anybody yet younger. Sort of a mock on all the boomer-dumping going on, with in the case of Social Security the boomers got shafted financially compared to the earleir generations. Are you questioning that last point? Simple fact, but I do not get worked up about it.
Eric Anderson,
I do not know what you are referring to here when you make your
dumbest bunch of bagfflegab” remark. You make no specific criticism of any specific argument made by anybody here (or elsewhere for that matter) although provided a link showing that Congress is led by a lot of old people, but I might note that like two of the leading Dem prez candidates, a lot of those people are actually Silents, not boomers. OK? Otherwise you just engage in name caling, which, franklly, looks like a bunch of dumb bafflegab (although that is kind of an amusing term.
Want to make an actual argument beyond just calling names, boy?
Barkley:
Like I usually am, I was curious.That’s all.