Australian columnists love attacking baby boomers. It’s a staple, apparently we’re the worst generation ever and we ought to be getting out of the way.
So this morning, veteran SMH columnist Miranda Devine has a new angle on next week’s presidential election. Amazingly, you may not have noticed, it will spell the end of the boomer generation. Gosh, gee. Don’t worry. It’s utter drivel, of course.
This presidential election is the first to be the offspring of boomer ideals. It is the boomer election we’ve waited 40 years for.
Before boomerdom women and african-americans didn’t get much of a look in when it came to the White House. The number of women and african-americans who have been either President or vice-president of the USA is exactly zero.
No matter who wins on Tuesday, the gender or racial composition of the White House will be something unimaginable without the efforts and obsessions of the baby boomer generation.
Some of Devine’s sentences just don’t make any sense to me:
Obama’s sensibility is with generation X, and he has chosen to be their elder statesmen rather than tagalong kid brother to the Boomers
What does that mean? It’s one of those fact-free sentences that just float on by because there is nothing to anchor it in reality.
Actually, the whole column is a kind of disjointed mish-
mash.
Anyway, in her assessment about Obama’s generational identification Devine is now at odds with that other veteran baby boomer disparager the Australian’s Greg Sheridan. Back in August, Sheridan wrote:
He (Obama) is technically a member of generation X, born just too late to be a baby boomer. Yet his consciousness is quintessentially that of the baby boomer.
As you may have already guessed, being called a quintessential baby boomer by Sheridan is not a compliment:
We middle-class baby boomers are the most privileged generation in human history. Nothing has been asked of us and everything has been given to us. All we have been required to do is live lives of unparalleled affluence and not go mad. Yet throughout Obama’s admittedly beautifully written memoirs, on numerous occasions he claims to be fighting off despair. This tone captures the whining self-pity and utter self-obsession of the archetypal baby boomer.
Sheridan’s seems to believe that unless you survive a couple of world wars and a great depression, you’re pretty much certain to turn out to be a self-absorbed arsehole.
The most inconsequential aspect of next week’s presidential election is the generational identification of the candidates. Perhaps, that’s why it is so appealing to certain Australian newspaper columnists.
13 Comments
Generation wars are so terribly tedious.
Sure Miranda’s column is a fact-free zone, but are you honestly claiming Greg Sheridan is wrong about Boomers?
Let’s see, most Xs and Ys can’t afford to buy a house, so Boomer politicians do what? Fritter away the surplus propping up house prices to maintain the bubble value their investment properties. In other words, further enrich themselves while making home ownership harder for everyone else.
What next? Steal our taxes to pay for their retirement (future fund, endless handouts to pensioners etc) while future generations pay for their own out of their wages.
And why is health such a big political issue now? Because doddering Boomers wouldn’t dream of paying for the immense cost of the heart bypasses and colostomy bags they’ll need to keep them alive and whinging well into their 80s and 90s.
Golly I could go on, but you’d have to be a truly privileged, self-obsessed arsehole not to realise that Boomers have done nothing since 1968 but turn into the fat-cat authoritarians they railed against.
You and your generation are The Man now, Trevor; stop complaining when someone points it out to you.
Yes I think the whole anti-boomers idea is just a total nonsense and distraction.
But the idea that xers and yers have it any tougher than previous generations is just absurd. I’m sick of all that ‘we can’t afford a house’ crap. Whoever could? Housing affordability is about the same now as it was when I took out my first mortgage 30 years ago. In fact, I had a mortgage before I had a passport. O’seas travel was far more expensive in those days
It all depends on what you mean by ‘affordable’. It is also about expectations, I know sons and daughters of immigrants in Sydney’s western suburbs who are buying their own units in their twenties. I also know thirty-somethings who moan about not being able to buy in Bondi.
Your problems with government policy are due to bad policy not some generational conspiracy. There is no housing affordability problem in Sydney, we have a problem because the govt puts an average $100k of taxes and charges on each block of land and releases far too few blocks to match demand.
We had major economic instability in the 1970s and major recessions in the 80s and 90s followed by a 14 year boom. We were downsized, outsourced, delayered and the rest of it. Don’t pretend that boomers enjoyed some dream run of interrupted economic good times (that’s much truer of yers).
Done nothing since 1968? Except pay the taxes that put record numbers of people through higher education and provided a full-employment economy for them to work in between overseas jaunts. Oh yes, universal health care, compulsory superannuation (most boomers will retire with little or no super), some of the highest minimum wages in the world etc. Just terrible.
But this is ping pong and it’s pointless. Some people get on with it and others whinge about being left behind. It’s always been like that.
While many xers and yers play the whinging game, many others are getting on with it and building businesses, climbing corporate ladders, building remarkable academic and media careers on a global basis etc just as they did during the baby boomer period. Only from what I can see there are more opportunities these days and more people taking advantage of them
And here’s a reality tip for you, as Obama says ‘power never concedes’. The Man doesn’t go away, the Man gets pushed out of the way by people with the talent and guts to make it happen. And it’s happening all the time.
Oh dear… looks like more people are falling for the silly generation wars guff spewed by the media. Who exactly speaks for these generations to give them a voice? Tell me please because I’m not hearing people ‘playing the whinging game’ from any particular generation. Whinging looks like it’s quite evenly spread.
Good point itep and the silliness is highlighted by the disagreement between Sheridan and Devine about whether Obama is a boomer or an xer.
He’s not a boomer or an xer, he’s a communist.
Utter tosh. Your counter-arguments are a deft combination of ad hominem and bullshit.
Housing is as affordable now as 30 years ago? Unsubstantiated piffle. Every economic indicator there is says you’re wrong. 30-odd years ago my parents bought a three-bedroom house in inner-suburban Melbourne on one teacher’s salary. You can’t do that now, except maybe on the outer fringes. Of Walgett.
Free higher education? Don’t make me choke. Heard of HECS? Oh that’s right, they didn’t have it when you were at uni.
Compulsory superannuation, yes – that’s how Boomers conned the next generations into paying for their parents’ retirement as well as their own. As you pointed out, most Boomers are heading straight for Centrelink, which will be funded for the next 30+ years from our taxes.
Perhaps it’s poor government policy that keeps housing so expensive and all the rest. But it’s poor policy created, on the whole, by Boomers, with the completely coincidental and unintended side-effect of making Boomers a whole lot wealthier.
Of course, this is all the fault of us uppity youngsters having unrealistic expectations. We should all stop complaining and move to Walgett.
Personally I’m getting on with it. Job, mortgage, building a career and the rest. Perhaps even some time and effort for a social conscience.
But I have no patience for sanctimonious geezers who are so self-centred they can’t even own up to the consequences of the decisions they took to make themselves richer and more comfortable. Or deal with the possibility that someone else had a harder time in life. We demand equal opportunity to be victims! Boo hoo, poor us!
Substantiation: The RBA noted earlier this year: “An alternative way of looking at affordability for younger households is to consider trends in the real income that this group would have had after servicing a mortgage of a given size (Graph 6).12 The data indicate that real residual income of this group would have fallen between the early 1980s and early 1990s, but then would have increased through to 2006/07. For the 25-year period from 1982/83, expenditure on servicing a mortgage would have grown faster than income. But the real residual income available for other goods and services would nevertheless have grown, by around 0.5 per cent per annum. So the increase in housing prices has not in aggregate terms resulted in a fall in real spending on other goods.” http://www.rba.gov.au/Speeches/2008/sp_so_270308.html
The RBA also observed: “Certainly there are many well understood factors (the long economic expansion, the fall in inflation and interest rates, developments in the financial sector, etc) that have contributed to the household sector choosing to spend more money on housing.13 Indeed, the experience of the past couple of decades suggests that, for a significant part of the population, housing may have been something of a ‘superior good’, that is the type of good to which consumers devote an increasing share of their income as incomes rise. To some extent, the recent experience might also suggest that in the earlier era of high interest rates and a regulated financial system, households were unable to spend as much on housing as they might otherwise have chosen.”
Did you also read the rest of the ABS article? You quote the two paragraphs in it that vaguely support your argument, but ignore the 20 that say the exact opposite. You talk about the one statistic that could be interpreted to mean housing isn’t that much less affordable – helpfully labelled ‘an alternative’ – but fail to mention (or grasp) the seven that disprove your argument.
And they say educational standards have slipped and us young people don’t understand the fundamentals of research…
I’m bored now… I guess I don’t have the hard-working grit and determination that allows you Boomers to maintain self-justifying delusions against all evidence. Perhaps I’ll jet off on another overseas jaunt. Toodles!
It is an RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia) not an ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) document I was citing. I cited those two paragraphs because you said “Unsubstantiated piffle. Every economic indicator there is says you’re wrong.” I was just pointing out that it is not as clearcut as that. Every you see is negated by the existence of one.
As you may also know, measuring housing affordability as a simple ratio of income and housing costs and posting stress as more than 30% of gross income is considered misleading as an indicator of ’stress’ and is now only applied to the lowest 40 percent of income earners and is what is known as the 40/30 rule. I.e. it is recognised by many people that ‘mortgage stress’ is really a bit of a furphy in relation to middle and upper income earners.
Many of the paras in the RBA doc cover arguments I had already made i.e there is a ‘demand’ problem driving up housing prices close to CBD, harbours beaches etc and there is a ’supply’ problem on the fringes of the cities because of local and state government policies.
What’s more with housing prices apparently falling sharply now and interest rates coming down sharply too housing costs and affordability will probably improve dramatically.
That should cheer you up.