Inspired by some anti-Boomer hate speech in this Pit thread.
The Boomers have mostly had their hands at the wheel for the last 30 to 40 years and have only recently been surpassed by the millennials in voting bloc size. As they begin to retire and as millennials’ voting power forces them to be more responsible for who is in charge, I’d like to ask: is the world a better or worse place for their efforts?
I’d argue better.
Despite the headlines violence globally is down, both individual acts and by war. (See Pinker’s book on this for all the proof you could want.) Groups that previously lived in fear now more commonly do not. Life expectancy is way up. We have technology that was considered fantasy science fiction just a few decades back now as something affordable and available to most. The world is more interconnected with larger portions accepting basic precepts of rights than before. Since 1975 global income inequality and poverty has fallen dramatically.
Yes we have issues inadequately addressed. Climate change may undo lots of good and more, for example. We’ve not won the battle let alone the war on may rights issues. Trump’s one term may cause who knows how much harm? But is the world a better place for the Boomer turn at bat as they begin (assuming they start to vote more often and otherwise step up to the plate) to cede power to the millennials (willingly or not)?
I’m thinking that most of the things you talk about aren’t really the boomers’ doing. (Particularly since “boomers” are technically just the USAians.) Technology and crime, global or not, are driven by people well below boomer age.
I do think we can trace most of the american contribution to global warming to them, though. There’s that.
I was going to make a comment about how boomers have kept the world safe for decades, but I figured most would miss the joke.
As for your topic, I’d say that certainly by any measure the world is better it was in 1946 (or 1965), and the noticeable uptick has accelerated world wide since the boomers took power from the Greatest Generation™. The world is certainly a ‘better place’ today. I don’t think you can really hang global warming on the boomers, either, nor has it been all bad…much of the good things you list are attributed as much to hydrocarbon usage as the boomer generation, per se. And the technologies to perhaps wean us off of it’s use have been put in place and researched and developed to this point on the boomers watch. The fact it hasn’t been completely adopted yet has more to do with the fact that the technology just isn’t there…yet. But it will be, and perhaps sooner than later. I’m guessing before I finally shuffle off and free the world for the next generation it will be increasingly adopted.
Trump now…yeah, that’s an issue of the boomers, for sure. But he’s just one man in one country, albeit a very powerful country. And his time will come. I think on most of the downside things you listed there have been tremendous strides during our time, and while that might not be as great as you or others might like it’s been astonishing to someone born right after the 50’s ended to watch not just in the US but world wide. It’s hard to convey how different the world is today compared to how it was when I was a teen or even in my 20’s or 30’s.
Let’s see, ended a war, brought down a president, changed for the better relationships between the races and genders. I’d say OK. The biggest problem we’ve had is that we’ve never quite healed the rift between the hippies and the hardhats, between the grunts and the students. But the left made its biggest mistakes when we were young and kind of supposed to. The right has made its biggest mistakes when older and has less time to recover from them.
The world is better, but the world has been getting better fairly steadily for the last 200 years or so.
Also boomers is an American term, most of the decline in world poverty has happened because of leadership in China.
Having said that, I think politics will be better when the (white) boomers and silent generation are dead. Many of them can’t accept multiculturalism, and they’ve descended down the rabbit hole into conspiracy theories and neofascism because they can’t handle an America with muslims, immigrants, blacks and gays in it.
Also I think there is something to the argument that the boomers were the locust generation. They took up all the good jobs, gave themselves tax cuts and then ran up the deficit. Also plutocracy has become more entrenched in the last few decades, so that is a problem. There is a feeling among younger generations that we will see our taxes go up, our standards of living go down and our expenses go up to fix the damage caused by some of the boomer excesses.
All in all, yes the world got better when the boomers were alive. But the world has been fairly consistently getting better for a few centuries now (with some setbacks here and there). But the boomers and silent generation are toxic politically and I hope their time in the sun ends soon.
Crazy idea, but do you think, perhaps, that might have something to do with the US normalizing relations and setting up trade with China? Naw…I’m sure it was Mao.
I think the boomers did well building upon what we inherited from the previous generation … looks to me like the next generation is doing a fine job building on that …
Europe didn’t erupt into total warfare during the boomer generation … woot … that hasn’t happened since before Charlemagne died …
I am a boomer and I agree with Wesley Clark: “But the boomers and silent generation are toxic politically and I hope their time in the sun ends soon.”
I recall my five-year-older friends (i.e., hippies) telling me how they were going to save the environment, do the right thing, etc. Some of that happened but in my opinion we were a disappointment. The very people I listened to back then are in Congress now and all I see is partisan bickering. We need to go.
It had nothing to do with the US. It had to do with Deng Xiaoping instituting reforms in the late 1970s. Also the oldest boomers were barely 30 when this happened, so it wasn’t them doing it.
Since roughly the start of the industrial revolution. Life started slowly getting better across the board around the time of the enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Again, had nothing to do with America.
You are giving far to much credit or condemnation to different generations. The single most important thing responsible for human progress in the U.S. and around the world over the last 100+ years is electricity, and every generation has improved and broadened the utility of it.
Very well said. I’m often amazed at how people who were young in the 60s-70s squandered the potential for positive generational change. Look at today’s elderly/near elderly, and it would be a challenge to imagine a more greedy, short-sighted, judgmental group, more willing to bankrupt future generations.
I’ll cop to being America-centric here and defend that as appropriate for the period of the Boomers. The Boomer period overlapped with American hegemony. What happened here rippled across the world. Less so going forward.
First Boomer president - Clinton. And as popular as bashing the international trade agreements that his administration birthed has become, they are probably the biggest driver of most of the global positives listed in the OP, from decreasing poverty globally, to decreasing global income inequality, to less death from international conflict, to the actually quite successful export of what we consider positive American cultural ideals such as democratic principles and human rights.
Violence within our country? Well start Boomer leadership with Clinton and you get taking the wheel with murder rates having gone up over many decades, essentially having doubled since the '50s. Over the next several decades it has halved in a pretty consistent drop.
American companies created, led, and driven by Boomers, not by Xers (I see you!) or millennials, have driven the disruptive advances in technology and in how that technology gets applied, across the world.
Biggest positive impacts on health have possibly been the decrease in tobacco use, global use of immunizations, food safety, and maybe the decrease in lead exposure. The United States, under Boomer leadership, has led the way for the world there as well. Fits and starts perhaps, fighting over it, sure, but nevertheless.
Xers and millennials - the bar is set high, the challenge made. Do better than we have!
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Boomers ever done for us?
Boomers have done some amazeballs stuff and some bonehead stuff. I expect the same will be said of GenX eventually, and the Millennials in turn. Certain demographics of the population may share some common attributes, but I think humanity is sorted fairly consistently along the continuum ranging from “absolute predator” to “selfless goodiegoodie” no matter what era you look at. Predators do some awful shit, GoogideGoodies do some truly groovy shit, and the net effect is typically slightly positive.
Naw, apparently we’re just the frizzy telomeres on the chromosomes of the Boomers and Millennials. We’ll take the blame for the cancers caused by them both.
Nothing? Nothing at all? It had zero impact? :dubious:
Just a happy coincidence I’m sure. Again, it had zero impact. Man, the US could not even be here in the world and everything would be exactly the same!
