Quote:The Baby Boomers ruined America. That sounds like a hyperbolic claim, but it’s one way to state what I found as I tried to solve a riddle. American society is going through a strange set of shifts: Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history: The longest such period ended in the Civil War. So what’s to blame for this institutional aging?
One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018. The retiree share of the population is booming, while birth rates are plummeting. When a society gets older, its politics change. Older voters have different interests than younger voters: Cuts to retiree-focused benefits are scarier, while long-term problems such as excessive student debt, climate change, and low birth rates are more easily ignored.
But it’s not just aging. In a variety of different areas, the Baby Boom generation created, advanced, or preserved policies that made American institutions less dynamic. In a recent report for the American Enterprise Institute, I looked at issues including housing, work rules, higher education, law enforcement, and public budgeting, and found a consistent pattern: The political ascendancy of the Boomers brought with it tightening control and stricter regulation, making it harder to succeed in America. This lack of dynamism largely hasn’t hurt Boomers, but the mistakes of the past are fast becoming a crisis for younger Americans.
To avoid copyright violations (and to encourage people to read the article) I offer synopses.
Synopses:
1. Zoning has made it easier to build housing for high-income people, but more difficult to build housing for the working class. This creates a near surfeit of of "McMansions", but a great shortage of affordable housing. Of course, housing will always be pricey, but the real cost of housing has never been so high in American history. This goes beyond a larger population. It often uses environmentalist language as a cause to exclude people from a modestly-good life.
I recognize the need to protect property owners from blackmail (give us $5 million, home-owners, and we will not build a smelter in your neighborhood and reduce your middle-class housing to slums). Quarter-acre lots do not have a softer impact upon the environment than close-in apartment complexes.
2. Licensing makes getting jobs with genuine opportunity in professional advancement and starting businesses more difficult. Licensing in theory keeps the incompetent out of certain activities, but it also keeps people from getting chances to develop competence in a skilled occupation. Licensing has gone far beyond the traditional licenses for physicians, attorneys, and CPA's even to short-order cooks and taxi drivers. Despite having the potential to advance, multitudes get stuck in low-skilled, dead-end jobs.
3. Escalation of educational credentialing. Just about everyone wants to see himself as part of a noble profession, and raising the educational requirements can create such an image. Such also keeps people out of jobs that they might reasonably 'grow into'. Work that people used to do with high-school diplomas (and I would be leery of hiring a high-school dropout because such indicates someone likely to be a rebel or to not be up to the job) now requires a college degree.
The disparity between incomes by people with doctoral or professional degrees and people with less than a high-school education has gone from about 3:1 in 1970 to nearly 6:1 today. The disparity between the incomes of people with doctoral degrees and 'some college' has gone from about 3:2 in 1970 to about 3:1 today, which means that people with "some college" or an associate's degree (the latter hardly a lark) is as severe as the difference between the difference between a doctoral degree and being a high-school dropout in 1970.
People with doctoral degrees are not obviously more competent than they used to be.
(from the article):
Quote: Meanwhile, even as higher education gets more expensive, the actual economic returns to a university degree are about flat. People who are more educated make more money than people with less education, but overall, most educational groups are just treading water. The social norm requiring degrees for virtually any middle-class job is one largely invented by Boomers and their parents, and enforced by those generations.
4. Incarceration. Beyond any doubt, convicted offenders, not all of them violent, have been getting harsher sentences as "put 'em away and lose the key" attitudes entrenched themselves. Incarcerated offenders become a supply of super-cheap labor for gain and profit of economic elites.
5. Public and private debt. People assume huge amounts of student loan debt just so they can be glorified clerks, doing what 'mere' high-school grads might have done in earlier years. Debt ties to efforts to stave off recessions and to government payments to retirees. Eventual consequences will be higher taxes (an anathema of the Right that accepts its chose interpretation of the vague and indefensible Laffer curve as economic orthodoxy that all must accept), increasingly-inadequate (by current standards) public services, privatization (to monopolistic gougers) or budgetary collapse that could make the 1929-1932 meltdown look enviable by contrast.
6. an aging population. Death rates for young adults have been on the rise -- suicide, the opiate epidemic, vehicle crashes, and violence.
Boomers (or perhaps only elite Boomers -- my interpretation) , this article suggests, made choices that can only hurt the young who can solve America's problems if not overwhelmed.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...ket-newtab
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
