12-08-2020, 09:03 PM
(12-08-2020, 06:06 PM)MarkDBlackwell Wrote: The youngest Boomers will retire eventually—are Gen-X ready? There are reasons to think the long-awaited, wholesale tip-over of power, from Baby Boom to Gen-X, will happen next year, in 2021.
My article, Generational tipping point: 2021, explains the historical reasoning.
This aims to be a serious, scientific article, so please critique!
I checked your link, and all I can say about the tipping point for Boomers abandoning roles in the upper echelons of business: not a moment too soon. Elite Boomers got everything on a silver platter, devoured the caviar and lobster, got drunk on the champagne, and kept the silver platter. They left everyone else with macaroni and cheese on dirty paper plates.
Although non-elite Boomers could keep their heads on straight, because the normal rules of business mandate submissive deference to bosses and customers. Elite Boomers chose to go to MBA school at which they learned that the rewards of success impressed people even more than wealth-creating activity such as starting small businesses or doing industrial labor. Those MBA grads largely shut others out of any pathway to success that would allow them to show their competence, dedication, and imagination. The created low, rigid ceilings in organizations that did not then have them. Consider the typical GI executive in a small manufacturing firm. He (the GI's allowed success only for men, in general) may have started in the mail room or on the shop floor and demonstrated that he was capable of something else... and got a chance as a supervisor or a salesman. With dedication to achievement and with overall competence he solved problems at every turn and found himself in his fifties in an executive position. He was making perhaps ten times as much as someone holding a job on the shop floor or in the mail room, but... well, ten times what such a worker got was more than adequate. What was he going to do at age fifty? Get a sports car or a yacht? Buy a mansion? About as he and his wife of similar age were celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary he had never gotten fully into the habit of conspicuous consumption that is a time-consuming and asset-devouring diversion from creating wealth. He was approaching retirement and he knew it. He was more likely to buy a whole-life insurance policy (which is one of the most reliable sources of capital for investment) than an expensive house or car.
The Boomer executive was getting his high income by age 40, and was well into a sybaritic lifestyle, which was easy enough with the gigantic salaries for a sort of executive nomenklatura responsible largely to itself so long as it maximizes profits. The secret, of course, was treating others badly.
Generation X will not be able to get away with as much.
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.