Boomer Woes

Full Disclosure

I was born in 1953, and therefore have to confess that I am a boomer, right there in the middle of the pack. There were boomers ahead of me, and boomers behind me, and absolutely everybody in my third grade class was also a boomer. Although we didn’t call ourselves that at the time. Sad to say, we were largely unaware at the time.

Nevertheless, despite this glaring fact, the following observations should be treated as being entirely free of bias, favoritism, preconceived notions, prejudices, or any inclination whatever to unfairness.

But be forewarned. It won’t seem all that even-handed unless you read all the way through to the end.

Introduction

So Kevin O’Leary from Shark Tank recently made a splash with some disparaging comments about the spending habits of some from the downstream-from-boomers generations.

The backlash to this statement represented it as just more “out-of-touch boomer lecturing,” and critics naturally pointed to all kinds of other factors that tend to feed the complaints of the younger generation—inflation, housing prices, student debt, stagnant wages, and so on. And yes, all of that is part of the mix.

And so what is the situation? Is it really a matter of the kids thinking they need their avocado toast instead of being content with PB&Js? On Wonder Bread?

And then there was this salvo.

But the eruption of anger following O’Leary’s remarks was not an oddity. Over the last few years, I have seen a steady build-up of bitterness and acrimony, aimed directly at the boomers, and it has been the kind of hostility that does not want to make any distinctions at all. Sometimes the negative assessment seems fair and hits a legitimate target, and at other times it seems to me that a generational antipathy has to be dragged in by the ears. What is behind all this?

Back of the Napkin Grok Numbers

What follows in this section is not an attempt to get down into the decimal places. This is not a granulated argument, not at all, but rather a rough approximation of the wealth terrain. Look . . . I am holding a broad brush. In other words, these are Grok numbers, with me splitting the difference on the ranges given to me by Grok. But I think the general point stands regardless, even if everything is ballpark.

The generation that fought World War 2 passed their wealth on to the boomers. What that legacy consisted of was approximately $10 trillion dollars.

The boomers, in their turn, are in the process now of handing on their legacy downstream, and what they will bequeath will be approximately 10x that amount, at about $100 trillion dollars. There was a vast explosion of wealth during the heyday of the boomers.

But the point of this comparison is not how much money each generation enjoyed during their time in the sun, but rather how much of it has been or is being passed on to the following generations. Now in one sense, “all of it” is passed on because, as the adage goes, you can’t take it with you. After a certain number of trips around the sun, all of that boomer wealth is going to be somebody else’s.

The life expectancy of the WW2 generation was 59 for men, and 66 for women. For boomers, it is about 74 for men, and 79 for women. The boomer men are living 15 years longer than their fathers did, and the women are living 13 years longer than their mothers.

It would seem as though the nub of the complaint might not be that boomers are being stingy and self-absorbed, but rather that they are not dying off quickly enough. But yearning for the death of somebody else so that you can have their stuff is not exactly a mark of altruism.

Abortion and Generational Succession

But when it comes to inheritance, timing and amounts are not the only measurement of generational selfishness—if measured biblically. After all, everybody has to die and leave their wealth to somebody. Nothing can be done about that, and in one sense, we are all resigned to it. But there are certain practices that are manifestly selfish, and which are directly related to generational issues. Chief among them would be abortion.

Now obviously, the central crime in abortion is the bloodshed simpliciter. It is simply wrong, regardless of any economic impact. But neither can we pretend that there are no economic consequences, and in the case of the United States, the impact of our abortion carnage has been really bad. It is wicked on the face of it, and then stupid on top of everything else.

The Roe decision came down in 1973, when the oldest boomers were 28, still in their child-bearing years. As middle-of-the pack boomers, Nancy and I got married in 1975, two years after Roe. The number of children aborted by boomers was 40 million, exhibiting what can only be called a radical selfishness. The number of boomer women was also right about 40 million.

This was a generational insult to Gen X, because it decreased the population of their cohort by 40 million. Instead of being around 60 million strong, Gen X would have been around 100 million. If you view human beings as nothing but a drain on resources, you think that this gave Gen X more economic breathing room. This is the false idea that people are consumers only, and not also producers. People are an incredible resource. So what this actually did was impoverish the next generation. We are born into the world with one mouth and two hands, and in a properly run nation, a nation with free markets, we would be able to produce twice as much as we consume. Those 100 million people would be 200 million hands. So the great economic travesty here is not the money the boomers have failed to pass on, because in a very short time that money will be passed on. Just wait. But the 40 million slaughtered children will never receive any of it. No life, no liberty, no pursuit of happiness.

But it not as though subsequent generations repented of this sin. There are about 32 million Gen X women, and they have been responsible for about 10 million abortions. Not as bloody as the boomers, but still really bad.

Next up were the Millennials. There are 74 million of them. Had it not been for Gen X, that could have been 84 million—168 million hands. But the 37 million Millennial women were responsible for 23 million abortions.

Now obviously, in each generation you had faithful women who would not procure an abortion, and you had women who procured more than one. More on this in the next section. But when looking at generational responsibility, the boomers averaged one abortion per woman. Gen X was better, but it was still horrendous—on average, one abortion for every three women. The Millennials represented a regression in this regard—two abortions for every three women taking a rough average.

So the problem is this: when it comes to this great generational wickedness, this great sin of abortion, not one of our generational cohorts gets to ride on a high horse about it. Each generation has sinned grievously against the next one. And the sin has not just been the murder, but also the theft.

Evil Generations and Remnants

The Scriptures most certainly allow us to speak in general terms about the moral character of generations.

This is not automatically an unwarranted generalization. Generations are moral agents. They can make decisions that are moral or immoral in nature, and they go along with things that are grossly immoral in nature. Generations are the recipients of judgment in Scripture. And so when it comes to the kind of moral assessment that Scripture would have us apply, the problem with boomers is not that they have nice houses, money in the bank, and a life expectancy that is a decade longer than their parents. That by itself is not a problem at all. The problem is the blood on their hands, all the way up to the elbow.

But this is not a charge that can be brought against them by their children and grandchildren, because the subsequent generations followed them in the same wickedness, and they have blood up the forearms.

Now when we assess generations like this, we also need to keep another biblical doctrine in mind—the doctrine of the remnant, the doctrine of those who refused to go along. The biblical antithesis is not between black and white, or boomer and Gen X, or any category like that. The antithesis is between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. It is between righteousness and unrighteousness. In biblical thinking, the divide is always ethical, and those ethics are defined by the revelation of God in Scripture.

But in identity politics, in critical theory, the ethical standard is based on the grievances of whichever group is deemed to be oppressed. If you are black, you are justified, period. If you are white, you are condemned, period. Identity politics traffics in groups, and refuses to make distinctions. Jews are Jews, period. Blacks are blacks, period. Boomers are boomers, period. And right wing identity politics simply switches the ethical evaluation made, but still traffics in all the same groups, thinking of people in clumps. The progressives will justify random stabbings, just so long as the stabber is black. The woke right blames all blacks for the stabbing, whether or not they had anything to do with it.

The biblical thinker knows that God has reserved to Himself a faithful remnant, and He has done this in each one of these generational cohorts. There are boomers who kept their robes clean . . . many did so. They fought the cultural downgrade, and they fought valiantly. They have handed that same fight on to Gen X, and to the Millennials. What will the faithful among the Gen X inherit? What will the faithful Millennials inherit?

They will have seats on the school boards of hundreds of classical Christian schools, started in the eighties. They will be responsible for all the crisis pregnancy centers started in the seventies. They will be editors and writers for publishing houses and magazines, founded in the eighties. And when the older generation hands on the baton, saying that they have fought the good fight, and that the glory of young men is their strength, the younger generation will take the baton without laughing. They know it is true. And they will turn to the task before them, part of which is preparing their children for their role in the long war.