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Boom and Bust

Writer's picture: Kevin BerendKevin Berend

Updated: Jun 24, 2022



By the time they were in their thirties, the baby boomer generation owned approximately 21% of the nation’s wealth. Millennials today, now that same age, own just 3%.


Reading that floored me, and crystallized a nagging sense of frustration and injustice I've felt for some time but couldn’t quite place. Because we've done everything right—joined sports teams and drama clubs, gone to college, worked hard, pursued a dream. Checked all the boxes we were told would lead to success. But, coming of age in the Great Recession, Millennials, the largest generation in history, instead entered the workforce hampered by debt and lousy job prospects, often lacking health care and a clear future. We are buying homes at lower rates, getting married later, delaying the major milestones of life, even moving back in with parents and still struggling to make it.


Now, with shutdowns caused by Covid-19, we are experiencing the second major economic crisis of our young lives. Shops and restaurants are being forced to close or lay off workers, young families are juggling child care and remote learning along with making a living, compromising both, nurses and health care workers are at the breaking point, and any alleviation of those pressures by federal government seems a long way off. For those that pioneered the gig economy, what do you do when all your gigs are cancelled? It's hard not to feel like the deck has been stacked against us.


Much has been said about Millennials. Raised on irony and sarcasm, we have been called "lazy, entitled narcissists". Plenty of fretful or condescending think pieces have been published criticizing our spending habits and blaming us for everything from the disintegration of the social fabric to the demise of canned tuna. Even our reputation as SJWs is a caricature—tweeting and sharing the latest outrages and hashtags but mostly unmoved beyond the limits of our screens.


I can’t shake the feeling that we are some kind of joke. Voicing concerns about our situation is seen as just the whiny Millennials proving their whininess. Just lay off the avocados and lattes, already, and get those loans under control! Buck up! Maybe there's some truth that we're overly coddled and unprepared for adulthood, but are we forgetting who did the coddling?


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Baby boomers still hold roughly 55% of the nation’s wealth and occupy the highest strata of power and influence in all the most visible material ways: media, politics, academia, Wall Street, corporate America. They are living longer than any cohort before them and are going into retirement as the wealthiest generation on record.


Of course, boomers did not create the socioeconomic system that brought them to prominence. They benefited from a robust postwar economy that churned out jobs and children (hence the term), along with the interstate highway system, military-industrial complex, car culture, suburban sprawl, and unapologetic consumerism. As far as environmental policy, there was actually much to be applauded. A flowering environmental consciousness brought us the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, fuel efficiency standards, and marine and wildlife protected zones across the country—under a Republican administration no less! (before the Earth itself was a partisan issue) But even the radical social upheavals of the 1960s can be seen as a luxury granted by peacetime economic superiority. The rewards of the free trade gospel flowed freely.


We now live in the shadow of that era—crumbling roads, bridges, and public transit. Racial enmity boiling over. Political gridlock, with no relief in sight. Thanks to Bernie, we are all familiar with how the "1%" (over 90% of whom are over 50), have found ways to gather ever larger shares of the pie. After driving the economy into the ground, banks got bailouts while ordinary people were put on the street.


But the failure to address climate change is arguably the most glaring lapse of the boomer generation. Exxon knew in the 1970s that emissions from the burning of fossil fuels was the “most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate”. Evidence mounted. Warnings were made and ignored. Calculated disinformation campaigns were employed to mislead the public on the facts. Environmental protection is all well and good, as long as it doesn’t cost anything.


Millennials consistently rank climate change as among their highest priority issues, for good reason. By 2050, Phoenix could see 95 degree temperatures six months out of the year, with much of the south and west becoming unlivable. Crop yields may drop by up to 70%, while sea level rise, storm damage, and heat will cost billions along the Gulf coast. 2020 saw both the greatest number of named storms in a season and the most to make landfall in the U.S. More acres burned in wildfires than ever recorded. Rising seas will displace millions of people from Boston to Miami and around the globe. Where will those people go? Europe is already buckling under the weight of rapid social change brought by the influx of migrants from war-torn areas, and the line between those fleeing war and climate change is becoming more and more blurred. Once again, we’re being evicted.


Recent years have not been any more inspiring of hope. We have witnessed the retreat from the Paris Climate Accord and other international commitments, the issuance of new drilling leases on federal lands, reductions to marine protected areas and national monuments, the rollback of auto emissions standards, loosening of methane regulations and protections for migratory birds, and losses for endangered species across the board. Already we are experiencing effects experts consider to be "locked in", or irreversible, including sea level rise, stronger storms, extensive wildfires, and record temperatures. "Don't think of it as the warmest month of August in California in the last century," says atmospheric scientist Cristian Proistosescu of the University of Illinois, "think of it as one of the coolest months of August in California in the next century." That native American adage about not inheriting the Earth from our ancestors but borrowing it from our children seems apt.


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In August 2018, a fifteen-year-old girl in Sweden named Greta Thunberg had had enough. She walked out of school and began striking in front of parliament, in protest of the lack of action by global leaders on climate change. "Why should I care about my schooling when you don't care about my future?", she asked. Her "Skolstrejk för Klimatet" (or "School Strike for Climate") gained attention, leading to global Fridays for the Future school strikes. Before long she was speaking before the UN, choosing to travel to New York by sailboat rather than commercial flight. Her words were incendiary, delivered with the moral clarity of a child and the acid stare of someone far beyond those years:


"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!"


Greta belongs to the second generation raised in the climate crisis. We have been fighting this battle for so long that it has become a routine part of life, the nearly audible tick, tick, ticking in the back of our minds, reminding how little time there is left to change course. Greta is famous partly, though, because over her lifetime, virtually no progress has been made. It took the condemnation of a child to get the world’s attention for just a moment. To remember the stakes and shake us from complacency.


She also put her finger on what may be the core of the issue—that the real driver of decision making has always been the economy. Ever-rising economic output is seen as the marker of success for entire nations, indeed civilization, and worshiped akin to religion. The powers that be would have us believe that making the required investments to address climate change means sacrificing that success and prosperity. But the choice between climate and the economy has always been a false one.


We will feel the climate’s wrath even if we choose to ignore it—in fact, especially so. We crave increasing GDP, stock prices, and levels of consumption at the expense of the very life-sustaining processes of our planet. As Sir David Attenborough said, “Anyone who thinks you can have infinite growth in finite circumstances is either mad or an economist.”


Yes, there may be significant wealth transfer in the coming decades. But what good is money in an uninhabitable world? What good is a 401K or Social Security when unrest and natural disasters leave those systems in tatters? What’s the point in having an economy if there’s no way to live happily in it? It will be too late. There is no bailout for the earth. No amount of cash infusion that can bring back species and ecosystems. The beauty and tragedy is that there’s only one (okay, boomer?).


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I was once asked, “Aren’t you angry? Aren’t you upset at the state of the world my generation is leaving for yours?” The truth is, it’s taken a long time to come to terms with our predicament and have any response at all. It's all quite numbing. So not anger exactly, I don’t blame boomers. History goes according to human nature, and anyone in their shoes would have done the same. What makes me upset is the idea we are expected to adopt that climate change is just another crisis. But this is not a depression or a war or a nuclear standoff. We have inherited a world fraying at the seams and been told to make do. O well, that’s how things are. I know every generation thinks it’s the end of the world, but living here, now, this time feels different.


The philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia” for the sense of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change. He describes it as the “homesickness you have when you are still at home.” I think that sums it up well. To know that our children will know only a Great Barrier Reef dead and barren, the rainforest stomped by slash and burn, or Glacier National Park with no glaciers is to be burdened with a deep grief for the loss of irreplaceable things, a loss of something more than just the places themselves. What words are there?


More than ever, we need massive reinvestment in infrastructure, civic society, immigration reform, jobs, and sustainable energy. A Green New Deal or something like it. For too long we have been ignored by a political establishment that regards proactive governance as a pipe dream and the aspirations of younger generations as mere whims. We are tired and frustrated, and have been screaming into the void for long enough.


David Brooks writes that Millennials “have been thrust into a harsher world where it is necessary to be guarded, and sensitive to risk. They want systemic change but there is no compelling form of collective action available. Their only alternative, which is their genius, is to try to fix their lives themselves, through technology and new forms of social interaction, rather than mass movements.”


We are only now gaining enough power to sway the system. Will we do what is necessary? I don't know, but please step out of the way.


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In ecology, the laws of population dynamics describe the cycles of life and death of organisms, from bacteria to brontosauri. Using a small set of inputs, such as resource availability and population growth rate, they can predict the fates of entire communities. Often, it is a story of unrestrained exponential growth: overexploit resources, overshoot carrying capacity, deplete resources, and crash.


It may be fitting that in the end, humans too are subject to these laws. Despite our imagined self-importance and uniqueness, we are not so powerful as to circumvent those most basic physical limits. There’s a kind of solace to be found there too, that all bills eventually come due. Maybe the wisdom of our generation is to finally wake up to that fact. What choice do we have?

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Barry Eckwahl
Barry Eckwahl
18 de dez. de 2020

Well said Kevin !

Curtir

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