Quotulatiousness

March 23, 2012

Millennial generation not following the script

Filed under: Economics, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:57

They’ve been subjected to more “sharing/caring” and “we are the world” propaganda than any group of youngsters since the Young Pioneers and the Hitler Youth, yet they appear to be shrugging off the programming in double-quick time:

Young Amer­i­cans care less and less about the the en­vi­ron­ment, pol­i­tics, and the world around them in gen­er­al, a study has found; even the idea of seek­ing a mean­ing­ful life is out of fash­ion.

In­stead, mon­ey, im­age and fame are the idols of our time.

“Pop­u­lar views of the mil­len­ni­al genera­t­ion, born in the 1980s and 1990s, as more car­ing, com­mun­ity-oriented and pol­i­tic­ally en­gaged than pre­vi­ous genera­t­ions are largely in­cor­rect, par­tic­u­larly when com­pared to ba­by boomers and Genera­t­ion X at the same age,” said the stu­dy’s lead au­thor, Jean Twenge, a psy­chol­o­gist at San Die­go State Uni­vers­ity and au­thor of the book Genera­t­ion Me. “These da­ta show that re­cent genera­t­ions are less likely to em­brace com­mun­ity mind­ed­ness and are fo­cus­ing more on mon­ey, im­age and fame.”

[. . .]

The wish to save the en­vi­ron­ment, an ar­ea of par­tic­u­lar con­cern to mil­len­ni­als, showed some of the larg­est de­clines, with three times as many mil­len­ni­als as ba­by boomers at the same age say­ing they made no per­son­al ef­fort to help the en­vi­ron­ment. Fif­ty-one per­cent of mil­len­ni­als said they made an ef­fort to cut down on elec­tri­city use to save en­er­gy, com­pared to 68 per­cent of boomers in the 1970s.

[. . .]

In the Amer­i­can Fresh­man sur­vey, the pro­por­tion of stu­dents who said be­ing wealthy was very im­por­tant to them rose from 45 per­cent for ba­by boomers (sur­veyed be­tween 1966 and 1978) to 70 per­cent for Genera­t­ion Xers (sur­veyed be­tween 1979 and 1999) and 75 per­cent for mil­len­ni­als (sur­veyed be­tween 2000 and 2009).

The frac­tion who said it was im­por­tant to keep up to date with pol­i­tics dropped, from 50 per­cent for boomers to 39 per­cent for Genera­t­ion Xers and 35 per­cent for mil­len­ni­als. “Be­com­ing in­volved in pro­grams to clean up the en­vi­ron­ment” fell from 33 per­cent for boomers to 20 per­cent for mil­len­ni­als. “De­vel­op­ing a mean­ing­ful phi­los­o­phy of life” de­creased the most across genera­t­ions, from 73 per­cent for boomers to 45 per­cent for mil­len­ni­als.

July 29, 2011

Boomer bashing: how the idea evolved

Filed under: Economics, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

Frank Furedi looks at the evolution of the “bash the boomers” meme, and how it differs from more traditional generational conflict:

Gone are the days when the baby boomers were perceived as the personification of a relaxed but enlightened 1960s live-and-let-live lifestyle.

This cohort of people, generally defined as those born between 1945 and 1965, are globally pathologised as the source of most forms of economic and environmental distress. Constantly accused of living way beyond their means, the baby boomers are blamed for depriving the young of opportunities for a good life. They are condemned for thoughtlessly destroying the environment through their mindless pursuit of material possessions and wealth, as well as resisting change, hanging on to their power and preventing the younger generations from progressing.

[. . .]

The idea that ‘it’s all their fault’ captures the intense sense of cultivated immaturity of the parent-basher. A sentiment that is usually associated with the intellectual universe of a truculent five-year-old is now embraced in earnest by biologically mature generational warriors. Paul Begala’s Esquire article ‘The Worst Generation’ captures this sense of uncontained resentment. ‘I hate the baby boomer’, he wrote, concluding that ‘they’re the most self-centred, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandising generation in American history’.

[. . .]

The guilt-tripping of boomers is underwritten by an unusually philistine interpretation of the way society works. The 18th-century Malthusian obsessions about natural limits has been recycled as a warning to human ambition. From this standpoint, resources are fixed and the consumption of one generation reduces what’s available to the next. Accordingly, the flipside of boomer wealth is the poverty of the generations coming of age today. Catastrophic accounts of how young people have been deprived of opportunities for a comfortable life have fostered a cultural climate where the moral status of the elderly is continually questioned.

[. . .]

One of the most distinctive feature of the denunciation of the baby boomers is that it lacks any hint of a future-oriented idealism. It is principally driven by a sense of resentment against a generation that apparently had a really good time.

Instead of tackling the question of how to create a prosperous future, anti-boomers are more interested in gaining a larger slice of the wealth created in the past. Baby boomer self-indulgence pales into insignificance in comparison to the low horizons of their unambitious critics.

Never has the term ‘rebels without a cause’ had more meaning than today. At least Bazarov’s nihilism was in part motivated by the cause of ridding Russia of its feudal autocracy. Even the Lost Generation of the inter-war period were responding to a very real event that shaped their existence. Today’s anti-boomers are freed from the burden of a cause to fight for. As Tyler Durden remarked in the 1999 film Fight Club: ‘Our generation has had no Great Depression, no Great War’, before adding that ‘our depression is our lives’.

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