Back when I was in high school (see bad 80’s hair above) I did the sort of work around the neighborhood that’s typical of teenagers. I mowed lawns, cleaned rain gutters, washed windows, and did a lot of general housekeeping for folks. I earned a bit of money and learned some important lessons that have served me very well in life.
As I went about my chores for various families I noticed that each generation had a radically different way of thinking about things – particularly money. The retirees from the Great Depression and World War II era were frugal as a result of their early years of deprivation and sacrifice. They paid cash for everything. They drove older less expensive cars – and had few of them. They lived in modest well maintained homes and kept everything simple. Several of them had raised five or six kids with only one bathroom in the house. When new children came along or other relatives came to live with them they put the girls in bunk beds and moved the boys down to the rumpus room in the basement. They kept abundantly stocked pantries. They salted away money for a rainy day. They were pragmatic and stoic about everything in life.
I loved these old couples and spent as much time with them as I could when I was young. It says a lot that we kept in touch for years after I left for the west coast. We continued to visit each other until, sadly, they gradually passed away. I miss them.
Baby Boomers were the second big group in the neighborhood who, at that time, were in their 30’s and 40’s. They were at a different stage of life busy building their careers and raising children. I liked them all well enough, but I never bonded with them as a young person the way I did with the older folks. They were just too busy.
They would often talk about their financial strategy. “We have a big mortgage and all that interest is deductible from our taxes. It’s like giving yourself a raise.” “Never spend your own money on big purchases. You don’t want to tie up your cash when it could be working for you in other investments.” Boomers lived in much larger homes than the older generation and they were always improving them. I watched as one young family after another put on a master bedroom suite, a family room, a home office, a guest wing, a two car garage with bonus room, an in-ground swimming pool… They always bought new cars. They took expensive vacations. And all of this was acquired on credit – often by tapping the equity in their homes.
Then, in October of 1987 the market crashed. Stock values dropped by half, real estate values sank significantly, unemployment spiked, and many of the highly leveraged Boomer families were thrown into financial turmoil. More than one of these families lost their homes to foreclosure and disappeared – moving out of state to start over again.
As I went through life I watched as another boom and bust cycle played out with the crash of October 1997 and then again in the crash of September 2008. The interesting thing to me is the way different generations interpreted these events. The older folks never adjusted their penny pinching when times were good. They reflexively saved against lean times regardless of the current abundance. Boomers never learned to restrain their enthusiasm no matter how often they screwed up. They held firm to their buy-now-pay-later ethos decade after decade. A dog doesn’t change its spots.
I’m quite certain that there are readers of this blog who remember friends and relatives of the WWII generation who were gamblers, drinkers, and spendthrifts. And I have no doubt that many Boomers have always been careful savers and planners who cut coupons and squirreled away cash for college and retirement. But the overall verdict is best viewed from a national perspective.
Wikipedia
When older folks were in control of the levers of power they left behind a solvent country. There may well have been all sorts of festering unresolved problems, but money wasn’t one of them. The moment Boomers seized power and asserted their priorities on the nation they began to dismantle the institutions and procedures of their elders. The result is massive debt and a looming economic crisis that they, as a generation, are uniquely unqualified to resolve.
As a member of Gen X (the smallest and least influential generation in American history) I’m waiting for the Millennials to take over. They’ll pick up the broken pieces and build up new institutions that will reinvigorate the country and return America to solvency. I see in them the best qualities of pragmatism, reasonable compromise, and resourcefulness reminiscent of a bygone era. They are sorely needed today. But we’ll have to wait another twenty years for them to mature and arm wrestle control from the Boomers who show no sign of wanting to let go of the reins as they squabble and flail about. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Not for nothing boomers dubbed the “Me Generation”. And they haven’t acquitted themselves well. No question the earlier generation was more frugal and forward thinking. The astounding debt increase since the 1980’s show how much prosperity was borrowed from the future; even at the time much of it had a phony tinge. As a late Boomer myself, the antics of the earlier boomers frequently irritate. And advertising has always been manipulative, why couldn’t the Boomers resist like those before or after?
Look back further and you’ll find the “Roaring 20s” mindset, which is like the Boomer mindset you describe, but on amphetamines. (Often literally.) That led to one *hell* of a crash. We honestly won’t see a crash quite so severe this time because the partying this time was *never* as extreme it was in the 1920s.
Being obstensibly from GenX I love to rag on boomers, but at my core I don’t think it is a generational “kids these days” thing, and is 90 percent blame the victims BS. I believe that there are political and economic dynamics that push the zeitgeist this way and that, almost like an oscillating pendulum. What I see as different through the time frame the author is looking at is the defeat of any notion of collective action and decision making in favor of individual freemarket enthusiasm and the conception of government as bankrupt of utility. Also it is not as if the baby boom created the consumer society into which they were born, there is and was a great deal of selling and psychological manipulation that surely pushes people to behave the way they do.
What was the crash of 97?
That picture belongs at the top of the blog as your icon. It’s fantastic. Preppy, meet mullet!
I also wonder if the specific Boomer behaviors- huge cars, huge houses, in general a taste for space- reflect childhoods in those bunk beds or fighting for space in the back seat of the car. (They’ll regret all that in ten years when they can’t drive and badly built tract mansions are unsaleable). In which case, a lot of people born after the 1970s are rebelling against the specific boring suburban gigantism of their childhoods and seeking a physical scale that has 1950/60s walkability, but with fewer people per square foot. I sure remember how boring it was to walk for half an hour through cul-de-sacs to get to, um, a McDonalds. That’s probably as unpleasant a memory for me as fighting over a bathroom every morning was for a lot of Boomers.
My boomer dad somehow inherited a Depression-era mindset. His idea of good time was going to the dump and finding some old lawn mower he could fix. As a teenager, I wasn’t too thrilled with hand me downs while my friends’ had all the goodies. But reality came home to roost and a lot of my parents’ friends ended up in trouble in 90s. Meanwhile, my parents quietly sold their modest (mortgage-free since the 80s) California home for a mint and retired comfortably in Oregon.
On the other hand, a lot of my Gen X siblings and friends discovered the credit card lifestyle and ended up in trouble. I got in on the action with some unnecessary student loans, but the painful repayment of those put me straight. When I actually had a career sufficient to buy a house, I seriously under bought compared to what I was qualified for.
But all this is anecdotal. We know our grandparents were thrifty, but I’m not sure if there’s some actual data about Boomer, Gen X and Gen Y and their relation to debt relative to their stage in life. Seems like the credit card lifestyle cuts across all those generations.
I really dislike generalizations of enormous groups of people, and generational breakdowns especially so. After all, how generations are defined is not scientific in the least, and you can find GenX age ranges that go anywhere from 12 to 18 years depending on the source. Also, the definitions tend to always reveal the bias of the particular author. Just one quick example – GenX is always characterized as a tiny group of people, but if you look at actual census numbers you’ll find there are as many people today in their 40’s as in their 20’s. And, that over any 10 year period in the 60 years, the number of live births has never varied by more than 10%.
That all aside…. your larger narrative is something I tend to agree with. I’d simply characterize it as – this is what happens when a society gets wealthy very quickly. The first group creates the wealth, the second group carries some forward but risks it, and the 3rd spends it all. It seems like a natural cycle of human beings – we get a lot of money and power, and then we proceed to destroy that which put us there to begin with. Greed, gluttony, laziness – call it whatever you like. The US for some time has clearly been in the “let’s have a big party and spend it all” phase, and the big wake-up call was 2008. Whether we can course-correct remains to be seen, but I do think blogs like yours and others that are popping up make me encouraged.