In the next year or so, older workers hanging on will make things worse. Retirement waves usually smooth recessions, as somethings quit, start spending pensions and savings, and make room for younger workers. But once the downturn is done, the presence of older workers could be a positive. When more people work, more people spend freely, and that creates jobs.
For example, women entering the workforce in the s and '70s didn't cause permanently higher unemployment. There were positive offsets instead: demand for child-care workers took off, the prepared-foods industry boomed.
And unemployment rates in the following decades hit new lows. What's more, as jobs in traditional corporate America filled up, more people struck out on their own. New companies were formed. New industries popped up. And that was something the boomers did. They were the generation that first decided everybody needs to go to college, and college is something not for a minority of the population, but for everybody.
Why not Newt Gingrich or someone like Rush Limbaugh? I did have some conservatives on my short list. But eventually I decided that while not every boomer is progressive, the boomer legacy is a progressive one. I ran into the same difficulty in trying to choose a faith leader, because religion is important to me and to people in general and society.
Everybody loves his show about politics, The West Wing , even though politics is a subject Sorkin knows nothing about, by his own admission. As he told every interviewer when The West Wing was on the air, he was a musical theater major. Politics is not his field. But when he tried making shows about the television industry, which is a subject he does know and care deeply about, everybody hated them. The idealism of Studio 60 was real. The idealism of The West Wing was fake. His boomer audience preferred the fake idealism.
It also suggests some of the ways that boomer idealism, more broadly, is often just a pose. I guess after all that boomer hate, we have to say something about millennials. There were early readers of this manuscript whose feedback was that for a book about how terrible the boomers are, you sure seem to spend a lot of time bashing millennials.
And I guess my response to that is that millennials are the children of the boomers. To be fair, millennials inherited the mess boomers left behind. Millennials are the way we are because of boomers, and the world we inherited is broken because of what the boomers did, but at a certain point you have to stop blaming your parents and also stop blaming yourself, and just say, where do we go from here? The boomers were dealt an easy hand, millennials were dealt a difficult hand.
Now what? So we agree that millennials are still largely stuck in the world boomers created — the same language, the same ideas with slight modifications , the same paradigms, the same art. Do you see any potential for breaking out of this cultural morass? They are the last people with any memory, any foot in the pre-boomer world.
The boomers, by clogging up the career pipeline, have refused to get off the stage and give Gen X its moment. So even though Gen X is aging now, we still have not yet seen all that they can do. We have not seen a world run by Gen X-ers. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today to help us keep our work free for all.
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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Millennials are stuck in the world boomers built. Silvia Fabela, 35, who lives in Washington D.
The median age of workers at labor union offices is In November, While some of those were returning to the workforce after hanging it up, many simply have put off retirement, says Susan Weinstock, vice president of financial resiliency for AARP, a nonprofit that lobbies for the interests of middle-aged and elderly people. More than half of all U. Many saw their k investments hammered by the Great Recession of or had to take lower-paying jobs after getting laid off.
Marc LeVine, 63, of Freehold, New Jersey, depleted his savings and k accounts when sales at his staffing business plummeted during the recession. Companies such as Brooks Brothers value long-serving employees and are accommodating them with flexible schedules as they struggle to find qualified job candidates. They listen better. Such technology includes Slack, the work collaboration tool, artificial intelligence and accounting software, says Ian Siegel, CEO of ZipRecruiter, a top job site.
A study by Upwork, the online freelancing platform, found that millennial and Gen Z managers are more than twice as likely as boomers to invest in technology to support a remote workforce. Some experts are skeptical that boomers are blocking the ascent of millennials. Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist of Glassdoor, says younger workers may be stymied by boomers at their offices but can find opportunities at other firms.
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