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Summary:
- Generational cohorts do not have agency and have been used by the wealthy to stoke generational hatred for their own interests
- Social Security and Medicare programs can be fixed through tweaks and raising the income ceiling for payroll taxes
- The shift to financialization and neoliberal policies, driven by figures like Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, has led to income and asset concentration in the hands of the wealthy
- Millennials are accumulating less wealth compared to Boomers, with the top 10% of millennials faring better due to substantial parental assistance
That is not to say that younger cohorts have not suffered in relative terms as the neoliberal con of asset price goosing has started hitting its limits. But the big winners have been the wealthy, as income and asset concentrations in the top 1% and 0.1% exploded in the neoliberal era.
Money quote (pun fully intended)
Lambert and I have inveighed repeatedly against using cute marketing categories (GenX, Millennials, Boomers) in political analysis. Generational cohorts do not have agency. Please identify a GenX party or a Millennial lobby, for starters. But that typology nevertheless proved to be very successful in stoking yet another implementation of the Jay Gould saying, “I can hire on half of the working class to kill the other half.” And as Gould intimated, the rich who were pulling the strings remained as the real threat to the common man.
Nevertheless, the moneyed have successfully stoked generational hatred as a Trojan horse for their own interests. One noteworthy example was billionaire and Soros fund manager Stan Druckenmiller. In the years shortly after the financial crisis (there was a period when unemployment among recent college grads was higher than among high-school-only job seekers), he sponsored presentations on college campuses that presented Boomers (and not other age cohorts) as leaching off the young. His talks focused on Social Security and Medicare, contending that Boomers were getting a great deal and the young would get nothing like that.
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Read the full post at Naked Capitalism.
