A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

Feelings would be the great enabler, allowing Boomers to undermine the whole edifice of fact and reason in favor of personal truth, expedient and final. Henceforth, if the science of climate change commanded reduced consumption or other sacrifices incompatible with sociopathic desires, it would be denied. If basic accounting held radical and permanent tax cuts entailed a corresponding reduction in services Boomers enjoyed, Boomers would create a parallel reality furnished with a more convenient set of books. The Boomers were the first modern generation to harbor really negative feelings about reality and science, and their success in undermining these goods has been tremendous. And by reposing ultimate truth solely in feelings’ subjective dominion, the Boomers were able to discount and dismiss the entire concept of expertise, scientific consensus, and elite opinion, previously a source of restraint on impulse gratification. For the Boomer, la vérité, c’est moi.

And so today, many American Catholics believe and behave in ways utterly contrary to official teaching; for example, 40 percent believe that abortion is acceptable (emphatically not, per Humanae Vitae), many believe that despoiling the environment is dandy (contra Laudato Si’), that divorce is acceptable, etc. American Catholics appear to operate under the impression that Francis is running some sort of Berkeley-in-the-Borgo, sanctioning whatever license one is personally disposed to.

The connection between lucre and salvation, after the long hiatus imposed by Martin Luther, reappeared in the reptilian form of Creflo Dollar and other evangelists of the “prosperity gospel,” which took the metaphor of Malachi 3:10 and made it literal. Tithe a tenth of earnings, and God would “pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it,” a (tax-exempt) rate of return to which Goldman Sachs can only aspire.40 This new form of worship, genuflecting to God-as-vending-machine, was all the salvation with none of the guilt, a doctrine of consumption instead of charity, individually tailored to the preexisting political beliefs of the congregation. It was perfect for Boomers (and in the case of the Bakkers and Dollar, peddled by Boomers).

Regardless of the school, every variety of neoliberalism depends upon key and problematic assumptions: that individuals are rational, prudent, and informed, and that they therefore can be relied upon to meet their own needs. Most economic theories rely on these assumptions, but few to the degree that neoliberalism does. However, a large body of work, especially by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, shows that humans are not wholly rational agents, that we are susceptible to numerous cognitive biases that drive our thinking away from the rational idea. These biases lurk in normal people, but sociopaths operate at even greater remove from the rational ideal, prey to needs for immediate gratification, fond of risk, and unable to plan for the future. Neoliberalism requires Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill’s homo economicus, the rational individual optimizing among his economic choices, but at best gets flawed homo sapiens, and from the 1970s on, must content itself with the Boomers’ homo sociopathicus. The results have not been good.

Carter didn’t fully understand the deep changes to the American demographic the Boomers had wrought, nor did he count on the emergence as a serious political figure of Ronald Reagan, the actor whose sidekick Bubbles the Chimp had been replaced by Art Laffer and his Magic Curve. Reagan (or, at least, the public’s version of him) was tailor-made for the sociopathic electorate. Never again would the Boomers be told to save, or adjust the thermostat, or define themselves other than by their material possessions, to work on their families, to trust a meddlesome government, to abandon the pursuit of unrestrained individualism, or to undertake an “all-out effort” of any kind. All problems would be resolved by neoliberalism, for once the decks had been cleared of encumbering regulation and the human bilge discharged from the holds of the welfare state, things would take care of themselves: growth, jobs, inflation, consumption, all of it.

Social Security is a policy defined explicitly by the age at which benefits are paid, and therefore for the purposes of uniting the Boomers, the only thing that matters is that Social Security holds together long enough to pay off the majority of the generation. The median Boomer was born in 1952, and for those alive today, they can expect to live to roughly eighty—i.e., until 2032. The Social Security Trust Fund is expected to be exhausted between 2030 and 2037, with 2034 being the frequently forecasted date of depletion.

All three full peacetime government shutdowns in American history happened during Boomer Congressional control, and each featured taxes and related budgetary matters as main events.

Because interest rates remain low, the debt crisis probably will not emerge until the Boomers are near their ends. Boomers have no personal incentive to address debt and have shown no appetite for doing so. The failure to do anything about the debt (other than add to it) amounts, therefore, to a declaration of generational bankruptcy, financial and moral, with costs transferred to subsequent generations.

The “notional” size of credit derivatives is larger than world GDP, and while most of these positions are netted against each other and others are unlikely to produce a total loss, there’s clearly a significant mismatch. If you ensure a Camry at the value of a Rolls Royce, are you really buying insurance or are you betting that the car gets stolen before your next payment to GEICO is due? If GEICO wrote you that policy, would it be an insurance company or something closer to a speculator?

To make the most of RN, other laws had to be dismantled, like the Glass-Steagall Act (GS). Passed as part of the New Deal, GS restricted banks from engaging in riskier (if potentially more lucrative) activities that were unrelated to their core business. The Federal Reserve opened some questionable loopholes to GS in the 1980s, but the law remained on the books. By 1998—about four years after the government wound up the last of the S&Ls—Citicorp merged with Travelers Insurance to form Citigroup. The combination would have violated what remained of GS, and unless that law were repealed, Citi would have to divest many assets it had just acquired, making the transaction costly and pointless. However, Citi’s CEO was confident the Boomer neoliberal establishment would see the light. It did. By 1999, thanks to intense lobbying of Gingrich, Clinton, et al., the law was officially buried, and the head of Citi sported a trophy lauding himself as the “Shatterer of Glass-Steagall” (hopefully not a conscious invocation of Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita during the first A-bomb tests).

Any one bailout, tax cut, or similar would have been fine; indeed, orthodox. But it was not “just one”; the crisis was not so much acute as it is ongoing, beginning with the S&L disaster of the mid-1980s and continuing with the LTCM emergency of 1998, the dot-com crash of 2000, and the housing and financial panics of 2008. And yet, over years of Boomer control the response has always been the same: more deregulation, more spending, lower taxes, and no adequate structural reform during the windows of opportunity between scandals.

Valuation changes have generational consequences. Stocks were relatively cheap in the early 1980s, when median Boomers were thirty-somethings buying stocks (cyclically adjusted P/E ratios ran 9 to 12). Stocks are now expensive, as the median Boomer turns sixty-five and begins liquidating. For each successful seller there must, of course, be a buyer, and domestically, the natural buyers are the young. The generational effect is that the Boomers bought low and sold high thanks to accommodating public and private actors (which they controlled). Should P/E ratios revert to historical norms, the generational transfer will be fully realized. Reversion will make it vastly harder for the young to build retirement savings, as any return to normal valuations will create losses in their existing portfolios, putting young savers even further behind.

Without reform, no one—not even the trustees of the systems themselves—believes that scheduled benefits programs can be maintained much beyond 2034–2037, i.e., just as the median Boomers die off. In the meantime, older Boomers have begun collecting benefits and the entire generation will be on the dole by 2028–2034, at which point it will be infeasible to cut Boomers’ benefits. The Boomers’ OAB maneuvers are as well-timed as they are deliberate. The result is that every generation born after the Boomers will bear disproportionate costs, while most of the Boomers and their parents harvest disproportionate gains. There is still time to rescue the system and the United States has the means to do it, but we only have about a decade before the choices become very painful.

Therefore, the essential task is to convince younger people to continue supporting their elders while presenting a subsidy as the earned return of enforced savings. Accordingly, all OABs have been subject to sustained campaigns of deceit and misinformation, from all political corners—the Right, which claims government programs are bankrupt (not true, yet); the Left, which claims programs are equitable (not in generational terms); and various interest groups espousing all manner of self-interested fixes like privatization. The unifying theme, however, has been to keep the system going at minimal present cost until the Boomers die.

In theory, a sixty-five-year-old couple retiring in the 2030s—i.e., the first of the post-Boomer cohorts—will receive Social Security and Medicare (SSM) benefits at a ratio of 1.62:1, basically the same payout as the middle Boomers. However, that’s only while the Trust Funds have a positive balance, which of course, the various Trustees admit they will not by the 2030s. When the Funds run out, Social Security benefits will automatically fall 16–27 percent; it’s also possible for Medicare to experience a version of this.34 Automatic reductions would reduce the payout 1.25:1 or so. For average workers born after 1975, the ratio will probably be significantly worse than that. Benefits will be cut and payroll taxes increased, driving realistic payout ratios down toward 1:1 or less.

In 1996, Clinton succeeded in replacing AFDC with something much less generous. (Therefore, when Boomers argue that Social Security is “untouchable” and an inviolable social bond, they forget their own record.) Neoliberal magic promised Clinton’s reform would induce the slothful masses to get jobs—though of course many were genuinely unable for reasons of disability, lack of education, and, after 2001 and 2008, poor job markets. Two senior Clinton officials resigned in protest. A major gutting of benefits, therefore, happened under the first Boomer president, a Democrat.

The Boomers had more than enough tailwind and time to prepare for retirement. They chose not to, and they have not been honest with themselves or with the population they govern. While Boomers retain power, they will do their utmost to ensure that the consequences of their improvidence are borne by anyone other than those really responsible. And so the Boomers will leave us with a titanic entitlements crisis. It is not the only existential crisis to unfold under the Boomers.

In 1983, the Commission produced A Nation at Risk, a remarkable document that offered a candid assessment of American secondary education and provided wholly sensible ideas for reform. Quite a bit of ANAR remains depressingly current—if you strip out the dates, parts could have been written yesterday. That is the core of ANAR’s present relevance: more than three decades later, most of it a period of almost complete Boomer power, the problems remain the same while many of ANAR’s recommendations languish ignored and untried. It was not that Boomers did not know what to do, it was that they did not do it.

One notable perversity of Boomer justice is the creation of a police state by Leftists of the very same generation so heavily associated with protesting the “pigs” during the Vietnam War, the 1968 Democratic Convention, and so on, their supposedly libertarian cogenerationalists, and even small-state Rightists.

The Brennan Center noted that an “aging population” contributed somewhat to the decline in crime. Young people historically have a greater propensity to commit crime, but the arrival of the very large Millennial generation prompted no crime wave, nor was there anything comparable before the 1960s. The Boomers may be more entangled than anyone realized. After all, something changed from 1967 to 1991, and we will pay the price for decades to come. Alas, the Boomer decades have left the country ill equipped to pay for anything, including a spectacularly ill-advised prison state.

economic inequality has vastly expanded since the 1980s, with money flowing to the top segment and almost nowhere else. It is, in substantial part, a Boomer phenomenon, because while inequality has risen in other countries, in no other advanced economy has the shift been quite as pronounced as in the United States, with the limited exceptions of our cultural cousins in Canada and Britain.

Inequality is a consequence of a capitalist system for which there is no replacement, as the utter failures of North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and the Soviet Union showed (many of which proved that “communist” regimes also had extreme inequality).

Although older households are usually wealthier than younger ones for obvious reasons, the gaps between younger and older, Boomers and non-Boomers, grew. In 1989, fifty-to sixty-four-year-olds (non-Boomers) were ~1.7 times wealthier than thirty-five-to forty-nine-year-olds (Boomers). By 2013, Boomers were the fifty-to sixty-five-year-olds, and they were ~2.5 times wealthier than the new set of thirty-five-to forty-nine-year-olds (almost all of whom were non-Boomers). And that calculation of wealth does not include Social Security or pensions, which probably drag the entire Boomer cohort into positive territory; everyone else did and probably will do worse.8 The Boomers’ extraction of wealth from other generations helps explain why the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranked the United States dead last among peers in a 2013 survey of “intergenerational equity.”9 The United States, an “outlier” among developed nations, had an “exceedingly high” rate of child poverty (21 percent), compared to Northern Europe (4–7 percent). Achieving lower rates of senior poverty at the expense of the young, present and future, has been a choice. Per the OECD, US spending on the old outpaces spending on the young by almost 5:1. The ratio will only get worse as more Boomers retire and absorb benefits, a process that will continue as Boomers join entitlements rolls and remain there until the last Boomers die out after 2050.

Over a single (sociopathic) individual’s lifespan, an optimum strategy might be to oppose immigration and trade while young and vulnerable to displacement, flip to support in middle age once union rules, tenure, and capital provided some buffer, at that point relying on the government to ensure against the diminishing period of risk between tariff-free binges at Costco and the collection of Social Security. For someone born circa 1950, the 1980s might have therefore been premature for unrestrained free trade; perhaps better to “Buy American!” and support a Republican waging a trade campaign against Japan (as Reagan did). The arrival of the 1990s and middle-aged security might have been a chance to reverse those positions in favor of maximum consumption without any worry of personal replacement (and indeed, this was when NAFTA passed with bipartisan support and when a major wave of illegal immigration occurred). By 2016, with Social Security kicking in and a transfer of spending from foreign goods to domestic services (provided for by millions of illegal immigrants already emplaced), one might have been free to indulge in whatever view aligned with the prejudices of the moment. And this was, of course, basically what happened: heavy-handed statism under Reagan, liberalization starting with Clinton and perhaps ending after Obama, and a certain renewed tolerance among those older, on the dole, or in possession of large portfolios, of nativism and monopoly power (more on the l...

The rise of firms with monopoly power and their ability to generate profits without the usual sorts of investments may also explain why the S&P 500 has experienced better profit growth than revenue growth over long periods (notably, after 2008). It’s not that these firms are growing so much as they are making easy profits, cutting costs, and buying back stock with the proceeds (which boosts earnings per share without increasing the intrinsic value of the business).23 Market power permits these easier options instead of the harder work of innovation.

The Boomers inherited some of the lightest intergenerational burdens in American history and will leave some of the greatest. In doing so, the Boomers have authored one of the greatest injustices of a modern nation (mostly) at peace. It’s an injustice that is not as overt or violent as the cruelties based on categories of race, gender, or sexuality. And unlike conventional categories of oppression—which were based on minority status (with the exception of women, a minority that is in population terms, a majority)—intergenerational injustice affects not only most Americans now living, but all those yet to be born. The various explanations, excuses, motivations, and contexts for this catastrophe have already been raised and disposed of in earlier chapters; all that matters here is that the intergenerational injustice created by the Boomers, in full service of themselves, by itself moots any idea of Boomer goodness.

It is very hard for one generation to engage in the “pursuit of happiness” if it is busy paying the bill for another generation’s sociopathic pursuit of the same. Worse, it can be hard to even participate in democracy at all. If a younger citizen, saddled with educational debt, paying taxes to service obligations taken out by prior generations, working a crummy and inflexible job, cannot take time off to vote, then his vote has been rendered nugatory. Economic injustice is a more roundabout way of disenfranchising people than the Jim Crow laws of old, though it has its own considerable power.

Under the Boomers, Right and Left, adjectives and qualifiers have started to return, and the moral arc has begun to reverse. Felons had long faced voting restrictions, but these restrictions were of limited numerical impact until the Boomer justice system started mass-producing millions of felons, starting with Bill Clinton. If poll and literacy taxes were out, proxies like voter ID laws could be employed, and have now become something of a vogue with Boomer legislators. You still have to be able to read and to cough up money to get, say, a driver’s license, though since these filters are applied at the DMV instead of at the voting booth, they don’t count as poll taxes or literacy tests. To take another example, many states have no explicit provisions that require employers to provide paid leave to vote, so a stagnating economy also serves as a filter, one that can favor older people, who are either retired or are senior enough to have flexible jobs.

Meanwhile, the once minor category of people disenfranchised by felony records has become a major one, swollen by the huge rise in Boomer felony prosecutions. These ex-felons tend to be substantially younger and less white than the Boomers, and even if the intent of three-strikes laws was not to adjust the voting balance, that was its effect. Recently, Boomer Democrats have started to let small numbers of felons vote, a ceremony of minor consequence except when it isn’t—as with the suspicious concurrence of such reforms during close elections, with Virginia’s governor in 2016 performing a recent act of decency-cum-self-service by allowing up to 200,000 felons to vote.13 (Virginia can be a swing state, and its governor had ties to the Clintons and probably some reasonable beliefs about how his new voters might cast their ballots.)

Lest this seem merely academic, the corrosive money politics of the Boomer era have become so entrenched and pervasive that the Supreme Court now seems unable to even define corruption. During an appeal by Virginia’s ex-governor (Boomer Bob McDonnell) in a trinkets-for-favors case, the defense boiled down to this: behavior of McDonnell’s sort had become so widespread—that Boomer favorite, “everybody does it”—that the Court should no longer find these sorts of transactions corrupting. So what if McDonnell (who had campaigned on a promise to convene an ethics panel and then wisely dropped the issue) had received vacations, the loan of a Ferrari, or had a $15,000 catering bill picked up by a donor open to the occasional kindness (wholly nonreciprocal, of course)?19 After all, McDonnell had not issued any legislation with a receipt for “services rendered” in lieu of a signing statement. Rather surprisingly, Justices of various stripes seemed to agree with McDonnell during oral argument and eventually, and unanimously, vacated the conviction. It’s hard to see how a generation can maintain its moral credentials when it has created a political culture so distorted that no member of the nation’s highest court can distinguish between bribery and business as usual. Who is bribing whom and why are questions that, by this point, have obvious answers.

With even the youngest Boomers now past menopause, that generation can indulge in God-fearing regulations that will have no impact on them or, if liberal, can save political capital for more Boomer-specific challenges.† (Roe/Casey were on the ballot in 2016; a vote for Trump was tantamount to a vote against Roe. Boomer women seemed not to care.) Thus, the accelerating closure of abortion clinics, the renewed drama over anything relating to fetal tissue, sex ed, evolution, and other matters that were and/or should have been settled long ago.

Finally, on the international stage, the consumer-driven, neoliberal Boomer culture has unleashed vast environmental and social problems, and just because some of these manifest offshore does not mean they vanish from the moral equation. The sociopathic society of consumption depends heavily on goods turned out by dismal sweatshops (e.g., Boomer Kathie Lee’s/Wal-Mart’s Dickensian workshops, Boomers Steve Jobs’/Tim Cook’s subcontracted factories, so depressing that they feature suicide nets to prevent employees from leaping to their deaths).23 Asking other countries to improve their labor conditions would not only be ethical, it would improve America’s competitive position. The only thing Boomers really ask for now, however, is that their purchases be cheap and the moral quandaries offshored. As for pollution, geographic felicity will make America one of the last countries physically affected by global warming. Countries like Vietnam, for which liberal Boomers had affected so much sympathy in the Sixties, will be inundated by the consequences of Boomer energy policy. (Henry Kissinger was right: Consumer capitalism could defeat Hanoi.) By then, of course, the Boomers will be in their expensive, environmentally unsound caskets, manufactured by funeral oligopolist Hillenbrand. At least Hillenbrand is an American company featuring “predictabl[ly] strong cash flows”; it’s even, as Wall Street would put it, “acylical.”24 The next time someone tells you that America makes nothing,...

As went the ADA, so went health care generally, a landscape of mixed outcomes and motivations. Medicare Part D, as previously seen, was a huge subsidy, to the old and to the drug companies. Because there is no long-term plan to finance Part D, it is a temporary gift to the Boomers and a permanent liability to everyone else. It is a liability made larger by the Boomers’ lack of antitrust enforcement, which permitted huge consolidation in drug, insurance, and hospital companies.

the generation that pledged “not another Vietnam” has found itself with several. Chief among the Boomer military fiascos are the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there were others, active and otherwise, usually with murky motivations. Compare Bill Clinton’s tardy response to the human rights crisis in the Balkans to the swiftness of his missile attacks on Sudan, conveniently coincident with the Lewinsky investigation.37 Consider the debacle in Libya under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, partially disowned even by her own boss, however elliptically, in an interview with The Atlantic and more candidly by Vice President Biden elsewhere.38 Peruse the entirety of the foreign policy under Boomer neocons (Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condoleezza Rice chief among them), which established overt regime change as part of the national mission, against which the covert expeditions of the CIA in the midcentury in Central America and Iran seem downright limited and gentlemanly.

At best, Boomers failed to maintain the pace of gains prevailing before 1970. At worst, Boomers have begun to actively thwart progress. For those who believe these moral failures come purely courtesy of the Republican Party, and not the Boomers generally, there are two counterpoints: (1) Boomers overall, especially younger Boomers, are net Republican (Chapter 7); and (2) many rights lapses have been enthusiastically bipartisan, like the prison legislation of the 1990s.

Remediating the sociopathic Superfund site of Boomer America will be expensive. In money alone, the project will require $8.65 trillion soon and over $1 trillion in additional annual investment. Given the past chapters, the size of the bill will not come as complete shock. What may be surprising is that the United States can afford all of it.

The Bill Infrastructure Near-Term Costs: $3.6 trillion Ongoing Additional Costs: $100 billion Pensions Near-Term Costs: $1 trillion Ongoing Additional Costs: $200 billion Military Near-Term Costs: $800 billion Ongoing Additional Costs: $100 billion Entitlements/Health Care Near-Term Costs: $750 billion Ongoing Additional Costs: $200 billion Climate Near-Term Costs: $1 trillion Ongoing Additional Costs: $150 billion Education/R&D Near-Term Costs: $1.5 trillion Ongoing Additional Costs: $250 billion Extra interest Near-Term Costs: — Ongoing Additional Costs: $170 billion (minimum) Total Near-Term Costs: $8.65 trillion Ongoing Additional Costs: $1.17 trillion Note: “Near-term” means the next few years, a window that reflects both the cheapest time to remediate and also the period in which part of the sum can be collected from the Boomers; it is for those reasons more front-loaded than it could otherwise be. “Ongoing” simply means the additional, unbudgeted expense over the next thirty or so years, at which point certain items like education, pensions, and climate should be in good enough shape that they can be maintained fairly cheaply and we can finally begin repaying part of the national debt.

What could work is an investment program, much of it administered by the state, initially funded by debt and ultimately paid for by moderate tax increases on most Americans. After years of neoliberal conditioning, such a program may seem irretrievably Leftist, fundamentally un-American, or antithetical to growth; none of these descriptions are warranted. All of these strategies have been pursued before, often quite successfully, and by both parties. Using tax revenues to support even the most expensive and state-centered programs, e.g., infrastructure and defense, would not strike a 1950s Republican like Dwight Eisenhower as creeping socialism, for the simple reason that he did so himself. Doubtless, some of this book’s proposals are to the notional Left of Obama and Clinton; then again, those politicians offered policies that frequently lay to the Right of Nixon, except in certain matters of civil rights. It’s all a matter of perspective, and that perspective should be supplied by data and social consensus, not the idiosyncratic worldview of the shrinking Boomer electorate.

Distinguishing between investment and consumption is a subject treated at length in policy literature and worthy of considerable pondering by bureaucrats, but no voter has time or opportunity to do the same. When bond issuances arrive on the ballot, the options are “yes” and “no.” To resolve that binary in the three minutes allotted in the voting booth, a rule of thumb helps: if a project does not provide benefits for at least as long as the term of the associated debt, that project should be viewed with (nondispositive) suspicion. Projects with fleeting and unquantifiable benefits are likely to be disguised consumption. It should also (though it hasn’t, for thirty-odd years) go without saying that total ascertainable benefits should exceed total costs.* These are not rules to be applied with unthinking narrowness.

Better the government address these problems now, before crushing debt derails younger lives prematurely and the costs arrive, compounded, via the back doors of welfare and other programs. Student debt is just one example of the flexibility permitted by the currently low costs of government borrowing.

In legal terms, what the Boomers did to the country was knowing and voluntary, sometimes reckless but often intentional, and they profited from their actions. This is what the law requires before ordering restitution. While not all of the Boomers directly participated, almost all benefited; they are, as the law would have it, jointly and severally liable. Traditionally, it’s up to group defendants to sort out who should pay what, but in this case the analysis simply collapses to a question of who can pay at all. And given the size of the claim, essentially every Boomer who can pay should. Then again, given the sum involved, so must we all. That is the nature of society, sociopaths be damned.