A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

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.