The Best of Times

If you look in Google Images for "Best of Times," you get some strange images.  The one at the left might have been the strangest.

I sometimes read posts about polls in which people say they think that things will be worse for the children that it was for them.  And I find those sentiments strange, because I have considered many times over the years the incredible impact technology has had just in my lifetime, and I can only think that my children will have more than I could have ever had, and their children will have more, and so on.

There are so many examples I could give, but the one that somehow always strikes me is kind of a frivolous one:  the movie business.  I suppose the thing that fascinates me about movies is that a whole industry, symbolized by Blockbuster stores, has been built up from nothing and then wiped in my lifetime.  When I was young, you watched movies either in a movie theater or when they came on TV, with commercials, and you had to watch as they were broadcast, no recording.  And movies did not come on very often, because we only had a few channels.

The first big breakthrough I remember was the VCR.  Now you could rent a movie or buy it and watch whenever you wanted.  DVDs were just a better version of the video tape, but the DVR, combined with dozens of channels, made it possible to get free shows from all over cable.  Now even DVDs from Netflix are becoming obsolete; you just get a digital download of anything you want off of cable or Netflix.  My kids will never know a world in which you can't watch movies whenever you want to.

Want a more practical example?  OK, cars.  When I was young, cars had seat belts, for the driver anyway, and the front seat passenger also, I think.  They didn't always have belts for the back seats.  And these were lap belts only, no shoulder belts.  Forget about air bags, and cars weren't built to save your life in a crash.  It used to be that you hoped to get maybe 100,000 miles out of a car; now it's more like 200,000.  And when I was younger, when you started a car, you turned the key and the engine cranked and cranked, maybe you had to give it a little gas, and you hoped it caught before it flooded.  Somehow they solved that problem; cars just start now.  And those cars drained a lot of gas.  Now engines are more efficient, and electric cars may take over the world during my boys' lifetimes.  We didn't even have rear window defoggers.  Cars have gotten better.

Apply that kind of change across dozens of industries, and life has just gotten better and easier and richer over the years.  Ebooks, iPhones, iTunes, the Internet, microwaves, flat-screen TVs, GPSs, ATMs, so much more.  Right now is the best it has ever been.  Five years from now will be better.

Defending the Baby Boomers

It is one of those things that seems to be accepted as common knowledge that something is terribly wrong with the baby boomer generation, that we are, in the words of Paul Begala, "the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation in American history."  I am not sure how one measures self-centeredness, self-absorption, or self-aggrandizement, but I have never really bought this characterization.  I think my generation has been maligned.

Just as a little background, I was born in 1957, so I fit right into the dates on the social security card pictured here, as do my siblings and their spouses, and people I knew from high school and college.  As a general rule, we went to school, got jobs, bought houses, raised kids and gave them every chance to succeed.  We have more stuff and more opportunities than our parents had, but they had more stuff and more opportunities than their parents had too, and our kids will have more than we ever did.

The quote from Paul Begala is from a column he wrote titled "The Worst Generation."  I read the column; I wondered if there was some measurement behind the prevailing caricature of baby boomers, and if his column is any indication, no there is not.  Instead, he generalizes and picks out historical events that he blames on boomers, which is sort of what I intended to do in reverse, so now I feel a little bit validated in my approach.

When I turned 18 in 1975, the economy was in a kind of malaise, with high inflation and occasional gas shortages caused by OPEC, and American companies were beginning to show their weakness versus foreign companies, especially the Japanese.  My generation did not cause these problems, but we were in the workforce when the economy turned around in the 1980s.  Baby boomers, mostly a little older than myself were at the forefront of the high-tech companies that drove the strong economy during the 1980s and 1990s.  We made our contribution.
It has also been largely during my adulthood that we have made substantial progress toward equality on many levels.  A generation before us, racism was still standard practice across the country (I know, it has not completely gone away), women were barely represented in the workforce, gays were treated like criminals.  Tolerance is still a work in progress, but baby boomers have made huge strides toward equal treatment on many fronts.

For a generation that is supposedly so selfish, our generation has given plenty to the previous generation and to the next one.  People my age have taken care of their parents when they got sick, just like generations before, not to mention all the taxes we paid supporting their Social Security and Medicare.  As for our kids, we have lavished more attention and money on them than our parents could have ever afforded.  We used to do sports a couple of days a week when I was a kid.  Our kids go to sports camp, have to buy uniforms, do fundraisers for their sports.  We get them involved in music and community service and AP classes so that their college resumes are overfilled with impressive accomplishments.  If anything, they may suffer from too much parental input and too much spending on their behalf, but we have not exactly neglected them in favor of ourselves.
And as we approach retirement, we keep hearing that we are the selfish generation that is going to bankrupt the country, because we want the government to take care of us in our old age, and we won't agree to reductions in Social Security to help balance the books.  Hmm, let's think about that.  So first, who could have guessed that all of these tens of millions of people would be retiring and taking money from the government at the same time?  I wonder, who could have known?  The answer, of course, is that pretty much everyone everywhere realized for the last 60 years that a huge wave of retirees was coming.

The logical -- or more importantly, the responsible -- approach would have been to build up a surplus in the Social Security system, then let that surplus drain down as the baby boomers used it.  And sure enough, Social Security has a big surplus, and it really is not going broke at all, and it can easily be made solvent for another fifty years with some small changes.  The problem is not the Social Security system.  The problem is that while all of that surplus was building up in Social Security, the rest of the government was borrowing it to pay for all of our deficits.  Now, it has to be paid back, and it's a big crisis because the United States has been borrowing my retirement contributions for 40 years, and now they don't have the money to pay for my retirement.  The fact is, the government has been living off the taxes the boomers have paid during their working years, and now that baby boomers are retiring, politicians are trying to find a way out of the bargain we agreed to all of this time.

I have some other suggestions for ways to balance the budget, but I will save those for another day.  But at least realize that baby boomers are not exactly asking to retire in luxury and spend the next 30 years sailing our yachts around the world.  I have read that people retiring now are the first group ever who will get less back out of Social Security than they put in, hardly what you would expect from a self-absorbed, self-indulgent group of people.  We are also the first generation to get screwed by private industry by replacing pensions with 401K's, which saved companies money and reduced their risks but have not turned out to be sufficient for most retirees (although to be fair I think only about one generation ever got widespread pensions.)  No, we are not retiring rich (certain people I know notwithstanding.)  Instead, I read all the time that people my age should just plan to keep working into their 80s (selfishly taking jobs that young people really need), and then die quickly and preferably cheaply.  Or something close to that.  We have no expectations of being pampered in our elder years.

I suspect that some clever person twenty years ago or so realized that baby boomers were going to hit Social Security age one day and decided to start a campaign to disparage them so that they could be screwed out of as many retirement benefits as possible.  I don't think there is really anything to it other than anecdotes and cherry-picked stories.  Boomers I know have plenty to be proud of.