Wrong. It's only "disproportionate" because that cohort actually votes. The only reason that group has more power than any other group is that 20-29 year olds don't vote. People in their 60's do.
Captains of business, finance, and education make a lot of important decisions and use money to influence the political process through lobbying and litigation. As corporations grow in power, gaining more rights and representation, so does this channel of political influence, which is controlled almost exclusively by an older cohort.
The article calls this out in detail: casino interests played a huge role in destroying Sydney's nightlife in order to funnel drinkers to the casino bars that were exempt from shutdown laws.
Notable exceptions would be Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Evan Spiegel. But they are just that: exceptions. And I wouldn't exactly consider any of them role models or champions for a younger generation.
So the people who'd argue for change can't afford to live on the wages provided, leaving only the people with a decent amount of money in the bank (and who usually trend towards having more conservative or authoritarian views). It might also be why journalism isn't particularly diverse in terms of who works in the field (despite what some of them like arguing about), because non minority candidates tend to have the support networks to fall back on to continue working in the field.
If there's a predominance of older people at the higher levels in the media world on the other hand, I suspect it's because getting rich in this industry was a lot easier before the internet was a big thing. Most of these people started when anyone wanting visibility had to go through the old media gatekeepers...
Compare this to 60+, who are probably often retired or semi-retired, or working a job at a higher level where they've earned some form of paid time off, or are financially stable enough to just take the day off without pay, etc. They have no kids at home to take care of. They can much more easily just head over to the polls that day, without having to make extensive arrangements in advance.
*And no, this isn't universal, just general trends. Yes, some young folk have professional positions with paid time off, some don't work. Likewise, some older folk are stuck working crappy low end jobs to make ends meet. But when we're talking percentages, I'm rather confident that the older generation is more likely to be able to go out and vote on one particular day in November.
Honestly, voting gets more credit than it deserves. I don't think it's 100% corrupt at the booths, but the candidates that are allowed to compete are vetted by the elites.
Interestingly enough, both Sanders and Trump have snubbed the major political systems, but neither of them are really that much of a threat to the establishment.
Those that are truly feared (e.g. MLK Jr, Malcolm X, perhaps JFK) are not 'allowed' to take part in the game.
Wrong too, I'm afraid. In lots of Western countries the average age of the population has rose as high as 40 year old (in contrast with older values of even less than 30). So it's not always that 'young people don't vote', it's also there are less of them too.
Just because there happen to be more old people, and they tend to vote more conservatively, does not mean that it's "disproportionate" when they actually vote and influence policy. If all the baby boomers died tomorrow nobody would bemoan the disproportionate influence of 40-year olds in the next election.
I'm afraid you have misread disproportionate to mean some kind of unfair representation.
It just means "they are more, and thus get more votes", i.e. that their influence (because of their numbers) is higher. Nobody implied they get more than 1 vote per person...
disproportionate: "too large or too small in comparison with something else"
"Too" means excessively. Boomer representation is only "too large" if you happen to disagree with their policy choices (which I usually do) - but it's not an unfair level of representation or influence, which is what disproportionate does mean in this context.
Consider a country with 10,100 people, where 100 baby boomers voted and only 1 younger person bothered to vote but the general demographics are the inverse ratio (10,000 young people, 100 baby boomers).
The exact word to use for the baby boomers voting influence there would be "disproportionate".
That's literally what the word means -- it's not tied to the voting system, or stealing votes.
It's disproportionate not because they got more votes than it's fair to according to the voting system, or because they don't deserve those votes, but because they got more votes than what would be the ideal proportional representation of the two demographic groups.
(E.g. where young/old is as close to votes_of_young/votes_of_old as a ratio).
The two groups have the same capacity/opportunity to get proportional representation (in the voting system), but they don't have actual proportional representation (in the voting results).
Who said that that, in itself, is reason to blame anybody?
It's just an empirical, quantifiable, observation.
That said, there are many OTHER, valid, reasons to blame "old" people, or the baby boomer generation, and lots of them have been laid out in the comment section.
>Only if you go by extension that I intentionally raised my kids to not to vote as a part of my evil plan for dominance over young. sheesh
Well, I don't think anybody brought this conspiracy shit up, or even implied it. Just that:
a) older people are over-representent at elections,
b) thus they exert the most political influence
c) most politicians elected are crap
d) that these get elected is predominantly the fault of older people
One might argue that younger people are also to blame for not participating as much in elections, but that's probably not as bad as actively voting for and supporting crap.
Disproportionate means they get _more_ than you would already expect from proportional representation.
It's not about cheating or "proportional representation". It could mean that too, if we were discussing voting systems, but we are not.
We're discussing the fair share of the vote each group gets -- and how the total of young votes vs old votes are out of proportion, that is imbalanced.
disproportionate: "too large or too small in comparison with something else" (dictionary)
I'm not really very interested in Sanders except that he is clearly a response by a frustrated youth.
I don't think it's at all strange that younger people tend to be more progressive, regardless of party.