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Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

I think there are numerous ways in which Tim Cook's generation has failed the next generation (at least in the US).

* Wages are flat, * Housing costs are up (in large part due to NIMBYism), * College is more expensive (in large part due to Cook's generation cutting subsidies that they got), * Environment is shot- that whole global warming thing isn't going away anytime soon.

Generally speaking the baby boomers, as a whole, have focused more on enriching themselves than any other previous generation. This is the first time in generations that, in the US, the newer generation is seen as worse off than the one before it.

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What are you asking for? The world has changed drastically, culture and preferences have changed drastically, and new technological tools make the job and economic landscape entirely different than earlier. That's not Baby Boomers' fault. Are you really going to blame them for not predicting the future well enough? Baby boomers aren't forcing young folks to like living in cities more than suburbs. They're not maliciously causing robots and computers to be more reliable than humans at menial repetitive tasks. They're not forcing young folks to want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mediocre private universities when reasonably priced state universities exist (and a world of knowledge for self-teaching is available through the internet). And even the global warming thing, our current prosperity--and don't kid yourself, America is pretty freaking prosperous--strongly depended on us exploiting cheap and reliable energy for decades. And it's that prosperity which gives us the bandwidth and resources to think "hey, let's do something about this, either find a way to avoid or prepare or cope".

Yes, it would have been nice if everyone in the previous generation had a crystal ball and selfless motives. But that is not something we are due as a right, nor is it something anyone should reasonably hold against them. They didn't blow up the world, and made it better in better in a bunch of ways, and maybe a bit worse in some ways. On net, that's still like a B+ or higher in my book.

> Are you really going to blame them for not predicting the future well enough?

They predicted it just fine. Then they failed to work together to prevent it.

> Baby boomers aren't forcing young folks to like living in cities more than suburbs.

Young people can only afford overpriced apartments because jobs have steadily migrated to cities, they don't have the credit or capital to afford a house and car in the suburbs, they're overburdened with debt and rising costs of living, not paid accordingly, and well-paying jobs for the lower and middle class are more scarce. Oh, and media conglomerates and advertising have been repeating since before they were born that what they really want is only found in glamorous cities.

> They're not forcing young folks to want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mediocre private universities when reasonably priced state universities exist

That's all they've ever heard. "You have to go to college. You have to go to the best college. You can go to the best college, you'll just be in debt for 30 years once you do. Don't worry, here's a thing we invented in the 70s called a credit card."

> our current prosperity [..] strongly depended on us exploiting cheap and reliable energy for decades

We have been the most powerful and wealthy nation since WWII, a generation or two before the boomers. The boomers were even hit by a major oil crisis and recession more than once, and rather than look to alternatives (which Congress literally declared they had to do), they doubled down.

> They didn't blow up the world

Yes they did. Climate change is going to be, and already is, disastrous.

People are complaining about the Syrian refugees crisis, that's literally the tip of the iceberg.

I would've asked Boomers to not have wasted trillions of dollars on unnecessary military spending (which could've gone to infrastructure, education, and universal healthcare) and countless lives on unnecessary military actions. I would've asked them to not have supported trade pacts that were great for those the jobs went to in developing countries and for domestic consumers of goods where production was off-shored/outsourced, but hollowed out the middle class. I would've asked them to not have allowed private companies to run rampant in healthcare, economically devastating anyone who has chronic health issues or doesn't have a cush employer provided healthcare plan, and then having the audacity of shouting "Socialism!" when healthcare systems working in every other first world country are proposed. I would've asked them to consider the world they were leaving their kids and grandkids, and make efforts to transition off of fossil fuels sooner. I would've asked them to make efforts to support Labor and Unions, not allow them to crumble under the guise of "Right To Work", stagnating wages for forty years and solidifying Capital's stranglehold over the economy, including workplace and employment conditions. I would've asked they not use drug legislation and prisons as weapons against certain classes of people. I would've asked for less greed and more compassion. I would've asked for a bit more (reasonable) sacrifice for future generations.

But here we are, so I suppose we'll just clean up the mess the Worst Generation left us all with. It's just a shame they squandered so much for so little; the time for asking anything of them has passed [1].

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/03/millennials... (Millennials approach Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation in the electorate [Note: As of 2019, Millenials will have surpassed Boomers as the largest electorate])

> I would've asked them to not have allowed private companies to run rampant in healthcare, economically devastating anyone who has chronic health issues or doesn't have a cush employer provided healthcare plan, and then having the audacity of shouting "Socialism!" when healthcare systems working in every other first world country are proposed.

"Boomers" didn't really do this--a small cadre of the ultra-wealthy did this with the help of a lot of stupid people.

"Boomers", in fact, were probably the last generation to engage in successful large-scale labor actions.

The fight isn't between generations--the fight is against the concentration of wealth.

On the whole, I too agree with Pinker. But I don't think it's necessarily mutually exclusive with one generation "failing" another (I hate that wording because it feels reductionist).

If the claim is true that the millennial generation is the first to have a lower quality of life than their parents, that sounds a lot like a failure to manage resources given the prosperity you cited. How can we be at the most prosperous time yet have a generation worse off than the previous? It seems like it's either a failure of values, mismanagement of resources, or bad metrics.

Put another way, if this was a company that was posting record sales and margins yet somehow posting worse profits than the previous CEO, wouldn't that at least raise some eyebrows?

If the millennial generation wants a higher quality of life than their parents, they will need to gather and harvest more resources.

The methods the boomers & prior generations used for that were a combination of investing in fossil fuel extraction infrastructure and sometimes waging war/extracting resources from other countries.

Look at China - massive generational improvement in living standards, massive increase in pollution (to the point where it goes well beyond the theoretical concerns of global warming).

As a body the wannabe thought-leaders of the millennials are inconsistent on this point. Do they care more about wages and living standards, or more about the environment? There is no longer the enthusiastic consensus on living standards that existed in the previous generations.

I think this is a false dichotomy. The only way it's true is if we assume the quality of life desired by millennials is the same as conspicuous consumption previously portrayed by Madison Avenue. To that point, I see younger generations largely rejecting this definition of 'quality of life' in favor of alternate definitions.

In regards to China, I don't know if this is a point that this is the only way to do things or if it's just following a previously defined template, similar to the way most economies transition from agrarian, to industrial, to service economies.

I also think it's erroneous to frame it as an either/or state when there's opportunity for both improving standards of living without an additional impact on the environment through increases in efficiency on how we put those resources to work. There's lots of sectors (healthcare, energy, etc.) that affect quality of life that can improve without the assumption that we throw more resources at them, just that we be smarter about how we use those resources.

I suppose this shows how old and out of touch I am, but who are the 'thought-leaders' you refer towards? I'm not being snarky, I legitimately don't know who would be considered a millennial thought-leader and would like to find out.

> following a previously defined template

That was the interpretation I was going for. It is conspicuous - the only way we know how to rapidly increase living standards involves using fossil fuels. Solar and wind are only cost competitive at the moment after easily 30 years of pressure and research. They weren't an option to set the millenials up for success.

The alternatives are very tentatively proven at this stage, and not at the same scale as China from backwater to superpower in 60 years. They didn't do that with wind energy - they burned a lot of coal. We still don't have compelling evidence that a society can flourish without the internal combustion engine. Maybe it is about to hit, we can all hope.

> I suppose this shows how old and out of touch I am, but who are the 'thought-leaders' you refer towards? I'm not being snarky, I legitimately don't know who would be considered a millennial thought-leader and would like to find out.

I don't actually know who would be considered a thought leader for the millenials. Wouldn't even know where to start figuring that out, or even what the term means.

But there are a lot of very vocal individuals on the subject of environmentalism who clearly want people to think like them (the sort of people who lead protests and make up the activist core of the environmental movement). They were the ones I'm referring to.

I fully grant your point that the rate at which Chinese were brought into the middle class is dependent on fossil fuels.

But similar to your point on the infancy of renewables, this is largely because ICE and other fossil fuel technology has been improved on for the last 150 years. It's unfair to compare renewables to this standard as they are still very much the new kid on the block.

What I think will be very disappointing is if we, as a society, decide to blindly continue focused on fossil fuels because we're optimizing in the short term, rather than the long term. In my opinion, we should be leveraging the last 150 years of fossil fuel technology as a stepping stone to something more sustainable.

I think there's a tendency to treat it as an overly simplified optimization problem, as in we need to maximize output at all costs. It's probably better to set it up as an optimization problem with the proper constraints. These constraints may be externalities that the government is involved in regulating. Yes, we may sacrifice some short term benefit for long-term success. But we (hopefully) won't have squandered an amazing resource like fossil fuels for an ill-advised myopic gain.

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It strikes me as a false dichotomy to think we have to choose between higher wages / quality of life and the environment.

As mentioned earlier, a lot of investment went into fossil fuels in the past. Now, we could put a lot of investment into technologies that won’t hurt the environment as much. There will be an initial cost to doing that (we’ll still use fossil fuels to get much of the electricity to make solar/wind/etc), but eventually things will even out and we can start having environmentally-friendly sources be much more affordable.

>> They didn't blow up the world

That's a depressingly low bar for "not failing".

And even so they've failed there too.

One thing that has happened in the last few decades is that increases in prosperity mainly went to a few at the top and for the rest it stagnated. I think you can put the blame on the people in power during that time.

My net wealth is massively negative and will remain so for decades... and yet any fair assessment of my quality of life is that it's great. I can't afford a car, but I can still be chauffeured around like a celebrity at the push of a button on my phone. I can summon almost anything I want from across the planet and have it show up in my doorstep in 2 days as if I was a king. I have access to probably 99+% of the knowledge, information, art, entertainment, and telecommunication tools of the richest guy in the world. I could hardly care less that some people are preposterously wealthy while I'm "poor", because I really think my life is probably at least 80% as good as theirs is. I also hope for greater equality in the hope that it would further spur creation and make people feel more comfortable with risk taking and self-fulfillment or self-expression. But, thinking that millennials/post-millenials/future generations have been somehow "screwed over" or have been given a world on fire is an ungrateful and borderline laughable delusion.

The "previous generations failed us" mentality implies that we are somehow due all of the good things previous generations have given us (even though the only thing most of us have done to "deserve" them is exist) without having to deal with any of the bad. I think if some people had their way, we'd be shivering out in the cold and bartering mounds of dirt for big circular rocks because they'd have villified the people that first cut down a tree for shelter or crucified the people who thought that steam engines were an innovation.

The undertone of your posts appears to be that climate change is not that big of a deal. Do you think we're facing an incredibly serious problem with climate change or just some minor corrections to be made?

> That's not Baby Boomers' fault.

Who changed the culture, preferences, and technological tools? Who made the economic and political decisions that brought us where we are today?

There's inevitably a window where some generational demographic is generally the driving leadership and consumer/citizen force behind societal trends and decisions. The boomers have been that force for some time and they're far from gone.

It's fair to acknowledge that some of the tech / choices made are useful. And, hey, "nobody owes anybody anything" or "no generation owes successive ones" is a values statement, even though it may be sociopathic. "That's not the Baby Boomer's fault" doesn't make any sense (except as an expression of that non-ethic).

> Baby boomers aren't forcing young folks to like living in cities more than suburbs.

> They're not maliciously causing robots and computers to be more reliable than humans at menial repetitive tasks.

> They're not forcing young folks to want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mediocre private universities when reasonably priced state universities exist (and a world of knowledge for self-teaching is available through the internet)

> And even the global warming thing, our current prosperity--and don't kid yourself, America is pretty freaking prosperous--strongly depended on us exploiting cheap and reliable energy for decades.

But they did preside over changes which:

* moved opportunities (not to mention narratives of opportunity) to cities over suburbs

* remove protections for labor and diminish safety nets for those who've been caught in automation-based change

* enshrined credentialism as a mark of professional opportunity, whether or not a world of knowledge for self-teaching is available on the internet, and then administered both public-supported universities and private universities in such a way that students frequently have to pay more in tuition than they did 30 years ago.

* prioritized individually maximized returns (with some degree of shared prosperity) over sustainability.

> " that prosperity which gives us the bandwidth and resources to think "hey, let's do something about this, either find a way to avoid or prepare or cope"."

Any post WW2 prosperity should have been enough to do some important things about climate change once we understood the relevant dynamics.

> it would have been nice if everyone in the previous generation had a crystal ball and selfless motives.

"Crystal ball", that's neat, it implies we'd need impossible magic to have foreseen economic or environmental consequences 30 years ago.

> what are you asking for?

I want cooperation. Younger people, myself included, want policy changes that will attempt to mitigate some of the damage done by the previous generation. However, boomers are still in power and actively resist changes that attempt to curb issues like climate change and income inequality. I think this is where a lot of resentment comes from. Additionally boomers will be dead before the consequences of their actions have a chance to seriously effect their lives, furthering the resentment.

To me this story of boomers callously enriching themselves at the expense of future generations sounds like just a bigoted unfounded accusation. Talk about not taking responsibility.. foisting all your problems onto the parent generation as if you yourself have no agency to tackle these challenges. Maybe the millenials will be blamed by the next generation for just burying themselves in video games and drugs at the time when climate change became common knowledge, when there was still time to do so something but instead they chose to be pandered to.

I never said anything about boomers enriching themselves at the expense of future generations.

I think blaming younger generations for not taking responsibility for what was handed to them is unfair. We are trying to fix things, however it is difficult when the people in power (who happen to be boomers) will not allow progress. That resistance to change and the resulting resentment is what I was attempting to discuss in my previous comment.

When people say "boomers" do they mean "boomers" world-wide, or do they mean "boomers" as in American "boomers"? I ask because everyone is part of this thing, but some people may think only American boomers have partaken in the above ascribed behavior.

I am American and I generally am referring to Americans when I talk about boomers

There's nothing wrong with future generations holding millennials responsible for their actions as well. It doesn't negate the argument and is a fairly weak position to take

What you’re wrong about is the notion that markets dictate itself. Actually pretty much the entirety of America and possibly most of the rest of the developed world is wrong on this notion because the country and the rest of the world is so rooted in capitalism. It’s like crying about the fact that we are polluting the world with single use plastics and saying that we are powerless to do anything about it because individuals will always optimize for personal gain. The reality is we as people are people and every single one of us has the ability and capacity to choose to not use single use plastics. We aren’t dumb robots that absolutely have to follow this code of maximizing for personal gain. People as individuals, or organizations, or really groups of people of any size are capable of doing anything because at the base level, every single person has the capacity to make one decision over another, because we are people not robots. If we chose to keep the earth clean, we could keep the earth clean. It’s not impossible, and people need to stop believing that the only force is this blobby uncontrollable multicellular creature of human mass that creates cities, destroys natural landscapes, and kills rhinos. It’s at this level of learned helplessness where you (and I’m not crticizing only you, but pretty much the rest of the world) is wrong. If baby boomers collectively chose to help the next generation they absolutely could have done more to help the next generation. They just never believed anything could be done so they never really tried.

It may be that a lot of the issues do not represent any especially egregious failing of any generation, but rather structural changes. The post-war exponential growth that fed unprecedented wealth generation simply could not continue, it has run its course. So while it is tempting to look back a generation or two and see how they had it much easier in a lot of ways, if you look back just a little bit further, it's easy to feel pretty damn lucky to be living today.

A lot of this is by-product of Globalization. Not that it can be contained, but with Globalization, wages seek their level, with Worldwide capital flows housing becomes a hot investment. College is more expensive, but greater numbers of people are going to college than before because it's thought a blue-collar job is insufficient to survive. More people and wealthier people means greater consumption which degrades the enviro.

Now, if Boomers are seen as greedy, then wouldn't their successors be greedier if they wanted to out-earn them?

>* College is more expensive (in large part due to Cook's generation cutting subsidies that they got),

College is more expensive because the government ensures that 18 year olds have uncapped credit cards for educational expenses and everyone tells them "dont worry about it right now". When you increase demand and defer all cost pressure by years, the cost will always skyrocket.

Blaming this on a lack of subsidies is actually backwards; providing guaranteed funding for education would further boost costs. As long as schools are setting the price, demand is high, and the money is flowing like water, that cost is going to continue to increase.

> * Environment is shot- that whole global warming thing isn't going away anytime soon.

But renewables use is also way up.

This is the parent's point: these claims utterly ignore the historical reality. We're greener than ever, we've stopped using CFCs and arsenic preservatives and lead paints and high particulate energy generation. We have more access to education than ever. And in the west, our wages are on average 5x that of the rest of the world.

So many of these complaints look ignorant and petty when you zoom out a tiny bit from one's personal circumstances. You have college debt? Cry more, you have access to more opportunity than the preceeding 99% of your ancestors and than 95% of your current peers.

Imagine previous generations that were being drafted to the army to go off to WW2, Korea, Vietnam. Ah yes but Millennials have flat wages and expensive college. We've failed them all.

Personally, I'd rather be drafted than have to watch my kids and grand-kids go fight in pointless resource wars that will be the result of decades of unchecked climate change. Frankly, the attitude previous generations have had towards climate science has can best be described as criminally negligent.

So the bar you're setting is based on the some of the bloodiest conflicts in human history?

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