geoff: The impact of the baby
boom generation is impossible to
ignore.
The roughly 76 million people
born between 1946 and 1964 have
reshaped American society at
each stage of their lives,
crowding American classrooms in
the 50s and 60s, filling the
labor and housing markets
decades later, ultimately
leaving their imprint on our
politics and institutions.
Philip comp -- bump is a
national columnist for the
Washington post and he takes a
look the generation's impact.
His book is, the aftermath: The
last days of the baby boom and
the future of power in America
and Phil bump joins me now.
We are talking about the 76
million people join during that
19 year span and their influence
is stitched into the fabric of
modern-day America.
You borrow an analogy in the
book, you say when the boomers
entered the world it was like a
python swallowing a pig.
In what way?
Why is that a fitting analogy?
Philip: It's certainly not
charming but it is fitting in
the sense that you can imagine
very easily this fairly narrow
python that all of a sudden has
a huge old Ginette.
And -- huge bulge in it.
It has to work its way through
the system.
The population was only 140
million in 1945.
It was a massive increase,
especially of young people at
the outset of the baby boom, it
forces the United States, the
python, to deal with the pig it
has swallowed.
The pig is still passing to the
python and we've reached the
point where baby boomers are
retiring and creates a new set
of issues we have to deal with.
Geoff: How was this generation
different from the one that
preceded it and the ones that
followed?
Philip: The baby boom began
during a lull in American
immigration.
There were restrictions on
immigration and those were still
in place when the baby boom
began.
One demographer tell me the
average immigrant was somebody's
grandparent at the beginning of
the boom.
Come at the end, immigration
laws were loosened and you saw
more immigrants from central
America and Mexico and Asia.
What happened when the baby boom
began, it began when America was
very heavily white in a way that
it no longer is.
The baby boom, obviously it's a
very heterologous generation,
but it tends to be more heavily
white than particular the
generation that followed it,
less heavily made up of
immigrants, and it tends to have
other characteristics as well.
It is less likely, boomers are
less likely to have gone to
college than millennials or gen
Z.
Marriage among them, the
military, things along those
lines.
Those really shape the culture
and politics of the baby boom in
a way that makes them distinct,
particularly from younger
generations.
Geoff: Understanding the
generational analyses are in
some ways unavoidably crude and
imprecise.
We talk about the baby boom and
we are talking about the
woodstock generation in many
ways.
Who in 2016, these were the same
folks that put Donald Trump in
office.
Help us understand how that
happened.
Philip: It's a great question
and fundamentally it comes down
to the fact that the baby boom
really is to separate political
groups.
There is a Republican group and
democratic group, not unique to
the baby boom.
Boomers are also less likely to
be registered independents than
younger generations.
You had the left and right in
the boom itself but because the
Republican party itself is so
much older than the democratic
party, baby boomers big up a
larger percentage of the
democratic party.
So yes, the politics shifted to
some extent for individual
boomers over that time but it's
also the case that
fundamentally, the baby boomers
who voted for Donald Trump were
sharing a similar sort of
concern, particularly around
race often times, to some extent
economics as well, that made
them vote more homogenously than
Democrats from the baby boom.
We had this effect where yes,
this was the generation that
fought against things like the
Vietnam war draft, but over time
had gotten to a point where they
sell Donald Trump as the
preferable candidate in 2016 and
helped propel him to the white
house.
Geoff: Let's talk about the
impact on the economy.
I was struck by this line, you
say the baby boom has
accumulated an enormous amount
of wealth during its three
quarters of a century of
existence.
Baby boomers, many of them are
supporting the lineal --
millennial children, or
sometimes the grand children.
What happens to the
distributional wealth as baby
boomers age?
Philip: An enormous amount of
wealth is being transferred from
baby boomers to younger family
members but not exclusively.
$2 trillion according to some
experts I spoke to, in 2022
alone.
It is an enormous amount of
wealth.
There are a lot of questions
about what happens with that,
right?
What happens as boomers age and
need more medical attention?
How much is siphoned away in
terms of the cost of medical
care or senior housing or
living?
What happens to the housing
market as a seniors age?
A lot of senior citizens view
their houses as a storehouse of
value for their retirement.
How does that affect house
prices and wasn't mean for
millennials looking to buy
houses?
There are all of these ways in
which this massive amount of
wealth held by baby boomers is
-- it is not will it clear how
much that will trickle down to
their families.
It's also important to know that
because the baby boom generation
is so large, it's not that baby
boomers themselves are so
wealthy individually, it's that
they have a lot of wealth
because a lot of them, --
because there are a lot of them.
Geoff: I also want to ask you
about one of the unanswered
questions in your book.
You write that a generation used
to accruing and defending power
through sheer scale is watching
that power combo.
We seem generational tensions
before them up but we are living
through something exceptional, a
decline not of the Spartan
civilization but the Roman one.
We are living through a historic
disruption of the American
empire.
What does this mean for the
future of our politics and our
democracy?
Philip: Absolutely and
unfortunately I'm not so brash
as to have a hard answer on
that.
The boom shaped what America
looks like today, both in terms
of the boomers themselves making
decisions but also the way that
America had to respond to the
emergence of the baby boom.
We are seeing that change and
the boom has to deal with the
lineal's and generations he --
millennials and gen Z.
That is contributing to some of
the backlash, some of the
increased tension we see in
politics.
Does this mean young people, for
example, if they are more
diverse, which they are, will
they vote democratic forever?
Probably not, there are a lot of
factors to take into
consideration, at this moment of
tension is particularly acute
because the baby boom has for so
long been so powerful and for
the first time is having to
compete for that power.
Geoff: Philipbump, thank you
for your time.