The Luckiest Generation

 

What are the odds?  Born in the greatest, freest, wealthiest country in the world.  But also at the best time.  

The Lost Generation; the Greatest Generation; the Silent Generation; Baby Boomers; Generation X; Millennials; Generation Z – they covered the entire 20^th century and into the 21^st.  I was born in 1952, a third of the way into the Boom that followed World War II.  

People tend to think the best music is the kind they grew up with as teenagers and young adults.  So the Greatest and Silent Generations loved jazz, bebop, and Frank Sinatra, while for Gen Xers, Millennials, and Gen Zers it’s grunge, pop, and hip hop.  Along those same lines, we Baby Boomers think we were the best generation overall, growing up with, it goes without saying, the best music of all time.  We were, in other words, the Luckiest Generation.  Here’s why:

THE PEACE BENEFIT: Start by considering that Boomers lived during mostly peaceful times.  Yes, there was Vietnam, and many years later the mess in Afghanistan and Iraq.  But context matters: In the US Civil War 612,000 soldiers died, about 1.7% of the country’s population at the time.  In WWI, the toll was much lower: 0.12% of the population; WWII deaths totaled nearly 419,000 or 0.28% of Americans, and the Korean War a relatively modest 0.02%.  By contrast, the Vietnam War claimed some 58,000 precious American lives, 0.03% of the country’s population - basically in line with the Korean War.  1990’s Persian Gulf War?  Only 219 US dead.  During the mess in Afghanistan and Iraq, 15,000 US military and contractors perished, or 0.005%. 

So while American men (almost exclusively) fought in one or sometimes two horrific worldwide wars a mere 23 years apart, and/or in another major war just five short years later, we Boomers faced only one serious, but nevertheless much smaller military action.  Between the end in Korea and the present day, that’s seventy-four years with only two relatively minor wars – while recognizing they were anything but “minor” to those involved.  Again, perspective:  0.03% dead in Vietnam, 0.005% in the Middle East over a period of 74 years, vs. 0.12% in WWI, 0.28% in WWII, and 0.02% in Korea over a span of 35 years.  Baby Boomers were blessed to live in generally peaceful times that, apart from sparing them and their loved ones the agony of going to war, granted them huge additional benefits compared to those of their elders.  

HIGHEST STANDARD OF LIVING: One such benefit was the greatest real (adjusted for inflation) standard of living ever known.  Baby Boomers’ parents lived through the Great Depression and the scarcity years of WWII, when food and consumer goods were severely limited by a general lack of income in the first case and lack of supply in the second.  But by the mid-1950s, Americans increasingly had both the income and availability of goods to buy houses, cars, appliances, plentiful food, and just about everything else.  A common way to see the improvement as Boomers were growing up is by comparing Real GDP per Capita (RG/C), or the amount of goods and services the average American could buy in a year, adjusted for inflation.  

At the bottom of the Depression in 1933, RG/C was $4,800.  By the end of WWII, the economy was booming and RG/C stood at $12,100.  Things only slowly improved from there until 1960’s figure of $13,150 and then 1970’s $17,450.  The trend continued, to $21,600 in 1980, $26,900 in 1990, and then $32,600 in 2000.  And remember – those figures are adjusted for inflation and show vast growth in material wealth between 1960 and 2000, the time most Boomers were growing up and then building families.  Since 2000, however, improvements in material well-being have slowed, with 2005’s $35,380; 2010’s $35,390; 2015’s $38,000; and 2020’s $39,200 – up 20% in twenty years, vs a 51% gain between 1980 and 2000.  

So Baby Boomers enjoyed vastly higher standards of living than their parents or grandparents had at the same ages.  At the same time, the generations that followed Boomers saw notably smaller improvements in their standard of living.  Except in three key areas, the Achilles Heels of modern American prosperity, where they were much actually worse off: Health Care, Housing, and Retirement. 

In the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, working Boomers didn’t worry about having health coverage; virtually every job provided it to their workers with little or no deductibles.  Few employed people worried about whether they could afford to have a baby, get that operation, etc. The same goes for retirement plans; virtually every employer offered a way for workers aged 55-65 to retire and live a reasonably comfortable life in their golden years.  Obviously, neither of those benefits have been widespread for the past couple of decades, thus taking away any small gains in RG/C since the turn of the millennium – and then some.   

As for housing, we can look at both Home Ownership levels, and the ratio of Rent to Income, or what percentage of the average American’s earnings go to renting a place to live.  With the country still mired in Depression in 1940, only 45% of American families owned a home.  By 1955, that number had zoomed to 60% and for the next decades held mostly in the mid-60s, peaking in 2005 at 69%.  Since then, home ownership levels have wobbled a bit, most recently standing at about 65%.  In the past few years, however, things have gotten much tougher, with rising demand for housing far outstripping new homes coming on line.  Recent home owners are as likely to have achieved that status by inheriting their parents’ homes as by buying on their own; lower-income Americans, whose parents rented rather than owned a place?  Well, they are mostly stuck on the outside looking in. 

Rent to Income (RTI) rates are even worse, as they tend to affect middle- and lower-income Americans, already disadvantaged by extreme and growing income inequality. Their incomes are growing, sure; but rents have soared, far outpacing income gains.  Here we’re confronted by widely different statistics that make it hard to see just how bad renters are being hurt these days.  One source says that RTI has surpassed 40% “for the first time in many decades.”  Another writes that 2023 saw RTI “top 30% for the first time in two decades.”  Meanwhile, RTIs for the decades of the twentieth century are generally unavailable, and the state of Washington claims that the nationwide RTI stayed at 19-20% between 2005 and 2020.  So how much of their income do renters pay now?  20%, 30%, 40%?  

It’s not clear.  But the reality is: Renters such as Millennials and Gen Z’ers, along with many middle-income and most low-income Americans, are being mercilessly squeezed when it comes to housing costs - in direct contrast to most Baby Boomers, sitting pretty in their all- or mostly-paid for homes.  That underscores a dismal shift from the past: Baby Boomers were the last generation that could count on a standard of living higher than their parents.  Due in part from Boomers abandoning their “peace, love” values of the 60s and 70s to become poster children for excessive materialism, their progeny are too often left to their own (insufficient) devices.  

BEST EDUCATION: Another way that Baby Boomers were the luckiest generation was in terms of education.  Black and brown minorities admittedly didn’t benefit as much as their white peers, yet overall American students enjoyed the world’s best K-12 public schooling in the 1950s and ‘60s.  And U.S. universities were widely acclaimed (as they still are now) as among the best in the world. 

Quoting www.econlib.org , “In the 1980s, economists puzzled by a decline in the growth of U.S. productivity realized that American schools had taken a dramatic turn for the worse (a cause of the aforementioned slowdown in improved living standards). After rising every year for fifty years, student scores on a variety of achievement tests dropped sharply in 1967. They continued to decline through 1980. …Although achievement levels began to recover in 1980, the recovery has been weak and student achievement has yet to regain 1967 levels.” 

That source dives into the multiple reasons for the decline in U.S. educational quality, but the bottom line is that most Boomers got a better education than the generations that came both before and after them; one more life advantage they enjoyed over everyone else.  

GREATER PERSONAL FREEDOM: This is a broad category encompassing a great many improvements Boomers came to enjoy (and in many cases, create) relative to earlier generations.  Starting with improvements in Civil Rights, begun in the mid-1950s, kicked up another notch in the mid-1960s, and gradually improving further from there.  Black and Brown Americans still trail behind whites by most metrics, but the spread has narrowed substantially – most notably between 1954’s Brown v. Board decision and the 1971 legalization of school busing: prime Boomer years. 

Women’s rights improved substantially as well, starting with the FDA’s 1960 approval of “the pill,” and steadily progressing through the likes of 1963’s Equal Pay Act, Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, 1972’s Title IX, and 1973’s Roe v. Wade.  While those advances benefited both previous and subsequent generations of American women as well, it was the Boomers whose lives were the most different, the most improved, in terms of their personal freedoms and well-being. 

Gay rights advanced significantly too.  1958’s Supreme Court One, Inc. v. Olesen was the first case to advance homosexual rights, but the movement really gained traction following 1967’s Black Cat Tavern raid in New York. The 1970s saw more gains, with openly gay people being elected to high positions, and clawing back more and more previously withheld rights in succeeding decades.  After Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage in 2004, most others soon followed.  

Recreational drug use is obviously a double-edged sword, but nevertheless an example of increased personal freedom of choice.  Whereas before the mid-1960s virtually no self-respecting American wanted anything to do with marijuana or other drugs, in the mid-‘60s Baby Boomers (mostly) were pushing hard against that image.  By the end of the 1970s, eleven states had decriminalized marijuana while most others had reduced their penalties.  The trend continued, with California legalizing weed’s medicinal use, breaking down the door that by now makes marijuana’s use legal for any purpose in nearly half of all states.  

Greater personal freedoms are literally visible in other ways as well, such as in the type of clothing that’s permissible in public and the workplace.  Along with hair length and styles, and facial hair.  Short skirts, puffy sleeves, psychedelic patterns, bell bottoms, going braless – all those and more were on the menu from the mid-1960s on, in glaring contrast to the previous strict social mores.  Today virtually any clothing, any styles are OK for both men and women; even top CEOs go tie-less and just as often suit-less.  Like recreational drug use, that’s not always a great thing, but in any case this other type of increased freedom is thanks to the Boomers. 

TECHNOLOGY: Oh boy!  Let’s recap what people had back in 1960, a time when most Boomers were kids of one age or another:

 - One or maybe two cars with manual transmission, manual windows, low gas mileage, AM radio, no air,  

   no seatbelts, no Bluetooth, and no cruise control.

- One or maybe two phones; corded, rotary dial, with no free long-distance. 

- One or maybe two TVs; black & white, 26” or less, low resolution, 3 or 4 channels, no remotes.

- No personal computers, cell phones, Apple watches, DVDs/Blue ray or streaming services

- No home air conditioning, microwave ovens, electric can openers, pasta makers, juicers, etc.

- No DoorDash, Uber, Sirius, eHarmony, etc. 

Unlike their grandparents, Baby Boomers grew up with reliable autos; unlike their parents, they grew up with TVs and a life full of most modern conveniences, even if primitive by current standards.  During their lifetimes, Boomers had the luck and the income to benefit from the steady improvements and outright inventions of all that we now take for granted.  Their quality of life, thanks to the incredible increase of technology, steadily improved. 

PLAY: But life’s about more than just having more things, better things, and Boomers lucked out here as well. They were blessed with the freedom to just be kids; to play outside all day long, chase pollywogs in the local pond, get hit in the lip during a rock fight, ride their bikes to the beach, or spend the day at a friend’s house, come home filthy - with none of it being a big deal.  Boomers spent time in Nature, getting fresh air with their friends, making up their own entertainment, and often being in Scouts.  But that changed.  Membership in the Boy Scouts of America peaked in 1972 at 6.5 million, for example; by 1998 it was 4.8 million; the most recent figures show only a bit more than one (1) million Boy and Cub Scouts.  Data on Girl Scouts isn’t readily available, but one imagines a similar decline. 

In the 1980s and beyond, though, it was increasingly about tightly scheduled “play dates” and other programmed activities.  But otherwise – inside most of the time, watching TV, then computers, then staring at their phones 24/7; building up little resistance to the bacteria and whatnot from playing in the mud and getting banged up outdoors.  Boomers commonly walked a mile or more to school; now parents drive their kids the three whole blocks to school.  They might get kidnapped, raped, hit by a car! Frickin’ bubble kids, absorbed by all their “devices.” But at least now they’re “safe”…  

ENTERTAINMENT             

Television was another defining Baby Boomer thing, with the 1950s considered the Golden Age of Television, and kids growing up with such great shows like The Mickey Mouse Club, Gunsmoke, and the Howdy Doody Club.  The ‘60s started out with Bonanza and The Flintstones, and ended with The Smothers Brothers, Sesame Street, and Laugh-In.  All of them, and early-70s shows like All in the Family – groundbreaking, high-quality television.  

Sure, later years brought other great shows: M.A.S.H., Cheers, The Cosby Show, and Law and Order among them.  But groundbreaking?  Not as much.  And what great things did the ‘90s and ‘00s give us – reality TV?  The Bachelor, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Keeping Up With the Kardashians?   All of them cheap to produce crap, mindless pabulum for the masses. So Boomers got to enjoy the best that television had to offer.  Better entertainment value, better for their growing minds than what followed.  And certainly better than what their parents and grandparents grew up with: no television at all. 

Now we come back to where we started, with the Baby Boom generation living during the most exciting time for Music, being blessed with the freshest and best music of any modern generation.  Starting with the mid-1950s and the first rock ‘n rollers, introduced by Hollywood via 1955’s Rock Around the Clock, then headlined by Chuck, Little Richard, and Elvis: a whole new teenagers-only music that set the stage for decades of the genre.  Round two kicked things up another notch between 1963 and 1965 with Motown, Girl Groups, the Beach Boys and the two incomparable, best-ever musicians of the 20^th century: The Beatles and Bob Dylan, with the Rolling Stones right behind and a whole passel of genre-boosting groups from both sides of the pond licking at their heels.  1967 led off the next and final stage of Classic Rock ‘n Roll, with the Doors’ Light My Fire that summer, quickly followed by Jimi, Cream, and the whole high-energy music that gave us Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, et al; mellower sounds a la CSN and the Eagles; and of course the ladies: Aretha, Joni, and Linda.  

By 1975, it was about all over.  Not that there wasn’t more great music to come from great groups in the late-70s, the ‘80s, ‘90s and beyond!  But nothing as good, as new under the sun.  Rap as the new Motown?  Grunge and techno as the new electric blues?  K-Pop?  You’re joking, right?  

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I sense a lot of “OK, Boomer!” out there.  Maybe so.  I’m biased.  But it really should be “OK, Luckiest Generation!”  And that matters, as the Luckiest/Boomers mostly run the world of today based on perspectives born of their extraordinary luck.  Their Not-As-Lucky kids and grandkids are quickly taking over the reins of power, with their dissimilar perspectives.  The success, or not, of this emerging paradigm shift requires that both groups understands where the other’s coming from.  And America in the 21^st century seems anything but a redoubt of respecting diverse outlooks.