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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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])
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes they did. Climate change is going to be, and already is, disastrous.
That's a depressingly low bar for "not failing".
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.
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.