
How the baby boomers destroyed everything - teslacar
http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/02/26/how-baby-boomers-destroyed-everything/lVB9eG5mATw3wxo6XmDZFL/story.html?p1=Article_Trending_Most_V
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charles-salvia
I'm not a baby boomer, so I have no interest in defending them, but there's
something inherently tautological about this whole line of reasoning. The
argument is basically "everything sucks right now, so blame the largest voting
bloc/age-group". I mean, yeah, that line of reasoning is more or less valid in
any moderately-functioning democracy. But it doesn't really actually _explain_
anything useful. I mean, it's not like people born in the period after WW2 to
the mid 60s are somehow genetically predisposed to be complete sociopaths.

I realize the article attempts to touch a bit on _why_ the baby boomers may
have been psychologically predisposed to be so irresponsible (raised on TV or
something), but that seems pretty hand-wavy. The reality is it's simply human
nature to take the path of least resistance and put off solving hard problems
in favor of easy short-term gains. And after WW2, America experienced
unprecedented economic growth as a new emergent industrial superpower. But
that kind of growth can't last forever. The baby-boomers were just around at
the right time to benefit from it, and their natural human short-sightedness
pretty much guaranteed they wouldn't prioritize making decisions that
benefited future generations.

