The peak mortgage rates, crucial for nesting and reproduction at first marriage, accurately match the peak age of first marriage by baby boomer females as well as peak oil prices. And the below graphs don’t even include the wage depression when employers witheld salary increases by the “wage and price controls” of the Carter stagflation era – controls that were utterly ineffective on prices.
As much as people want to complain about “Boomers” it was “The Greatest Generation” that “Western Civilization” rewarded by cooking their grandchildren behind the scenes and serving them up in a most sumptuous feast.
You know what their real crime was – those damn spoiled Boomers?
They were the product of 15,000 years of a culture of individual integrity.
Food for collectivists once WW II unleashed them on the West.
I could not agree more. I’m sicka this crap. My peers were and still ARE a VERy hardworking generation ( well, not me personally, but in general).
We spent our college years in the shadow of certain death in Vietnam. We came of age in the early 70s, just in time for the demoralization of Watergate and, as you say, the Carter debacle. It wasn’t easy getting a job. (And for those puppies who’d say, yeah, and now you won’t retire! I’d say: we can’t; we’re the only ones who know how to do our jobs) Then came the “interesting times” of the early 80s, when the mortgage interest rate soared to 18%.
Really that wasn’t SO long ago, and I’ll never get used to hearing people gasp over the specter of 9%, which is what the mortgage interest rate was for a decade at least. So: fuck those arrogant ephebes!
Young folks have a legitimate gripe against boomers. After all, boomers carried out Gramsci’s long march through the institutions that delivered the woke GAE that the youth will have to live with. Boomers were the ones indoctrinating the country’s best and brightest in the academy. Boomers also oversaw the hollowing-out of American manufacturing, leaving the country as a service economy, much of which produces nothing of value.
The reality is that housing in most markets is far less affordable than it was 50 years ago. I well remember the spike in interest rates in the early 80s that briefly made buying a house unaffordable. I moved to Southern California in 1983. However, rates soon dropped and it was possible to afford a house. Rents were also still reasonable at that time because sharp spikes in interest rates are not immediately reflected in rent prices. The current 30 year mortgage rate is not much different from what it was in the early 70s.
People have been complaining about the younger generation since forever. There’s even a song ridiculing that. In the meantime, you kids get off my lawn!
I’m stuck in the wayback machine. In the early 80s I was at the seam of society, practicing “family law “. Perfect storm: in 1980 Pa adopted no-fault divorce. Also during those years the unemployment rate in Pa soared; our legislature actually was considering a law to give people a “right” to their jobs! (That in addition to unemployment compensation). Then the soaring mortgage interest rates, which made it impossible for first time buyers to get in—but that was not the worst of it: the worst was:
Adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs).
When interest rates began to rise, People sitting in their comfy homes with 8 or 9% mortgages were seduced into taking out second mortgages at variable rates. Maybe they were betting rates would go down again? Which they did eventually, but for the immediate future they just went straight up, and the mortgage payments increased dramatically. And of course two can live more cheaply than one: if the marriage foundered, and one spouse moved out, they were even more strapped.
The ARM creditors were junior lenders, which means their lien would be wiped out if the prior mortgagee foreclosed first. So if people fell behind on the 9% mortgage, the second lender would begin paying the first mortgagee—and their advances bore interest at 18%. The “marital residence” was usually people’s biggest, maybe sole, asset. By the time it was sold ( and as above, it wasn’t exactly a seller’s market) the parties would get nothing out of it. And the “homemaker spouse” would end up homeless.
I used to lie in bed at night crying, while my BMD intoned the mantra he learned in medical school: “Detached concern! Detached concern!”
(TMI about Reagan’s first term, I’m sure….Carry on.)
We’re surrounded by “conspiracies” only because people don’t understand how powerful incentives are in shaping mob behavior. A mob is not a “conspiracy” in the modern sense of that word – conscious collusion and planning as the primary organizing principle. It is, however, a “conspiracy” in the root word relating to “breathing together” or “being of the same spirit” which can mean simply that those “breathing together” or “being of the same spirit” share a common interest due to shared incentives.
This, in turn, is the failure of the public and the vast majority of experts in the social sciences to appreciate that civilization’s power arises from positive network externalities. Moreover, this has led us to a deadly embrace between “capitalists” and “socialists” to centralize the capture of those positive externalities.
The fact that only a tiny, well educated, and intelligent minority of critical thinkers have a clue as to what I just said is part and parcel of what ails the body politic. If you don’t “get” the foundation of civilization’s power, you don’t “get” civilization itself.
So what is “network effect positive externality”? Most obvious is the way Ma Bell turned into a government sanctioned monopoly: Each additional customer added value to all of the other customers in the phone network. Ma Bell enjoyed the capture of that positive network externality.
But let’s go a bit further into the “externality” concept. By way of illustration let’s consider a negative externality that we’re all familiar with:
Pollution.
Someone spews poison into the external environment and other people are negatively affected.
What is the opposite of pollution? Some would point to carbon capture and sequestration, but that’s a relatively weak form when considering the foundation of civilization. Consider instead Henry George’s argument about land value tax (LVT):
Someone owns a piece of land and builds something of great public value on that piece of land. Adjacent pieces of land rise in value as a result, even though their owners did nothing to earn that rise in value. Ideally the builder would be awarded that rise in land value just as would a builder of a polluting industrial facility have to pay damages to the affected parties. This involves the judiciary in both positive and negative externality cases. LVT advocates say this places an impractical burden on the judicial system, so what should instead be pursued is a government whose incentives are to increase positive externalities by rewarding the government whenever there are such positive externalities. Such a government would seek to empower the subordinate capitalist.
This, ultimately, is the “socialist” argument. However, in the final analysis, the “capitalist” argument of Ayn Rand is also socialist:
“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don’t feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.”
This is the “capitalist” version of the socialist hero: The values of the proletariat are so-aligned with that of the “capitalist” that their only compensation for placing their flesh blood and bone between chaos and civilization is the value brought to them by capitalism’s positive network externalities, traditionally expressed in the root word of “civilization”:
Cities.
But what happens when the men, who throughout history place their flesh, blood and bone between chaos and civilization, have lost life’s meaning? The tip of that iceberg:
Plummeting total fertility rates not to mention declining life expectancy.
Why would they be inspired by Ayn Rand to so-sacrifice their flesh, blood and bone more than the straight up socialists who may, at least, offer them crumbs falling from the banquet of Washington DC managerialists who live in the highest median income counties in the world – especially when adjusted for risk of loss of civil service employment.
This last paragraph is why you can listen to any of Trump’s rallies and notice the stark contrast between when he talks of building a big beautiful wall and when he talks of opening a big beautiful gate for increased immigration rates. Socialists rightly see these rallies as threatening because votes are a proxy for force and this thinly veiled proxy is starting to show the true military nature of those rallies that is what many are calling Trump’s " Caesarism".
But now we come to the greatest “capitalist” enterprise of all, based on such flesh blood and bone military men:
The World Reserve Currency as The Worst Resource Curse.
Demand for US dollars is driven by growth in a global economy that uses the US dollar as a pricing standard. As that global economy grows, so grows the demand for US dollars. These dollars enter into the global economy in 2 basic ways:
Government spending and Banks.
The result is global “trickle down through the institutions” of INCENTIVES that people have mistaken for the Long March Through The Institutions – corrupting all institutions both public and private.
What Trump’s Pirate Ship has effectively argued is that centalizing that positive network effect externality in the hands of capitalists is less centralized than doing so through Washington, DC.
I’ve offered both capitalists and socialists what they supposedly value:
Privatization of government delivery of social goods by a citizen’s dividend funded by a generalization of the land value tax. This I proposed as a reaction to having testified before Congress at hearing about the collapse of the Soviet Union and what to do with the “peace dividend”. It was a hearing about the START Treaty regarding the nuclear missile manufacturing infrastructure in the context of our grassroots coalition’s success in getting a law put on the books to bar NASA from competing with private sector launch services. My subsequent experience attempting to commercialize the MX Missile system as an orbital launch vehicle, which DARPA sabotaged with the Delta Clipper announcement the very morning we were meeting with Los Angeles area investors, who then walked out fearing government sanctioned competition, was the final straw.
That “9924” at the bottom is the odds against there having been such an enormous disempowerment of the mid to late boomers by the early boomers.
Oh don’t kid yourself that you can explain this as a mere statistical anomaly when it is obvious to anyone who lived through that nightmare that there were men surfing the wave of nubile girls coming of age after them, and of men (and women) surfing the ECONOMIC wave of cheap labor that enriched those who were able to buy into the real estate market before the rest of us could even begin to try to get a leg up on life.
On top of that, you even have, to this very day, early boomers encouraging young people to blame “boomers” in general for their plight while they, themselves, are insulated from the consequences of things like flooding the labor markets with immigrants AND WOMEN on top of the demographic wave that they caught.
So, yeah, early boomers sat at the same banquet as The Greatest Generation, dining on the flesh of the grandchildren of The Greatest Generation.
PS: With the onrush of guys like Obama and Vance it is now obvious that the biggest demographic group in US history from which we should have expected the most number of Presidents and other leadership positions, will not EVER occupy those positions of power.
You know why that is?
Because if guys like ME ever got to be President, we’d fix the REAL underlying problems with this disaster called “Western Civilization” because we have had no choice but to confront the necessity.
Good grief. Is that all you got? That I linked to Wikipedia? And meanwhile your oracular pronouncement on Trump approval by age provides no source when it is obvious that polling agencies are not all equal?
In any event, where the rubber meets the road is in the exit polling and your thesis doesn’t hold water. While Boomers voted less for Trump than GenX, they voted better than other age groups.
Sure, it’s a CBS/YouGov poll. If anything, they are likely to want to underestimate youth support for Trump since it goes against narrative. In this case, this poll agrees well with Rasmussen (within one point), which suggests that the legacy media may be taking a break from lying. Admittedly, other polls show different results, but note that the poll I cited is the most recent (Feb. 5-7), while the Emerson poll you cited was (Jan 27-28): about 10 days earlier. This is a rapidly-evolving situation. As Lenin observed, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” In the week between those two polls, decades happened.
Is that enough sources for your inner sealion? Hey, look! I’m even citing your favorite reference source.
Dear Dr. Lorentz (I’ll resist rejoining your incivility and therefore expect an apology), it is obvious from my response that I was aware of and responded to what you said.
Thanks for providing the source. I was aware of the Rasmussen link you provided and didn’t cite it because it doesn’t include by-age breakdown.
While “Sealioning” isn’t necessarily an epithet I only “demanded” one reference from you while your absence of reference caused me to have to go out hunting and providing a variety of sources. What is it when someone provides a controversial claim and thereby demands that others go out and provide a statistically significant sample to check the veracity?
I will not be apologizing for using a term of endearment, albeit jocularly. However, I would note that your demand of a source, having referred to my “oracular pronouncement” is a roundabout way to implying that I made it up. You should know by now that I always bring receipts, which I proved in this case. Before you imply someone is fabricating data or is a liar, you’d better make sure you’re on firmer ground.
I await, but do not expect, an apology for your behavior. A person who impugns the integrity of another without good reason probably should take greater care.
Hey, you could have just taken my word for it. Alternatively, you might have asked for a reference politely. Incivility, thy name is @ jabowery.
Nope. Your sniping is clearly provocative. The “oracular” nature of your assertion that “Trump enjoys >50% approval in all age groups except boomers” is not based on you having no source but on you performing the gymnastics of, in one sentence accusing me of using a source that you considered unreliable, thereby imputing to me reliance on other sources typical of “Boomers” only to then assert with no source provided, a controversial statement as fact.
Quite honestly, Dr. your behavior puzzles me. What’s your beef? It doesn’t appear to be solely with me.
but in general).
