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BOOK REVIEW |
Director, Office of Academic Affairs AARP 601 E Street, NW Washington, DC 20049
Boomsday, by Christopher Buckley. Twelve Books, New York, 2007, 336 pp., $24.99 (cloth).
Encore: Finding Work that Matters in the Second Half of Life, by Marc Freedman. Public Affairs, New York, 2007, 224 pp., $24.95 (cloth), $14.95 (paper).
The Long Baby Boom: An Optimistic Vision for a Graying Generation, by Jeff Goldsmith. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, 2008, 232 pp., $24.95 (cloth).
More than 15 years ago, Professor James Hunter wrote an influential book titled Culture Wars (1992), which evoked a polarized debate about the future of America. Hunter later had second thoughts about just how deep this divide might be (Hunter and Wolfe, 2006). But those of us who remember the Sixties recognize familiar polarizing issues all too well: Once it was "Acid, Abortion and Amnesty"; more recently it has been "God, Guns, and Gays." Today we're seeing a new conflict of ideologies that I will call the "Boomer Wars." On the one side are those who label Boomers as selfish and paint a gloomy picture of America as Boomers grow older. On the other side are those who see Boomers as idealistic agents for positive social change. Both sides in the Boomer Wars talk past each other, but they both make good copy for the media. The Boomer Wars often are ignored by academic gerontology, but this ignorance could be a mistake. Media imagery can have a big influence on culture and public policy. We need to take the Boomer Wars seriously in order to avoid over-simplified polarities and to appreciate the power that public discourse and media images can have in shaping our thinking about generational change in an aging society.
In commanding media attention, those with a message of conflict or disaster usually have the upper hand. Media treatment of population aging follows this pattern. There is a recent history of those who are worried—very, very worried—about the oncoming Age Wave—"tsunami," "train wreck," and "iceberg" are metaphors commonly used to describe it. Pete Peterson, author of Gray Dawn (1999), has long been concerned about population aging, and his books are intended to make us fearful about the costs of an aging society. Peterson has never carried a special grudge against Boomers, but he has recently endowed a new billion dollar foundation in his name, intended to follow in the steps of Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" and make us worried about the future. The Peterson Foundation is headed by former U.S. Comptroller David Walker, famed for his "Fiscal Wake Up Tour." A new film supported by the Foundation, I.O.U.S.A. has brought its message to the public in another way. We're soon likely to hear a lot more from people who James Schulz and Robert Binstock (2008) have called "doom sayers." Some of this discourse seems bound to get entangled in the way we portray aging Boomers.
In this review essay, I give an overview of those who forecast a grim future for aging Boomers along with those who see a sunnier prospect for things to come. It is this recurrent polarization of discourse that I describe as the Boomer Wars. Along with negative and positive constructions, I offer some alternative ways of thinking about Boomers: the age-period-cohort model of generational change along with a cohort segmentation approach based on class, gender, and ethnicity. Both of these alternatives are familiar to gerontologists but they rarely influence popular discourse or shape the social construction of how Boomers are portrayed. Finally, I will explore some pragmatic approaches to the aging of the Boomers, approaches inspired by markets and by public policy.
The Negative View of Aging Boomers
The Generational Equity Debate of the 1980s made us familiar with an image of "Greedy Geezers," and that image has never entirely gone away. As Boomers get old, the accusation of selfishness seems bound to be revived. For example, Steve Chapman, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, is worried about what will happen when the Boomers reach Golden Pond, as Robert Butler memorably phrased it. In Chapman's view, it looks like Golden Pond will be polluted or dried up or otherwise unavailable. Chapman gives a grim forecast of things to come, published on Slate.com under the title of "Meet the Greedy Grandparents: Why America's Elderly Are So Spoiled." After rounding up the usual suspects (Social Security, Medicare), he concludes that the Boomers will make things worse: "If politicians think the current geezers are greedy, they ain't seen nothin' yet."
If this outlook seems gloomy, maybe the best thing would be for Boomers to just get out of the way. In the immortal words of the Rolling Stones, "I hope I die before I get old." On the web we can find a blog called "Boomer Deathwatch." A quick glance at that site confirms the general idea: There are more Boomers, they're getting older, and they'll cost us too much, since they have too much political power. The celebrated "idealism" of the Boomer generation, it seems, is just a mask for greed and narcissism. The June 2000 issue of Time offered readers an article titled "Twilight of the Boomers," denouncing, not surprisingly, greed and narcissism. Denunciation is followed by typical imagery of physical and mental decline long associated with old age. Ageism, it seems, is one prejudice that just doesn't seem to go away.
Popular books pick up this theme. David Brooks, in Bobos in Paradise (2000), portrayed Boomers as aging Hippies who have "sold out" and become materialistic Yuppies. A similarly harsh indictment of Boomers appears in Joe Queenan's book Balsamic Dreams (2001), subtitled A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation. The persistent indictment of "narcissism" and "selfishness" is given a psychospiritual slant by Ken Wilber in his novel Boomeritis (2003). Wilber, a proponent of transpersonal psychology, hopes that Boomers will rise to a higher level of consciousness. Unless they do, he fears it will just be politics as usual, and the outlook is not bright.
The politics of aging Boomers moves front and center in Christopher Buckley's Boomsday (2007), a novel of political satire. Buckley portrays a world of the future where retiring Baby Boomers are bankrupting the country and have inspired a revolt by younger generations. In this future, world inflation is running at 30% a year, and the U.S. is at war with countries around the world. Boomers are collecting Social Security, but there is no money to pay for benefits promised. As a result, the "U30s"—that is, people under the age of 30—are rebelling against higher taxes. Onto this scene comes the heroine of the novel, a 29-year-old blogger named Cassandra Devine, pushing for a new law in favor of "Transitioning"—that is, suicide at age 75. Instead of a Woodstock reunion, in Buckley's world of the future, the best we can hope is that Dr. Kevorkian will be making house calls.
This gloomy picture of aging Boomers is not limited to web sites or novelists. Leading sectors of the media seem to take it for granted. For example, liberal columnist Thomas Friedman, of the New York Times, refers to Boomers as "the greediest generation," and his fellow columnist Nicholas Kristof follows the same line. On the conservative side of the same newspaper, columnist John Tierney calls the Boomers the "whiniest generation." Much of the media critique of the Clintons during the 2008 Presidential race took for granted an image of Boomers as self-centered and hostile to younger generations.
The Positive View of Aging Boomers
This indictment for selfishness sounds bad. But are the Boomers going to lie down and take it? Hopefully, they won't, argues marketing consultant Brent Green, author of Marketing to Leading Edge Baby Boomers (2006). Green writes: "It is in the generation's long-term interest to challenge marketers and media that perpetuate stereotypes, especially the special brand of Boomer ageism that links their self-absorbed, unpatriotic image from the Sixties with the traditional negative images of aging. This is an unprecedented double whammy. The price for ignoring this phenomenon may be greater than the Boomer Generation or society is willing to pay in the coming years."
Well, what does the opposing team have to offer in the Boomer Wars? To find the answer, look at one of the best books on the subject, Marc Freedman's Prime Time (2002), which carries the hopeful subtitle How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America. Freedman predicts that Boomers will not accept traditional ideas about retirement but instead will direct their energy toward social activism and community service. His book presents some of the best arguments for what has now become the fashionable idea of "civic engagement." Theodore Roszak, in The Longevity Revolution (2001), paints a rosy picture of the decades ahead, "as Boomers become elders." He links the Boomer cohort with idealistic aspirations of the Sixties, described so vividly in his own earlier classic, The Making of a Counterculture (1968). Roszak believes there could be a flowering of what he now hails as an "Elder Culture," as aging Boomers blend self-actualization with altruism and social activism. Boomers, as they age into their 60s, Roszak hopes, will revive the ideals of the Sixties and recapture the idealism of their youth. Along similar lines, Leonard Steinhorn, The Greater Generation (2006), offers an unapologetic defense of the Boomers' legacy. Perhaps more than any other author, Steinhorn's political liberalism leads him to equate Boomers with positive social change, so he, too, is optimistic about aging Boomers. Steinhorn praises the Boomers as "the Greater Generation" because of their historical push for rights and tolerance, which he contrasts with the World War II Generation that came to prominence during the more conservative 1950s.
This nostalgia of the Sixties does raise a problem. Not all the Boomers were protesting against the War in Vietnam. On the contrary, many of them were fighting in that war or were opposed to the protesters. If we believe the Baby Boom extended to 1964, then those born from, say, 1960 to 1964 were too young to be influenced by that War at all. Then again, did the Boomers even create "the Sixties?" Maybe not. After all, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Tom Hayden, Ralph Nader, and Jane Fonda were not Boomers at all, as market researcher David Wolfe points out. Wolfe adds that Boomers "may be justifiably called the most misunderstood generation in history." Early on, Boomers were labeled by pundits with a list of traits that supposedly made them different from people in other generations, like the "Lost Generation" of the Jazz Age celebrated by F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. In his book Ageless Marketing (2003), Wolfe takes a dim view of our current enthusiasm for characterizing aging Boomers in distinctive ways, preferring instead to think in terms of life-span development instead of cohort.
Part of the problem is that the Baby Boom Generation has been celebrated and analyzed for so long in so many ways. One of the first to do this was Langdon Jones in Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom (1980). More recently, historian Steven Gillon offered his own portrait in Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever, and How It Changed America (2004). Celebration of Boomers as a distinct generation reaches a peak in The Boomer Century, 1946–2046: How America's Most Influential Generation Changed Everything (2007), by Richard Croker, with a foreword by the ubiquitous Ken Dychtwald, who himself hosted a TV special trumpeting the distinctiveness of Boomers past, present, and future. Along the same vein, we can mention J. Walker Smith and Ann Clurman's Generation Ageless (2007), a book that celebrates the alleged Boomer denial of aging as a good thing. Smith and Clurman claim that as Boomers move into later life, they'll "change everything" and "they're just getting started." Who said denial is not just the name of a river in Egypt?
Against Cohort-olatry
What are we to make of this endless rumination about the Boomer generation? Let me give a name for it: "cohort-olatry," or the unreasonable worship of distinctive features of a cohort. We have seen this vice recur repeatedly among both those who have a negative and those who have a positive view of Boomers. We should mention here what one might even identify as a General Theory of Cohort-olatry: namely, the book titled Generations, by Neil Howe and the late William Strauss (1992). Howe and Strauss claim to have found in cohorts the key to historical explanation, and so they subtitle their book as nothing less than The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069. Nostradamus, move over: Cohort experts are reading the tea leaves now.
The opposing voices in the Boomer Wars make for entertaining reading, but at a certain point it becomes time for "reality therapy" in thinking about aging Boomers. The most elemental approach here is segmentation of the Boomer population into more manageable groups. Thus, "leading edge Boomers" (born 1946 to 1954) have sometimes been distinguished from the group dubbed by Jonathan Pontell as "Generation Jones" (those born 1955 to 1964). This chronological segmentation is helpful in answering the question of whether Barack Obama (born 1961) and Hillary Clinton (born 1946) both belong to the same cohort (they do and they don't, depending on definitions). More helpful still is to look at Boomers in terms of social class, gender, and ethnicity. A 62-year-old African American woman may not have that much in common with a 44-year-old Caucasian man, for all kinds of reasons. Classifying them both as "Boomers" doesn't tell us a lot and tends to obscure important social forces. Because of the power of cumulative advantage and disadvantage, inequities linked to class, race, and gender profoundly shape what happens in later life. Still more deeply, we need to disentangle the impact of age, period, and cohort as we think about any group of people growing older in historical time. This last point should lead us to remember that the "Baby Boom" took very different form in different countries of the world (U.S., U.K., Australia, Finland, France, and others), a subject discussed in detail by Chris Phillipson (2007).
There are some thoughtful books that examine the aging of Boomers and identify deep trends that don't easily fall into the polarization of the Boomer Wars. Among gerontologists, we may cite Mary Elizabeth Hughes and Angela O'Rand's Lives and Times of the Baby Boomers (2004), published by the Russell Sage Foundation and Population Reference Bureau. Cheryl Russell, former editor of American Demographics, has a book on Boomers (2004) that is helpful and avoids exaggerated hopes or fears. Susan Whitbourne and Sherry Willis's edited collection, The Baby Boomers Grow Up (2006), gives full attention to subtleties of research and methodological complexities. Contributors to that collection examine health and psychosocial characteristics of Boomers in midlife, with full awareness of the methodological hurdles entailed by the age-period-cohort problem. But by far the best and most comprehensive academic treatment of aging Boomers is Rob Hudson's recent edited collection, Boomer Bust? Economic and Political Dynamics of the Graying Society (2008), a two-volume set that is a veritable encyclopedia of boomer issues, with 29 original essays by some of the best thinkers in aging: Robert Binstock on politics, Edward Lawlor on Medicare, Sara Rix on older workers, Ronald Manheimer on lifelong learning, and many others. Volume one addresses demography, economics, and the political dimensions of aging Boomers with strong treatment of the major public policy questions likely to arise in the period 2010 to 2030. The second volume includes essays covering social, financial, and civic dimensions of later life, including treatment of topics less often covered such as philanthropy and images of age in media. This landmark work will be the definitive source for scholarly treatment of aging Boomers. [Editor's Note: Since this book was not available to the author at press time, these assessments are preliminary. We plan a full review of this book in a later issue.]
A strength of the Hudson collection is its treatment of the big question: Namely, what sort of world is likely to be there in the period 2010 to 2030 when most of the Boomers enter old age? Some trends, at least on the demographic side, seem quite predictable. The Palo Alto-based Institute for the Future has published its own version of "scenarios" and hypothetical possibilities. But even that future forecast largely overlooks the big problems of energy shortages and climate change that are likely to be of decisive importance when Boomers reach Golden Pond. Recent attention by gerontology to issues of the environment—for example, a forthcoming special issue of Generations devoted to this topic—may in itself be a hopeful sign for our common future.
It is not wise for gerontology to avoid looking at "period effects" likely to coincide with the aging of Boomers. To appreciate the importance of period effects, think only about a very recent one: namely, the subprime mortgage crisis and the decline in the U.S. housing market that began in 2007. According to research by Alicia Munnell, the burst of the housing bubble brought a 14% decline in net worth for the typical household approaching retirement. If you were selling vacation or retirement homes to aging Boomers in this historical period, it would be crystal clear that a period effect—namely, falling home prices and credit contraction—is far more likely to overwhelm any cohort effects.
The recommended "reality therapy" for victims of cohort-olatry needs to include more refined segmentation in our picture of Boomers, attention to class, gender, and ethnicity, and awareness of the age-period-cohort problem. But beyond such analytical efforts, there is also the pragmatic question: What can we do in anticipation of the "Age Wave" represented by aging Boomers? I will conclude here with two pragmatic responses: the marketplace and public policy.
Boomer Markets and Boomer Policy
As to the marketplace, aging Boomers obviously comprise a huge consumer market, spending up to $2 trillion each year. Understandably, market researchers have not hesitated to hail them as a new bonanza. Among the best of recent books on marketing to Boomers is Turning Silver into Gold: How to Profit in the New Boomer Marketplace (2007), by Mary Furlong. Matt Thornhill, co-author of The Boomer Consumer (2007), runs a think-tank, "The Boomer Project," explicitly devoted to figuring out what aging Boomers want. Big companies obviously want to know. Academic gerontologists have given, by and large, only minimal attention to consumer and marketing issues, but that neglect needs to change.
Along with the consumer marketplace, we also need to be thinking about the labor market for aging Boomers. David DeLong, in Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce (2004), warns of a looming problem. His book is not focused primarily on Boomers but on the loss of intellectual capital that will happen unless we find ways to extend Boomers' work lives. Many books now in print insist that we're "too young to retire," that we should "rewire, not retire" during our exciting "Power Years." These books offer guidance on how to "reinvent" ourselves, but few thoughtfully address the deep structural constraints (e.g., ageism) that prevent this optimistic outcome from happening. One of the most inspiring of these is Marc Freedman's Encore: Finding Work that Matters in the Second Half of Life (2007). Rarely do such books consider the power of cumulative disadvantage or segmentation of Boomers according to class, race, and gender. And it is almost impossible to find a popular book on aging Boomers that shows even dim awareness of the Age-Period-Cohort model.
Jeff Goldsmith in The Long Baby Boom (2008) shares some of this optimism but, in contrast to Steinhorn and Roszak, Goldsmith puts the focus less on culture and more on economics and politics. He predicts that aging Boomers will work longer and thereby avoid putting a larger financial burden on society. But he believes this positive scenario won't easily come to pass unless we adopt policies that encourage more savings, health promotion, and personal responsibility, though without abandoning key government programs that provide security. In Goldsmith's view, a positive future for aging Boomers depends on acting now to make that future a reality.
But will older Americans actually be able to work longer in the years to come, as Goldsmith and Freedman hope they will? The picture is mixed. On the one hand, the National Health Interview Survey shows that, during the past three decades, "healthy life expectancy" has increased by nearly 3 years for a typical 50-year-old man. But disparities remain between those in the top and bottom quartiles of the population, and class and ethnicity are big factors here. One of the most surprising trends appears in the Health and Retirement Study, currently tracking more than 20,000 U.S. adults as they move through middle age toward retirement. When researchers examined the first wave of Boomers to enter the study—5,030 adults born between 1948 and 1953—they were shocked to discover that they appeared to report poorer health than groups born between 1936 and 1941 and 1942 and 1947. These early Boomers were much less likely than their predecessors to describe their health as "excellent" or "very good," and were more likely to report having difficulty with routine activities, such as walking several blocks or lifting 10 pounds. They also were more likely to report pain, drinking and psychiatric problems, and chronic problems such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. "It's not what I expected," said Beth Soldo of the Population Aging Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who led the analysis. Richard Suzman of the National Institute on Aging added: "If people are entering early old age in worse health, it doesn't bode well for society. It's quite worrying."
One answer to this worry would be more ambitious efforts at health promotion, a strategy neglected for the most part by Medicare, along with managed care plans. In our current health care system, we pay for sickness, not for health. Goldsmith supports pro-health promotion strategies, which should go hand-in-hand with public policies to encourage more saving for retirement, and work-life extension to enable Boomers to remain productive in their later years. Of course, work-life extension and "productive aging" have problems of their own, as critics such as Martha Holstein and Meredith Minkler (2003) have warned. Still, the great strength of Goldsmith's analysis, and a prime reason for his optimism, lies in his belief that more enlightened public policies can actually encourage elements of positive aging. That hopeful outlook for aging Boomers will not happen automatically. But without a "politics of hope," we may not mobilize the collective will to confront the challenges of population aging in the years to come.
The key point is to look forward, not backward. It's nearly 40 years after Woodstock and long past the time when Boomers should be claiming moral high ground for a Counter Culture that itself has become a political distraction. The Boomers' accomplishment lies not in the past but in the future—in safeguarding our environment, reforming Social Security, and acting on behalf of future generations. We need stewardship, but we should not be blaming Boomers for selfishness, as some right-wing commentators love to do. Whatever problems we have with entitlement spending, Boomers have barely begun collecting Social Security and none have become eligible for Medicare. True, health care spending is out of control, but Boomers are no more to be blamed for that than for global warming or the sub-prime mortgage problem. However, because of their own deteriorating health status, Boomers could end up as victims of Medicare cutbacks, just at the time when they will be most in need.
The Boomers visit to Golden Pond will not be a trip to Leisure Village. It will involve working longer, and evidence already suggests that early retirement is becoming a thing of the past. But aging Boomers need more help in reskilling to get decent jobs and to have longer productive work lives, which they say they want and will certainly need. Ageism remains a problem in the workplace, and Boomers are its biggest victims. Yet government and business have done little to invest in human capital on a life-span basis. Instead of blaming age or globalization, we should be helping aging Boomers acquire the skills for the jobs of the future.
The same strategy applies to savings. Aging Boomers' net worth has been eroded by loss of home equity and by declines in the stock market. We should be helping aging Boomers save for retirement—for example, through automatic IRA enrollment and low-cost indexed mutual funds. With U.S. savings rates hovering near zero, we will need a revival of the virtue of thrift if our society is to have a viable future. In addition, aging Boomers need protection from predatory lending, including the mortgages that have led to record foreclosure rates and the collapse of major financial institutions. This means government regulation and protection for the vulnerable. A pro-savings strategy would maintain Social Security, the last defined benefit program for most workers. But Social Security will have to be reformed to ensure its long-term solvency. We have a model for how to do this through intergenerational sharing of burdens, as we did successfully in 1983. Social Security itself operates on a time horizon of 75 years, and we all need to be thinking in much more long-range terms if we ever are to tackle challenges that reach beyond any single generation.
Finally, we should not accept the Boomers' deteriorating health status as inevitable. Three-quarters of all Medicare spending goes for just five chronic conditions: diabetes, congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease, asthma, and depression. All are amenable to primary and secondary prevention. But incentives in both Medicare and private insurance plans are in the wrong direction. Aging Boomers would benefit from a health-care system, instead of the disease-service system we now have in place. Achieving better health will require more personal responsibility (a conservative virtue), along with collective public responsibility (a liberal virtue). That certainly includes strengthening our public health system and more attention to chronic diseases. Aging Boomers, now in their 50s, would likely be very responsive to such interventions, but leadership is required.
The beginning of leadership is to abandon the rhetoric of the Boomer Wars altogether. We need to avoid the rhetoric of blame and "selfishness" as well as nostalgia for the "Sixties Generation." One of the best-selling hardback books in history is Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life (2002), which begins with the simple words "It's not about you." Instead, it's about us. Aging Boomers, like others in the second half of life, are beginning to realize this. That realization opens up new possibilities for solidarity across generations. Boomers will grow up as they grow older, eventually "outliving the self," in the words of John Kotre (1984), describing the virtue of generativity. No one said it better than W. H. Auden: "In the end we are all contemporaries."
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