What are Baby Boomers all about – what have they done – what do they want to do in the future? A big question.
Unfortunately, the commentators (in the UK) who proffer their insights and opinions are doing a bad job of answering it. Ha it is Sunday, I can be a bit more direct; they are making an abysmal pathetic mess of it.
Some smart character wrote that the ‘environmental debate’ is like a Christmas tree – you can hang upon it all of your personal or corporate prejudices and come to any answer you want. The same is true of the “Baby Boomer question”.
Let’s look at the media’s attempts. A few days back I posted an item about the
BBC’s rather puny attempt to answer the question. Around the same time I noticed an article in the New Statesman by Faisal Islam entitled: “
The great generational robbery”. Its naivety had a certain quaintness about it and I assumed Mr Islam was a recovering ASBO (recipient of an Anti Social Behaviour Orders) who was being given a second chance by the magazine. To see the article’s silliness read this analysis in the
humanists for labour blog.
Much to my amazement I find that Mr Islam won the award of Young Journalist of the Year at the Royal Society of Television awards. The mind boggles about the other candidates!
Mr Islam, like so many of his generation, maunder on about having to pay for their university education and how the Boomers had their higher educated paid for by the state. What is never mentioned is that at the start of 1960s only one in sixteen kids participated in higher education. By 2010 the figure is planned to grow to 1 in 2.
I appreciate that many journalists are numerically-challenged but surly it is obvious that only a tiny number of the 1960s generation were recipients of college grants – the great majority of them were paying taxes for a few of their peers. This was the era when kids leaving school had the ‘gap-week’ – not the gap-year that today’s generation perceive as their God given right.
Academia doesn’t do much better. This week I sat through what can only be described as mind boggling boring and simplistic set of presentations by a group of academics who have spent my taxes producing ill-founded motherhood conclusions. The culprits will remain nameless.
Another example of the dubious quality of academic research is the
simplistic study about Boomers’ size 12 carbon foot prints. I posted about this study a few weeks back.
Naively I have always thought that academia applies rigour and structure to its research. Not so.
Finally, we come to the corporate world. There are numerous examples of companies spending a few bob on research to generate some cheap headlines. The most recent example is Scottish Widows: “
Baby Boomer generation of retire-easies”. Notice the mandatory silly name (retire-easies) intended to make the release more likely to be picked up by the media. The conclusions of the research don’t stack up with the reality.
Fact: 20% of the age group 55-70 own 80% of the wealth of that age group and contains most of the high income earners. There are a lot, the majority, who are not in this Retire Easy position.
Fact: See the diagram and read this quote
from the CCCS.
Last year debt problems of the over 60s accelerated faster than for any other age group while contrary to popular perception, the debts of young people declined. CCCS predicts that by the end of 2007 its counsellors will be helping more people over 60 than under 25.
So what does all of this mean? Facts are better than prejudices. Facts always trump simplistic generalisations. And, facts require a bit of hard work that it seems the media, academia and the corporate world are not prepared, or capable, of doing. Dick Stroud
Email this post
