January 10, 2017 • 49 mins
Baby Boomers are probably the most talked about generation in American history. But who are these people and how did they help shape the country we know today? Find out all about the big boom in today's episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, I'm welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's guest producer Noel
over there. So this is stuff you should know. Yeah,
Noel likely to sit in on this one and not
(00:21):
just hit record and run screaming. Yeah, we were kind
of surprised. Yeah, it's weird though. It's been so long
since we had someone in here with it's been at
the Ghosts the studio that time forgot. But we have
to suck in our guts again. Sit up right, I
have to lick my fingers in the straight my hair
(00:41):
with them. Sure. So, Chuck, Yes, you are a gen
x or did you know that? Yeah? Are you? Yeah?
That was my next point? Sorry, I am too. Yeah,
uh no, I think it's a millennial. Know what you were?
You born? Knows a millennial? God knows what Jerry is
(01:04):
no idea. Yeah, she's of her own time. Um so boy,
none of us are. Jerry might be. I don't know
our baby boomers now, Jerry, you know Jerry's a gen xer. Yeah.
One thing that this inspired me to do was to
do a show on generations period. I find it fascinating
(01:27):
how people are grouped and also a little frustrated when. Um,
once I got into the sub groups, it helped me,
But when I looked at like, especially the Baby Boom generation,
there's such a clear difference in the which we'll get
to the early and the later part of that, it
(01:47):
was just like, well, why why don't you just call
them to different generations? Some people do well, some people do,
but for the most part they don't. For the most part,
people say, the baby boomers are people who are born
from ninety nineteen exty four is the general definition of them. Yeah,
it's just weird, Like my mom missed out on it
just by a couple of years. But then my sister
(02:08):
just missed out on it by a couple of years.
So it just doesn't seem like, I know, they're not
the same generation, but they it is not even close.
It shouldn't be. No, it's not. And and again like
so we'll we'll get into it a little bit more.
But um, some people say that's just too wide of
a swath. And more to the point, which this is
the basis of generations, the life experience of those of
(02:30):
the people on either end of that that twenty year
or so spectrum are so we're so wildly different that, yeah,
they don't. They can't be in the same generation. It
just doesn't make sense because the point of a generation,
um is that it is a group of people born
around the same time who all shared some sort of
major life experience, a collective life experience. Yeah, whether it's
(02:54):
culture or ideologies. Yeah, usually an event though, like the
assassination JFK's would go to for baby boomers that in
the event was so enormous that it shaped their worldview
for the rest of their lives, Like ours would be
the where's the beef commercials? Right exactly? Uh, well, we
(03:15):
do share that though, Oh no, I'm I was dead serious,
You're not. Well, I don't know if that's the identifying
for well, for millennials, um, especially older millennials, it would
be like nine eleven would be for ours. Maybe Challenger,
the Challenger explosion is the one I always go to.
Does it always have to be a disaster, No, it's
(03:38):
just gotta be an enormous event that enough people are
aware of and impacted by that it shapes who they are.
So it's almost like a group of people, all about
the same age, all being touched in relatively the same
way at the same time, so that their world view
is changed forever by that event. So where's the beef. Yeah, Okay,
(04:00):
that we agree. Uh So the reason, um, there were
a lot of Well, the deal with the baby boomers is,
as you'll see, is that there are a lot of them,
and birth rates rose quite a bit in n and
stayed that way for about twenty years. And it's interesting
when you look at the reasons. Um, the most obvious
(04:22):
thing you can point to is just say, like, yeah,
dudes came home after the war and had a lot
of sex. Pretty much that has something to do with it.
But this article points out something I never considered, which
was sort of a convergence of of that and then
not just wanting to have a lot of sex after
the war, but the promise of like prosperity to come
(04:44):
after the war and like things are gonna be great,
so let's like go all in on the family. But
that converging with the uh a bit of an older
generation of parents post depression that may have waited to
have kids for very race reasons, and that kind of
all happening at the same time. Yeah, younger families having kids,
(05:04):
not postponing the older generation that had postponed having the kids,
all at the same time. Huge, huge population increases. From
nineteen uh, nineteen fifty to nineteen eighty, the American population
increased by fifty that's not From nineteen forty six to
nineteen forty five, the number of babies born year over
(05:25):
year increased by that's that's a lot. Yeah. So in
nineteen six millions, I think about an average of four
four million and change babies started being born every year,
and it kept going and going until I think nineteen
fifty seven, when it plateaued and stayed high for a while,
(05:46):
and then it dipped again starting in nineteen sixty four
sixty five, which coincided with the widespread availability of the pill. Uh.
One reason I think the baby boom generation is so
interesting and endlessly talked about and studied is because it
just there. The the shift, the ideological shift that they
(06:11):
were presiding over is it was was just massive. This
article kind of sums it up nicely, like they created
the youth movement of the sixties when they're in their twenties.
It was that culture excess of the seventies, and then
in the eighties they became the yuppies. And now they're
entering retirement or in retirement and running the world. And
(06:33):
then and and and then, as you'll see, a lot
of them are rebuffing the excess of hey, let's make
and spend tons of money, and like concentrating on giving back,
which was originally inspired by like the Kennedy administration volunteerism.
Yeah that that asked not what your country can do
(06:56):
for you? Yeah, that whole thing, right, But it's interesting
this one lady, the first moment, I'm sorry, the first
boomer born just after midnight in New Jersey. Uh, Kathleen
Casey Kirschling is widely regarded as the first baby boomer. Yes,
she's born in January first nine. Yeah, and as you'll
(07:17):
see if you look at her life, she really is
like a symbol. And of course, you know that's kind
of the problem with generations, as you lumped them all
in as this, and of course it varies from person
to person. Well that's one criticism of even studying generations
in the first place. Yeah. Yeah, but she was married
for a time, got divorced, um has a self made pension,
(07:43):
that she accrued over the years, like I'm gonna take
care of my own, you know, retirement, doing appearances as
the world's first baby boomer. She missed out if she
didn't last be uh, and then like had a career,
it's successful careers, I think, like a corporate trainer. Then
in the early nineties left corporate America and became a
high school teacher for like fifteen or twenty years. She Yeah,
(08:04):
she basically read a book on how to be a
typical baby boom It's interesting. And now like splits time
between Maryland and Florida and his concentrated on volunteerism in
her retirement. That's really neat. Yeah, it's like she's kind
of the prototypical boomer of if you want to buy
into that thing. Yeah, traditional into non traditional family structure,
(08:24):
family life, right, career, took care of her her own retirement,
and then during retirement chose not to actually just retire,
but to stay active and engaged. That is it's pretty
typical boomerism. Yeah. Uh. Should we hit people over the
head with some of these stats? Yeah, I mean they
were pretty interesting, like I guess just because they came
(08:48):
at a really interesting time in America's history, Like the
Boomers started to be born at the same time as
the suburbs. The consumerism, American consumerism all really started with
the Baby Booms generation. They felt really good about spending
money on themselves. They were the first children targeted by advertisers.
(09:08):
When we're the advertising of kids that started with the boomers. Um.
Everything changed around that time. Um and and in part
because of the Baby Boomers. So they're probably the most
studied generation in American history. Yeah. So there are more
California Boomers than any other state. I think Utah has
the fewest amount of boomers, but they still had like
(09:32):
twenty three percent of their their population was Baby boomers. Yeah,
but they're the only one that was under right. Uh
what else? Twelve point six percent the Boomers never got married,
which is uh from their parents generation only three point
nine percent never got married. So that's a pretty big
increase shunning nuptials. I wonder what it is now. I
(09:52):
couldn't find it. I don't know, it's just increasing. I'm
sure what people getting, oh, choosing not to get married
right or or living a non traditional or maybe it's
traditional now even like we're just together, we're just not
married partnerships. Um what else? I mean we could read
(10:13):
out stats all day, but that's boring. I thought you'd
love doing that. Okay, well, there were there were two
things that really stood out to me, though they go
hand in hand. Baby boomers expected their adult children to
move back in with them, and then thirty percent expect
their parents to move in with them, and for some
of those people that overlaps. One of the curious positions
(10:36):
that some boomers find themselves in is caring for adult
children and um aged parents at the same time, under
the same roof. Yeah, and I posted something a while
ago on stuff you Should Knows Facebook page and um,
something about kids moving back in and people like, what
a bunch of losers, And then so many people from
(10:57):
all over the world. We're like, you know, America's like
the only country that feels that way, like that family
should leave at a certain age and not come back.
And they're like, all over the world people are like,
you know, we think it's a great thing. Family is huge,
and we welcome family to live with each other and
you know, into their twenties or thirties if they want to. Bizarre,
(11:19):
we help each other, rely on each other, Yeah, weird
because I mean, I guess the rest of the world
doesn't know we In America, when you turn eighteen, they
have a c U in hell party where you leave
and um, you're not allowed to come back into the
house until you well, until your parents are dead. What
we call it a hit the bricks party. All you
were Baptist family. That's right. Now that we're making stuff up,
(11:43):
do you think we should take a break. Yeah, let's uh,
let's do some real research and come back into this again.
(12:20):
All right, chuck. So the baby boomers were until very
very recently the biggest generation that population wise to ever,
um ever hit America. And they hit America bite, they
hit a like brick of bricks. Yeah. But millennials are
they're taking over now, right, Yeah, Millennials just surpassed um
(12:41):
the boomers in number from what I understand, Yes, millennials
as of two thousand and fifteen. Of course that number
has grown now U seventy four million, just edging out
seventy four point nine million Baby Boomers. But here's the thing.
Millennials are still being born. Boomers are dying. Yeah, the boomers. Actually,
(13:01):
here's here's something that I just thought was amazingly interesting.
The Baby Boomers peaked fairly recently as far as their
numbers go. They peaked in at seventy eight point eight million, right,
and our generation is going to peak next year. So
if all the signs and symptoms that you personally are dying,
(13:22):
and I'm dying more and enough, our whole generation is
now dying. We're going to decline after next year. Yeah,
I think more and more about that. But our generation
peaking in two thous No about me dying, I know
what you like, I never thought I would be that
guy that um you know that just sort of like
(13:43):
that whole Woody Allen obsessed with your own death things?
Are you obsessed? No, but it's healthy to think about
the fact that you're gonna die. Some some people believe,
including me, that accepting, genuinely accepting your own death is
the key to living fully. Yeah, I agree. I think
(14:05):
that's the struggle. Yeah, you know, yeah, I mean you
can throw that on a T shirt. But no, I
know sometimes I'm like, I wonder if if it just
hasn't fully sunk in yet and one day down the
road and be like, I'm gonna die. I think, uh,
this has come more and more for me in the
(14:25):
past five years. So I'll check back in with you
in five years. If I'm alive, I'd be bad. I'd
be really sad. Um. Yeah, it'd be sad for at
least three people that I know, and you're one of them. Um.
So I was talking earlier about the Boomers that age
range is too big and it needs to be split up,
(14:47):
and turns out it has been. Uh generally, if you
look at nine to fifty four, people refer to that
as the leading edge of the Boomers, and fifty five
and sixty four as shadow Boomers or Generation Jones. Yeah.
Did you look into that? Yeah, I mean did. The
name was the first thing I was like, well, where
did that come from? And apparently there's a few different
(15:09):
things either, like, uh, they were Jones ng for prosperity
of like days to come, more so than the leading edge. Yeah.
They had just as high expectations, if if not higher
than the first the first batch, but fewer resources available
to them. Yeah, it's a weird name. So they apparently
(15:31):
were considered to be more cynical, more bitter, yeah than
the first batch of baby boomers. And then um, also
their life experiences again like we're we're talking about earlier
so different that um that there, it's just a different generation.
Everybody's just being stubborn and wants Baby Boomers to be
this twenty year generation rather than ten. Well, yeah, but
(15:54):
you were talking about the the life events or whatever,
the binding life events. Uh. These two writers, Howard Schumann
and Jacqueline Scott in the mid eighties kind of did
a little bit of research on what they feel like.
Is that what people feel like is they're defining thing
from their generation, and it is sharply divided. When you
have the leading edge, you've got obviously uh JFK, Robert Kennedy,
(16:19):
Martin Luther King, a lot of assassinations, the moonwalk, uh,
Vietnam War, civil rights movement, and then the more cynical
um shadow Boomers or or Jones is uh, you're talking
Nixon and Watergate, the Cold War, the oil and bargo.
It sort of makes sense. It's definitely too like those
(16:39):
are two pretty starkly different sets of events. They yeah,
they are. It's like almost a different world that happened,
that took places along that change along that divide America
switch gears in large party. And you asked earlier, if
it always has to be a disaster. Yeah, I mean
(17:00):
all of these basically are pretty glom and gloomy. I
think the disaster unites though. That's probably a big thing
that But also I think it leads to a loss
of innocence, which happens in a personal level as well. Right,
And that's kind of when you grow up, is when
you realize, oh my god, everything isn't totally stable and
my parents can't solve every problem in the world, and
(17:22):
there's like real strife and hardship and injustice and and
and bleakness. And when you realize that, suddenly say something
like that this president you idolize being assassinated. It can
it can have a real solidifying effect on your your life,
your outlook. Yeah. First you mentioned the challenger for us,
(17:43):
and I'm in no way like downgrading that, but for
me personally, and it might have just been the way
I received the news even it wasn't like, uh, I
don't feel like it like was the big defining thing. Okay,
it was obviously a big deal, But did you see
it happen? No, I don't think I saw it happen live,
which probably is a big factor. Um, but like Reagan
(18:07):
being assassinated is rings more in my head, at least
as a memory. I'm not saying it affected me as
much personally, but like when I think back, like what
big thing in the childhood happened on an international stage,
Like I like remember where I was when Reagan was
shot And I don't remember the Challenger as much, which
is weird because it was later. Yeah, I was only
like five when Reagan was shot. I don't have any
(18:29):
memory of it whatsoever. Right, you didn't care. I didn't know.
I was like, yeah, I didn't know it was going.
Five year old didn't care. I guess not. You're playing
with your g I Joe's that's right. But as the
article points out, one thing that united all boomers was TV. Yeah. Okay,
so if we're talking about how and we shouldn't we
should give credence or um props. I guess to the
(18:52):
guy who came up with the concept of generations. It
was a sociologist named Carl Mannheim, and he wrote The
Problem of Generations UM back in and basically said this
is a thing. Now I'm called my Mannheim good night,
And in it he says like I was saying before
that the generation is is held together by the shared
(19:15):
experience that they all go through together. Um, and up
until television, I mean, you had radio, you had newspaper,
you had a guy on horseback running around from town
to town shouting news or whatever. But when with the
invention of television, like now you have this really powerful
way for people to share the same thing at the
same time because they were getting the news in exactly
(19:38):
the same way through television, where a generation really could
be solidified and defined into an actual group that had
a lot in common because of this event. Well yeah,
not just news, but just culturally, like the first generation
that sat around and watched TV shows, yeah, yeah, uh
together like that. In music were like the two biggest
(20:01):
things culturally. I mean you can I mean obviously you
can talk about the Frisbees and hula hoops and Barbie
dolls and stuff like that, but um, TV and music,
like the birth of rock and roll in the birth
of television are like the two hugest things for sure. Elvis,
the Beatles, those were very much in the wheelhouse of
(20:21):
the boomers. Yeah, so you've got those things, You've got
the what they were, Like you were saying, you've got
the fact that they can be shared easily by a
number of far flung people all over the country of
the same age. You got yourself a generation, buddy. Yeah.
And then the final little piece there is the skepticism
of that generation I think was a really big um
(20:44):
uniting factor. Like Boomers were the people who said, don't
trust anyone over thirty and the whole Nixon Watergate, the
Vietnam War being played out every night on TV. It
was like that led to like political revolution in this country.
I think because of that skepticism. Yeah, but it's interesting.
Rather than saying, like their generations of parents before them, well,
(21:08):
this is just the way they things are, I can't
do much about that. Um, this generation was among the
first to say, no, we re reject this way of
looking at things, and we seek to rebuild these institutions
in a way that more reflect how we think the
world should work. That's hug. That was a huge hallmark
(21:29):
of the baby boomer generation. Yeah, it's weird though when
you look at all this stuff, like they were the
most selfless in a lot of ways, but also the
most selfish generation in a lot of ways. Oh yeah.
At the whole time, the whole eighties yuppy thing. Yeah,
the me generation and the consumerism like was hand in
hand with the birth of feminism, or maybe not birth,
(21:49):
but at least rebirth of feminism and uh, the civil
rights movement. Like it's really interesting that all those things
like we're wrapped up in this one generation. Well similarly though, too,
they were also very political and then a political depending
on the decade. You know, like they were members of
organized student groups in the late sixties, and then by
(22:09):
you know, a decade later, they were all like doing
coke and turning their back on politics while they were
like disco dancing. You know, you're like, hey, money, that's
actually kind of cool if you have it right. Yeah,
it's it's it was like it was. They've gone through
huge ships and and sociologists have run after them, studying
them the whole time. Yeah, politically, it's sort of hard
(22:31):
to lump the baby boomer generation politically because and I
think this could probably said of most generations, but they're
really hard to pin down. So this is an old survey,
but in two thousand four, a RP didn't one that
um found out that baby boomers supported abortion rights and
gun control stem cell research, but they also uh supported
(22:54):
the death penalty and being more conservative, uh fiscally and
like sort of all over like all over the map politically.
What's what's funny is I saw like there's a sexual
sentence in this article. It's very difficult to pin boomers
down as being either liberal or conservative. I went huh
and tights into Google found immediately two fourteen gallop poll
(23:17):
has said no percent conservative liberally of of baby boomers.
Interesting self reported on a pole. So that's uh total. Yeah,
so the other don't learn't The other rest were like
if if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there.
(23:38):
And the the polster was like a sero, I didn't
ask you about the sixties. That's funny. Um. And we
talked a little bit about consumerism. But that was also
a really big uniting factor was this was the first
generation that really went all in on saying it's okay
(23:58):
to spend money on yourself. You don't have to feel
bad about it. Uh. You know those previous generations were
of the depression era, right, you know, you don't just
do things like that. Don't throw that safety pin away.
You can fix that. It's not And he saved as
a penny earned, whereas the boomers were like a penny
saved is when you could be spending on something cool.
(24:21):
What's interesting is that it's it's come back again, like
that level of thrifty nous. We're in the we're in
the midst of right now. You think I didn't live
through the depression, true, but I yeah, compared to even
ten fifteen years ago, pre prerecession mentality, Uh, what we're
(24:42):
in right now is definitely thrifty or interesting. Um yeah,
and um yeah, same thing though great depression, great recession
has a tendency to bring out the thrifty nous and people. Um.
We were talking about politics though too. So the first
baby boomer president was Bill Clinton, and then George W.
Was the second baby boomer president. Huh uh. And then
(25:05):
it went to generation Jones with Obama, right, he was
the first Jones or but baby boomer. Yeah, but really
generation Jones really, so Billy and George were in the
leading edge. Yeah, they're both born in nine. Obama's generation Jones.
(25:26):
And then the next guy is uh, he was born
in nineteen as well, So it went back to baby
boom after Obama. Interesting, and this well, I don't know
you never know what's gonna happen in twenty but you
would think that not even just the presidency, but in
in all of politics, that they will Obviously they will
(25:49):
be phased out with time. But I wonder if there
will be another president from that generation. I don't know,
although Joe Biden just said, don't count him out, and
he's he'll be eighty then. Really he's got a lot
of vim and vigor though he does. But boy, I
mean not to knock any eight year old listeners out there. Well,
(26:10):
Bernie was eight one, I think he would have been
just fine. Yeah, that's true. Eighties the new sixty. Well,
I hope. So all right, let's take a break and
um and maybe continue with this afterward. Huh, I think
we should. All right, we gotta finish. Let's do it.
(27:03):
So check. One of the things about a baby boom
is that, um, they're significant, and that it's a sudden
influx of a lot of kids being born at the
same time. And the reason it's significant is because previous
to that and then usually after that, there's fewer kids
being born. So it's a bulge in your population. Right,
(27:25):
So that means that that population is eventually going to
grow old, and as they grow old, they are going
to need more social services that you have reserved for
the elderly for the aged in your population, right yeah,
I mean not only that. The other side is is
the health care sector period, whether or not it's we're
(27:46):
talking like Medicare and social Security and stuff, but just
health care period in the private sector is like licking
their chops. Oh yeah, it's gonna be money to be made,
and as being made, it's going to be a big
boom for the health care sector. And it has been
booms for all these for several other sectors along the
way as they've aged and matured, and then now they're
(28:07):
looking to healthcare more and more. Um, it's it's not
gonna be just like a a sickness bonanza for the
health care industry because the one of the hallmarks of
the baby boomer generation is they were one of the
first like really take care of themselves. Like I remember
when we were younger, Like a sixty five year old
was like an old person, like they might be on oxygen.
(28:30):
They were they were not in good shape by their
mid sixties, like like they're doing one handed push ups
in the street and stuff. Like that that was the
result of the baby boomers doing things like taking up jogging, um,
like eating vegetarian, like just generally taking better care of themselves,
having an emphasis on that. So they're not going to
(28:53):
just all start getting sick on mass or not. I'm sorry.
Previously the boomers they were like, well, what kind of
steak do you want tonight? It's like what cut of beef?
I want steak? Stuff with steak? Oh? Man, I just
listened to uh a Mark Mayren episode with David Spade
and he's talking about Farley. Uh. And he said that
(29:17):
Chris Farley would put a new full pat of butter
on every bite of steak that he ate. Oh, that
doesn't sound very tasty. Butter on steak is delicious. You
can but that much butter on each bite? That's too much? Yeah,
it's you might even say that's excessive. And Spade would
get on and be like, dude, you can't do that,
(29:38):
and he said Farley would look at him and go,
He's like, but each one needs its own hat. He's like.
You couldn't help but laugh because he was just so adorable.
What a loss. Oh, I'm just so sad. Man. He
talked a lot about it was really interesting. Yeah, to
check that one out. I love those two together. Yeah,
(29:59):
very sad um not to bring everything down, but you did.
But we were talking about them aging and and being healthier. Yeah,
they are aging in a much healthier manner than previous generations.
But it still will need healthcare and these social services
they are available specifically, like Medicare for healthcare and Social
Security for retirement pensions. So what's the are scared? They're
(30:23):
they're like no, no. I started to look into it,
but I got depressed. And but then I also saw
that like, no, we saw this coming. So that have
taken measures. Yeah, I saw in a couple of places
that it's the most predictable train wreck in American history. Okay,
well that's good and bad. So here's the thing. When
you're working, you're contributing to Social Security. It comes out
(30:44):
of your paycheck, right, that goes into a poorly managed
fund um that loses money very quickly. Right, So, um,
it was in grave danger of really running out. UH
in the not too distant future decade it's pass and
in UH there was a payroll tax increase that created
(31:06):
a reserve fund and means that it was a Ronald
Reagan tax increase. Right, So this reserve fund is still around.
I think there's like two point six trillion dollars in it,
but we're depleting it each year, and it's it makes
up the shortfall that that Social Security is lacking. Right,
So as we deplete it more and more, um, well,
(31:28):
we have less and less money to provide for people
down the road. And they think by four we'll just
be back to just social Security. The reserve fund will
be depleted and we'll be able to offer something like
seventy eight percent of the benefits that's coming to each person.
That's a big shortfall. In other words, Hey, what you
(31:48):
thought you were gonna get, You're gonna be short yes, exactly.
So people are like, what do we do? It turns
out there's a lot of very not painless but not
painful at all measures that you can pick from and
put together. I saw this great Forbes article on it.
(32:09):
They had like an infographic, so it really drove it home.
But it was like pick pick three of these, pick
two of these, pick five of these, pick ten of these,
and like they were just um increasingly smaller and smaller,
less noticeable measures that you could take and make up
a hundred a hundred and twenty hut of the shortfall
and social security just by moving money around. Yeah, or
(32:31):
just slightly increasing these taxes, slightly slashing benefits, slightly making
the age of retirement a little longer, a little older. Yeah.
That that altogether the average person wouldn't even notice, really, right. Um.
So I'm I'm sure that we're going to be able
to figure it out in a way that's not going
to just ruin everything. The The thing that's keeping it
(32:54):
from really going downhill, though, is that the baby boomers
seem to have said, I can't retire. Right. So in
two thousand and eight, that great recession that happened, there
was a massive transfer of wealth out of the real
estate holdings and the stock portfolios of Americans. A lot
of them were baby boomers who are poised to retire.
(33:16):
They lost a lot of money. It went elsewhere, right, um.
And as a result, the baby boomers just said, well,
I have to go back to work, or well I
was going to retire, but I'm gonna have to keep
working for five more years. Um. And that mentality seems
to be keeping uh, social Security from being further strange.
(33:37):
They're just not They're not. They're working longer than they
normally would be expected to under Social Security. Yeah, it
says here the Concressional Budget Office, so that boomer households
don't have enough savings put away to retain their standard
of living upon retirement. So there's that. Uh. There are
(33:57):
also a large set of boomers that uh want to
stay active and keep working. Like I think it said
something like seventeen only seventeen percent are expected to fully
retire and be done working, and not all of them
are because they need the money. Um, it sort of
(34:18):
depends some. I mean, it's kind of sad. Some people
have been forced out of their jobs and at a
late stage in life or later stage in life have
to go back to like these hourly jobs, and other
people are choosing to They're like, you know what, I
want to go work in a wine shop and like,
you know, twelve bucks an hour. It's and or like, um,
the first baby boomer chose to go teach high school
(34:40):
as her second career. Yeah, and it is now full
and on volunteerism. So um, yeah, there are there's it's it.
There's definitely both going on again. You can't paint that
generation with just one brush, right, Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm
so sorry for using that metaphor, Well, but you don't
like that, no pinting with the brush and no, why
do you hate art? We're that one guy? Yeah, man,
(35:04):
But there are plenty of people who just simply can't
afford to and that to me is just really really sad,
especially if the reason is that they're they're four one case,
just lost value or their house isn't worth what they
were planning on and that was their nusta. That is
really sad to me. It is. Um. We don't give
advice much, but I think millennials have are much better
(35:27):
about trying to think about their long term financial future
than our generation. Um because I didn't think about that
stuff till just far too late. But um taking it
very seriously now. But my advice to younger people is
just like just start early, dudes and do debts with
with small contributions even uh, talk to someone who knows
(35:50):
what they're doing, uh, like who knows what's gonna happen, Like,
don't depend on social security, like take care of yourself
yeah oh yeah, with safe investments. And you know, i'd
be like, yeah, dude, I gotta covered. You know, my
brother's gonna open up some uh some pay lots. I'm
going all in on his parking lots. I think that
might work out. But try try some nice safe investments,
(36:12):
long term stuff. We'll diversify. Yeah, don't don't put all
your egs in one basket or in that pay lot
right exactly, which now just occurred to me. That was
the fargo. Uh that's what you want of them? Oh?
Is that what it was? Yeah, he wanted to buy
some parking lots. Yeah, real rich deal stand yeah, hand
like a good movie. So I have. I know you're
(36:34):
office stats these days, but I have some that I
feel are worth sharing. I'm just gonna go sit outside.
I got least from the Miley fool and they're depressing
soft of baby boomers expect to rely heavily on Social Security.
That's up from in two thousand fourteen. So more are
counting on that now. Yeah, I thought that would go down.
(36:56):
You know, things are not going well right now. Have
no retirement savings, wow, none anymore. They may have had
it before, they don't have it now. They never saved
whatever that's up from. Who said that in two thousand four.
So things are tanking for the baby boomers right now.
(37:17):
Expect to wait until seventy to retire. Stopped adding to
the retirement assets. In two thousand and sixteen, sixteen percent
had had taken premature withdrawals, were in debt with a
median dead of man. Yeah, this is not how we
should care for aged population. You know it's not. And
(37:42):
then do you couple the facts with like, that's great,
you're gonna expect to rely heavily on Social Security. You're
going to be disappointed. But do you just go ahead
and report that to any guy who asks you with
the poll? Yeah? Yeah. The other big misconception is um
that the boomers work harder than uh millennials or gen xers.
(38:02):
Oh yeah, they're Protestant work ethic. That yeah, And you
found this cool thing. This guy at Wayne State, Keith
zbl Uh. He examined seventy seven studies comprising a hundred
and five distinct measurements of work ethic and he basically said,
that's all just a bunch of junk that you read
in uh Salon or slate. He's like, if you look
(38:26):
at the numbers in the stats, there is no difference
in work ethic between the generations, which is interesting and
interesting feels right, you know, like it just feels like
just something that some editor wants to write about and
assigns it like that's a hot topic. Well, apparently that's
a big like human resource thing too. Is figuring out
how to structure a corporation two squeeze the most out
(38:50):
of each of the generations of working there. And this
guy's saying, like, don't even bother. They're they're all they
all work the same. Yeah, although they did say that,
um that baby boomers tend to thrive more in um well,
they subscribe to organizational structure more so hierarchies, whereas like
millennials in Generation X are more like, yeah, let's do
(39:13):
some more work from home. How about that? Or how
about a big, huge, cavernous office with no walls. We're
all the same. Can we get some butter first steak
around here? How about a standing desk? You know, I
because sitting is for chumps and Gen xers, you remember
that whole period. What do you mean here in our
(39:35):
own office? Yeah? Yeah, they're oh yeah, some people still
do that the weird Yeah, but I've also seen more
stools in here than oh, sitting stools. What else? Apparently
the Boomers are really the first big generation to um
(39:57):
robust le ops for cremation upon death and not have
this morose, open casket, traditional sad funeral and be more
like I want to die as I lived, with verve
and vigor, and let's have them. Let's have a party. Man,
scatter my ashes on the White House lawn. How much
(40:21):
does it cost to hire Gallagher? I wonder these days.
I'll bet he's still tours too. I'm sure he does.
I bet he's. I bet he's got his own place
in Branson. Uh, he's a little too hip for Branson,
right between Yakov and Ingelberg. Humper dink. Do you got
(40:45):
anything else? Um? I don't think so. Oh well, I
did think it was interesting them the big suburban boom
that came with the Millennials or with the I keep
saying that, I don't know why, like skipping Jenne altogether. Well,
that's the curse of our generation, the big suburban boom. Uh,
(41:07):
with the Boomers, they in the nineteen fifties, you know
all these it became cheaper basically to move outside the
city and in the tiny apartment and like buy an
actual home in the backyard. And that's when the suburbs
really boomed. And apparently it had a had quite a
deleterious effect on women. The women who moved to the suburbs.
(41:31):
It was they were sort of, in a weird way,
taught like, hey, go back to that thing where you
you don't want to work, you want to just be
a mom out in the suburbs and raise your kids,
Like that's the thing to do. Relutionary road. I know
you were talking about depressing movie, um, but apparently it
generated that dissatisfaction is what led to um, the women's
(41:56):
rights movement, Like that statisfaction turned it into feminism of
the sixties, right, because I mean there were plenty of
women's rights movements before, like with the suffrage and um,
well with suffrage. This this revived it big time just
living in the suburbs did it had? It had such
a crushing effect on women living in the suburbs, isolated
(42:18):
from the city, from other people, from social networks, and
living in this place where they were expected to just
basically raise kids and keep the houses clean. Yeah, it's
pretty neat how things like produce like opposite equal and
opposite reactions. You know. Yeah, This lady Betty fried In in
in the nine book The Feminine Mystique said that the
(42:41):
suburbs were burying women alive. And it's a very harsh
way to put it, but it certainly drives it home.
Oh yeah, yeah, I find that interesting. We need to
do a feminism when sometime. I do. Have one more
on baby boomers smoking um grass. Apparently they like it.
(43:04):
It was one of the three things you could give
for a ride, yeah, gas and one other one that's
still to me one of the all time great bumpers.
It's just so good. Uh. This man Benjamin Han, he's
a doctor uh Jerry, attrition and health services researcher at
the Center for Drug Use and Uh. He let a
(43:27):
study called the Demographic Trends among Older Cannabis Users in
the United States two thousand and six and two thousand thirteen.
It's kind of worthy, but um. He evaluated close to
fifty tho adults fifty and older and found that seventy
one increase and marijuana used among adults age fifty and
older between twenty two thousand and six and two thousand thirteen,
(43:50):
Which makes sense. These hippies getting older, the and and
it says here that they didn't start like they just
kept smoking grass right the aged into another age group. Yeah,
they're not new users, but that fell off a lot
after sixty five, significantly lower prevalence of use um, but
(44:10):
still two and a half times higher or that eight
year period. So um, yeah, it's pretty interesting there. I've
seen the same thing with STDs as well. There's higher
rates of STDs among older populations than before. And again
it's because the baby boomers are aging into these new
age brackets. Yeah, bringing all of their vices with them. Yeah.
My friend, um, well I won't say any names, but
(44:32):
I have a friend and his wife has her family
in South Carolina has an island, just one of these
old coastal You know, it's not like an island like
you would think it is an island, but it's not
a big, huge thing, just a small area of land
on the in the on the waterways that get in
on the outer banks. Yeah. But I mean you got
(44:55):
to see the place like it's a it's land, but
it's surrounded by water and all. But when you think
like someone owns an island, you think of this big
thing with like houses everywhere, and like banks is like
just tons of the little island. So they own one
of them. And they have a little retreat there which
is basically, uh a cabin with like eight bunk beds
and then this huge just picnic area, like a covered
(45:20):
picnic area, And they have this retreat every year, a
couple of times a year. And I've been on it
and all these old South Carolina hippies are all these
kids parents, and they put us to shame. They all
get naked. They like getting naked. They it was too
cold to get naked, but they they like we were
(45:42):
in bed before they were. They were up again the
next morning before we were. And I remember like literally
waking up hungover and like walking out to the fire
and there was like seven sixty year olds with like
three joints being passed around between them. You know. Nine
in the morning. Did you leave? And everybody else was asleep,
(46:04):
And I was just like, what world have I stepped
into here? And these are the boomers? He said, he
was just like these cool old hippies. Yeah, Martin Mall,
still fighting the power, you know, Martin Mall. Yeah, it
was interesting. They're they're a fun group I gotta say,
still fighting the power on a private island in South
Carolina pretty much. Uh, well, we could probably sit here
(46:25):
and talk smack about baby boomers for a year or more.
I love them, Yeah, they're great. Um, but we're going
to stop right okay, So if you want to know
more about baby boomers, well stop baby boomer in a
grocery store and ask him about what it's like to
be a baby boomer. And since I said that, it's
time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this uh English
(46:51):
sayings of sorts. Hey, guys, love the show. Uh enjoy
the way you have a go at pronouncing things, and
you seem to be enjoyed being corrected on these, So
hold on tight. I was listening to the podcast on
police circuses and you mentioned mentioned Hertfordshire, England. A couple
of pointers. Hertfordshire is pronounced Hertfordshire. I admit it. It
(47:16):
isn't spelled hr t. But then that is just the
English language for you, the legendary oh that has many
sounds like tough cough. Though through it can be a
royal pain in the butt for everyone learning English. But
it must be a nightmare to learn English at a
later age. My free tip for you is that if
(47:37):
you ever have to discuss a place called Lochborough in Leicestershire, Leicestershire,
it's pronounced Luffborough in Leicestershire. Okay, got it. Cambridge is
not on hertford Shire, It's in Cambridgeshire. That's a bit
like saying Boston, New Hampshire close, but no cigar. So
(48:00):
I guess we messed that one up to No. No,
that guy got it wrong. I was saying it's spelled
like Hertfordshire, so I'm sure it's pronounced Cambridge. Oh he
wasn't listening. He didn't get the joke, gotcha. It was
a esoteric It was a little American. Anyway, Guys love
the podcast. I'm currently going through your back catalog, which
he spelled with a g u e uh. And it
(48:20):
wiles away the boring drive to work each day across
Cambridge Shure. Our differences are so vast, How will we
all ever get along? That's Ian Rose, Thanks Ian or
Ian Rose Rose. Uh. If you want to get in
touch of this, like Ian or Iron did, you can
(48:41):
tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You
can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you
Should Know You can send us an email to Stuff
podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always
joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you
Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com?
(49:09):
H m hm
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, I'm welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's guest producer Noel
over there. So this is stuff you should know. Yeah,
Noel likely to sit in on this one and not
(00:21):
just hit record and run screaming. Yeah, we were kind
of surprised. Yeah, it's weird though. It's been so long
since we had someone in here with it's been at
the Ghosts the studio that time forgot. But we have
to suck in our guts again. Sit up right, I
have to lick my fingers in the straight my hair
(00:41):
with them. Sure. So, Chuck, Yes, you are a gen
x or did you know that? Yeah? Are you? Yeah?
That was my next point? Sorry, I am too. Yeah,
uh no, I think it's a millennial. Know what you were?
You born? Knows a millennial? God knows what Jerry is
(01:04):
no idea. Yeah, she's of her own time. Um so boy,
none of us are. Jerry might be. I don't know
our baby boomers now, Jerry, you know Jerry's a gen xer. Yeah.
One thing that this inspired me to do was to
do a show on generations period. I find it fascinating
(01:27):
how people are grouped and also a little frustrated when. Um,
once I got into the sub groups, it helped me,
But when I looked at like, especially the Baby Boom generation,
there's such a clear difference in the which we'll get
to the early and the later part of that, it
(01:47):
was just like, well, why why don't you just call
them to different generations? Some people do well, some people do,
but for the most part they don't. For the most part,
people say, the baby boomers are people who are born
from ninety nineteen exty four is the general definition of them. Yeah,
it's just weird, Like my mom missed out on it
just by a couple of years. But then my sister
(02:08):
just missed out on it by a couple of years.
So it just doesn't seem like, I know, they're not
the same generation, but they it is not even close.
It shouldn't be. No, it's not. And and again like
so we'll we'll get into it a little bit more.
But um, some people say that's just too wide of
a swath. And more to the point, which this is
the basis of generations, the life experience of those of
(02:30):
the people on either end of that that twenty year
or so spectrum are so we're so wildly different that, yeah,
they don't. They can't be in the same generation. It
just doesn't make sense because the point of a generation,
um is that it is a group of people born
around the same time who all shared some sort of
major life experience, a collective life experience. Yeah, whether it's
(02:54):
culture or ideologies. Yeah, usually an event though, like the
assassination JFK's would go to for baby boomers that in
the event was so enormous that it shaped their worldview
for the rest of their lives, Like ours would be
the where's the beef commercials? Right exactly? Uh, well, we
(03:15):
do share that though, Oh no, I'm I was dead serious,
You're not. Well, I don't know if that's the identifying
for well, for millennials, um, especially older millennials, it would
be like nine eleven would be for ours. Maybe Challenger,
the Challenger explosion is the one I always go to.
Does it always have to be a disaster, No, it's
(03:38):
just gotta be an enormous event that enough people are
aware of and impacted by that it shapes who they are.
So it's almost like a group of people, all about
the same age, all being touched in relatively the same
way at the same time, so that their world view
is changed forever by that event. So where's the beef. Yeah, Okay,
(04:00):
that we agree. Uh So the reason, um, there were
a lot of Well, the deal with the baby boomers is,
as you'll see, is that there are a lot of them,
and birth rates rose quite a bit in n and
stayed that way for about twenty years. And it's interesting
when you look at the reasons. Um, the most obvious
(04:22):
thing you can point to is just say, like, yeah,
dudes came home after the war and had a lot
of sex. Pretty much that has something to do with it.
But this article points out something I never considered, which
was sort of a convergence of of that and then
not just wanting to have a lot of sex after
the war, but the promise of like prosperity to come
(04:44):
after the war and like things are gonna be great,
so let's like go all in on the family. But
that converging with the uh a bit of an older
generation of parents post depression that may have waited to
have kids for very race reasons, and that kind of
all happening at the same time. Yeah, younger families having kids,
(05:04):
not postponing the older generation that had postponed having the kids,
all at the same time. Huge, huge population increases. From
nineteen uh, nineteen fifty to nineteen eighty, the American population
increased by fifty that's not From nineteen forty six to
nineteen forty five, the number of babies born year over
(05:25):
year increased by that's that's a lot. Yeah. So in
nineteen six millions, I think about an average of four
four million and change babies started being born every year,
and it kept going and going until I think nineteen
fifty seven, when it plateaued and stayed high for a while,
(05:46):
and then it dipped again starting in nineteen sixty four
sixty five, which coincided with the widespread availability of the pill. Uh.
One reason I think the baby boom generation is so
interesting and endlessly talked about and studied is because it
just there. The the shift, the ideological shift that they
(06:11):
were presiding over is it was was just massive. This
article kind of sums it up nicely, like they created
the youth movement of the sixties when they're in their twenties.
It was that culture excess of the seventies, and then
in the eighties they became the yuppies. And now they're
entering retirement or in retirement and running the world. And
(06:33):
then and and and then, as you'll see, a lot
of them are rebuffing the excess of hey, let's make
and spend tons of money, and like concentrating on giving back,
which was originally inspired by like the Kennedy administration volunteerism.
Yeah that that asked not what your country can do
(06:56):
for you? Yeah, that whole thing, right, But it's interesting
this one lady, the first moment, I'm sorry, the first
boomer born just after midnight in New Jersey. Uh, Kathleen
Casey Kirschling is widely regarded as the first baby boomer. Yes,
she's born in January first nine. Yeah, and as you'll
(07:17):
see if you look at her life, she really is
like a symbol. And of course, you know that's kind
of the problem with generations, as you lumped them all
in as this, and of course it varies from person
to person. Well that's one criticism of even studying generations
in the first place. Yeah. Yeah, but she was married
for a time, got divorced, um has a self made pension,
(07:43):
that she accrued over the years, like I'm gonna take
care of my own, you know, retirement, doing appearances as
the world's first baby boomer. She missed out if she
didn't last be uh, and then like had a career,
it's successful careers, I think, like a corporate trainer. Then
in the early nineties left corporate America and became a
high school teacher for like fifteen or twenty years. She Yeah,
(08:04):
she basically read a book on how to be a
typical baby boom It's interesting. And now like splits time
between Maryland and Florida and his concentrated on volunteerism in
her retirement. That's really neat. Yeah, it's like she's kind
of the prototypical boomer of if you want to buy
into that thing. Yeah, traditional into non traditional family structure,
(08:24):
family life, right, career, took care of her her own retirement,
and then during retirement chose not to actually just retire,
but to stay active and engaged. That is it's pretty
typical boomerism. Yeah. Uh. Should we hit people over the
head with some of these stats? Yeah, I mean they
were pretty interesting, like I guess just because they came
(08:48):
at a really interesting time in America's history, Like the
Boomers started to be born at the same time as
the suburbs. The consumerism, American consumerism all really started with
the Baby Booms generation. They felt really good about spending
money on themselves. They were the first children targeted by advertisers.
(09:08):
When we're the advertising of kids that started with the boomers. Um.
Everything changed around that time. Um and and in part
because of the Baby Boomers. So they're probably the most
studied generation in American history. Yeah. So there are more
California Boomers than any other state. I think Utah has
the fewest amount of boomers, but they still had like
(09:32):
twenty three percent of their their population was Baby boomers. Yeah,
but they're the only one that was under right. Uh
what else? Twelve point six percent the Boomers never got married,
which is uh from their parents generation only three point
nine percent never got married. So that's a pretty big
increase shunning nuptials. I wonder what it is now. I
(09:52):
couldn't find it. I don't know, it's just increasing. I'm
sure what people getting, oh, choosing not to get married
right or or living a non traditional or maybe it's
traditional now even like we're just together, we're just not
married partnerships. Um what else? I mean we could read
(10:13):
out stats all day, but that's boring. I thought you'd
love doing that. Okay, well, there were there were two
things that really stood out to me, though they go
hand in hand. Baby boomers expected their adult children to
move back in with them, and then thirty percent expect
their parents to move in with them, and for some
of those people that overlaps. One of the curious positions
(10:36):
that some boomers find themselves in is caring for adult
children and um aged parents at the same time, under
the same roof. Yeah, and I posted something a while
ago on stuff you Should Knows Facebook page and um,
something about kids moving back in and people like, what
a bunch of losers, And then so many people from
(10:57):
all over the world. We're like, you know, America's like
the only country that feels that way, like that family
should leave at a certain age and not come back.
And they're like, all over the world people are like,
you know, we think it's a great thing. Family is huge,
and we welcome family to live with each other and
you know, into their twenties or thirties if they want to. Bizarre,
(11:19):
we help each other, rely on each other, Yeah, weird
because I mean, I guess the rest of the world
doesn't know we In America, when you turn eighteen, they
have a c U in hell party where you leave
and um, you're not allowed to come back into the
house until you well, until your parents are dead. What
we call it a hit the bricks party. All you
were Baptist family. That's right. Now that we're making stuff up,
(11:43):
do you think we should take a break. Yeah, let's uh,
let's do some real research and come back into this again.
(12:20):
All right, chuck. So the baby boomers were until very
very recently the biggest generation that population wise to ever,
um ever hit America. And they hit America bite, they
hit a like brick of bricks. Yeah. But millennials are
they're taking over now, right, Yeah, Millennials just surpassed um
(12:41):
the boomers in number from what I understand, Yes, millennials
as of two thousand and fifteen. Of course that number
has grown now U seventy four million, just edging out
seventy four point nine million Baby Boomers. But here's the thing.
Millennials are still being born. Boomers are dying. Yeah, the boomers. Actually,
(13:01):
here's here's something that I just thought was amazingly interesting.
The Baby Boomers peaked fairly recently as far as their
numbers go. They peaked in at seventy eight point eight million, right,
and our generation is going to peak next year. So
if all the signs and symptoms that you personally are dying,
(13:22):
and I'm dying more and enough, our whole generation is
now dying. We're going to decline after next year. Yeah,
I think more and more about that. But our generation
peaking in two thous No about me dying, I know
what you like, I never thought I would be that
guy that um you know that just sort of like
(13:43):
that whole Woody Allen obsessed with your own death things?
Are you obsessed? No, but it's healthy to think about
the fact that you're gonna die. Some some people believe,
including me, that accepting, genuinely accepting your own death is
the key to living fully. Yeah, I agree. I think
(14:05):
that's the struggle. Yeah, you know, yeah, I mean you
can throw that on a T shirt. But no, I
know sometimes I'm like, I wonder if if it just
hasn't fully sunk in yet and one day down the
road and be like, I'm gonna die. I think, uh,
this has come more and more for me in the
(14:25):
past five years. So I'll check back in with you
in five years. If I'm alive, I'd be bad. I'd
be really sad. Um. Yeah, it'd be sad for at
least three people that I know, and you're one of them. Um.
So I was talking earlier about the Boomers that age
range is too big and it needs to be split up,
(14:47):
and turns out it has been. Uh generally, if you
look at nine to fifty four, people refer to that
as the leading edge of the Boomers, and fifty five
and sixty four as shadow Boomers or Generation Jones. Yeah.
Did you look into that? Yeah, I mean did. The
name was the first thing I was like, well, where
did that come from? And apparently there's a few different
(15:09):
things either, like, uh, they were Jones ng for prosperity
of like days to come, more so than the leading edge. Yeah.
They had just as high expectations, if if not higher
than the first the first batch, but fewer resources available
to them. Yeah, it's a weird name. So they apparently
(15:31):
were considered to be more cynical, more bitter, yeah than
the first batch of baby boomers. And then um, also
their life experiences again like we're we're talking about earlier
so different that um that there, it's just a different generation.
Everybody's just being stubborn and wants Baby Boomers to be
this twenty year generation rather than ten. Well, yeah, but
(15:54):
you were talking about the the life events or whatever,
the binding life events. Uh. These two writers, Howard Schumann
and Jacqueline Scott in the mid eighties kind of did
a little bit of research on what they feel like.
Is that what people feel like is they're defining thing
from their generation, and it is sharply divided. When you
have the leading edge, you've got obviously uh JFK, Robert Kennedy,
(16:19):
Martin Luther King, a lot of assassinations, the moonwalk, uh,
Vietnam War, civil rights movement, and then the more cynical
um shadow Boomers or or Jones is uh, you're talking
Nixon and Watergate, the Cold War, the oil and bargo.
It sort of makes sense. It's definitely too like those
(16:39):
are two pretty starkly different sets of events. They yeah,
they are. It's like almost a different world that happened,
that took places along that change along that divide America
switch gears in large party. And you asked earlier, if
it always has to be a disaster. Yeah, I mean
(17:00):
all of these basically are pretty glom and gloomy. I
think the disaster unites though. That's probably a big thing
that But also I think it leads to a loss
of innocence, which happens in a personal level as well. Right,
And that's kind of when you grow up, is when
you realize, oh my god, everything isn't totally stable and
my parents can't solve every problem in the world, and
(17:22):
there's like real strife and hardship and injustice and and
and bleakness. And when you realize that, suddenly say something
like that this president you idolize being assassinated. It can
it can have a real solidifying effect on your your life,
your outlook. Yeah. First you mentioned the challenger for us,
(17:43):
and I'm in no way like downgrading that, but for
me personally, and it might have just been the way
I received the news even it wasn't like, uh, I
don't feel like it like was the big defining thing. Okay,
it was obviously a big deal, But did you see
it happen? No, I don't think I saw it happen live,
which probably is a big factor. Um, but like Reagan
(18:07):
being assassinated is rings more in my head, at least
as a memory. I'm not saying it affected me as
much personally, but like when I think back, like what
big thing in the childhood happened on an international stage,
Like I like remember where I was when Reagan was
shot And I don't remember the Challenger as much, which
is weird because it was later. Yeah, I was only
like five when Reagan was shot. I don't have any
(18:29):
memory of it whatsoever. Right, you didn't care. I didn't know.
I was like, yeah, I didn't know it was going.
Five year old didn't care. I guess not. You're playing
with your g I Joe's that's right. But as the
article points out, one thing that united all boomers was TV. Yeah. Okay,
so if we're talking about how and we shouldn't we
should give credence or um props. I guess to the
(18:52):
guy who came up with the concept of generations. It
was a sociologist named Carl Mannheim, and he wrote The
Problem of Generations UM back in and basically said this
is a thing. Now I'm called my Mannheim good night,
And in it he says like I was saying before
that the generation is is held together by the shared
(19:15):
experience that they all go through together. Um, and up
until television, I mean, you had radio, you had newspaper,
you had a guy on horseback running around from town
to town shouting news or whatever. But when with the
invention of television, like now you have this really powerful
way for people to share the same thing at the
same time because they were getting the news in exactly
(19:38):
the same way through television, where a generation really could
be solidified and defined into an actual group that had
a lot in common because of this event. Well yeah,
not just news, but just culturally, like the first generation
that sat around and watched TV shows, yeah, yeah, uh
together like that. In music were like the two biggest
(20:01):
things culturally. I mean you can I mean obviously you
can talk about the Frisbees and hula hoops and Barbie
dolls and stuff like that, but um, TV and music,
like the birth of rock and roll in the birth
of television are like the two hugest things for sure. Elvis,
the Beatles, those were very much in the wheelhouse of
(20:21):
the boomers. Yeah, so you've got those things, You've got
the what they were, Like you were saying, you've got
the fact that they can be shared easily by a
number of far flung people all over the country of
the same age. You got yourself a generation, buddy. Yeah.
And then the final little piece there is the skepticism
of that generation I think was a really big um
(20:44):
uniting factor. Like Boomers were the people who said, don't
trust anyone over thirty and the whole Nixon Watergate, the
Vietnam War being played out every night on TV. It
was like that led to like political revolution in this country.
I think because of that skepticism. Yeah, but it's interesting.
Rather than saying, like their generations of parents before them, well,
(21:08):
this is just the way they things are, I can't
do much about that. Um, this generation was among the
first to say, no, we re reject this way of
looking at things, and we seek to rebuild these institutions
in a way that more reflect how we think the
world should work. That's hug. That was a huge hallmark
(21:29):
of the baby boomer generation. Yeah, it's weird though when
you look at all this stuff, like they were the
most selfless in a lot of ways, but also the
most selfish generation in a lot of ways. Oh yeah.
At the whole time, the whole eighties yuppy thing. Yeah,
the me generation and the consumerism like was hand in
hand with the birth of feminism, or maybe not birth,
(21:49):
but at least rebirth of feminism and uh, the civil
rights movement. Like it's really interesting that all those things
like we're wrapped up in this one generation. Well similarly though, too,
they were also very political and then a political depending
on the decade. You know, like they were members of
organized student groups in the late sixties, and then by
(22:09):
you know, a decade later, they were all like doing
coke and turning their back on politics while they were
like disco dancing. You know, you're like, hey, money, that's
actually kind of cool if you have it right. Yeah,
it's it's it was like it was. They've gone through
huge ships and and sociologists have run after them, studying
them the whole time. Yeah, politically, it's sort of hard
(22:31):
to lump the baby boomer generation politically because and I
think this could probably said of most generations, but they're
really hard to pin down. So this is an old survey,
but in two thousand four, a RP didn't one that
um found out that baby boomers supported abortion rights and
gun control stem cell research, but they also uh supported
(22:54):
the death penalty and being more conservative, uh fiscally and
like sort of all over like all over the map politically.
What's what's funny is I saw like there's a sexual
sentence in this article. It's very difficult to pin boomers
down as being either liberal or conservative. I went huh
and tights into Google found immediately two fourteen gallop poll
(23:17):
has said no percent conservative liberally of of baby boomers.
Interesting self reported on a pole. So that's uh total. Yeah,
so the other don't learn't The other rest were like
if if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there.
(23:38):
And the the polster was like a sero, I didn't
ask you about the sixties. That's funny. Um. And we
talked a little bit about consumerism. But that was also
a really big uniting factor was this was the first
generation that really went all in on saying it's okay
(23:58):
to spend money on yourself. You don't have to feel
bad about it. Uh. You know those previous generations were
of the depression era, right, you know, you don't just
do things like that. Don't throw that safety pin away.
You can fix that. It's not And he saved as
a penny earned, whereas the boomers were like a penny
saved is when you could be spending on something cool.
(24:21):
What's interesting is that it's it's come back again, like
that level of thrifty nous. We're in the we're in
the midst of right now. You think I didn't live
through the depression, true, but I yeah, compared to even
ten fifteen years ago, pre prerecession mentality, Uh, what we're
(24:42):
in right now is definitely thrifty or interesting. Um yeah,
and um yeah, same thing though great depression, great recession
has a tendency to bring out the thrifty nous and people. Um.
We were talking about politics though too. So the first
baby boomer president was Bill Clinton, and then George W.
Was the second baby boomer president. Huh uh. And then
(25:05):
it went to generation Jones with Obama, right, he was
the first Jones or but baby boomer. Yeah, but really
generation Jones really, so Billy and George were in the
leading edge. Yeah, they're both born in nine. Obama's generation Jones.
(25:26):
And then the next guy is uh, he was born
in nineteen as well, So it went back to baby
boom after Obama. Interesting, and this well, I don't know
you never know what's gonna happen in twenty but you
would think that not even just the presidency, but in
in all of politics, that they will Obviously they will
(25:49):
be phased out with time. But I wonder if there
will be another president from that generation. I don't know,
although Joe Biden just said, don't count him out, and
he's he'll be eighty then. Really he's got a lot
of vim and vigor though he does. But boy, I
mean not to knock any eight year old listeners out there. Well,
(26:10):
Bernie was eight one, I think he would have been
just fine. Yeah, that's true. Eighties the new sixty. Well,
I hope. So all right, let's take a break and
um and maybe continue with this afterward. Huh, I think
we should. All right, we gotta finish. Let's do it.
(27:03):
So check. One of the things about a baby boom
is that, um, they're significant, and that it's a sudden
influx of a lot of kids being born at the
same time. And the reason it's significant is because previous
to that and then usually after that, there's fewer kids
being born. So it's a bulge in your population. Right,
(27:25):
So that means that that population is eventually going to
grow old, and as they grow old, they are going
to need more social services that you have reserved for
the elderly for the aged in your population, right yeah,
I mean not only that. The other side is is
the health care sector period, whether or not it's we're
(27:46):
talking like Medicare and social Security and stuff, but just
health care period in the private sector is like licking
their chops. Oh yeah, it's gonna be money to be made,
and as being made, it's going to be a big
boom for the health care sector. And it has been
booms for all these for several other sectors along the
way as they've aged and matured, and then now they're
(28:07):
looking to healthcare more and more. Um, it's it's not
gonna be just like a a sickness bonanza for the
health care industry because the one of the hallmarks of
the baby boomer generation is they were one of the
first like really take care of themselves. Like I remember
when we were younger, Like a sixty five year old
was like an old person, like they might be on oxygen.
(28:30):
They were they were not in good shape by their
mid sixties, like like they're doing one handed push ups
in the street and stuff. Like that that was the
result of the baby boomers doing things like taking up jogging, um,
like eating vegetarian, like just generally taking better care of themselves,
having an emphasis on that. So they're not going to
(28:53):
just all start getting sick on mass or not. I'm sorry.
Previously the boomers they were like, well, what kind of
steak do you want tonight? It's like what cut of beef?
I want steak? Stuff with steak? Oh? Man, I just
listened to uh a Mark Mayren episode with David Spade
and he's talking about Farley. Uh. And he said that
(29:17):
Chris Farley would put a new full pat of butter
on every bite of steak that he ate. Oh, that
doesn't sound very tasty. Butter on steak is delicious. You
can but that much butter on each bite? That's too much? Yeah,
it's you might even say that's excessive. And Spade would
get on and be like, dude, you can't do that,
(29:38):
and he said Farley would look at him and go,
He's like, but each one needs its own hat. He's like.
You couldn't help but laugh because he was just so adorable.
What a loss. Oh, I'm just so sad. Man. He
talked a lot about it was really interesting. Yeah, to
check that one out. I love those two together. Yeah,
(29:59):
very sad um not to bring everything down, but you did.
But we were talking about them aging and and being healthier. Yeah,
they are aging in a much healthier manner than previous generations.
But it still will need healthcare and these social services
they are available specifically, like Medicare for healthcare and Social
Security for retirement pensions. So what's the are scared? They're
(30:23):
they're like no, no. I started to look into it,
but I got depressed. And but then I also saw
that like, no, we saw this coming. So that have
taken measures. Yeah, I saw in a couple of places
that it's the most predictable train wreck in American history. Okay,
well that's good and bad. So here's the thing. When
you're working, you're contributing to Social Security. It comes out
(30:44):
of your paycheck, right, that goes into a poorly managed
fund um that loses money very quickly. Right, So, um,
it was in grave danger of really running out. UH
in the not too distant future decade it's pass and
in UH there was a payroll tax increase that created
(31:06):
a reserve fund and means that it was a Ronald
Reagan tax increase. Right, So this reserve fund is still around.
I think there's like two point six trillion dollars in it,
but we're depleting it each year, and it's it makes
up the shortfall that that Social Security is lacking. Right,
So as we deplete it more and more, um, well,
(31:28):
we have less and less money to provide for people
down the road. And they think by four we'll just
be back to just social Security. The reserve fund will
be depleted and we'll be able to offer something like
seventy eight percent of the benefits that's coming to each person.
That's a big shortfall. In other words, Hey, what you
(31:48):
thought you were gonna get, You're gonna be short yes, exactly.
So people are like, what do we do? It turns
out there's a lot of very not painless but not
painful at all measures that you can pick from and
put together. I saw this great Forbes article on it.
(32:09):
They had like an infographic, so it really drove it home.
But it was like pick pick three of these, pick
two of these, pick five of these, pick ten of these,
and like they were just um increasingly smaller and smaller,
less noticeable measures that you could take and make up
a hundred a hundred and twenty hut of the shortfall
and social security just by moving money around. Yeah, or
(32:31):
just slightly increasing these taxes, slightly slashing benefits, slightly making
the age of retirement a little longer, a little older. Yeah.
That that altogether the average person wouldn't even notice, really, right. Um.
So I'm I'm sure that we're going to be able
to figure it out in a way that's not going
to just ruin everything. The The thing that's keeping it
(32:54):
from really going downhill, though, is that the baby boomers
seem to have said, I can't retire. Right. So in
two thousand and eight, that great recession that happened, there
was a massive transfer of wealth out of the real
estate holdings and the stock portfolios of Americans. A lot
of them were baby boomers who are poised to retire.
(33:16):
They lost a lot of money. It went elsewhere, right, um.
And as a result, the baby boomers just said, well,
I have to go back to work, or well I
was going to retire, but I'm gonna have to keep
working for five more years. Um. And that mentality seems
to be keeping uh, social Security from being further strange.
(33:37):
They're just not They're not. They're working longer than they
normally would be expected to under Social Security. Yeah, it
says here the Concressional Budget Office, so that boomer households
don't have enough savings put away to retain their standard
of living upon retirement. So there's that. Uh. There are
(33:57):
also a large set of boomers that uh want to
stay active and keep working. Like I think it said
something like seventeen only seventeen percent are expected to fully
retire and be done working, and not all of them
are because they need the money. Um, it sort of
(34:18):
depends some. I mean, it's kind of sad. Some people
have been forced out of their jobs and at a
late stage in life or later stage in life have
to go back to like these hourly jobs, and other
people are choosing to They're like, you know what, I
want to go work in a wine shop and like,
you know, twelve bucks an hour. It's and or like, um,
the first baby boomer chose to go teach high school
(34:40):
as her second career. Yeah, and it is now full
and on volunteerism. So um, yeah, there are there's it's it.
There's definitely both going on again. You can't paint that
generation with just one brush, right, Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm
so sorry for using that metaphor, Well, but you don't
like that, no pinting with the brush and no, why
do you hate art? We're that one guy? Yeah, man,
(35:04):
But there are plenty of people who just simply can't
afford to and that to me is just really really sad,
especially if the reason is that they're they're four one case,
just lost value or their house isn't worth what they
were planning on and that was their nusta. That is
really sad to me. It is. Um. We don't give
advice much, but I think millennials have are much better
(35:27):
about trying to think about their long term financial future
than our generation. Um because I didn't think about that
stuff till just far too late. But um taking it
very seriously now. But my advice to younger people is
just like just start early, dudes and do debts with
with small contributions even uh, talk to someone who knows
(35:50):
what they're doing, uh, like who knows what's gonna happen, Like,
don't depend on social security, like take care of yourself
yeah oh yeah, with safe investments. And you know, i'd
be like, yeah, dude, I gotta covered. You know, my
brother's gonna open up some uh some pay lots. I'm
going all in on his parking lots. I think that
might work out. But try try some nice safe investments,
(36:12):
long term stuff. We'll diversify. Yeah, don't don't put all
your egs in one basket or in that pay lot
right exactly, which now just occurred to me. That was
the fargo. Uh that's what you want of them? Oh?
Is that what it was? Yeah, he wanted to buy
some parking lots. Yeah, real rich deal stand yeah, hand
like a good movie. So I have. I know you're
(36:34):
office stats these days, but I have some that I
feel are worth sharing. I'm just gonna go sit outside.
I got least from the Miley fool and they're depressing
soft of baby boomers expect to rely heavily on Social Security.
That's up from in two thousand fourteen. So more are
counting on that now. Yeah, I thought that would go down.
(36:56):
You know, things are not going well right now. Have
no retirement savings, wow, none anymore. They may have had
it before, they don't have it now. They never saved
whatever that's up from. Who said that in two thousand four.
So things are tanking for the baby boomers right now.
(37:17):
Expect to wait until seventy to retire. Stopped adding to
the retirement assets. In two thousand and sixteen, sixteen percent
had had taken premature withdrawals, were in debt with a
median dead of man. Yeah, this is not how we
should care for aged population. You know it's not. And
(37:42):
then do you couple the facts with like, that's great,
you're gonna expect to rely heavily on Social Security. You're
going to be disappointed. But do you just go ahead
and report that to any guy who asks you with
the poll? Yeah? Yeah. The other big misconception is um
that the boomers work harder than uh millennials or gen xers.
(38:02):
Oh yeah, they're Protestant work ethic. That yeah, And you
found this cool thing. This guy at Wayne State, Keith
zbl Uh. He examined seventy seven studies comprising a hundred
and five distinct measurements of work ethic and he basically said,
that's all just a bunch of junk that you read
in uh Salon or slate. He's like, if you look
(38:26):
at the numbers in the stats, there is no difference
in work ethic between the generations, which is interesting and
interesting feels right, you know, like it just feels like
just something that some editor wants to write about and
assigns it like that's a hot topic. Well, apparently that's
a big like human resource thing too. Is figuring out
how to structure a corporation two squeeze the most out
(38:50):
of each of the generations of working there. And this
guy's saying, like, don't even bother. They're they're all they
all work the same. Yeah, although they did say that,
um that baby boomers tend to thrive more in um well,
they subscribe to organizational structure more so hierarchies, whereas like
millennials in Generation X are more like, yeah, let's do
(39:13):
some more work from home. How about that? Or how
about a big, huge, cavernous office with no walls. We're
all the same. Can we get some butter first steak
around here? How about a standing desk? You know, I
because sitting is for chumps and Gen xers, you remember
that whole period. What do you mean here in our
(39:35):
own office? Yeah? Yeah, they're oh yeah, some people still
do that the weird Yeah, but I've also seen more
stools in here than oh, sitting stools. What else? Apparently
the Boomers are really the first big generation to um
(39:57):
robust le ops for cremation upon death and not have
this morose, open casket, traditional sad funeral and be more
like I want to die as I lived, with verve
and vigor, and let's have them. Let's have a party. Man,
scatter my ashes on the White House lawn. How much
(40:21):
does it cost to hire Gallagher? I wonder these days.
I'll bet he's still tours too. I'm sure he does.
I bet he's. I bet he's got his own place
in Branson. Uh, he's a little too hip for Branson,
right between Yakov and Ingelberg. Humper dink. Do you got
(40:45):
anything else? Um? I don't think so. Oh well, I
did think it was interesting them the big suburban boom
that came with the Millennials or with the I keep
saying that, I don't know why, like skipping Jenne altogether. Well,
that's the curse of our generation, the big suburban boom. Uh,
(41:07):
with the Boomers, they in the nineteen fifties, you know
all these it became cheaper basically to move outside the
city and in the tiny apartment and like buy an
actual home in the backyard. And that's when the suburbs
really boomed. And apparently it had a had quite a
deleterious effect on women. The women who moved to the suburbs.
(41:31):
It was they were sort of, in a weird way,
taught like, hey, go back to that thing where you
you don't want to work, you want to just be
a mom out in the suburbs and raise your kids,
Like that's the thing to do. Relutionary road. I know
you were talking about depressing movie, um, but apparently it
generated that dissatisfaction is what led to um, the women's
(41:56):
rights movement, Like that statisfaction turned it into feminism of
the sixties, right, because I mean there were plenty of
women's rights movements before, like with the suffrage and um,
well with suffrage. This this revived it big time just
living in the suburbs did it had? It had such
a crushing effect on women living in the suburbs, isolated
(42:18):
from the city, from other people, from social networks, and
living in this place where they were expected to just
basically raise kids and keep the houses clean. Yeah, it's
pretty neat how things like produce like opposite equal and
opposite reactions. You know. Yeah, This lady Betty fried In in
in the nine book The Feminine Mystique said that the
(42:41):
suburbs were burying women alive. And it's a very harsh
way to put it, but it certainly drives it home.
Oh yeah, yeah, I find that interesting. We need to
do a feminism when sometime. I do. Have one more
on baby boomers smoking um grass. Apparently they like it.
(43:04):
It was one of the three things you could give
for a ride, yeah, gas and one other one that's
still to me one of the all time great bumpers.
It's just so good. Uh. This man Benjamin Han, he's
a doctor uh Jerry, attrition and health services researcher at
the Center for Drug Use and Uh. He let a
(43:27):
study called the Demographic Trends among Older Cannabis Users in
the United States two thousand and six and two thousand thirteen.
It's kind of worthy, but um. He evaluated close to
fifty tho adults fifty and older and found that seventy
one increase and marijuana used among adults age fifty and
older between twenty two thousand and six and two thousand thirteen,
(43:50):
Which makes sense. These hippies getting older, the and and
it says here that they didn't start like they just
kept smoking grass right the aged into another age group. Yeah,
they're not new users, but that fell off a lot
after sixty five, significantly lower prevalence of use um, but
(44:10):
still two and a half times higher or that eight
year period. So um, yeah, it's pretty interesting there. I've
seen the same thing with STDs as well. There's higher
rates of STDs among older populations than before. And again
it's because the baby boomers are aging into these new
age brackets. Yeah, bringing all of their vices with them. Yeah.
My friend, um, well I won't say any names, but
(44:32):
I have a friend and his wife has her family
in South Carolina has an island, just one of these
old coastal You know, it's not like an island like
you would think it is an island, but it's not
a big, huge thing, just a small area of land
on the in the on the waterways that get in
on the outer banks. Yeah. But I mean you got
(44:55):
to see the place like it's a it's land, but
it's surrounded by water and all. But when you think
like someone owns an island, you think of this big
thing with like houses everywhere, and like banks is like
just tons of the little island. So they own one
of them. And they have a little retreat there which
is basically, uh a cabin with like eight bunk beds
and then this huge just picnic area, like a covered
(45:20):
picnic area, And they have this retreat every year, a
couple of times a year. And I've been on it
and all these old South Carolina hippies are all these
kids parents, and they put us to shame. They all
get naked. They like getting naked. They it was too
cold to get naked, but they they like we were
(45:42):
in bed before they were. They were up again the
next morning before we were. And I remember like literally
waking up hungover and like walking out to the fire
and there was like seven sixty year olds with like
three joints being passed around between them. You know. Nine
in the morning. Did you leave? And everybody else was asleep,
(46:04):
And I was just like, what world have I stepped
into here? And these are the boomers? He said, he
was just like these cool old hippies. Yeah, Martin Mall,
still fighting the power, you know, Martin Mall. Yeah, it
was interesting. They're they're a fun group I gotta say,
still fighting the power on a private island in South
Carolina pretty much. Uh, well, we could probably sit here
(46:25):
and talk smack about baby boomers for a year or more.
I love them, Yeah, they're great. Um, but we're going
to stop right okay, So if you want to know
more about baby boomers, well stop baby boomer in a
grocery store and ask him about what it's like to
be a baby boomer. And since I said that, it's
time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this uh English
(46:51):
sayings of sorts. Hey, guys, love the show. Uh enjoy
the way you have a go at pronouncing things, and
you seem to be enjoyed being corrected on these, So
hold on tight. I was listening to the podcast on
police circuses and you mentioned mentioned Hertfordshire, England. A couple
of pointers. Hertfordshire is pronounced Hertfordshire. I admit it. It
(47:16):
isn't spelled hr t. But then that is just the
English language for you, the legendary oh that has many
sounds like tough cough. Though through it can be a
royal pain in the butt for everyone learning English. But
it must be a nightmare to learn English at a
later age. My free tip for you is that if
(47:37):
you ever have to discuss a place called Lochborough in Leicestershire, Leicestershire,
it's pronounced Luffborough in Leicestershire. Okay, got it. Cambridge is
not on hertford Shire, It's in Cambridgeshire. That's a bit
like saying Boston, New Hampshire close, but no cigar. So
(48:00):
I guess we messed that one up to No. No,
that guy got it wrong. I was saying it's spelled
like Hertfordshire, so I'm sure it's pronounced Cambridge. Oh he
wasn't listening. He didn't get the joke, gotcha. It was
a esoteric It was a little American. Anyway, Guys love
the podcast. I'm currently going through your back catalog, which
he spelled with a g u e uh. And it
(48:20):
wiles away the boring drive to work each day across
Cambridge Shure. Our differences are so vast, How will we
all ever get along? That's Ian Rose, Thanks Ian or
Ian Rose Rose. Uh. If you want to get in
touch of this, like Ian or Iron did, you can
(48:41):
tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You
can join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you
Should Know You can send us an email to Stuff
podcast at how stuff Works dot com and has always
joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you
Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com?
(49:09):
H m hm
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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