I think Gen X are the finest, most practical, the most insightful generation of engineers. Sure, its is a generalization - of course it is - but it is worth noting how exceptional both the circumstances and the incentives were for them to lead us into the technological prowess.
From semiconductors to the internet, thanks folks. I have many mentors from this generation and I find a common thread of extreme discipline and rigor in their work - this is largely lost in my own generation (millenial).
Transfer of knowledge needs to be from prev to next gen. Unlike tutorials on YT teaching horrible practices, which is exactly the opposite. Experienced people from Gen X doesn't have the time, motivation, etc to go on YT with full blast click bait tutorials and compete with user engagement tactics. They write books. They're better than edu-entertainment IMO.
That's way too much (I'm in gen x). I think you are being sarcastic!
Gen x didn't have all the advantages of great economy like baby boomers, but we still had it better than today. My college total cost was something like $5k. I went to grad school and had multiple job offers at each stages.
It's not just engineering! I don't think we would have progressed so far, so fast if Gen X had not discovered the laws of thermodynamics and invented peanut butter.
Ha, we were left to our own devices and I think it was to our advantage. 70s moms. I remember when I was about 10 my buddies came over and asked if I wanted to go night fishing with them down at the pier on the bay. My mom said "sure, but be back by 10:30pm. Have fun." So off we went walking about a mile with our fishing gear in the dark. Now I don't think that would happen and that's kind of a problem.
And -- in the US at least -- crime was out of control and off the charts in comparison to today. Everything is so much safer now but people seem so much more paranoid. It is perplexing to me.
I was briefly unstuck in time when I watched Bio-Dome for the first time since I was little (millennial) and the adults were complaining about Gen X slackers Bud and Doyle. The '90s don't feel that long ago, and yet...
I take your statement to be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but if you're unfamiliar with Strauss-Howe generational theory[0], you'd think there would be another "good generation" right around the corner.
While I do think we went kind of downhill since gen x, I wrote that comment as a joke.
You actually could argue that new generations are worse because we're lazier, hedonists, more disrespectful, etc or you could argue that boomers and gen x are actually the bad ones that left everything in such a bad state that following generations spent decades to make everything right again.
GenX will never be in power. There aren’t enough of us. They’ll just skip us and once the Boomers die off, we will be a handful of elderly kooks watching Seinfeld reruns and dealing with Millennials making all the rules for themselves.
Those were heady days.
Using news groups before everything in them morphed into German pornography.
The glory days of Gopher.
We had the foresight to write the whole thing in C; paving the way for many future generations to work on endlessly patching it.
It went public in 1994, when GenX was in college and entering the workforce. I wouldn't call what the internet was in 1994 as "built," it came well after.
Facebook was create by a Millennial though, just sayin'.
The article even mentions how boomers still have 50% of the wealth despite comprising just 33% of the population. I guess we really are slackers compared to them.
That's all? I'd have thought more. And it makes perfect sense since "boomers" they have worked for 50+ years to expand their wealth. Think about it for a little bit -- older generations should have more wealth than younger generations if things are working correctly.
I don't think having more wealth per capita is unreasonable, unexpected or unfair. In life you acquire things over time (capital, skills, experience, relationships), you get more of this the more time passes so it's to be expected that older generations just have more of everything (maybe except health and energy, can't really buy biology, not yet).
The numbers that we _should_ be looking at is not how much they have vs how many they are (ie the wealth per capita) but wealth per capita at different stages in their life vs same stages in other generation's lives. Compare how much wealth per capita boomers had in their mid twienties, mid thirdies, etc compared to younger generation. I feel those comparisons are much more fair and telling (and yes, AFAIK, there is a discrepancy that makes it seem unfair).
It always depends on with whom you're comparing. Millennials hold less than 5% of wealth despite comprising almost 30% of households, and until very recently, Gen X were mostly grouped with Millennials, in contrast with Boomers and older.
The "news" is that Gen X is joining the other groups, pulling away from Millennials.
What percentage of total population were the Boomers? What percentage is gen X? Or just calculate how much they had/have per person. That's what counts.
My only regret in life is that I wasn’t born 8 years earlier. My older sister paid 60% less for college and bought a house twice the size for half the price of what my family is currently considering. Timing is everything.
I sincerely hope not. If such a thing were to happen that means the wealth divide would be significantly worse. That’s the opposite of the direction the world needs to be going in.
Middle millennial here. I've pretty much given up home for my generation getting the opportunity to experience this effect. The problem seems to be a combination of boomers having been too greedy and millennial expecting opportunities to "trickle down" if they play within the system they were taught to.
Newer generations lucked out because they learned early that boomers will only help themselves and the only chance they have for social mobility is to gamble their way into wealth. Lucky for them, they'll get to live out their life being served coffee by some of the smartest, most well educated baristas the world has ever seen.
As one firmly in Gen X, I often remark to younger generations that we could actually see the Boomers' ladder being pulled up behind them, rungs slipping out of our fingers. Nor was it just tuition, opportunities, and so on; we went from nervous anticipation of the sexual freedom that had been quite popular to a dreadful SEX = DEATH, with GRID and the uncertainties of whether or not it was a virus, and if so, how easily it was transmitted. The future was so bright, it just looked like an atomic flash.
We are a small cohort and I sometimes wonder if we are less slackers than just preemptively traumatized, waiting for the other shoe to drop like a neutron bomb, The Road Warrior as training for those who wish to survive, holding our collective breath waiting for the apocalypse to finally show up.
As a millennial, GenX seems like the most reasonable generation to me.
They got the best of a lot of things. (Very anecdotal)
* Excellent Music - Top tier Rock and Rap
* Moderate on Politics - Saw the evils of Communism, but don't have the rosy eyed image of Capitalism as 2008/2000 hit them at critical ages (20-30) in their lives.
* Less involved in identity politics - Went to college before campus activism was based around identity.
* Understanding of the Millenial's struggles, cautiously liberal, and stuck in a terrible housing market because Boomers refuse to die.
Sadly, The Boomer's stranglehold over politics has affected them the most. This is most evident in this [1] graph, where the GenX wave clearly never came and Millenials are already nipping at their heels with Jon Ossof in the senate. This is visible in in presidential runs too. Obama, McCain, Trump, Bernie, Warren, Kamala and Biden are all Boomers or older. Yang and Pete came closest, which is still embarrassingly far for a generation at the top of the Presidential age bell curve [2].
Honestly, the political tone of my generation (Gen X) as youth was resoundingly apathetic and cynical, and this was remarked on at the time. At least in North America.
The early 90s was a terrible recession where I was. It went along with the drab grunge music and the floppy fashions. There were no cranes on the skyline, and minimum wage was the deal, if you could get a job after high school at all. A pretty bleak time.
(It wasn't until the mid-90s that things picked up and then it went from all that plaid and grey and "I'd be really angry but even that is too much work" to the hayday of late 90s rave culture and total excess)
I was very politically active and radical, but I was definitely in a minority.
What I find interesting about this whole "baby boomers hold a disproportionate percentage of US wealth", is the fact that this also means that eventually, their Gen X and Millennial children are going to inherit vast amounts of wealth.
It's going to be one of the largest, albeit gradual, generational transfers of wealth in history. I'm very curious to see how all that wealth in Gen X and Millennial hands will be put to use.
Sort of. A lot of that wealth is tied up in "McMansions" that nobody wants, due to both changing tastes and generally poor construction. The land will still be worth something, but a lot of that value is going to evaporate. https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/boomers-millennials-and-...
I feel like a lot will also evaporate when Boomer retirement accounts get liquidated to pay off Millennial student loans. As a Gen-Xer I 100% believe this will happen a year after I retire.
This. The amount of gaudy 2 story mansions that's standing vacant while delapitated and for sale. Most of them end up as rentals as they don't sell, and deteriorate even more in value as they're not cared for. Add this to the inevitable fire insurance quotes you'll get for owning in a place that can accommodate such a monstrous build and it all comes out extremely wasteful and risky.
Aren’t reverse-mortgages big with Boomers too? A lot of them want to die penniless and spend everything lavishly on themselves on their way out. “Let the bank deal with the house after I croak!”
I don't doubt for one second that you're right about this being prevalent as well. Tom Selleck sure tries his best to talk more boomers into this line of thinking.
The trouble with that is that inherited wealth replicates existing inequalities, whereas newly earned wealth at least offers the chance for social mobility. I'd be more interested in median wealth of each generation.
> members of Generation X saw their wealth jump [...] as they hit their prime earning years during a record bull market for stocks.
...just like the Boomers.
And, in a couple decades, the same line, with different parts under the ellipsis, will be written about Millennials.
Because record (if you adopt the right measure) stock market booms happen frequently enough, and named age cohorts are broad enough, and them becoming more financially dominant as they hit their prime earning years certain enough, that you can pretty much guarantee the opportunity to apply this frame.
It's “news” the way “the sun rose in the East today”, and it's connection to whatever else is going on and which gets reported with it as if it were particularly relevant is nearly as tenuous as if those things were being attributed as relevant to the sunrise.
Coming out of the pandemic, Boomers, Gen X and Millenials all have a firmer grip on America's wallet, coming at the expense of the silent & earlier generation who saw their households drop :(, but still, the Boomers' grip is tighter than others', which I think is the real lede, if any.
In all honesty, you could read this as members of the Silent generation are dying and they're bequeathing their wealth to Boomers and Gen X... I guess Millenials have to hope they'll be so lucky when Boomers die.
I don't dispute that Boomers hold an unreasonably large amount of wealth. but besides that, I struggle to see anything but normal demographics in the movements shown in this chart.
> you could read this as members of the Silent generation are dying and they're bequeathing their wealth to Boomers and Gen X
How could you read it any differently?
> I guess Millenials have to hope they'll be so lucky when Boomers die.
What's there to hope? Where else is the Boomers' wealth supposed to go when they die?
66 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadSo, thanks, Gen X. You did good.
From semiconductors to the internet, thanks folks. I have many mentors from this generation and I find a common thread of extreme discipline and rigor in their work - this is largely lost in my own generation (millenial).
Transfer of knowledge needs to be from prev to next gen. Unlike tutorials on YT teaching horrible practices, which is exactly the opposite. Experienced people from Gen X doesn't have the time, motivation, etc to go on YT with full blast click bait tutorials and compete with user engagement tactics. They write books. They're better than edu-entertainment IMO.
Gen x didn't have all the advantages of great economy like baby boomers, but we still had it better than today. My college total cost was something like $5k. I went to grad school and had multiple job offers at each stages.
The world hasn't changed, our reach has. And we're abusing that power.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
You actually could argue that new generations are worse because we're lazier, hedonists, more disrespectful, etc or you could argue that boomers and gen x are actually the bad ones that left everything in such a bad state that following generations spent decades to make everything right again.
>because we're lazier, hedonists, more disrespectful, etc
Also, "they" said the same stuff about GenX.
None of this is true
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_(search_engine)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine)
The internet? Our parents and grandparents did that.
I'm pretty sure we get to take credit for cat memes, though.
Facebook was create by a Millennial though, just sayin'.
The numbers that we _should_ be looking at is not how much they have vs how many they are (ie the wealth per capita) but wealth per capita at different stages in their life vs same stages in other generation's lives. Compare how much wealth per capita boomers had in their mid twienties, mid thirdies, etc compared to younger generation. I feel those comparisons are much more fair and telling (and yes, AFAIK, there is a discrepancy that makes it seem unfair).
The "news" is that Gen X is joining the other groups, pulling away from Millennials.
This nihilism does no one any favors of course. I just think we're no where near a breaking point for any of it to change significantly.
Newer generations lucked out because they learned early that boomers will only help themselves and the only chance they have for social mobility is to gamble their way into wealth. Lucky for them, they'll get to live out their life being served coffee by some of the smartest, most well educated baristas the world has ever seen.
We are a small cohort and I sometimes wonder if we are less slackers than just preemptively traumatized, waiting for the other shoe to drop like a neutron bomb, The Road Warrior as training for those who wish to survive, holding our collective breath waiting for the apocalypse to finally show up.
What a puny plan.
They got the best of a lot of things. (Very anecdotal)
* Excellent Music - Top tier Rock and Rap
* Moderate on Politics - Saw the evils of Communism, but don't have the rosy eyed image of Capitalism as 2008/2000 hit them at critical ages (20-30) in their lives.
* Less involved in identity politics - Went to college before campus activism was based around identity.
* Understanding of the Millenial's struggles, cautiously liberal, and stuck in a terrible housing market because Boomers refuse to die.
Sadly, The Boomer's stranglehold over politics has affected them the most. This is most evident in this [1] graph, where the GenX wave clearly never came and Millenials are already nipping at their heels with Jon Ossof in the senate. This is visible in in presidential runs too. Obama, McCain, Trump, Bernie, Warren, Kamala and Biden are all Boomers or older. Yang and Pete came closest, which is still embarrassingly far for a generation at the top of the Presidential age bell curve [2].
[1] https://flowingdata.com/2021/02/01/age-generations-in-the-u-...
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Age_dist...
The early 90s was a terrible recession where I was. It went along with the drab grunge music and the floppy fashions. There were no cranes on the skyline, and minimum wage was the deal, if you could get a job after high school at all. A pretty bleak time.
(It wasn't until the mid-90s that things picked up and then it went from all that plaid and grey and "I'd be really angry but even that is too much work" to the hayday of late 90s rave culture and total excess)
I was very politically active and radical, but I was definitely in a minority.
It's going to be one of the largest, albeit gradual, generational transfers of wealth in history. I'm very curious to see how all that wealth in Gen X and Millennial hands will be put to use.
...just like the Boomers.
And, in a couple decades, the same line, with different parts under the ellipsis, will be written about Millennials.
Because record (if you adopt the right measure) stock market booms happen frequently enough, and named age cohorts are broad enough, and them becoming more financially dominant as they hit their prime earning years certain enough, that you can pretty much guarantee the opportunity to apply this frame.
It's “news” the way “the sun rose in the East today”, and it's connection to whatever else is going on and which gets reported with it as if it were particularly relevant is nearly as tenuous as if those things were being attributed as relevant to the sunrise.
Coming out of the pandemic, Boomers, Gen X and Millenials all have a firmer grip on America's wallet, coming at the expense of the silent & earlier generation who saw their households drop :(, but still, the Boomers' grip is tighter than others', which I think is the real lede, if any.
In all honesty, you could read this as members of the Silent generation are dying and they're bequeathing their wealth to Boomers and Gen X... I guess Millenials have to hope they'll be so lucky when Boomers die.
> you could read this as members of the Silent generation are dying and they're bequeathing their wealth to Boomers and Gen X
How could you read it any differently?
> I guess Millenials have to hope they'll be so lucky when Boomers die.
What's there to hope? Where else is the Boomers' wealth supposed to go when they die?