How Baby Boomers screwed their kids

How Baby Boomers screwed their kids
salon.com

"The economic systems in which they have grown up, ones that prioritize numbers over people, are blindly accepted, as if that’s the way it has always been."

Right. For instance, when OWS, coherent or otherwise, camped out in half a dozen cities demanding radical change, that was the Millennial Generation's generational cry of Blind Acceptance of Status Quo. Likewise when they campaigned (naively or otherwise) for Hope and Change and spread-the-wealth-around.

And think! Just a couple generations back, our systems had a paradise of prioritizing People over Numbers. For instance: when the FDR administration took over the nation's agriculture sector and burned crops in the midst of a famine, then standardized the sector into a series of big-agribusiness factory-farm monocultures in the name of efficiency. And yet somehow when the author implies economic systems should be questioned, I don't think the Agricultural Adjustment Act - still on the books - was the sort of thing he had in mind.

There are a lot of interesting points in the article, but you'd have more chance to drown in the Sahara desert than to find a single proof of any of the aforementioned points. Best thing you get is a combination of weasel words and anecdotal evidence. Let's see a few of these brilliant examples:

> it’s easy to see how the Boomers earned their reputation as the Me Generation. Me before We. Putting the protection of ideas and wealth before the sharing of them is now standard.

Fair enough. How does the author know this?

> A New Jersey-based accountant told me that he sees a clear difference between his older clients and his younger ones. “My older clients want to work within the confines of the tax code to do what is fair,” he explained. “They are willing to simply pay the tax they owe. The next generation spends lots of time looking to exploit every loophole and nuance in the tax code to reduce their responsibility to as little as possible.”

What a rock-solid argument!

But wait, there's more!

> Generation Y is said to have a sense of entitlement.

Ok... let's see some evidence of that?

> Many employers complain of the demands their entry-level employees often make.

Could it possibly be the same many employers who try to offer unpaid interships that last basically forever, or who are cutting up expenses by outsourcing work to India so that the board members can buy bigger boats? Obviously, not every employer who claims that the demands of some entry-level employees are too harsh, but without any evidence of whether or not those demands are justified, the number of employers claiming that is no argument, for either side.

The apex of arrogance is, in my opinion, this one:

> According to a study at Northwestern University, the number of children and young people diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) shot up 66 percent between 2000 and 2010. Why the sudden and huge spike in a frontal lobe dysfunction over the course of a decade?

An interesting point, why?

At this point, you would obviously expect the author to quote one or several serious medical studies which show certain degrees of correlation between the development of ADHD and various factors that have been prevalent during the 2000-2010 decade to a greater degree than before. But no!

> I would submit that this huge spike is not simply because more people have ADHD than previous generations, though this could be true. Nor is it due to an increase in the number of parents having their children tested, though this could also be true. Though there are, of course, many genuine cases of ADHD, the sudden spike may be the result of something as simple as misdiagnosis.

Ok, ok, I'm still reading. Maybe there's a yet-unknown study, or at least one that is in development because someone who's an expert on brain stuff has a hypothesis?

> We know that sometimes our wires can get crossed and the wrong behaviors can be incentivized. Someone who finds the dopamine- and serotonin-releasing effects of alcohol as a teenager can become conditioned to look to alcohol to suppress emotional pain instead of learning to look to people for support. This can show up later in life as alcoholism. In this same way, the dopamine-releasing effects of the bing, buzz or flash of a cell phone feel good and create the desire and drive to repeat the behavior that produces that feeling.

Nope. What the author is proposing is, in fact, a personal hypothesis, based on a fairly superficial understanding of a complicated process ("our wires get crossed").

This wouldn't even be a problem, if the author would at least bother to provide some test -- the hell with that, at least some way to test this hypothesis. Who knows, maybe he got it right, in spite of an incorrect reasoning process (there was a time when reasoning by analogy was the dominant form of hypothesizing, but it wasn't exactly a period renowned for its intellectual achievements). But no.

I don't want to label the article as a load of useless rubbish. It's not wrong per se, I think it's just incorrectly titled, because it doesn't try to give a meaningful answer to the question in its title, just to present some of the author's prejudices. They are prejudices only by virtue of their lack of arguments, not their value of truth. Perhaps Simon Sinek is right, but after reading the article, you are no closer to understanding why he thinks he's right than you were before.