Generational battle is commonplace in historical past however now more and more consequential. Many younger Americans consider issues are getting worse, and a few blame the boomers who got here earlier than them. Former non-public fairness government Bruce Gibney, now 50 and a Gen Xer, labeled boomers “a era of sociopaths” who’ve left behind a burden of enormous government debt.
The angst among millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, in addition to older members of Era Z, displays a labor market that’s lower than sturdy. It clearly takes youthful individuals far more time to realize the markers of maturity resembling shopping for a home, getting married and beginning a household and even such conventional markers as getting a driver’s license or dating. They are typically highly alienated not solely from the older generations but in addition from one another.
California, as soon as seen as a middle of youth tradition, is now changing into overwhelmed by a grey tsunami. Since 2020, notes demographer Wendell Cox, the proportion of the state’s inhabitants made up of individuals beneath 25 has dropped far sooner than nationwide, whereas the proportion of older boomers outpaces the nation by as a lot as 10 factors. There are already more people over 65 than within the essential 25- to 34-year-old cohort. By 2060, the state’s median age is projected to be over 45. In 1970, it was extra like 28.
Older California boomers, roughly these born between 1946 and 1955, are clearly doing, on the entire, higher than youthful generations. However are they guilty for younger individuals’s dim prospects? And did the boomers have it simple by comparability?
Boomers additionally confronted robust financial challenges. The economic system they entered within the Nineteen Seventies was unraveling as productivity dropped. Younger individuals then confronted far larger unemployment rates, nearing 10% by 1980, pushed partly by high numbers of new entrants to the labor drive.
Inflation within the Nineteen Seventies additionally reached almost 4 occasions that of 2025 (2.7%). The collapse of producing devastated a lot of the Northeast and notably the Midwestern industrial heartland. In California, the shrinking of the aerospace industry took away many high-paying jobs.
After all, the prospects of the present era are also removed from rosy. As California’s economic system has developed, higher-wage-job development has been among the many slowest within the nation. At present our state stands well below the national average on the subject of creating jobs that pay effectively, whereas it’s on the high of the heap in creating below-average and low-paying jobs.
But when the present youthful generations face fewer headwinds from both unemployment or inflation, they nonetheless, notably in California, face tough prospects. Even the higher educated fear about synthetic intelligence that’s making the job market tougher for graduates. Hit hardest are these professionals on the “smooth” facet of the economic system: finance, accounting, legislation, code writers.
Fairly than blame the boomers, maybe younger adults have to do because the boomers did: Get actual and work tougher. Proper now millennials should not impressing employers, notes the Harvard Business Review. Even the scholars know the rating: Greater than half (53%) of latest faculty graduates really feel unqualified for an entry-level job of their discipline, with almost half (42%) admitting they didn’t have all the talents listed within the job description. A recent survey of more than 1,000 employers discovered that millennials and Zs had the worst work ethic of any era, extra involved with their life-style and leisure than their careers.
The boomers needed to up their recreation after they have been younger. Many made the often-painful resolution to go away their houses within the industrial Midwest or “Bonfire of the Vanities”-era New York. Additionally they gained the analytic expertise that helped them get forward within the rising info and business-service economic system. In spite of everything, this was the era that drove the emergence of Silicon Valley.
Just like the boomers, the subsequent era additionally must up its act, however in ways in which make sense in at present’s situations. One distinction: A school diploma is not a meal ticket. Now, as nearly 40% of the workforce beneath 40 has a four-year faculty diploma, far larger than in 1970, a diploma means a lot much less.
After all, some faculty levels are nonetheless value greater than the paper on which they’re printed. Individuals with coaching within the professions — notably in medical fields in addition to technology and engineering — stay in excessive demand. Against this, the humanities have lost 25% of their college students since 2012.
In distinction to the ’70s, at present’s economic system is drifting towards one wherein expertise utilized to the bodily world matter extra, together with fields resembling mechanical engineering, aeronautics, geology and robotics. Many younger individuals are seeking careers in the trades. As faculty enrollment dropped between 2020 and 2023, trade schools grew by 10% amid an ever-growing shortage of industrial and craft workers. One recent survey discovered that 83% of Gen Z really feel that studying a talented commerce could be a higher pathway to financial safety than faculty — together with 90% of those already holding faculty levels.
Shifting and adjusting to financial modifications is essential for any era, as has been the case for the reason that republic’s earliest days. That is most blatant within the case of housing, which has been a windfall for us boomers. The typical longtime homeowner in California made $265,000 promoting their residence, in contrast with barely $100,000 nationally. Together with Gen Xers, they’ve residence possession charges much like these in the remainder of the nation.
However between 1980 and 2020, the share of California 25- to 35-year-old owners declined from 39.4 to simply 15.5%. One study found that whereas 20% of individuals beneath 35 personal their very own houses in locations like Sioux Falls, S.D., an rising tech middle, solely 3.5% of their counterparts in San Jose could make the identical declare. The over-inflated housing costs are a key cause Californians beneath 35, these more likely to begin households and corporations, are precisely the group deserting the West Coast due to price of residing.
Making modifications in profession or locale is hard. Some need the older era to subsidize high-priced city life for younger adults. We noticed this in New York’s latest mayoral election, wherein socialist Zohran Mamdani promised to maintain down rents, construct new housing and lavishly subsidize things like transit and childcare. In California, the place the far left can be ascendant, we already see related proposals to tax the older prosperous inhabitants, as epitomized by the new wealth tax proposal. This after years of regular rises in different taxes. If handed, the wealth tax might turn into a template for confiscation of belongings of much less exalted boomers’ belongings.
If boomers wish to cease the drive towards mass redistribution, they should understand the worth in creating extra favorable situations for development for our state’s youthful generations. Which means the whole lot from reviving good blue-collar industries to scaling again laws that make it tough to construct inexpensive, and family-friendly, housing. With out such modifications, boomers inevitably will face a generational struggle over their belongings, one they may possible lose.
Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow for city futures at Chapman College and senior analysis fellow on the Civitas Institute on the College of Texas, Austin. Substack: @jkotkin
