A book everyone in the US born from 1965 onward needs to read!!! The topics touched upon by Gibney are spot on in showing how the US began its downhill slide into a soulless dystopian nightmare once the Boomer Generation came of age. Once the Greatest Generation began to die off and could no longer reign in the extremes of its offspring, the degeneration of US societal protections for the whole of all into the greed-soaked grab of everything possible for themselves at the expense of all who happened to be born after them.
In A Generation of Sociopaths, Gibney examines the disastrous policies of the most powerful generation in modern history, showing how the Boomers ruthlessly enriched themselves with a huge "Fuck You" to the world!
Acting without empathy, prudence, or respect for facts--acting, in other words, as sociopaths--the Boomers turned American dynamism into stagnation, inequality, and bipartisan fiasco. The Boomers have set a time bomb for the 2030s, when damage to Social Security, public finances, and the environment will become catastrophic and possibly irreversible--and when, not coincidentally, Boomers will be dying off.
This book is about intergenerational inequity. The title may seem an obvious exaggeration and a generalization, but the facts and history as narrated by Gibney show two things. First, the Baby Boomer generation have profited from the economic and sociological gains by its prior generation. Secondly, it is also neglecting its obligations to future generations, not to mention stealing from them. Gibney explains what happened and how it happened. The ‘why’ question is simple. It is greed and the sociopathic nature of the boomers.
Gibney shows that the boomer generation has benefited itself in every aspect of life, from economics, defense, education, environment, taxes, and planning for old age. And it does so by passing the costs down to future generations. In respect of tax cuts during the boomer-controlled years, for instance, Gibney says: ‘There was some sense in cutting taxes during a recession, but how the taxes were cut was illuminating – from a Keynesian perspective, the best cuts would be the cuts that led to the fastest spending, not the fastest squirreling away of retirement funds by older Americans’. The cut in estate duties came at a time when the Boomers’ parents had ‘one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel’. In other words, the Boomers were ready to inherit the full estate – without tax.
Countries that were awed by the superficial growth of the Boomer years and copied their policies are now seeing the same inequality gap, and the same bleak future for their future generations. Gibney explains how the Medicare system set up by the Boomers is intended to benefit the Boomers as they grow old and infirmed, and in need of continued health benefits – benefits paid for by a shrinking trust fund because the income from the younger generation cannot match the cost that the Boomers will incur. The ratio of workers to retirees is shrinking.
Another sinister phenomenon created by the Boomers is the twin terror – the closure of schools and the opening of prison doors. Gibney tracks the rise of private, for profit schools whose aim is to create profit, not raise education. That is why the creature known as the ‘adjunct professor’ is proliferating as long-service professors are dwindling in numbers. Adjuncts are cheaper, but they are also less likely to get tenure because ‘Boomer professors are determined to die in their endowed chairs’. The net result of the long chapter, ‘Detention, after-school and otherwise’, is that America is having too many ‘badly equipped students and an explosion of debts’. All that is linked to the Boomer ‘creation of an unforgiving penal state, furnished with intolerant laws and panoptic enforcers to supply the inmates. For many, schools are just the waiting room before formal incarceration’.
Gibney argues that younger generations have a fleeting window to hold the Boomers accountable and begin restoring America. And readers of this book will find it hard not to toss their Boomers relatives into the cheapest, decrepit nursing homes, nor to pull the plug on them when those brainwaves cease. Boomers should hope that their end doesn't come with a pillow over their face while hearing "don't resist" & "go to the light" from their Gen X, Millennial & Gen Z offspring!
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