Replies to post #435714 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Missing the forest for the trees, much? Go down the list again and report back just how many of the issues of concern you believe do not EMBODY inequity as a cause if not a result.

So maybe the Dem voters are better at intuiting which Party, albeit imperfectly, is better at addressing inequities, both historically AND prospectively? The older voters get the history and the younger voters sure as f'k do not trust the GOP Taliban to do jack shit to address anything they care about effectively.

Grandparents are among their concerns, so watch McCarthy backpedal the 'freedom caucus' threats to cut SS and Medicare faster than an NFL DB.

Stand by, stand back, the GOP House will instruct us all.

[fuagf]

Why the baby boomers rule American politics

"Why isn't inequity on the list?...'Economy' sure is, and, its number #1... "

This has to be interesting for all of us. Chuckle, you got me into exploring a bit yesterday, Some here am getting off tabs.

June 29, 2022

A diverse young generation is ready to change our politics and culture, but our congressional leadership and presidential options remain geriatric. It’s not just the normal politics of aging: the baby boomer generation has maintained extraordinary power and influence throughout its life course. Kevin Munger, a professor at Penn State University, finds that generational conflict is inevitable as the baby boomers retire but maintain their political influence against much more diverse, less religious, and more liberal rising generations. The institutions boomers built are losing credibility, but we should not expect their power to wane.

Niskanen Center – The Science of Politics · Why the Baby Boomers rule American politics
Guest: Kevin Munger, Penn State University

Study: “Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture”

Transcript

Matt Grossmann: Why the baby boomers rule American politics this week on the Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann. While diverse generation of young Americans stands ready to change our politics and culture, our congressional leadership and presidential options remain geriatric. And this isn’t just an age gap. The baby boomer generation has maintained extraordinary power and influence throughout its life course. How did the boomers take power and are any of the following generations likely to emerge as a counterweight anytime soon? This week, I talk with Kevin Munger of Penn State University about his new Columbia book, the Generation Gap: Why the Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture. He argues that generational conflict is inevitable as the baby boomers retire, but maintain their political influence against a much more diverse, less religious and liberal rising generation. The institutions boomers built are losing credibility, but that doesn’t mean we should expect their power to wane. Here’s our conversation, which started with a summary of his concept of boomer ballast.

Kevin Munger: Part of the angle of the book is that there are a lot of things going on generationally right now and in terms of age. So I try to condense all of that into a single phrase, which is boomer ballast. So the argument is essentially that today the baby boomer generation is distinctly powerful as a generation and as a group of older people. So this combines multiple causes. And so I don’t have a clean causal story. That’s sort of why I had to turn this into a book rather than a paper, but generations are generally not taken seriously I feel like, and I wanted to demonstrate A, that yes, generations are an important organizing group identity in American politics today. And B, that the baby boomers are the unique generation in American history.
[...]
And so has been a topic of academic research and social science for a long time. Even going back to Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism was very interested in the way in which generational replacement determined the rate of progress in a society. So it is a real social phenomenon, and it is especially important in the US today, precisely because of the baby boomer generation. So in terms of emphasizing its uniqueness, it is the only generation that is designated by the census as such. And a point I try to bring up as often as possible, the entire generation was awarded the Time Person of the Year award in 1967 as the inheritors, right? So they were inheriting a uniquely prosperous and free world. And the Time Magazine gave them their famous Person of the Year award just for being born. So this fact is obscured by the intergenerational sniping and the jokes about millennials avocado toast.
[...]
The baby boomers are much more likely people, sorry, people who are born in the age range, which technically define the baby boomer generation are much more likely when prompted to say, I’m a baby boomer than our gen X or millennials. Millennials are actually considerably higher than gen X, gen X is a low point of generational identification and so much else. And the gen Z is actually the highest. And it’s hard to say, of course, because of the age period problem you point out. But it does seem that there’s a coherent story to be told about the media that is affecting how people identify with their generation.

Matt Grossmann: So we also have, of course, big changes in the population of who is in these generations. You discussed the racial composition differences, which are very different. Of course there’s also education and religion and changes like that. So to what extent is sort of the social changes that are coming first to the youngest generations, sort of responsible for these generational differences?

Kevin Munger: So this is the classic age period cohort problem. And I’m not really able to answer it in this book. And in fact, I don’t try to. The one case in which I do is when it comes to the composition of members of Congress. So here we’re very easy to see changing age patterns among members of the House and Senate, both of them are older than ever before. And we can see that there’s a clear generational story. Although bracketing that briefly, it really is the people born during World War II who are the most unique generation. So it’s the people born between 1940 and 1950, basically that stand out in terms of their access to power today. So I am not trying to solve the HPA cohort problem other than that case. And this is because I actually don’t think it’s the most interesting thing we could do.
[...]
Kevin Munger: So this is a longstanding dream of to get the young people more involved in politics, but both in terms of the age story is very consistent. And there is a consistent cohort effect where each new cohort is less likely to vote than the one that came before it even holding age costs. So we do have some APC analysis, but the uptake of 2018, I think, is not likely to continue in 2022. I think that there’s very little effort on behalf of either party, but especially the Democrats. Very little effort on behalf of either party, but especially the Democrats to appeal to the young base. The fact of the uniquely old politicians involved makes this just on its face not an easy argument to make. I do think that youth in a nation from the political institutions and even the act of voting is downstream of how non-represented they feel.

[Insert: Considering his area of interest here Munger surely would have
been happy to see his expectation re young voters in 2022 was wrong.]

[...]
The Boomers are, again, a historical anomaly in terms of the world they inherited being very different from the world that came before and from basically any other world we’ve ever experienced in terms of broad-based, economic growth, new media technology, broadcast media, which tends to centralize people and bring them together and the experience of going to college and university as a catalyst for many people in this generation.

For millennials, the story is similar but different. The fact in this case seems to be a bit of a … It was forced upon them. The fact of the baby boom, Boomer ballast itself is what created the millennial generation, precisely because the standard age-based story of older people complaining about younger people, precisely because there were so many older people and they were so dominant in the media and cultural spheres, this produces the large-scale interest in millennials as such, which then increases millennial sense of self-identification.

I think that’s actually a different mechanism that’s going on with Gen Z, which has more to do with the fact that this is the first generation which is raised primarily on media that is created for, by, and about themselves.
[...]
Matt Grossmann: Gen X stands out for having low generational consciousness. The funny thing about that is that you would predict that from the stereotypes of Generation X potentially, that they would have mixed feelings about this. How should we see that generation?

Kevin Munger: Well, I go out of my way to make fun of them as often as I can. Largely because so many of my slightly older colleagues are Gen X and, in fact, they and many other people I’ve encountered on Twitter feel quite aggrieved about being left out of this conversation.

The cultural narrative you’re describing is not irrelevant. I think it is less important, though, than the simple demography, that there are many, many fewer Gen X-ers than there are either millennials or Baby Boomers. That keeps coming back to the importance of demography as a driver of American politics, which is deeply underappreciated.
[...]
Matt Grossmann: This should mean we can predict things better that are going to happen a long time in the future and that prediction should be the millennials will take over, and everyone else will be aggrieved because the birth rates have fallen since the millennials. What do you think?

Kevin Munger: Here is where the different mechanisms cut in different directions. It is true that demography is an important way in which millennials have an advantage over other generations. If we look at the other things on which Boomers have advantages which compounded their demographic power, including economic power and control of major institutions, millennials are lagging behind badly on these. I think this is a common, increasingly common among my specific generation, people, early thirties … The housing situation in major cities is just unbelievable. It is a serious impediment to how we think about how our lives should go and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to change any time soon.
[...]
Matt Grossmann: And is there any sign of the kind of analog of negative partisanship that this it’s not just people identifying with their own generation, but identifying as an opposition to another?

Kevin Munger: I did find that younger people, I think Gen Z and Millennials were more likely to oppose a politician who said that they would prioritize issues that the older generations cared about. So if there is, it seems to be in the resentment towards the old direction.

Matt Grossmann: So you also find that public policy is oriented toward helping older people. And that’s, of course a repeated finding, to what extent is that explainable by the relative power and engagement of the generations?

Kevin Munger: So the welfare spending of the U.S. for a long time has a higher percentage of it has gone to the elderly than in any other Western democracy. And largely this is because of lack of welfare spending on the non elderly, but as the elderly take up much more and more of the population and they live longer and longer, this spending becomes quite important. So the most obvious case is about social security. So Doug Arnold has a new book about reforming social security, which is great in which I based much of this argument on, but it has been clearly in terms of predicting the future, the actuarial tables behind social security payments could not be more set in stone. And it has been clear for decades that some kind of reform will have to happen to deal with the demographic shift.

And Congress has for decades put off a relatively small increase in the social security tax, which would have bit into the Baby boomers when they were in the workforce and making money and have them pay into social security the amount that they would need to in order to guarantee the full benefits. So as a result, the liabilities of social security are greater than what will be taken in at the current rates. And what will happen is at some point, the lines will cross, the amount of money coming in will be less than the money going out. And either they’re going to cut the social security payments to the retired Baby boomers, or they will have to increase the payroll taxes on the younger generations who are still working. And it’s not going to be the first one because of the power of the older generations politically.

Matt Grossmann: So they might be able to stop change, but I guess, are they responsible for the initial disparity? So, we might think of lots of other reasons why public policy is more geared toward helping the old, but of course there is a story that the ARP as an organization and other generational political influence kinds of stories did matter for this. So should we connect the two? Boomers dominate politics and policy, as a result is geared toward their interests.

Kevin Munger: Yeah, so policy is always geared towards the people who vote the most and have the most influence and are the members of organizations with power influence. And that has always been older people on average. So sure, that effect is what’s caused the system we have today to exist. But even when the Baby boomers were not older people, when they were in the prime of their working age, we could have solved social security problem by raising taxes on them. And we did not because of their power, because that they are a demographically politically powerful group. So I think these two effects are both these both mechanisms both operate and that soon they’ll both be operating even more in the same direction.

Matt Grossmann: So you of course study changes in technology frequently. And that is probably the most pointed to explanation for these generational lines. To what extent should we be connecting changes in technology use as the primary way that generations develop?

Kevin Munger: I think to a large extent, I think that media technology is increasingly alienated world and in our world in which media technology is more available than ever at every moment of our working lives, clearly a major force for everything that happens. And as I said earlier, the fact of social media allowing younger generations to make their own media is a kind of novel phenomenon in history in terms of the breakdown of intergenerational contact and transmission of everything. So I do think the media is a very important part of the story.
[...]
Matt Grossmann: How is this work you’ve been doing on generations likely to impact your other work on use of technology and its impact?

Kevin Munger: Yeah, so I’m focusing a lot more on novel political platforms, which target young people and trying to understand the style. So I think it’s true is at this point, that representative AOC has a very different way of using Twitter and that younger millennials in Congress do so in a very different way. And I’m trying to figure out how to operationalize that and see how that plays out. To try to update the idea of home style, to be digital home style, to see how younger generations feel connected to younger politicians who use the internet in a way that is relatable to them and how that affects this process of politicalization and issue transmission.

Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available biweekly from the Niskanen Center and part of the democracy group network. I’m your host, Matt Grossman. If you liked this discussion, I recommend checking out the following episodes, Racial Protest, Violence, And Backlash, How Marriage And Inequality Reinforce Partisan Polarization, How Online Media Polarizes And Encourages Voters, How Rich White Residents And Interest Groups Rule Local Politics, And Anti-immigration Politics Is California’s Past, The Republican’s Future. Thanks to Kevin Munger for joining me, please check out the Generation Gap and then listen in next time.

Photo Credit: iStock

https://www.niskanencenter.org/why-the-baby-boomers-rule-american-politics/

It's very long. Expect there must be some interesting and hopefully useful info. in it.

Heh, what i know about generations you would starve on. Until now wouldn't have had a clue when Boomers
supposedly stopped and Millennials supposedly began. Or what came in between. I see now it's the X factors.

January 17, 2019
Defining generations: Where Millennials end and Generation Z begins
By Michael Dimock
[...]
Pew Research Center has been studying the Millennial generation for more than a decade. But by 2018, it became clear to us that it was time to determine a cutoff point between Millennials and the next generation. Turning 38 this year, the oldest Millennials are well into adulthood, and they first entered adulthood before today’s youngest adults were born.

In order to keep the Millennial generation analytically meaningful, and to begin looking at what might be unique about the next cohort, Pew Research Center decided a year ago to use 1996 as the last birth year for Millennials for our future work. Anyone born between 1981 and 1996 (ages 23 to 38 in 2019) is considered a Millennial, and anyone born from 1997 onward is part of a new generation.
[...]
Generational cutoff points aren’t an exact science. They should be viewed primarily as tools, allowing for the kinds of analyses detailed above. But their boundaries are not arbitrary. Generations are often considered by their span, but again there is no agreed upon formula for how long that span should be. At 16 years (1981 to 1996), our working definition of Millennials is equivalent in age span to their preceding generation, Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980). By this definition, both are shorter than the span of the Baby Boomers (19 years) – the only generation officially designated by the U.S. Census Bureau, based on the famous surge in post-WWII births in 1946 and a significant decline in birthrates after 1964.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/17/where-millennials-end-and-generation-z-begins/

So Gen Z came through for the Dems which was good news, eh.

Gen Z announces itself in midterms with Democratic boost, historic wins
By Samantha Chery
November 11, 2022 at 1:33 p.m. EST
[...]
About 1 in 8 voters overall were under 30, and more than half supported Democratic candidates in the midterm elections, according to early exit polling and AP VoteCast. But support for Democrats among young voters, while still running well ahead of their support for Republicans, eroded somewhat from the 2018 midterms.

That might be because Gen Z’s allegiance is to issues, not to specific political parties or candidates, said Kenisha Mahajan, a 17-year-old advocate for political and community engagement. Gen Zers are most motivated by candidates who plan to address climate change, gun violence, reproductive rights, racial justice and LGBTQ rights, activists and candidates say. Mahajan cited as an example the defeat of Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), the chair of the Democratic National Campaign Committee, who, she said, didn’t appeal to the youth vote.

“Complacency and the bare minimum is not enough,” she said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/11/gen-z-midterms-2022-voting/