Notice how much of our discussion is around "culture issues": sex and identity, transgender, college campuses, etc. I believe these are Trojan horse issues designed to distract from the overwhelming nuts-and-bolts functions of government, which overwhelmingly favor the elderly. COVID-19 sort-of brought this issue to the front, but in general, Social Security, ADA, etc. are overwhelmingly in favor of the elderly. Efforts to aid the young are often on the face of it helpful while entrenching special interests, with the most recent student debt jubilee being the most recent examples. The next generation will face mounting tuition costs as a result, rather than see greater competition between universities.
The combination of inverted age pyramids and socialized government services, coupled with stagnant wages/recessions/declining real growth, means that fewer and fewer young people are essentially being handed the bill from older generations, and there's not a whole lot to stop it from happening. Anyone old enough to see SS as a potential source of income suddenly have a tremendous incentive to keep it in place, along with the value of their degree, work experience/etc. On these issues, it is worth pointing out that Republicans and Democrats are de facto united - only young Republicans are likely to vote against policies for the elderly.
Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, and many other influential figures who built the modern world were simply young people whose efforts were spent poring over trade center records and budgets - they were scholars of public finance. Right before COVID, there was an "OK Boomer" meme that I thought might bring this fault to the front of the culture war. It is only a matter of time before some angst-ridden teen realizes that the budget is extremely elderly-focused.
I would still think of any knowledge which resides within a 60 year olds brain with the same interest I would view 60 year old code. There’s got to have been something going right for it to have been working for 60 years. Sometimes it’s going to be barely working, sometimes it will be working great, but there’s something to be learned.
I also don’t think wisdom is just what people say but also what they do.
As time passes the environment, morals and the goals of a population can change drastically, and its behavior is attuned by those variables.
Anyone born in the boomer generation would probably have behaved exactly like them, for the good and the bad.
The professors in that article might be speaking like that, making amend to the young, but deep inside every generation thinks to be smarter than the previous and the successive ones.
But don’t seek the boomers short as do nothings. Four dead in ohio and all that, and the various riots of 68 were the young. And you can thank this age cohort for the networked device in your hand and the connecting software.
Did we make mistakes, yeah, but at least we didn’t make Facebook.
Zoomers (the young people this author is likely talking about) pretty much grew up while these networks already took off.
Though the generation the social networks target will likely switch to gen alpha soon, as they're quickly approaching their puperty.
In reality, tv and movies were machines made by the Greatest and Silent generations to sell products to children.
So boomers grew up to be hyper-consumers who are highly vulnerable to believing whatever the magic box in the living room tells them.
Now Gen X sells products based on the opinion of the crowd and the new fashion is constantly trying to match beliefs with the shifting consensus of a para-social cloud of "friends".
I'm reminded of Vonnegut's bit about the Booboolings, a species who thought it was a good idea to program their children socially...
https://realflashbytes.wordpress.com/2017/11/07/the-sisters-...
Personally I think the thing old people have (information, experience) is not that valuable anymore. We are deluged with information and your grandpas trick for performing some household task is irrelevant. Your grandparents/parents best life advice is going to sound bland when we have instant access to advice from the top minds in every field. Worried about your life having no meaning? Here is a compilation of centenarians biggest regrets.
However, reading your comment again proves my point. Perhaps not invisible, certainly irrelevant. One suggestion, pay attention to what we all did wrong then so as to not make the same mistakes now.
The truth is humans aren’t optimization machines that gravitate towards high quality inputs. There’s a massive emotional component to learning and development that can’t be ignored. A child will take to the opinions of people they have an emotional connection too over whatever google spits out.
The thing is at a certain age peers become more important than family in terms of emotional connection, at which point adults become to feel alienated. But this is not new, adolescents aren’t basically wired by evolution to break from their elders.
