Baby Boomers: scapegoats in a generational conflict?

Press Office
Flickr : Baby boomers these days... by Quinn Dombrowski } <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/" target="__blank">Attribution-ShareAlike License</a>

Are the so-called Baby Boomers depriving younger generations of life opportunities? Or is that post-war generation being used as a scapegoat?

A new book by University sociologist Dr Jennie Bristow argues that ‘Boomer Blaming’ has in fact become an easy opt-out in a collective failure to address wider social problems.

Dr Bristow’s book, entitled Baby Boomers and Generational Conflict, seeks to debunk the dominant narrative that the Baby Boomers ‘had it all’ – including the benefits of a booming economy, the welfare state and personal freedoms – and that this somehow deprived later generations of similar life opportunities.

Underpinning this narrative, she argues, is a consensus about the extent to which the Boomers were to blame – a consensus that stretches across the political spectrum and also across the generations writing about the Boomers.

Dr Bristow describes a scenario where the Boomers appear to be embodied in a ‘silver tsunami’ of ‘young olds’ who have just started retiring and threaten to live forever, allegedly sending the country into never-ending debt as it struggles to pay for spiralling costs of pensions, health and social care. In this scenario, Boomers are perceived to be using their considerable voting and purchasing power to skew markets and public policy around their own interests.

But Dr Bristow contends that the consensus on Boomers is rooted within a ‘wider ambivalence’ about the legacy of the Sixties, rather than any empirical analysis of the economic and social factors contributing to the wider issue of generational conflict.

She argues that ‘at the heart of this generational conflict is the mediation between past, present and future’. When a narrative of ‘Boomer blaming’ takes hold within the elite, practical consequences are likely to follow. These include policies designed to penalise the older generations for the alleged benefit of the younger generations, and encouraging people to think at a ‘common sense’ level that their Baby Boomer parents, colleagues, or acquaintances are the cause of their own economic or existential difficulties.

Dr Bristow concludes that ‘the social problem of the Baby Boomer is not an objective fact that has only recently been discovered and articulated’. Rather, she says, it is that ‘generational explanations have come to be mapped onto pre-existing social problems, which have their origins somewhere other than within the generations’.

Dr Bristow is an associate of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies (CPCS) within the University’s School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research.