Who's to blame -- Generation-Xers or Boomers?

[John]

Don't you think this turns some people away?

When I start worrying about that, then I might as well shut the
whole web site down.

John

[JimZ]

Matt,

John wasn't criticizing "the base". He was pointing out some facts about specific groups and newspaper editorial boards. Some people believe those views also are representative of "the Democratic base" however many people who are part of the Democratic base point out that were not cheering for America's defeat. When Moveon.org takes out full page ads about "General Betray-us" and specific politicians outright say "the war is lost" then those individuals and groups should rightly be held accountable for their actions. If most of them happen to be in the same political party then "it is what it is".

[John]

I just posted a web log article on Neil Howe's Washington Post
article calling Early Gen-Xers the "Dumbest Generation."

** Neil Howe calls Early Gen-Xers the 'dumbest generation'
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi ... 10#e081210

Here is the full text of Neil Howe's article:

> THE DUMBEST GENERATION
> The Kids Are Alright. But Their Parents ...

> By Neil Howe
> Sunday, December 7, 2008; Page B01

> It is the prerogative of every generation of graybeards to look
> down the age ladder and accuse today's young of sloth, greed,
> selfishness -- and stupidity. We hear daily jeremiads from baby
> boomers who wonder how kids who'd rather listen to Linkin Park and
> play "Grand Theft Auto III" than solve equations or read books can
> possibly grow up to become leaders of the world's superpower. The
> recent publication of "The Dumbest Generation" by Mark Bauerlein
> of Emory University epitomizes the genre. His subtitle -- "How the
> Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future"
> -- says it all.

> Generational putdowns, Bauerlein's included, are typically long
> on attitude and short on facts. But the underlying question is
> worth pursuing: If the data are objectively assessed, which
> age-slice of today's working-age adults really does deserve to be
> called the dumbest generation?

> The answer may surprise you. No, it's not today's college-age
> kids, nor even today's family-starting 30-somethings. And no, it's
> not the 60-year-olds who once grooved at Woodstock. Instead, it's
> Americans in their 40s, especially their late 40s -- those born
> from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. They straddle the boundary
> line between last-wave boomers and first-wave Generation Xers. The
> political consultant Jonathan Pontell labels them "Generation
> Jones."

> Whatever you call them (I'll just call them early Xers), the
> numbers are clear: Compared with every other birth cohort, they
> have performed the worst on standardized exams, acquired the
> fewest educational degrees and been the least attracted to
> professional careers. In a word, they're the dumbest.

> Obviously, we're talking averages. No one would apply the word
> "dumb" to Barack Obama (born in 1961) or Timothy F. Geithner, his
> nominee for secretary of the Treasury (born in the same month).
> Yet the president-elect himself has written eloquently about how
> hard it was for him and his peers to obtain a serious education
> during their dazed-and-confused teen years. Like it or not, Alaska
> Gov. Sarah Palin (born in 1964), who stumbled over basic civics
> facts during her vice presidential run, is more representative of
> this group. Early Xers are the least bookish CEOs and legislators
> the United States has seen in a long while. They prefer sound
> bites over seminars, video clips over articles, street smarts over
> lofty diplomas. They are impatient with syntax and punctuation and
> citations -- and all the other brainy stuff they were never
> taught.

> Want proof? Let's start with the long-term results of the
> National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is
> housed within the U.S. Department of Education. Considered the
> gold standard in assessing K-12 students, the NAEP has been in
> continuous operation for decades. Here's the bottom line: On both
> the reading and the math tests, and at all three tested ages (9,
> 13 and 17), the lowest-ever scores in the history of the NAEP were
> recorded by children born between 1961 and 1965.

> The same pattern shows up in SAT scores. The SAT reached its
> all-time high in 1963, when it tested the 1946 birth cohort
> (including such notables as Gilda Radner and Oliver Stone). Then
> it fell steeply for 17 straight years, hitting its all-time low in
> 1980, when it tested the 1963 cohort (Mike Myers, Quentin
> Tarantino). Ever since, the SAT has been gradually if haltingly on
> the rise, paralleling improvements in the NAEP. In 2005, teens
> born in 1988 scored better on the combined SAT than any teens born
> since 1956 -- and better on the math SAT than any teens born since
> 1951.

> Some critics say that the average SAT score should be adjusted for
> the share of all teens taking the test, since a larger share
> "dilutes" the average with lower-aptitude kids. Good point, but it
> only deepens the mystery. Early Xers have both the lowest average
> score and the lowest share of test-takers. The share taking the
> SAT peaked at about 40 percent in the mid-1960s, fell to a low of
> only 30 percent around 1980 and has since been rising again -- to
> a record high of more than 45 percent during the last few years.

> These numbers make the recent rise in SAT scores by the new
> Millennial generation seem even more impressive -- and the early
> Xer low even more disappointing. With a lot more kids getting
> higher scores, the average SAT scores of Ivy League undergrads
> have jumped since the late 1970s -- from 1230 to 1425 at the
> University of Pennsylvania, for example. Average scores for nearly
> all graduate exams have also been rising since the early 1990s,
> including the GRE, the LSAT, the GMAT and the MCAT.

> Now let's turn to education and career outcomes. According to the
> U.S. Census Bureau, Americans born from 1958 to 1962 have the
> highest share that has never completed high school among all age
> brackets between 25 and 60. They also have the lowest share with a
> four-year college degree among all age brackets between 30 and 60,
> and they're tied for lowest in graduate degrees. Pushed by their
> passion for enlightenment (and by their fear of being drafted for
> Vietnam), first-wave baby boomers became obsessive degree
> achievers. That drive dropped off sharply during the next 10 or 15
> years. Less-degreed than their elders, early Xers represent an
> anomalous back-step in educational progress.

> Once early Xers entered the labor force in the 1980s, the Bureau
> of Labor Statistics noticed something else: For the first time in
> decades, the share of young adults entering professions such as
> law, medicine and accounting began to drop. Around the same time,
> economists began to worry about the stagnation of median income
> and the decline of household assets among Americans in their 20s.
> Today, they're worrying about the economic stagnation of Americans
> in their 40s.

> So what explains the smartness deficit (and the related income
> gap) that has tracked these early Xers throughout their lives?
> Some say it's demographic pressure. Early Xers were born into
> large families at the tail end of the baby boom, with a relatively
> large share of higher-order siblings (just as first-wave boomers
> have a relatively large share of first-borns). As they grew up,
> they got crowded out in the competition for parental attention,
> good teachers and good colleges. Later on, by the 1980s, they
> arrived too late to enter the most lucrative professions and the
> cushiest corporations, by now glutted with boomer yuppies. Their
> only alternative was to pioneer the pragmatic, free-agent,
> low-credential lifestyle for which Generation X has since become
> famous.

> Yet sheer numbers aren't the whole story. The early Xers' location
> in history also plays a large role. Quite simply, they were
> children at a uniquely unfavorable moment -- a time when the
> divorce rate accelerated, when the media image of children turned
> demonic and when the "latch-key" lesson for kids stressed
> self-reliance rather than trust in others. By the time they
> entered middle and high school, classrooms were opened, standards
> were lowered, and supervision had disappeared. Compared with
> earlier- or later-born students at the same age, these kids were
> assigned less homework, watched more TV and took more drugs.

> Most early Xers know the score. Graduating (or not) from school in
> the early 1980s, they saw themselves billboarded as a bad example
> by blue-ribbon commissions eager to reform the system for the
> next generation, the Millennials. Angling for promotions in the
> early 1990s, they got busy with self-help guides (yes, those "For
> Dummies" books) to learn all the subjects they were never taught
> the first time around. And today, as midlife parents, they have
> become ultra-protective of their own teenage kids and
> ultra-demanding of their kids' schools, as if to make
> double-certain it won't happen again.

> Does America need to worry that this group is taking over as our
> national leaders? Probably not. Early Xers have certain strengths
> that many more learned people lack: They're practical and
> resilient, they handle risk well, and they know how to improvise
> when even the experts don't know the answer. As the global economy
> craters, they won't keep leafing through a textbook. They may be a
> little rough around the edges, but their style usually gets the
> job done.

> Just don't tell the early Xers that today's youth are the dumbest
> generation. Not only is that jibe factually untrue, it also calls
> into question all the family sacrifices the early Xers are now
> making on behalf of these youth. Let Generation Jones keep the
> "dumbest" label. They know it fits, and they're tough enough to
> take it.

> Neil Howe is the co-author of "Millennials Rising" and other books
> on generational issues.

> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... inionsbox1

John

[StilesBC]

John,

I don't think you're pro-American. I think you're pro-imperial America. And you do a piss-poor job of stereotyping the anti-war movement. Indeed there are some that were so ideologically opposed to the war, that they would jump on any opportunity to discredit it. That's fine, you can go ahead and criticize those folks as much as you want. I agree that doing that is 'self-destructive' and doesn't really serve any legitimate purpose other than to help oneself feel more righteous in their original views (that they shouldn't have gone in the first place.)

But to characterize anyone that was (is) against the Iraq War or the War on Terror as "leftist nutjobs" proves that you are reaching your conclusions from an incredibly biased perspective. To start, many people's objection to these incursions is not defeatism as you suggest. It is out of respect for the Constitution of the US (the law). It is out of an unbiased religious understanding of cause and effect (they want to kill us because we occupy their lands). It is out of a moral belief that America should not use her standing as the lone superpower of the world to submit poor and helpless countries to her want.

Those are not positions requiring any specific political origin. And they don't require one to be a "nutjob." In fact, if you were really pro-American as you say, you would be defending the constitution and the bill of rights, not the flag. You speak as if you were a patriot, and you hold Roosevelt in the same regard. Yet you nor he were patriots. You are nationalists. And there is a wide, gaping hole of difference between the two. The world is littered with examples of entire societies that haven't been able to tell the difference. I'm living in one of them right now (Germany).

Additionally, I'm extremely disappointed that you continue to believe in this ridiculous left-right political paradigm. It doesn't exist. There is no left. There is no right. Democrats are not lefties. Republicans are not righties. The labels are meaningless now. There is only proponents of large government (democrat and republican values) and proponents of small government (3rd parties who struggle with ballot access, media time, corporate funding, etc)

Luckily, I am able to distinguish between good ideas and poor. And for the 5% of nonsense that is spewed on matters like this one, I can still take the other 95% for what it's worth, and that is invaluable. I don't think many others can operate with that kind of discretion. If your goal is for Generational Theory to gain more legitimacy, you're going to have to put your "Pro-American" bias aside. Then again, I don't get the impression that you're the type to give a rat's azz what other people think of your views, and you just enjoy writing. That's fine too. But in my opinion, 70% of first time visitors read that article and won't ever return. You could have written the same article, railing against GenXers and Boomers without pissing off the enormous majority of the world who dislike American Imperialism. It's almost as if you're displaying some of the same GenX "self-destructiveness" that you criticize so much.

Sincerely,

StilesBC

First were the leftist nutjobs in moveon.org and dailykos.org. These
people, along with the NY Times, NBC news, and other such
organizations, were committed to the defeat and humiliation of
America in Iraq. If these people had been listened to, we would have
an utter disaster on our hands. These people, who are overwhelmingly
Gen-Xers, are much more dangerous to the country and to the Obama
presidency than anyone on the right is

[The Grey Badger]

My $0.02 on Iraq. At the time, we were supposed to be chasing down al-Qaeda wherever they were, an enterprise I supported whole-heartedly. When Bush called for the invasion of Iraq, I didn't like it. First, it didn't seem to have anything to do with the matter at hand and looked like an expensive diversion from what we really had to do - chase down bin Laden. Second, my understanding of the way Americans have always done things - of the moral standards we bring to these matters - is that we do not engage in pre-emptive war. Especially on such much-disputed grounds (and they were much-disputed at the time) as we had. Finally, we had no exit plan. To be blunt, we stuck our hand in the tar baby and had no way of getting it out that I could see.

Of course later, commentators could say with perfect truth that there was al-Qaeda in Iraq, because by now, there was. Those guys may be crazy, but they're not stupid.

So - as a treacherous, traitorous, anti-American leftish nutjob? I think our adventure in Iraq was a mistake from beginning to end. A very expensive mistake. Meanwhile, the entire al-Qaeda thing has gone viral. Not what we wanted, not at all.

[NomadandProud]

I find the generational theories useful in a general sense but I wonder at the venom, anger and contempt directed at various generations. Why so much energy devoted to contempt? If, by the theories and definitions of generational dynamics, the actions of the members of the generations are dictated by their upbringing and the point in history in which they were born aren't contempt and anger wasted emotions after a while? Equating blame with explanation is unhelpful after awhile and a waste of time in light of the crises that are facing us.

I would like to see more thoughts predicting going forward, which generations will have the best survival strategies, and once we begin to emerge from the rubble which generations will build restorative institutions and some ideas about what the restoration should look like.

John, you are a Baby Boomer but need to get over your contempt for your peers (and by definition yourself). If you really are different (for some reason) than your peers, we need your foresight to generate discussion about where to go and who to look to possible ways out.

[Matt1989]

Those are not positions requiring any specific political origin. And they don't require one to be a "nutjob." In fact, if you were really pro-American as you say, you would be defending the constitution and the bill of rights, not the flag. You speak as if you were a patriot, and you hold Roosevelt in the same regard. Yet you nor he were patriots. You are nationalists. And there is a wide, gaping hole of difference between the two. The world is littered with examples of entire societies that haven't been able to tell the difference. I'm living in one of them right now (Germany).

I don't think being pro-American has anything to do with the laws of America. What if one thinks the Constitution sucks, and the Articles of Confederation were better? Or some other type of organizational structure?

As a rhetorical device, it's pretty useless outside of silencing opposition. It seems pretty clear to me that anyone who wants what is best for America is pro-American. I think the guys at Kos or moveon.org have America's interest in mind.

Additionally, I'm extremely disappointed that you continue to believe in this ridiculous left-right political paradigm. It doesn't exist. There is no left. There is no right. Democrats are not lefties. Republicans are not righties. The labels are meaningless now. There is only proponents of large government (democrat and republican values) and proponents of small government (3rd parties who struggle with ballot access, media time, corporate funding, etc)

What about the Kel Weaver political bit then?

[StilesBC]

I don't think being pro-American has anything to do with the laws of America. What if one thinks the Constitution sucks, and the Articles of Confederation were better? Or some other type of organizational structure?

As a rhetorical device, it's pretty useless outside of silencing opposition. It seems pretty clear to me that anyone who wants what is best for America is pro-American. I think the guys at Kos or moveon.org have America's interest in mind.

The problem with that logic is it can be extended to anyone. In Hitler's mind, he was acting in Germany's interest. So was Stalin, etc. The US Constitution was specifically created to prevent the kind of tyranny your founding fathers had known from the British monarchy. Every single word written was with that in mind. To disregard it, is to disregard the very principles upon which made the nation great. A person who would advocate such a thing is inherently "un-American" in the minds of the people who coined the term, or is at least trying to re-define it's original meaning. I frown on revisionism. I prefer to call a spade a spade.

What about the Kel Weaver political bit then?

I disagree. There are plenty of people who believe in "limited" government. I suppose you could argue that those people are simply confused and that their views contradict one another. But, "you are either a fascist/communist or an anarcho-capitalist/anarcho-communist," oversimplifies matters I think. I agree with the assessment in this video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 6933078950

Regards,

StilesBC

[John]

> I don't think you're pro-American. I think you're pro-imperial
> America. ...

> But to characterize anyone that was (is) against the Iraq War or
> the War on Terror as "leftist nutjobs" proves that you are
> reaching your conclusions from an incredibly biased perspective.

I'm sorry your feelings are hurt, but apparently you're having
difficulty reading the English language. I criticized moveon.org and
dailykos.com as leftist nutjobs, not anyone against the war. There
are plenty of people who are antiwar in a responsible manner. In
fact, Barack Obama is one of them -- at least since he stopped
pandering to the leftist nutjobs and demanding immediate withdrawal at
the time of the surge.

I've never taken any position on whether the Iraq war was "good" or
"bad," or whether it was "right" or "wrong." I would compare it more
to a weather event, which is not good, bad, right or wrong. It just
is.

> The problem with that logic is it can be extended to anyone. In
> Hitler's mind, he was acting in Germany's interest.

Pretty much everything you wrote is vacuous nonsense.

Sincerely,

John

[John]

> I find the generational theories useful in a general sense but I
> wonder at the venom, anger and contempt directed at various
> generations. Why so much energy devoted to contempt? If, by the
> theories and definitions of generational dynamics, the actions of
> the members of the generations are dictated by their upbringing
> and the point in history in which they were born aren't contempt
> and anger wasted emotions after a while? Equating blame with
> explanation is unhelpful after awhile and a waste of time in light
> of the crises that are facing us.

> I would like to see more thoughts predicting going forward, which
> generations will have the best survival strategies, and once we
> begin to emerge from the rubble which generations will build
> restorative institutions and some ideas about what the restoration
> should look like.

> John, you are a Baby Boomer but need to get over your contempt for
> your peers (and by definition yourself). If you really are
> different (for some reason) than your peers, we need your
> foresight to generate discussion about where to go and who to look
> to possible ways out.

Well, thanks for the pop psychology, but that ship sailed long ago.
I've been working on this web site since 2002, and each year I've
gotten more and more furious, as I realize what happened. I'm
perfectly happy focusing on survival strategies, but I have
absolutely no compunction about spewing venom at people who
manufactured phony worthless securities and then sold them to people,
destroying their savings and their lives. It's one of the most
engaging features of my personality.

Sincerely,

John