My Generation: Blame the Rich, not the Boomers

Blaming a generational grouping is a coverup, not serious reporting

A recurring theme in policy circles over the last three decades has been that young people should blame their economic problems on older people. The idea is that rather than being concerned about the massive upward redistribution of income, which has made people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg ridiculously rich, young people should blame their parents and grandparents.

The New York Times gave us the latest version of this story last week in a video segment titled “Thanks a lot boomers.” The write-up (sorry, I don’t have time to view the video) tells us:

“Hey, boomers! Younger Americans would like a word.

“We’ve noticed that many of you are pretty upset about the state of the nation. And we get it. We really do. But do you ever stop and ask yourselves how we got here?

“In the Opinion video above, younger Americans from the New York region spell out the frustrations of the generations that followed the baby boomers. Like so many of us, they’re struggling with the high cost of education, a scarcity of affordable housing and a diminished American dream.

“We live in communities that are still divided by race, in a nation burdened by debt, on a planet that keeps getting hotter.

“We have one simple request: How about an apology?”

Okay, let’s bring a little reality to the New York Times. First, the idea that the boomers lived through wonderful times is demented nonsense, not anything that corresponds to the real world.

There was in fact a golden age, but it predated the entry of most boomers into the labor market. The economy experienced a period of low unemployment and rapid real wage growth, which was widely shared, from 1947 to 1973. At the endpoint of this boom period, the oldest boomers were 27, and the youngest were 9.

After 1973, the economy took a sharp turn for the worst. The most immediate cause was the Arab oil embargo, which sent oil prices soaring. The economy at that time was far more dependent on oil than is the case today. Soaring oil prices sent inflation higher, which prompted the Fed to bring on severe recessions, first in 74-75 and then again in 1980-82.

The full story is more complicated and highly contested, but what happened to the economy is not. We had a period of far higher unemployment and stagnant real wage growth that lasted until the mid-1990s. The median real wage in 1996 was actually 4.4 percent lower than it had been in 1973.

The average unemployment rate for people between the ages of 20-24 over the years 1973 to 1988 (when the last boomer hit 24) was 11.3 percent. By comparison, it averaged 7.2 percent over the last decade, although it has been rising rapidly in 2025.

Real wages are substantially higher now than they were in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. The real median wage in 2024 was 30 percent higher than it had been in 1980.

Source: Economic Policy Institute.

The increase should have been more. If the median wage had kept pace with productivity growth, as it had from 1947 to 1973, it would be more than 100 percent higher today than in 1980. The problem is that a larger share of income was diverted to high-end wages: CEOs, Wall Street types, successful STEM workers, and high-end professionals, like doctors, as well as an increased profit share since 2000, but 30 percent wage growth is not zero.

Anyhow, younger people should definitely have things better today than they do. But it is dishonest to say us old-timers are the problem, rather than the rich.

To start with, healthcare costs way too much. Suppose we got rid of patent and copyright monopolies, which redistribute over $1 trillion a year ($8,000 per household) from the masses to drug companies, medical equipment suppliers, software companies, and the rest. We can finance the development of drugs and medical equipment through upfront funding, like we do with the $50 billion a year we distribute through the National Institutes of Health. Then drugs and medical supplies are cheap, and healthcare costs far less.

We could also have universal Medicare, which would save us hundreds of billions of dollars a year on the administrative costs and profits of insurers. And, we could have free trade for physicians’ services, bringing their salaries in line with doctors in Germany, France, and other wealthy countries, saving us another $100 billion a year.

Boomers are not the reason we don’t have universal Medicare and free trade in prescription drugs and doctors. The lobbying groups for drug companies, insurers, and doctors are the reason healthcare is ridiculously expensive in the United States.

We also have the story of housing being extremely expensive, but here too we need to move beyond the lies. Housing costs had moved roughly in step with the overall inflation rate until the mid-1990s. Then we saw the take-off of a bubble, coinciding with the stock bubble, with house prices hugely diverging from rents and overall inflation.

While we built a huge amount of housing in the decade from 1996 to 2006, after the bubble burst and prices crashed, housing construction fell from a peak annual rate of almost 2.3 million to an annual rate of less than 500,000 at its low in 2009. Construction eventually picked up so that by the eve of the pandemic housing starts were running at 1.5 million annual rate, which was likely enough to meet new demand, but far below what was needed to make up a shortfall where we had seriously underbuilt housing for more than a decade.

NIMBYism surely slowed construction, but that could not have been the primary factor in the shortfall, since NIMBYism didn’t start in 2008. The main problem was the overreaction to the collapse of the bubble, with builders hesitant about new construction. This overreaction was what caused both rents and house sale prices to substantially outpace both inflation and wage growth. That is very clear in the data, but it is more popular in elite circles to blame boomers.

The best policy would have been to prevent the bubble in the first place. But the rich people who controlled news outlets were not anxious to say things about the housing bubble, even long after it should have been evident, because the financial industry was making money hand over fist pushing out bad mortgages. And, when the mortgages went bad and the banks faced bankruptcy, they got the government to bail them out.

If younger people want someone to blame for high house prices, they should look to the financial industry and the failed regulators of the bubble era, most notably Alan Greenspan, but also Ben Bernanke, and Larry Summers. If they had taken steps to rein in the bubble, it likely never would have grown so large and led to such a disastrous fall in construction when it finally burst.

There is a similar story on climate. While many people, including boomers, can be blamed for driving gas guzzling cars, and contributing to climate change in other ways, a big chunk of the blame surely must go to the executives of the fossil fuel companies. They deliberately misled the public about the dangers from climate change, pushing out false stories to hide the harm they knew they were causing. If the media, which is controlled by rich people, had been more effective in calling attention to these lies, perhaps there would have been more public support for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The story goes on, but the point is that it is dishonest to blame a generational grouping for the problems facing younger people today. The whole generation of baby boomers did not have equal power to influence public policy. A tiny elite had a hugely disproportionate ability to determine public policy and control the course of debate.

It is long past time to recognize this obvious fact. As long as we fail to do so, we will never be able to address the problem. I would also propose, as does the NYT boomer blaming piece, an apology from the rich. But as the old saying goes, being rich means never having to say you’re sorry.