The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved: Baby Boomers Have Ruined the Future for Millennials

Episode Date: February 26, 2020

Are Boomers to blame? On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, The Federalist's Lyman Stone and The Heritage Foundation's Stephen Moore debate the motion Be it resolved: Baby Boomers have ruined the future for millennials. SOURCES: CBS News, Nightly Business Report, CNN.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesman to statesmen like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background to where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Welcome to the Monk Debates podcast. Every episode, we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. Free of spin, focused on the facts, and animated by smart conversation to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind.

Today's debate, be it resolved. Baby boomers have ruined the future for millennials. Millennials are approaching middle age in worse financial shape than every living generation ahead of them. According to the Wall Street Journal, Americans born between 1981 and 1996 have less wealth, own less property, have lower marriage rates, and are having fewer children than any generation since the Great Depression. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. Millennials born to the baby boom generation are facing a very different world than their parents. did at their age. Income inequality, wage stagnation, loss of job security, unaffordable housing,

and rising debt. These are all just some of the challenges that millennials and gen Xers are living through in their adult lives. Many believe that their parents are to blame for the unfortunate circumstances that they now find themselves in. On this installment of the Monk Debates podcast, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved, baby boomers have ruined the future for millennials. Arguing for the motion is Lyman Stone. He is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Arguing against the resolution is Stephen Moore.

He's a senior economic contributor at Freedom Works and was an economic advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump. Lyman, I'm going to turn the microphone over to you to provide your opening statement on our resolution, be it resolved, boomers have ruined the future for millennials. Give us your opening remarks. Well, it's always a little bit of hesitation to be on the pro side for so strongly worded emotion. Where are we now and how did we get here?

And where I think that we are now is a world where there is not a lot of opportunity for young people, where young people have greatly reduced both opportunities and outcomes versus previous generations. And where the ability of a young person, by a young person, I should say, I mean someone in their 20s or early 30s. The opportunities that this young adult will have to achieve what we might call flourishing, which doesn't just mean, you know, a good income or a well-funded retirement. It means the family life they want. It means a sense of meaningful community where they are. that the opportunity to have this is much narrower than the past. So then if that's where we are, how did we get there?

I see a trend in the last really 50 or 60 years, which I would associate with baby boomers, but I should say not just baby boomers, right? They were not the only voters in America. But this trend towards greater control, a society where whether it's, You're right to do what you want with your land and build a house or sell it for apartments. Your ability to get a job without having an extensive list of certifications, qualifications, and pieces of paper saying you're good enough. Your ability to live freely in life without the constant threat of an increasingly interventionist police state is in fact jeopardized. And that this is due to a series of regulations and restrictions imposed over the last 30 or 40 years.

particularly associated with the political legacy of the baby boomer generation, and that these restrictions have made life as a millennial much more miserable and much less free than Americans have historically expected. Lyman, well said. Let's turn the microphone over to Stephen Moore, who's going to be arguing against the resolution, boomers have ruined the future for millennials. Stephen, let's have your opening comments. I disagree with the fundamental premise. Look, every speech that I give to young people, whether it's high school or college kids. I tell them that this is the greatest moment in the history of civilization to be alive and that they are blessed to be in the greatest place in the world to be alive,

which is the United States in terms of the kinds of opportunities they will have. I mean, very few people would say they would rather have grown up, say, 50 years ago than today when you look at the amazing progress that is made in terms of human improvement. I wrote a book 15 years ago called It's Getting Better All the Time. and just looking at the amazing advances that have been made in virtually every area of human life, whether it's life expectancy or infant mortality or job opportunities or the incredible improvements in the environment. I know a lot of people will be surprised when I say that, but the air that we breathe, the water that we drink is cleaner than it's ever been before.

I certainly do think that this generation faces special challenges. You know, I look at this generation. I wonder, how did they come up with some of the kind of crazy ideas? Why are so many young people in America enamored with this idea of socialism? When we know, you know, from the lesson of the 20th century, that socialism was a spectacular failure in every regard. You call yourself a Democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?

Well, we're going to win because first we're going to explain what Democratic socialism is. And what Democratic socialism is about, is saying that it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of one percent in this country own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, that when you look around the world, you see every other major country providing health care to all people as a right except the United States. But if you look at just individual groups, you know, for example, what about women? You know, women are more likely to go to college.

They have higher earnings than ever before. Women in many areas are actually outwe're earning men now, and the gap between men and women have been reduced substantially. So this is a great time to be alive. There's a lot of special challenges. There's been way too much debt that we're imposing on our kids. But let's not forget that this generation will inherit $100 trillion of wealth that was built up in no small part by the baby boom generation.

Great, Lyman. And I want to just pause for a moment here and just sum up for the audience your opening arguments. Lyman, you're saying in effect that baby boomers have kind of closed the door on the types of opportunities, the prosperity, the dynamism of the economy that they enjoy that allowed them to live lives full of wealth, meaning, and things that millennials don't have, like high levels of debt and a sense of less future when it comes to job opportunities. Stephen Moore, you've got a very different point of view. You're saying that the baby boom generation has created for millennials an incredibly bright future, a society that has been fueled by innovation that has had breakthroughs in health care and technology, all these things making our lives immeasurably better than they were in the past. And who would want to be born, in your view, 50 years ago, 20 years ago, versus the opportunities you have for being alive today?

So great opening arguments. Let's get into our rebuttals. Lyman Stone, I'm going to come to you first and have you challenge what you think are Stephen Moore's key arguments in this debate. What I'm saying is not that now is a miserable time to be alive in general. What I am saying is that this is a time where when a young person looks at the next 40 years, the next 40 years don't necessarily look great. It doesn't look like they're going to experience the same uplift that previous generations had.

They're not going to have the same opportunity. They're not going to have the same choices available to them because a lot of those choices have simply been walled off. Now, the other thing, the last thing I would mention is that this vast amount of wealth that will be inherited, it's this fascinating thing where you would think that that would be good for millennials to inherit all this. But the reality is a lot of us aren't going to inherit it. Life expectancies are declining in America. And they're not declining because of some epidemic of cancer and all. Alzheimer's killing retirees. It's happening because young people are dying because of suicide,

because of drugs, because of alcohol, because of a number of causes that selectively kill young people, right? Now, you could say it's young people killing themselves, yes, but they're killing themselves into response to some set of social conditions. So they're going to inherit it? No, they're going to be dead before their parents are. This is in many ways a wonderful time to be in live. But I would push back on the idea that in some sense, the intergenerational balance is going to flow in favor of my generation when an astonishing share of us are never going to make it to retirement. Fascinating points, Limon Stone. Let's go to you, Stephen Moore, for your rebuttal. Look, I mean, I just think it's factually untrue that young people today are not going to have

the same life expectancy that our generation. They will have substantially higher life expectancy. I mean, what's going on in health care, you know, sometimes I wish I had been born 30 years later than I was is, you know, we're going to see in the next 25 or 30 years the, you know, cures for Alzheimer's. We're going to see cures for cancer, heart disease, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's. We have these within our grasp. And, you know, what's going on in terms of gene therapy and so on, cell regeneration, it's quite possible, you know, my kids could live to 100 to 120 years old. So those are incredibly exciting dynamics that are going on in the economy. And again, I'll go back to this point that for young people that are black or Hispanic or women, they have incredibly more opportunities than people had 30 or 40 years ago.

And I think we're going to see an expansion of that. And by the way, when I grew up, there wasn't Google, there wasn't Amazon, there wasn't Federal Express. There weren't these amazing, you know, companies that are making life, you know, better for people. People probably have to work less to make more money in the next 30 or 40 years. I shouldn't say probably. They absolutely will work less as we move more towards artificial intelligence and robotics and 3D imaging and all of these incredibly cool things that are coming down the line.

So, Lyman, let's have you respond to an argument that Stephen Moore has written about in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that baby boomers shouldered a lot of really significant burdens over the last number of decades. They participated in the civil rights struggle. They won the Cold War with the Soviet Union. And on the other side of that coin, you have the millennials who, you know, in Stevens' view and the view of other people, have these, in a sense, outrageous expectations about what their life should be like and what they think is owed to them. How do you respond to that argument? What I care about is slightly more objective, measurable things.

So, for example, since the recession, if you look at household wealth in the survey of consumer finances, household wealth has recovered for households headed by people older than 35. If your household is headed by someone over 35, then odds are that you are wealthier than you were before the recession. If your household is headed by someone under 35, then you have probably, odds are you have not experienced any recovery. That is, household wealth for people under 35 has continued to decline. Now, whatever you say about, you know, how much better it is to live today, it's wonderful to have Google and to have clean air and have all these amazing technologies. I am not a declineist, but what I would say is that whatever you think about how good it is to live today, the reality is that for young people, it is much worse than it was a decade, decade and a half ago, two decades ago. Now, in the long run, when you talk about generational contributions, I don't deny that baby boomers have made, that many baby boomers have made excellent contributions. But, you know, just because some people made a very good contribution, it doesn't negate how they've set up the next generation to perform.

And the reality is that you look at the health of communities, you look at the social environments people inhabit in terms of their sense of connectedness to community. there's a recent survey on millennial loneliness, right? These are fairly concrete things that we observe a generation struggling and dealing with that, yes, maybe you didn't have Google 50 years ago. But you did have the blessing of intact communities that would help raise children together and that set up children to succeed. We don't have that. My generation didn't grow up with that.

We grew up with broken families. those were the choices of boomer parents. Stephen, you're a trained economist. I mean, what's your response to that? It seems like a pretty compelling argument. If Lyman's saying, in effect, this entire generation, the millennials have had no effective growth in household income since the Great Recession of 2008, 2009,

while older people, the so-called gerontocracy, have thrived. That just seems fundamentally unfair. Well, look, we did have a terrible recession in 2008 and 2009, and now we're coming out of it. in a good positive way. I mean, we have, you know, today, seven and a half million more jobs than people to fill them. You know, we have the lowest unemployment rate, the lowest inflation rate, the lowest interest rates, the, you know, highest wage gains in a long time. So, you know, the economy's healthy. And this is a good, it's hard to complain about this U.S. economy

right now. Now, things can always change. As a parent of two millennials, we have in some ways coddled this generation. This was the generation that grew up where everybody got a trophy. And this is the generation that now believes that they should have their safe spaces. This generation is facing special challenges. I'm an optimist. I think that will overcome these challenges. This generation has a lot of opportunities out there to flourish. And I think to tell these young people, oh, it's going to be horrible. And oh, my gosh, you know, know, who would want to be alive today rather than looking at the opportunities that people have that are really unrivaled in human history. I think that's what we should stress. So Lyman Stone, are you suffering from trophiedis? No, I actually agree. I think there is a case to be made for optimism about the future. But I think that a lot of the productive choices we can make for that future are basically to roll back the clock on the political leg.

of the baby boomer generation. It's to say, okay, there were all these restrictions where this generation was obsessed with real estate wealth. And so they established all these tight zoning restrictions to prop up the wealth that was embedded in these houses. And now that means young people can't afford houses. Many Americans in their 20s and 30s may have given up on the dream of home ownership. A new survey finds nearly 9 million millennials expect to be permanent renters. That's up more than a million people from a year. year ago, nearly half a millennial renters say they have not saved a dime for a down payment to buy a home.

We need to get rid of those regulations, right? Or, you know, we can look at incarceration. There was a very real crime wave, very real problem. It was responded to by a very excessive degree of incarceration. And even now that crime has fallen dramatically, we continue to incarcerate at rates that are higher than essentially any country other than North Korea. So, you know, this would be perhaps a policy that could be revisited. Maybe this was not, it was understandable at the time, maybe, but we don't need it anymore. So the path forward is to undo what was done.

You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast, be it resolved, baby boomers have ruined the future for millennials. If you like this podcast, make sure to check out our other episodes, including debates on everything from impeachment to social media to sanctions against Iran, all free to download or stream on our website, monkdebates.com. Now, back to the episode. Stephen Morrow, I want to talk to you about debt, because this, for any millennial or Gen X are listening to this podcast right now, this has been a reality of their lives, either now or for some cases, for a decade or more, crushing student debt.

And its effect on their life opportunities, their ability to flourish in the way that Lyman Stone has described. Isn't this something that we can lay at the feet of the baby boomer generation, this burdening of their children and their grandchildren with unsustainable levels of personal debt? I am concerned, as I think most Americans should be in our, about this massive size of our national debt. You know, those debts help pay to win World War II and win the Cold War and make it a safer planet. And so debt isn't always a bad thing.

I've always said, you know, it really matters what you're borrowing for. Now, when it comes to the student loan crisis, I mean, my gosh, you're not going to find anybody on this planet who's more of a critic of our colleges and universities. And the greatest financial scandal of modern times is how much our university. and colleges are charging our families. It's an outrage. Every college and universities should be charging half of what they charge. And it is, it's ridiculous that kids are, you know, graduating from college with $100,000 of debt. But let's not forget that, that I'll go back to that point, that this generation is inheriting a hundred trillion dollars of wealth. No generation has ever come anywhere close to that. And that's because of the incredible buildup of wealth.

and businesses and opportunities that happen because of baby boomers and people like, you know, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Fed Smith of FedEx and all these amazing companies that have really transformed the world and made it such a better place. So, you know, from a financial standpoint, this generation will actually be better off. Now, by the way, I am concerned about these millennials. I mean, we're seeing, you know, millennials that are 26, 27, 28 years old that are living in their parents' basement. still. And that's a new dynamic that is not healthy. By the way, this generation is better educated

than any other generation in history. So hopefully they should be able to use those educational advantages to gain, you know, really good jobs that pay well. So Limon Stone, respond to this Stephen's argument here that in a sense the balance sheet looks pretty good when you when you line it up versus, you know, yes, this generation encumbered with debt now, but inheriting $100 trillion, sounds pretty good to me. So, Steve, and I are both economists, and so we both appreciate the time value of money. It's true that eventually many of my generation will have considerable bequests from their dead parents. I think most people find it unpleasant to think that their economic future rests on the death

of their parents. But more than that, that money's not here now. That money might come later, especially since, as I mentioned, life expectancies for older Americans are continuing to extend. In fact, I actually appreciated what Steve said earlier about this variety of technologies going into cure a variety of conditions, mostly things that are experienced by older Americans. We're getting very, very good at helping a 55-year-old live to be 100 instead of 90 or 90 instead of 80 and have a higher quality life during that period as well. We're excelling at this, partly because there's a very large market of boomers who have a lot of wealth to invest in research on those conditions. We're not getting better at helping somebody make it to their 20th birthday. We're not getting better at helping

a 20-year-old make it to 30. Actually, we're getting worse at it. So I think it's important to understand that when one generation is dying younger and another generation is living longer and vast amounts of the wealth of a society are tied up in relatively illiquid assets like retirement funds that you're not going to hand off until you die, or real estate that you're not going to sell while you live in it. And increasingly, we're realizing that the real estate that boomers have invested in is actually very difficult to sell. It's not necessarily what the market is demanding now. This does create a problem where, yes, you have all this paper wealth, but you can't use it for anything. Stephen, do you want to come back on that point?

Look, a lot of it is going to be inherited wealth. But I'm talking about the wealth of our infrastructure, of our businesses. The most important wealth, Limeon, I think that your generation will inherit from baby boomers is the stock of knowledge. And look, that's the most important wealth of all is that, you know, we've, we are conquering diseases. We figure it out how to do things that, you know, people thought before were impossible. You know, look at, look at what's happened to the speed of transportation of information. You know, I have a, I'm holding that cell phone, that iPhone in my hand that has more computing power than virtually all of the computers that existed in 1950.

So that's the kind of wealth I'm talking about, the stock of knowledge that this generation will inherit. Lyman, talk to us as a member of Generation X who's closer to millennials, obviously, than Stephen is. What is the mood out there? And why, I mean, Stephen brought this up earlier in his remarks, this kind of this renewed interest in a really strong critique of capitalism, an assertion that the capitalist system for many millennials, they feel it's broken.

They feel maybe it's time for something different. Where's that emerging from? So I think that's a very real sentiment. There is this growing interest in more extreme solutions, even more centralized and controlling solutions. And I think part of it is that there is this promise of these things that we're going to change, that you look at the civil rights movement. Then you have all these various movements that have asserted that they were going to make

our life better and happier and more. free. And if you're a black man today, in some ways you're more free, right? You're able to vote with a liberty you did not have 70 years ago. But your odds of being incarcerated and having no freedom are far greater than they were in 1940 or 1950. So you get this in some sense, bipolarity of liberty, right? That for some people, society is much better. For say, a fairly well-educated black man or for a well-educated black woman, life has gotten a lot better. For a less-educated black man, that might not be the case. Wages have not performed extremely well for less-educated workers. Incarceration rates are astonishingly high for less-educated black men.

And we see this in other groups as well, but I bring up this example just because it's extraordinarily clear between incarceration and civil rights how these things have played out. And also because Steve mentioned this group is one that's clear. improved. And I would say, yes, some have clearly had an improvement in their conditions, but we've found new methods of control, new methods of restriction. And so I think the dissatisfaction a lot of millennials have is that there are all these historic movements that are supposed to have done great things for us, right? Well, we beat the Soviet Union. But wait, we're still dealing with Russia? What was the problem there? I thought we beat them. No, we didn't, right? We got like a 10-year

armistice, basically. So I think we have a lot of skepticism about the claims of success of the past. Drew, can I make one quick point that I wanted to bring up, and I sort of forgot to mention, which I think is important. You know, when I think about the millennials, and as I said, I'm a father of two millennials, what I see in that generation that I think disturbs me the most is this sense of entitlement. You know, I'm entitled to free health care. I'm entitled to free education. I'm entitled to free college. I'm entitled to all of these things. And that's, I think, a very cancerous kind of attitude of people because I do worry about the work ethic of this generation. I worry about the fact that they think things will just be given to them. And partly that's why I

use that, you know, that overused cliche about everyone winning a trophy. You have to work hard to get ahead. And I hope I'm wrong about this. But I do worry about the kind of work ethic of this generation. You know, I think one problem we've made as baby boomers is this idea that young people shouldn't work. I think it would be a good thing at 14, 15, 16, 17-year-olds worked. When I was at the Wall Street Journal, you know, I was had the privilege of meeting incredibly successful people in every walk of life, whether it was music or entertainment

or business or finance or sports, whatever it was. And I was surprised to learn that, you know, the people who I met were successful, first of all, a lot of them grew up on a farm. Why is that interesting? Because if you grow up on a farm, you start working when you're 12, 13 years old, if not younger, cleaning out the barn and the stables and feeding the animals and things like that. And maybe this is the price we pay of the very affluence that I've been bragging about. You know, I grew up on a farm and I share this concern with a sense of entitlement. And then I would ask, who gave us that? Right. Who invented the entitled, Youth culture. Who invented extended adolescence, right? This is a clear historical invention. This isn't a mystery, right? So, I mean, I think we can all fill in the blank there, right? It wasn't us who invented this. This was given to us. This was an integral part of American culture. I mean, literally, who passed the entitlements. You're listening to the Monk Debates podcast. Be it resolved. Baby boomers have ruined the future for millennials.

arguing for the motion is Lyman Stone, senior contributor to the Federalist. Arguing against the motion is Stephen Moore, economist at the Heritage Foundation. Now, back to the episode. Look, before we move to closing statements, I want to ask each of you, and Stephen, I'll start with you. What have you heard Lyman Stone say in the last half hour of our conversation that might make you change your mind? about the position that you've taken on this debate. Well, look, I'm a forever an optimist. And so I do think that things are going to be just fine for this generation.

I think Lyman raises some red flags that we need to be very attentive to. I mean, these improvements that I talk about don't happen automatically. They happen because we have a culture of freedom and a culture of opportunity and a culture of non-entitlement that you work for what you get. And so I'm appreciative that Lyman is. is raising these red flags about this generation. But I also think we shouldn't be too negative about the future that the next generation faces, because I think it's going to be damn exciting.

So Lyman Stone, something that Stephen Moore said in our conversation today that might make you rethink this debate. I think one thing I always try to be careful of, but am not always perfect at, is this line between raising red flags about the future, but also communicating that our problems are not insurmountable. And Americans have done great things many times in the past. So I think that whatever the difficulty of our present situation, there is no reason why millennials cannot have the kind of future that Steve thinks they will have. I'm a bit less confident, but I definitely think it's possible. Let's go to closing statements. And Stephen Moore, if you're going to just sum up,

Is there any key point you want to leave our monk debates audience with? I'll conclude with this, that there's been a great discussion. And for young people who are listening to this, whether they live in the United States or Canada, you know, you can make, you know, you can set your own path in life. And I don't believe in determinism. Everyone has an opportunity, whether you're black or white or a woman. We want to create a future where everyone has an opportunity to succeed. We don't want to be too negative.

You know, you don't want to tell the young kid you'll never be able to ride this bike. You want to tell the young kid, you can do this. And I think that's what we need to do as baby boomers. Great closing remarks. Lyman Stone, we're going to give you the last word. The thing we really need to push on is undoing a lot of the mistakes of the last generation or two. We've got to not just roll back the clock. We don't want to change everything.

We want to keep our clean air and our voting rights and all that. But there were a lot of mistakes. and we need to recognize them as mistakes. We need to call them that and we need to fix them. And that takes work. That takes diligence. That takes serious work in our communities and in our politics. I'm not a pessimist about the future.

I'm a realist. We have options. The future could be good, could be bad. And if we want it to be good, there's work to be done and there are things to be changed. Well, Lyman Stone, Steve Moore, thank you for a really thoughtful discussion on an important issue. We've maybe even been able to create a little bit of a bridge between two generations here, Generation X. You've been our representative, Lyman, and Stephen, you've been a terrific baby boomer for the last 40 minutes, channeling your generation's thoughts. So thank you guys.

Great conversation. We'll do this again soon. Thank you. Thank you. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank Lyman Stone and Stephen Moore for participating in a thoughtful discussion. You certainly gave us a lot to think about. I also want to thank our audience for listening to the.

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