This appeared a couple of days ago, but seemed to make light of the health sector impacts – which I think will be pretty large and transformative, while covering so other useful ground!
Boomers: the world wouldn’t be the same without ‘em
They came of age under the threat of nuclear obliteration paired with the promise of never-before-seen wealth and prosperity. What legacy will this much-maligned generation leave us with?
By Hugh Mackay
From The Weekend Australian Magazine
May 11, 2024
What a ride the Baby Boomers have had! The products of our highest birth rate since 1921, they were the beneficiaries of a post-war economic boom that ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity. They became, up to that point in our history, our most highly educated generation, setting a pro-education example that subsequent generations have enthusiastically followed. They also established new records for international travel, for home ownership and for divorce. In their middle years, they were buffeted by the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. They had to contend with an often baffling information technology revolution that their children and grandchildren took in their stride. And they were the generation that took up the cry for women’s rights and fought hard to make it happen. Time after time, in so many ways, it has fallen to the Boomers to be social pioneers.
The members of the Boomer generation were born in the 15 years after the end of World War II, 1946-61. (That rather conveniently fits the 15-year span that demographers typically use to define a generation.) In 2024, the oldest of them are turning 78 and the youngest 63.
For reasons we are about to explore, the Boomers were dubbed the “Me Generation” by their parents and other observers of this feisty, rebellious, hard-to-ignore cohort. Later in life, Boomers often characterised themselves as the “stress” generation as they set new records for the use of tranquiliser and anti-depressant medication. Along the way, they’ve also been known as the “denim” generation (forever young, though it’s stretch denim these days), the “sandwich” generation (when they were simultaneously caring for elderly parents and dependent children) and the “keep working” generation (as they eschewed the idea of retirement as too ageing, and embraced the concept of “refocusing” instead).
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The Boomers’ attitudes and values were formed by two powerful but contradictory influences on their early development: the confidence and optimism generated by the post-war economic boom, and the anxiety and pessimism of the Cold War.
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The optimism fuelled a big spike in the marriage rate after the end of the war. People were not only tying the knot and having babies in unprecedented numbers, but were doing it younger: by 1954, halfway through the boom, 60 per cent of women were marrying between the ages of 20 and 24 – roughly double the pre-war figure.
The marriage and birth rates had both increased steadily during World War II but exploded when the war ended. The baby boom, like the marriage boom, was a symbolic expression of the post-war spirit of energy and optimism. It signalled a return not only to peace, but also to the prospect of contented, stable family life. “Home and family” became the focal point of a society that was settling down to the serious business of making the dream of middle-class, suburban prosperity come true, and through the ’50s and ’60s that dream became a reality on a very large scale.
If the marriage boom was the demographic antecedent of the baby boom, then the economic boom was its cultural cradle. And what a boom it was! A housing boom, a construction boom, a manufacturing boom, a mining boom. Consumerism was born in an enthusiastic rush to buy all the goods and services flooding the post-war market: domestic appliances, kitchen gadgets, wall-to-wall carpets, cars (especially locally made Holdens), women’s fashions (the “New Look”, to match the new spirit of the times), confectionery, holidays and travel, even home phones (though many people in the ’50s were still walking to the end of the street – including the street I grew up in – clutching their two pennies to use the public phone).
Unemployment was hardly an issue. There was so much work to be done and so many European refugees looking to start a new life elsewhere that Australia began its massive immigration program. It was partly in response to the humanitarian crisis and partly to help supply the workers needed to fuel the economic machine that was now running at full throttle.
Having braced themselves for the long slog of post-war recovery, the Boomers’ parents were astonished by what actually happened: it seemed to them more like an economic miracle than a mere boom. But many of them said later in life that they had tried not to let it “turn their heads”: they maintained the values of prudence and restraint that the pre-war Great Depression and then the war years had taught them: save for what you want; stay out of debt; only buy what you need.
They had hoped to instil those same values into their offspring, but it was not to be. The siren song of materialism was too loud and too seductive! The Boomers became enthusiastic consumers from an early age; to them, it seemed that the future was rosy, and they would be borne into it on a constantly rising escalator of prosperity.
But all this economic jollity was coexisting with the other major post-war influence: the Cold War. The Boomers lived in the shadow of the atomic bombs that the US had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; nuclear weapons now represented a threat to human survival. This was not mere sabre-rattling – this was the threat of nuclear annihilation on a massive scale.
The Soviet Union and the US were both frantically stockpiling nuclear weapons, and the concept of MAD, or mutually assured destruction, had wide currency, even becoming the title of a satirical magazine that was a Boomer favourite. Its founders never claimed the name had been inspired by the Cold War acronym – that’s just my fantasy. (“Let’s get sex and violence off TV and back on the streets where they belong” was a typical MAD joke from the ’60s.)
Spending their formative years in a Cold War atmosphere, the Boomers were not only absorbing a kind of Armageddon mentality but were also being exposed to all the dark, dystopian material then being published in Cold War espionage novels and films. Spies, not soldiers, were the new heroes. This was a world of moral ambiguity, bleakly documented by writers like John le Carré (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold) and Len Deighton (The Ipcress File), and treated more flippantly by Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and the TV series Get Smart.
One of the features of this period was the widespread fear that nuclear war could be precipitated accidentally, by someone misjudging a situation or simply pressing the wrong button. That fear was compounded by the belief that if the Cold War ever turned hot, it would be an unstoppable danse macabre of nuclear strike and counterstrike.
All of that led to The Big Boomer Question – more intriguing than any question we might raise about any of the generations that followed the boom: how would this rising generation of young Australians reconcile two such utterly contradictory formative influences? On the one hand, there was the promise of endless prosperity and material comfort; on the other was the real possibility of nuclear obliteration.
The answer to that question can be found in a slogan that became the Boomers’ generational catchcry: “We’re not here for a long time; we’re here for a good time.” That meant they were in a hurry to do everything, including marriage. Thirty per cent of Boomer women were married by the age of 20 – though they didn’t have nearly as many children as their parents’ generation had. In fact, they cut the birth rate in half, down to 1.8 babies per woman by 1984, the year that mid-Boomers turned 30. That reluctance to have children was a reflection of their deep misgivings about the future. Getting married was one thing; having children was a commitment of a very different order.
The Boomers’ enthusiasm for higher education transformed the university and TAFE sectors by their sheer numbers. They were in a rush to travel, too, creating an unprecedented “youth travel” market. They were in a rush to get a mortgage and buy a house. They were in a rush to ascend the employment ladder as quickly as they could.
And they were in a rush to embrace social change. They were turning their backs on their parents’ values and way of life. They wanted to be – and were – more radical in their thinking. They wanted the fruits of “women’s lib” to be seen now. Older Boomers wanted Australia out of the Vietnam War now. In 1972, those old enough to vote were keen to support the switch to the first Labor government in 23 years – most of them by then had lived under a Coalition government all their lives.
If you had to choose one word to capture the essence of the young Boomers, it would be “impatient”. And why not? Given those powerful but contradictory influences upon them, who could blame them for feeling some urgency about doing the things they wanted to get done?
They were devoted to the concept of instant gratification. They managed to combine a reluctance to save with an eagerness to spend. The credit card revolution that began in 1974 with the launch of Bankcard was heaven-sent for Boomers. They didn’t like to think of borrowed money as a boring “loan”: they preferred the spunkier concept of “credit”.
By the mid-’90s, when leading-edge Boomers were hitting 50, one of Australia’s most astute economic analysts, Phil Ruthven, said of them: “The Baby Boomers have been the shortest-term thinkers of probably any generation for over 100 years .... And they are our worst savers on record, in terms of saving as a percentage of income.” At the same time Arun Abey, then executive chairman of IPAC Securities, described Boomers’ reluctance to save with a charitable obliqueness: “Baby Boomers have a very strong cash-flow need.”
In essence, Boomers were acquiring a reputation for doing precisely what you’d expect people to do if they’d grown up with the expectation that all the rosy prospects beckoning from the future could be swept away in an instant, courtesy of The Bomb. How do you live with the simultaneous prospect of a bright future and no future at all? Answer: you run very fast, you play very hard, and you experience all the things you want to experience – sex, travel, prosperity, power – as early as you can. Their goal was not only to “have it all”, but to have it all at once.
Whoa!
It’s always hazardous to define generational characteristics because – obviously – there’s a huge range of individual differences in any age cohort. Yes, the Boomers shared some mighty powerful influences early on, but like any other generation they had plenty of diversity; they had different parents, grandparents and siblings; went to different schools; and had different personalities and temperaments. Over the years of my research into Boomers’ attitudes, I’ve often encountered Boomers’ own resistance to the idea of any generalisations being made about them. As possibly the most extensively studied generation in modern history, they are understandably sick of being under the microscope and then being discussed as if they are specimens. All understood. And it goes without saying that a 15-year span is quite a long time: in 1968, for example – the year of worldwide student uprisings with faint echoes in Australia – the oldest Boomers were 22, but the youngest were only seven. Still, I’m not retreating from the broad outlines of this analysis. The facts about the Boomers’ generational behaviour speak for themselves.
As time went by, Boomers were gradually forced to accept that, actually, they were here for a long time after all. And they realised – dammit! – they were not necessarily having the good time that the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s had promised. All You Need Is Love, adopted by many of them as a theme song, turned out not to be quite true. Or not true enough. Or not the whole truth.
Their children – some tail-end Gen Xers but mostly Millennials (previously known as Gen Y) – have certainly not followed their parents’ example, any more than the Boomers followed their own parents’, because the formative influences on them were so utterly different.
Some daughters of Boomers looked at their feminist mothers’ “liberated” lives and said: “I thought you didn’t want to be a doormat to your family, but you’re a doormat to your own liberation. If you’re free to choose, how come you’ve chosen to be so out-of-control busy? Yeah, maybe you can have it all, but what makes you think you can have it all at once?”
Now, as they look back on their lives, many Boomers – women and men – are asking themselves the same question.
Boomers are the way they are because that’s the hand Fate dealt them. But in general (warning: another generalisation coming up), they have continued to try to reshape the world.
They have their regrets (who doesn’t?) and perhaps we can also learn from those. Less materialism would have been good; less indulgence of children, and a combination of more time and more discipline would have been good; and less impatience would have been good – it’s probably better to live as if there’s a future.
Which leads us to ponder, what sort of leaders did Baby Boomers make? Here’s where any generalisations will be too dangerous, except one: they were impatient for power. (And perhaps a second: they will not go down in history as long-range thinkers.) Australia has had four Boomer prime ministers: Kevin Rudd (born in 1957), Julia Gillard (1961), Tony Abbott (1957) and Malcolm Turnbull (1954). They all came and went in the space of about ten years, a period marked by constantly simmering leadership tensions as, one after another, the four aspirants for the top job lost patience with those who stood in their way.
The first, Kevin Rudd, was elected in 2007. Two and a half years later, he became the first Labor leader ever to be ousted in his first term when he was successfully challenged for the leadership by Julia Gillard. After the following election, when neither Labor nor the Coalition managed to achieve a majority, Gillard put together a government in coalition with the Greens, but before that government’s term was over Rudd’s persistent undermining of Gillard paid off and he defeated her in another party-room ballot. His second term as prime minister lasted a mere 83 days before Labor was defeated at the 2013 federal election.
On the Coalition side, a similar impatience for power was on display. Malcolm Turnbull, having weighed up the relative merits of the Labor and Liberal parties as his pathway to the long-cherished prime ministership, chose the Libs, entered parliament in 2004, and became their leader (in opposition) at his second attempt, just four years later. Before he could achieve his dream of becoming PM, however, he was ousted in a party-room ballot by another Boomer, the ever-eager Tony Abbott, who ultimately became prime minister at the 2013 election, promising a “kinder, gentler polity” (having mercilessly savaged Gillard throughout his time as opposition leader). Then, sure enough, Turnbull challenged Abbott for the leadership in 2015 and yet another sitting prime minister was gone.
It all seemed a bit breathtaking at the time, with such naked ambition and textbook Boomer impatience on display. (This was the period when it was said that paramedics could no longer check a dazed patient’s cognitive function by asking: “Who is the prime minister?”)
The Boomer PMs’ chaotic run came to an end when Turnbull’s dismal run of opinion polls led to another party-room ballot and his defeat by Scott Morrison. Turnbull became the fourth sitting prime minister to fall victim to internecine rivalries within eight years.
Like many other researchers, I have found Boomers endlessly fascinating, because their formative years were so utterly different from anything that had come before, and because the results of that formation have been on such public display. In fact, when you compare the young Boomers’ social, cultural and economic context with the contexts in which their parents and their children were raised, you realise just how swiftly our society has been changing. It’s almost as if those three generations represented three quite different Australias.
I once wrote that impatiens was the perfect flower for Boomers’ gardens, and stir-fry their perfect meal. I don’t know what the favourite flower of today’s rising generation of young adults might turn out to be – perhaps climate-proof cactus – but their favourite meal would be “home delivery”.
The Boomers’ story reminds us that, although family influence is always powerful, the wider world speaks loudly to us too. When children are fed a daily diet of information about the imminence of global destruction – by nuclear war, back then, or the effects of climate change today – anxiety about that message will lodge deep in their psyches and become an important part of who they are. In the Boomers’ case, all the talk of potential catastrophe was tempered – indeed, contradicted – by the promise of a rosy material future to come and by the exuberance of pop culture at the time.
It’s an interesting question for current and future researchers to study: will today’s children and adolescents be influenced even more profoundly than the Boomers were by the relentless bad news, because there’s no countervailing promise of a bright future? Some will respond with resignation, some with despair, some with deep-seated anxiety, some with anger and some with urgent activism, but which will be the dominant response?
Here is the link:
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-australian-magazine/hugh-mackay-on-the-making-of-the-baby-boomer-generation/news-story/67bdd4de5f7052f77f7d6f8b7f4f11bd
This is an excellent summary of the generation I am surely part of but I find it fascinating that we are yet to recognize just what a huge impact this now aging cohort is having on the health sector and how they are shaping the form of the health system through their demand for services and their intolerance of unavailability or access or lack of a “cure” for whatever ailed them!
The “Boomers” are a very considerable pull factor on how services are being delivered and are pretty intolerant of less than pretty well delivered and timely services.
They are also the generation that has seen the emergence of Digital and Digitally delivered services which have been more or less successful, and who have not tolerated some of the initial teething issues all that well! They are a generation that expect things to work, and to be intuitive in application! This has not always been achieved.
As they age the Boomers will push the health system pretty had in terms of both quality and availability and it will be interesting to see what changes occur. Digital service delivery will become more and more important as time passes I am sure.
This generation will, I suspect, want health services to just work and be available essentially ‘on demand’. I wonder how well those expectations will be met?
What do you think?
David.
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