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What exactly does a "generation of sociopaths" mean? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Bruce Gibney, Venture Capitalist, Author of A Generation of Sociopaths, on Quora:
A paradox of the past decades has been the creation of an increasingly anti-social society. (Anti-social personality disorder is the current name for “sociopathy,” by no narrative coincidence.) This should be a concern for all of us, because anti-social societies do not work very well – no surprise, of course. In our own society, the prime manifestation of this problem has been an emphasis on immediate self-gratification over long-term needs and the common good, and this becomes self-defeating in the same way that buying a new watch to feel better about a prior spending spree is self-defeating. But sometimes societies buy the new watch anyway.
The anti-social dynamic has prevailed for at least a quarter century and arguably for longer than that. And in that period, the most influential political generation has been the Baby Boomers, which is why I focus on that group in my book. (I define the Boom as 1940-64, focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on white, native-born Boomers, because they had largely similar and homogenous childhoods – the details are in the first chapters.) Boomers were an absolute majority of the electorate by 1982 and their voting influence grew for decades after that, because even as their relative share of population declined, their voting participation rates rose. My argument is that something went wrong with American policy over the same period and that there are causal links between Boomer policies and behaviors and national difficulties. This answer previews the extent of Boomer power and the effects it has had.
On power, voting influence translated into official control by the 1990s. Boomers helped vote their own into the executive and legislature in the first half of the 1990s. Bill Clinton took office in 1993 and in 1995 Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House; Boomers also constituted a majority of the House of Representatives by that year. Government power peaked in the 2000s, when Boomers controlled 79% of the House and they still hold 69% of that body today, along with the presidency, more than 80% of governorships, and much of the judiciary and the administrative state. If people are upset at the direction America has taken since the mid-1990s – and many people are upset – it’s reasonable to investigate the actions of the people in charge at the time and whether errors could have been avoided.
Rather than say that the past twenty-five years have been disappointing, let’s quantify one or two important failures. As Americans regularly cite the economy as one of their top concerns when polled, it’s reasonable to start there: how has the economy done under Boomer tenure? The answer: not particularly well. Growth has been lackluster, with average incomes close to flat for fifteen years, and for some places and cohorts, for longer than that. By contrast, annualized per capita GDP growth ramped up from 2.5% in the 1950s to 3.4% in the 1960s, before subsiding to 2.3% in the 1970s, and then 2.2% in the 1980s-1990s. As Boomer policies took hold, we have not even managed the same rates of growth as we saw in most of the 1970s, so that growth on the same metrics was only 0.7% in the 2000s and is running no higher than 1.3% for the 2010s. And even these modest gains have been distributed much more unequally, with most of the gains going to the older and wealthier.
Meanwhile, other problems started to erupt but were neglected. Debt rose from 34% of GDP in 1976 to 105% of GDP by the end of 2016 on a gross basis and is projected to exceed World War II levels in the coming years. The correctional population (people in jail, prison, or on parole or supervised release) rose from just over two million in 1980 to over seven million by 2007, about 2.3% of the total population then (just shy of the population of Virginia at the time, for context). Some correctional growth was a legitimate response to rising crime rates in the 1970s-1980s, but (per a subsequent Brennan Center estimate), more imprisonment had no real effect on crime after the early 1990s, which many people suspected would be the case at the time. Prison populations kept rising anyway and so did human and financial costs, and much of this will become the problem of younger generations in the form of debt and transfer payments to people who are released into the system. Other issues like climate change, decaying infrastructure, a sharp decline in savings rates, increasing instability in social insurance programs, and the erosion of higher public education and a giant increase in student debt, became serious and known problems over the same period. None of these issues has been seriously addressed, and whether you view that as “sociopathic” or just “dangerously negligent,” the consequences will be serious.
It’s possible that demographic changes made some of these events partially – but only partially – inevitable. However, for most issues, there was no reason the United States couldn’t have more responded more energetically and brought about different outcomes. For example, America had (and has) more than enough resources to maintain its roads properly and the power to address carbon emissions. Infrastructure maintenance actually provides a positive return on investment. But the federal gas tax, which supports transportation infrastructure, is lower in real dollar terms now than it was in 1993, which was the last year it was raised – and because the gas tax is not indexed to inflation, that means it’s considerably less valuable. Federal fuel economy standards did not improve on 1986 levels until 2011 and even recent modest gains are being targeted by the new administration for rollback. If Washington doesn’t maintain roads or provide incentives to address auto emissions, there are limits to how much spontaneous improvement we can expect. Similar dynamics apply to the other problems mentioned earlier.
Voter support for forward-thinking policies fell at the same time the Boomers were the most important voting bloc and when their co-generationalists controlled government. Whether this was just ignorance, incompetence, or something more sociopathic depends. The DSM-V, the clinical bible for psychology, evaluates sociopathy based on several factors like improvidence, deceit, lack of empathy, and so on, and I run through all of these in the book. (The National Institutes of Mental Health undertook a similar exercise in the 1980s and found higher levels of sociopathy in then-youngish Boomer cohorts, speculating that lifetime prevalence would rise further.) For the purpose of this post, it’s perhaps more helpful to skip the whole DSM inventory and the raft of endnotes I have in the book and pose a simpler question. Has the governing demographic tried to favor itself at the expense of others in a way we would find unacceptable? I think so.
Certainly, the outcomes we’ve covered are not appealing and they did disproportionately benefit one generation. The debt, we know, increased dramatically during Boomer tenure and is expanding, per Congressional Budget Office, at an “unsustainable” pace. Debt will be the problem of younger generations. Had debt been used to benefit everyone, like funding R&D or upgrading water systems and roads, that would be one thing, but it didn’t happen. On R&D, federal funding is substantially lower as a percent of GDP than it was in 1986, to say nothing of the 1960s. As for water, the crises in Oroville, Flint, Detroit, and Newark are pungent examples, but not alone, as reports by the American Society of Civil Engineers and Army Corps of Engineers make clear. Net infrastructure investment has been estimated at anywhere from 0% (by Larry Summers) to 0.5% (my own estimate, using somewhat more recent data). And the $1 trillion extra recently proposed will not be nearly enough to reverse decades of neglect, at least not according to ASCE.
Did the Boomers benefit from these policies of improvidence? In the long run, no one benefits, of course, but the Boomers’ long run is shorter than the Millenials’. As for the short run, dissaving certainly supported consumption. Boomers sliced investment in favor of tax cuts and programs that would benefit them. A certain hint of the favoritism involved can be seen in tax policy, which has been doctrinally unorthodox from a political perspective, but closely tracked Boomer financial lifecycles. Hence Republican Reagan cut taxes on income but raised them on capital gains (when Boomers, who were becoming politically important, had incomes but not portfolios), Democrat Clinton cut taxes on capital gains and houses (when Boomers owned those and controlled politics), Republican Bush cut taxes overall with a focus on estate taxes and also signed off on Medicare Part D (both items of concern to aging and influential Boomers). All of these were politically heterodox, but they did benefit the largest electoral group, the Boomers. The rich certainly did better than anyone, but Boomers overall gained disproportionately relative to other, especially younger, generations. There are other examples in the book.
Some argue that these outcomes were unavoidable and point to problems in Western Europe. Western Europe is growing slowly, but its infrastructure, social safety net, and educational systems are in much better shape. Moreover, nothing about the past forty years has been nearly as difficult, geopolitically or socially, as the post-World War II period. No president has been assassinated and there’s been no world war to recover from. It’s absolutely true that the United States is freer and richer than it was in the 1950s, but it’s not as free and rich as it could have been. Growth is substantially below potential. On the civil rights front, with the exception of gay marriage, there’s been nothing as dramatic as school integration (now reversing), the Voting Rights Act (also under attack) or the Civil Rights Act. Recent improvements been much more incremental, with political capital devoted to issues like tax revisions and maintaining consumption, especially where those benefit Boomers. It’s actually a fairly straightforward explanation, however controversial, because it posits that most problems were created by policies that a plurality of the electorate endorsed. We don’t have to reach to Russia or Davos to find an explanation. We just have to accept that there was a large group of people who voted in their short-term self-interest, and who didn’t care very much about the consequences for other people. Many voters are like this; my argument is notably only because I think the Boomers were unusually self-interested, if short-sighted, when they voted.
All of the problems noted will pass on to younger generations, as thinking people knew they would. There’s a reason why OECD ranked America last among developed countries in “intergenerational equity.” My argument is that this is a product of sociopathic governance. People prefer to pin it on politicians, and certainly Washington deserves a lot of blame, but someone kept voting these people back to office. And the data points to one group more than any other.
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