DEKKER ? Blog Archive ? From my new book: Greenspan Letter

Aug 24

This is a letter I sent to Mr. Alan Greenspan several months ago in response to comments he made about my generation. The letter will be included in my new book, a book of political and economic letters.

Mr. Greenspan?s original comments can be found here

Mr. Alan Greenspan,

Your recent comments regarding the generations of Americans born after 1964, known colloquially as generations ?X?, ?Y?, and ?Millennial?, are both morally reprehensible and ill-informed. For a man holding a position such as you do I am shocked that you would make such reckless assumptions without hard statistical data to back up your claims. For the purposes of this letter I will focus on the differences between the ?Baby Boomers 1946-1963? and ?Generation X 1964-1983?, as the younger generations are only recently becoming entry-level in the American workforce based upon a standard high-school graduation age of eighteen and a four year college education.

In your defense of the ?Baby Boomer? generation, you praise their work ethic and academic prowess over successive generations.

You have made the following public statements,

?In the United States, we are in the process of seeing the baby boomers ? the most productive, highly skilled, educated part of our labor force ? retire,? Greenspan tells The Globalist.

?They are being replaced by groups of young workers who have regrettably scored rather poorly in international educational match-ups over the last two decades.?

I will first educate you on the inaccuracies of your statements before indicting your beloved baby boomers with some rather damning facts.

Education:

27% of Baby Boomers received four or more years of college according to the US Department of Labor. However, according to a 2010 study by Sparxoo, an independent market research firm, Generation X has a 60% college graduation rate. According to Po Bronson in a 2006 Time Magazine article entitled ?Dear Graduates, Hilary Clinton Has Got You All Wrong?, as many as one third of all Generation X college graduates earned their degree while working a full time job.

Productivity:

You claim that the baby boomers were the ?most productive, highly skilled, educated part of our labour force?. The educational misnomer has been debunked, so I would like to share with you some statistics on employment. The same Time Magazine article I referenced earlier claims that 75% of college-age Generation X workers have some sort of job vs 68% from the previous generation. In addition to this a staggering 22% perform unpaid volunteer work of some type within their communities, the largest percentage in American history. A fact sheet provided by Boston College?s Sloan Work and Family Research Network claims: ?When we compare 2002 Gen-X employees with their age counterparts in 1977, we find that 2002 Gen-X employees actually work significantly more paid and unpaid hours per week (45.6 hours on average) than employees of comparable ages in 1977 (42.9 paid and unpaid hours per week on average)? (Families and Work Institute, 2004, p. 5).

Generation X and its successors stay productive despite baby boomer favoritism in the workplace. A Forbes.com article by Meghan Casserly from January of this year entitled, ?The New Pay Gap: Boomers, Gen-X, and Millennials? says: ?A 2009 study of 25,000 Millennials conducted by the Futures Company found that nearly 20% of the employees polled between the ages of 21 and 30 had seen at least one pay cut since 2008 and 14% suffered a layoff. In contrast, only 8% of Baby Boomers surveyed lost their jobs in the same year.?

Now that I have educated you on why your praise is misguided, I will enlighten you to the legacy of your favored generation.

Psychology:

The boomers had the highest divorce rate of any American generation and Dr. Judith Wallerstein of the Center for the Family in Transition is quoted by ABC News as saying of Generation X: ?They?re very good about work because they learn at a very early age you have to be independent, but they?re very troubled about their relationships, and they have a very hard time, and they blame their parents, and this affects the whole fabric of American society.?

Similarly, ABC News goes on to cite that Dr. Hetherington, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, found up to 25 percent of children with divorced parents ?have serious social, emotional or psychological problems?

The US Divorce rate peaked in 1980 at over 27%.

Reckless Banking:

The baby boomers purchased and built homes they could not afford and fueled a housing bubble that burst onto them. The way that this effects subsequent generations is two fold. First, banks are less likely to extend credit to those seeking home ownership. This is not as crucial as it may seem considering research points to Generation X having a substantially decreased desire for this as a goal. The second is bank lending for small business, an area where Generation X is being gutted. As large corporations place more and more workers on contract, small business is becoming the single most important coal in the American economic fire and Generation X and millennials are trying very hard to stoke the flame. There is a distrust for large corporate entities among younger people and can you honestly blame them? In our lifetime we?ve seen no less than three economic bubbles burst. We?ve seen the largest misuses of retirement fund monies and equity ownerships in American history. We?ve seen our parents laid off. We?ve seen ourselves laid off. We?ve seen our peers work at Starbucks on the weekend to secure healthcare benefits while they toil away at their regular publicly traded jobs forty hours a week. When they?re not taking reductions in salaried pay they?re being paid as consultants on forty-five to sixty day invoices for jobs which used to be regular positions. Corporations sit back and watch American workers starve while they float money owed. They give nothing and take everything. If the banks do not support small businesses by young and fresh people, the country is truly doomed. If you can not see that, then perhaps you never deserved your former position of authority. This may be yet another puzzle you have not unraveled, and your famous quote regarding the housing bubble of 2007 ?I really didn?t get it until very late in 2005 and 2006? could be applied to this same issue. Given time the situation may become more clear to you.

To be fair, I do praise your enthusiasm for immigration reform. I have a great respect for immigrant workers and support any and all channels which help them to help natural born citizens form a more prosperous nation.

I understand that you may find fault with some of my sourcing, especially Time Magazine, as they named you number three on their list of twenty-five persons most to blame for the 2007 economic crisis. For that, I can offer no solution. I can only offer a quote from an about.com article by Christine Kennard entitled ?Is Dementia Age Related?. The quote is as follows: ?Dementia will affect roughly 10% of Americans over the age of 65 and roughly 50% by the age of 85.? If I?m not mistaken you turned 85 just this March. As part of the statistically most compassionate generation on record, I beg you to please seek regular counsel from qualified medical professionals.

I trust this correspondence has been enlightening.

-R. Dekker Dreyer
Fringe Majority

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Source: http://www.dekkerdreyer.com/blog/from-my-new-book-greenspan-letter/

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