Note: The following predictive (and perceptive) description on this page was published by Strauss and Howe in 1991 under the heading "Entering Post-Elderhood in an Inner-Driven Era (1991-2003)." Since that timespan has already elapsed, I have altered their future tense to tenses more appropriate.
76Physical decline came hard to a generation whose definition of self (and virtue) was always so closely tied to activity, to getting things done, Many Greatest felt newly depressed, finding a loss of purpose, sensing a loss of respect. Yet the core of this generation tried, as always, to keep spirits up. Many of those in failing health moved from seniors-only condos into member-run "planned care communities," euphemized updates of what the Lost Generation had bluntly called "nursing homes." Wherever the Greatest lived, their peer society remained as friendly and collegial as ever.
The mutually supportive relationship between government and the Greatest continued into the latter's deep old age. Public attention to the needs of senior citizens shifted up the age bracket, away from issues that had earlier been on the minds of 60-year-olds (early retirement, reduced income and property taxes) and toward those of concern to 80- and 90-year-olds (long-term custodial care, access to life-extending technologies).
The Greatest lobbies made the case, with Silent Generation support and Boom Generation acquiescence, that their generation was "entitled" to the best-available health care, regardless of income or, more important, age. Like the Glorious and Republicans before them, the Greatest expected to be treated well, and their juniors generally complied--with any request involving material reward. And, as was always the case with Greatest benefits, the long-term cost was initially underestimated.
With the Greatest alone atop the age ladder, however, this "please--thank you" relationship with government took an unfamiliar turn. Fifty years before, everyone had understood that giving this generation public rewards for public deeds was a form of future-oriented investment. These young G.I.s were the future. When they prospered, America prospered--and their Missionary and Lost generational neighbors had looked on with approval, even though they had shared less in the public largess. During the 1990s, as the Greatest continued to get rewards, their Boom and Generation X neighbors again looked on with little objection, and again neither received, nor expected to receive, like treatment.
Yet there was one obvious difference: The Greatest were no longer the future. The generations looking on with noses pressed against the glass were not older, but younger. The Greatest self-perception had not changed at all. They still saw themselves as nice kids getting a public allowance for good deeds. But the same behavior that two life phases before had the feel of investment now had the feel of consumption.
The Greatest had not expected their lifecycle story to turn out this way. From the moment they had first come of age, they had followed their elders' instructions to save, invest, build, and be patient, pursuant to a Social Security "deal" through which the Greatest would be rewarded later in their lifecycle by younger (and presumably wealthier) generations. Through the postwar boom, everyone had assumed that these juniors would be able to afford the burden with little trouble--thanks to an expanding workforce, rising levels of savings and investment, and heady rates of productivity growth. Benefit levels kept rising, enabling the Greatest to receive back many times what they and their employers had paid into the trust funds. The Greatest had assumed their children and grandchildren would later enjoy the same pyramiding benefits when their own turns would come.
But something had happened along the way. Sapped by deficits, inflation, and a proconsumption tax bias, savings rates did not rise. (They fell.) Productivity growth did not speed up. (It slowed down.) Younger generations did not have larger families. (They had smaller ones.) Moreover, the public cost of supporting Greatest elders soared beyond all earlier projections--thanks to a mixture of automatic cost-of-living hikes, earlier retirement, greater longevity, health-care inflation, and the Greatest's own political muscle. In time, the cost began crowding out most other public resource priorities.
The result? Through the 1980s, generational transfer payments undermined the youth-focused investment activity that the Greatest undertook earlier in their lifecycle, and ushered in a historic reversal of phase-of-life income patterns. From Progressives to Missionaries to Lost, every elder generation the Greatest knew earlier in life had accepted, in old age, lower per-capita incomes and higher (typically much higher) poverty rates than generations in youth or rising adulthood. The Greatest, by contrast, had become America's first generation of elders whose per-capita income (after taxes) exceeded the average for all younger people.
When all income transfers were considered, America had ten times more Generation X and Millennials than Greatest living below the poverty line. Even so, the federal government spent ten times more per Greatest than it did per Generation X and Millennial child. When the Greatest had been young, by contrast, elder Missionaries had used government to direct resources in exactly the opposite direction--away from elders, and toward youth.
What had gone wrong, and when? The typical Greatest answer bore the bruises of their old generational battle with the Boom--and showed a clear parallel to the old Republican-Transcendental quarrels of the early Nineteenth Century. Many Greatest charged that Boomers had betrayed history--much as the aging Jefferson blamed the young in the 1820s and Albert Gallatin blamed the young in the 1830s and 1840s.
What had gone wrong, in the Greatest view, was that America's recent crop of rising adults had lacked the virtues the Greatest had possessed in their own youth. From the crumbling apartments of Pruitt-Igo to the debt-leveraged buyouts on Wall Street, Boomers had always seemed to grind down more than build--to care about self more than community, about consuming more than saving, about preserving personal independence more than working hard or building families.
When things had gone wrong (again in the Greatest view) had been during the late 1960s and 1970s. True enough. In their coming-of-age euphoria, Boomers had detested the material creations of their Greatest elders and had castigated the very concept of deferring current consumption for the sake of future rewards--a concept Boomers had considered to be a central pathology of their elders' mind-set. Yet this Boom Awakening had clouded the Greatest judgment as well, by subtly egging on their sense of worldly hubris. In effect, Boomers had told the Greatest: "You've made material life effortless, so why bother working at it?" And the Greatest had answered: "You're right, we have done rather well. Maybe it is time to let go." And so they had done.
Much had rested on this acquiescence. Despite their 1960s-era criticisms, the Boom and Silent had always depended on the Greatest--the generation that in their eyes had always epitomized secular endowment--to defend the ethic of investment. When the Greatest had indicated it was okay to feed off the future, other generations had accepted that decision from the ones who ought to have known. From the 1970s forward, roughly halfway through the Greatest tenure of political leadership, America had initiated a fundamental shift in its allocation of resources: from the future to the present, from investment to consumption, from young to old. The Greatest benefited personally from this shift, while Generation X (and possibly Millennials) stood to bear its greatest cost.
The Greatest could rest easy on two counts. First, no younger generation would ever take away a significant part of their retirement "deal" against Greatest opposition. Whenever the Greatest claimed that their public and private affluence belonged to them because they had earned it, they encountered little dissent from the one generation that could have challenged them: the Boom. Yes, Boomers thought, you did earn it--and, like a Jeffersonian "independent nation" generation, you have the right to take it all with you.77
Boomers were willing to shell out high Social Security taxes with little expectation they would ever get the money back, because they themselves gained something immaterial in return: personal independence from their parents and the ability to redefine social values without interference from politically powerful elders.
Second, the Greatest could take some solace in recognizing that they were not the first generation to see their own unique endowment type erode upon moving behind elderhood. That had happened to all generations. If the Great Society plan for a well-ordered cornucopia now seemed out of reach, the Greatest could nonetheless be proud that much of what they had built still endured.
Most of all, as the 1990s progressed, the Greatest noticed younger generations start to miss their old "civic" magic for making things work and started to see in the Greatest peer personality something America badly needed to relearn. Generational monuments such as Iwo Jima, once symbols of intimidating Greatest power, became shrines to a civic spirit remembered--but increasingly perceived as weak and endangered. Where people of all ages looked to Boomers for values, they still (Boom included) looked to the Greatest for guidance on secular endowments, deep into the latter's "old old" age. Thanks to lengthening lifespans, a significant number of Greatest lived to see this, and might well have been heartened by it.
If these post-elders had decided to help America rekindle a sense of teamwork and productive community, then younger generations would have been likely to follow. If the Greatest themselves had suggested that their wealthiest members deserved no health- or nursing-care subsidies or that rank-and-file seniors deserved no discounts below what harder pressed Generation X had to pay in full--for everything from property taxes to bus rides--their example might have encouraged a new generation of children to start acting as selflessly as the Greatest themselves had done in youth.
If the Greatest themselves had supported additional investment in education, Boom and Generation X parents might have joined them in putting the needs of children ahead of their own. If the Greatest had stopped tolerating trade and budget deficits that were (by simple arithmetic) elder-favoring, younger voters might well have agreed that, yes, we really should stop burdening our children with debt.
Would the Greatest relax their collective expectation of late-in-life reward? History said they would not. By the standards of their respective centuries, Glorious and Republican elders had died relatively wealthy, but culturally isolated and unhappy about how their heirs were managing public affairs. Yet history had one blind spot: Neither of those civic predecessors had had the Greatest's opportunity, as the first set of powerful post-elders in American history, to reach all the way across the cycle and help raise a new civic generation. In the 1990s, the Greatest had this chance, with the Millennials.
The power of this Greatest-Millennial bond was the major question mark in the remainder of the Greatest lifecycle and offered the most likely catalyst for a late-in-life repair of senior-citizen endowment behavior. The Greatest knew, through their own experience, that civic generations needed a positive relationship with government starting with childhood. The Greatest (like the Boomers) had been able to ignore poverty among Generation X children--but (also like Boomers) they might have found Millennial poverty far less tolerable.
Raising the Millennials was mainly the task of Boomers, of course--and this complicated the Greatest task of helping these children. The Greatest never felt comfortable with the Boomer personality--nor the Boom with the Greatest personality. But as the 1990s progressed, both generations began to realize that much of this antagonism had heretofore rested on their respective phase-of-life positions. Younger idealists (Boom) and older civics (Greatest) collectively repel each other, but older idealists (Missionary, Boom) and younger civics (Greatest, Millennial), just as strongly, attract each other.
In post-elderhood, the some of the surviving Greatest might have made an important discovery about their children: that Boomers, in midlife, were coming to resemble the Greatest's own parents--the righteous Missionaries--whose patriarchal persona these seniors remembered so admiringly. The Greatest knew they raised Boomers differently from the way they themselves were brought up. Nonetheless, they had expected Boomer "yuppies" to behave as dutifully and collegially as they themselves had in the 1930s and 1940s.
Instead, the tempestuous Boomers had followed the Missionary-led path through rising adulthood--a phase of life during which the Greatest had known their parents only through a child's undiscerning eye. As custodians of the memory of great Missionary leaders, Greatest senior citizens might have come to see in Boomers not the embodiment of civic-type virtues, but the factory of those virtues.
The more the Greatest would notice this, the less they might have felt inclined to opt out of the world of younger generations, or to deplete any more of the endowments they had worked so hard for so many decades to build. In return, Boomers might have seen in Greatest post-elders a living example of the competence and power they envision for their cherished Millennial children. This could have proved to be a mutually pleasing finale to the still-simmering Greatest-Boomer rift--much as the midlife Awakener Benjamin Franklin finally grew to respect the "Do-Good" memory of Glorious Cotton Mather, the very symbol of civic order that Franklin had ridiculed as a young man.78
Time--and "their" Twentieth Century--has run out on this generation. At the beginning of the 1990s, however, a Greatest Commander-in-Chief was still sitting in the Oval Office, and millions of President George H. W. Bush [41]'s peers were enjoying a life as healthy and energetic as his. These senior citizens were politically powerful out of proportion to their numbers, and they had ample time left to make an important choice between two currencies of elderhood. Had the Greatest relinquished some of their claims to secular reward, they might have redeemed a greater measure of the inner reward available to the elders they had known in their own youth: the confidence that, in their final years, they were doing what they could to endow their heirs with a better world.
No generation of younger Americans would have dared to force such a trade-off on the Greatest. It was a decision that only they could have made.