Have baby boomers rigged the system?

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0:34After your trial, you'll save an extra£5 a quarter on the subscription, which is exclusive to Making Money listeners. And that's moneyweek.com forward slash money. But there's a link in the description if you just want to click that. I think particularly in the UK, it feels like we're at a bit of a turning point almost. Do we sort out the housing crisis? Do we sort out some of these challenges? Tom Nicholas is a YouTuber who makes videos about politics, history, and culture. He made a film called Boomers, the rise of the gerontocracy. Did the system thrive because of them or in spite of them? We sort of rewrote the vision of what a human life looks like around the experience of the baby boomers.

1:13And now that's quite difficult to access. It feels like we've found the can. We've been kicking it down the road a long time. It's like, okay, the can is here. We can't kick this thing any further. But like, why did you make your biggest piece of work, your biggest project about boomers? It was something that I'd found myself coming back to in other videos I've been making in various different ways, whether that was boomers themselves and that kind of topic or whether it was changes which have happened throughout the second half of the 20th century. and this felt like a good opportunity to tie some of those things up and to yeah make something at that kind of film scale but also with that that language of film as well which i think does allow you to dig a little bit deeper than maybe a half an hour youtube project does that that like struck i i got that so watching it i know i'm a youtuber so i know all about like retention editing and You're the YouTuber.

2:20You never, ever mention it, Dan. I've never heard you say that. I thought you should bring it up, mate. I thought you should bring it up. Why are you here? But yeah, so, and I was coming into it and, you know, I know your YouTube works. I watched it and I was like, this format allows for such like beautiful moments that you just wouldn't get in YouTube. So one that shone out to me was when your mom was like, I've never really thought about being a boomer. and I was like you wouldn't get that because you wouldn't even really sat down with your mom on a YouTube video just been like this is this and this and this and this that that blew my mind because you know we define ourselves by generations but there was a couple there was you had a guy that was into um demographics as well who was like oh we we had the boomers we named them because they were a big generation and then we had the guys that came after and we were meant to stop there and we've just kept going and going and going why do you think the modern person young people are so obsessed with generations yeah so that was uh philip cohen who was a sociologist demographer that i spoke to in um wash just outside washington dc in maryland that was that's the uh particular place so it's quite a quite a whirlwind couple of weeks of going to lots of different places um but yeah he was kind enough to to have us out to the university campus there and to and to speak with me and yeah his his strongly held position is that generations as we usually use those terms and those labels are mostly bunk right it is useful to recognize that people have different experiences based on when they are born and when they go through certain life experiences for example so you know probably the period at which you finish school or and do or don't go to university and what the job market is like at that point is going to have like a reasonable effect on your life chances after that so whether you go through that in 2005 or 2009 makes a big difference whether you go through that in i don't know 2017 or the middle of the pandemic that that can make a big difference to your life um and there's kind of two ways that can be really useful of measuring those things one is with a uniform block of time so we go everyone that's born in the 1990s everyone that's born in the 2000s everyone's born in the 2010s or your five-year divisions whatever you want to do the other and sort of the original idea of of generations um this book called the problem of generations which came out sort of early 20th century was the sort of big world historical events really affect how certain people experience the world right so the first world war for example um people who were of i guess particularly men who are of a fighting age in 1914 that's quite a unifying experience in which maybe the age that you are becomes as or more in some ways important than maybe other factors um so suddenly the the fact that one of you earns twice as much the other and another period in time that might be really really important in that moment in time you've both just spent however many years in the trenches or whatever and suddenly actually when you're born becomes becomes a really key part of your identity.

6:01And so that can be really useful as well, right? We might talk about a COVID generation, we might talk about multiple COVID generations in terms of young people who went through, who were at school during COVID, where that has been a, had massive impact on their schooling and their education. We also might talk about, you know, people at other ages who have gone through COVID and that's affected their lives in different ways. Our current way in which we talk about generations is sort of neither of those things, with the exception of the boomers, which maybe we'll come back to. But Generation X, millennials, Gen Z, Generation Alpha, I think is the thing we're going for.

6:47The skibbities. Yeah. yeah and they're pretty arbitrary in terms of how they're measured they're different lengths of time and one of philip's things was that the length of a generation is going down because if you're someone who is either a demographer and maybe you're an academic maybe you're a kind of marketing person naming the next one is really good like that's really cool isn't it like being the person who was like we're going to call it this pretty pretty good so so like people are kind of like When can I get away with being like, this is generation blah, blah, blah. Even within that, though, I sometimes see some quite funny comments on the internet, like people talking, people are like, oh, I'm an elder millennial, or I'm a young gen alpha or whatever.

7:33And you're kind of like, okay, well, if you've decided that the category is really, really important, and then you're sort of subdivided, like at what point are we just like, I'm 32 years old? We're just back at the beginning. I was born in May. I'm dead but we do live in a time broadly where identity feels like a really thing that is really important to people and as a kind of nail in the ground of who we are and I think that's probably the case at any point throughout history but this seems to be one of those things that people have really stuck to and part of that I think is that we do I mean any times are tumultuous in in some respect aren't they but it does feel that particularly in terms of life chances and life opportunities and kind of experiences of life that just feel as though we are living through a a rough patch as it were and where when you were born can be a really big factor in terms of what your experience of life and particularly I think stability um is something that that sociologist said i thought was interesting was that like you said he said after boomers there wasn't really meant to be too many more there were meant to be other classes and groups but i think he said that like gen millennials and like gen z have quite a lot in common and boomers just kind of on their own to the side and all the other ones are kind of not that different to each other do you think that's true well yeah so so boomers is the the sort of baby boomer generation um probably adheres more to the the model of generations as being defined by a particular thing that was happening right yeah so i i guess quite basically that um in the post-war period so second world war ends um everyone sort of comes home that was that was away and we see this like massive sort of bulge of babies being born across kind of several countries, particularly the US and the UK, but we also see it in a bunch of other sort of broadly speaking wealthy countries.

9:47And from about 1946 to about 1964, that kind of continues. And so unlike other generations, we sort of all have kind of weird names, that one has one that very much refers to this kind of demographic event, where we get just a bunch more people born after After a period when birth rates have been going down, and actually similar to what we're seeing at the moment where a lot of people are kind of fretting about that, people are kind of really worried about what was going to happen in terms of would there be enough young people. There was sort of this big spike and you get this massive generation which passes through.

10:25And that has sort of continued to have ramifications throughout the rest of the lives of those people and also everyone living around them as well. and it's slightly different in different countries so the US sort of has a has a slightly more boom shape the UK has kind of two quite clear peaks and and the experience within those years is also a really telling and and interesting one of that is those those post-war years where European economy American economy much of the global economy is is just roaring and so it creates a real a very particular experience of the world and yet there are so many baby boomers that I think one of the things that's happened and maybe this bleeds into why so many young people kind of really see generation as a really key part of their identity is that I think one of the things we did is we sort of rewrote the vision of what a human life looks like around the experience of the baby boomers.

11:33And now that's quite difficult to access. Even though either side of it didn't exist potentially. Before it, there was life expectancy and quality wasn't that great. Like you said, people are in the war and go beyond that and the average person wasn't living a great experience. Yeah, go back to 19, I don't know, 12 or something and talk to someone about the housing ladder and they'll be like, what? What does that mean? The baby boomers, there's sort of enough affluence that people leave their kids in school slightly longer um university um attendance begins to go up slightly less here in the uk than in the us it's it's a lot bigger but there's a sort of cultural shift around how young people um you know starting work and then getting on the career ladder and like getting on housing ladder climbing the career ladder all of this stuff is actually quite particular to the baby boomer experience and yet we've kind of universalized it just at the right amount of time for uh it to become really difficult to access you know and at the other end of that like the long retirement and golden years was invented as a marketing slogan to sell a retirement village in arizona yeah yeah like the 50s and like people are like you know they internalize this idea of retirement as if that's a like a god-given right you know And I don't think that is a bad thing.

12:58Like, I don't think this is a like, you know, boomers were fat on the frivolities of the... Actually, would we prefer older people in our society when they are unable to work to be able to, you know, not put themselves through physical and mental strain to kind of keep themselves in food and shelter? yeah that's probably a good standard for society for society to set um and yet so many aspects of that kind of narrative have become really hard to access i mean like i always think about the housing ladder as being this really interesting one you know this idea that you're going to buy a like a starter home you can still hear people use that phrase quite a lot and then you're going to gradually buy a slightly bigger home but a bigger home as i mean i guess in the idyllic vision of this it's that your family grows or whatever but you know you're going to climb climb up this ladder and then just before retirement you're going to downsize you're going to release all the equity and you're going to be like great i can kick back is that a realistic vision of how you're going to engage with the housing market if you're a young person today probably not you're maybe you're maybe going to buy a house, you might move houses, but are you going to keep buying a bigger and bigger house and then downsize it?

14:20It requires an ever-increasing property market. I think house prices between 1951 and 2024 went up like 151 times. To do that again over the next, the average house price would be 43 million. And you've got to ask yourself, is that kind of growth realistic? And inflation will do a number on it, yeah, sure, but it was exceptional, the house price growth, you know, unlikely to happen. And if it does, people wouldn't even be able to get on the ladder, like you say. And the challenge at the moment is that house prices to wages have separated massively. I think we're well over seven times now, I think I'm saying.

14:55Depends where you're looking. Yeah, and it depends where you're looking in the country. But, you know, it gets to that point where your salary isn't increasing as much as the gap to the next house on the ladder or whatever. So actually, again, people might move house for practical reasons, but are you going to gradually work up to that detached house in the countryside or whatever? Probably not. And yet we still have all the language of this that floats around. And especially because that boomer generation have lived that experience and might be the parents of the people going, well, just do what I did, you know, like buy a property.

15:37I've got a question then about the boomer generation and this large block of people that moved through the economic system. And I think you did a really good job of showing, at every milestone, these guys just changed the game, right? Did the system thrive because of them or in spite of them? Was the economic prosperity of the 50s and post-World War as a result of this large population base, or were they just lucky that it was happening at the same time? I think that's one of the really challenging aspects of like covering this topic and maybe something that I pulled my punches on a little bit.

16:13Initially, I was like, I'm going to make this film called Boomers and one of the poster ideas we went through was just sort of like an old hand giving the middle finger. And I sat there and I looked at it for a while and I was like, it's sort of great. It's really eye-catching and it tells a story in the way that you want a poster for something to do. It'd be a great thumbnail, like, yeah. Great thumbnail. Yeah. And I was just like... You know, big clickbait, maybe. And I was like, if you're 60, 70, 80, and you see that poster, are you going to watch the film? And I was like, no. And I also have a bit of a thing in terms of, like, thumbnails and stuff, posters, titles, whatever, where I do think it's always worth thinking of that as a sort of product in and of itself in terms of a thing you're putting out into the world.

16:59Like, most people who see a thumbnail or see a poster or whatever are going to watch the thing. and so at that point have i just put this really um uh abrasive kind of insightful thing into the world um so what was oh yeah so so is it that like so so is it their fault or is it not is kind of the the question and you know i did loads of research going into boomers and read the sort of invectives that are like, can I say fuck? Yeah, you tell me. You can hit the buzzer. Sorry. Yeah, that was for the invective. What's an invective? Oh, just like, just really critical, like angry, targeted, like fuck the boomers.

17:41Like they've done all this to the world. And then some stuff that was more, you know, these are events which have happened around the times at which the boomers were alive. And, you know, I'm sure many listeners will have heard a lot about kind of demographic crises at the moment in terms of what does that look like for the economy going forward and because young people spend money and people buy things for their children and all of this kind of stuff and and we know that that is like part of the it's part of the growth story of the the second half of the 20th century i mean also a lot of the world was destroyed during the second world war you have a lot to build you have a lot to reconstruct that creates jobs that gets money moving through things um and there's this really kind of interesting kind of way in which the world looks at those post-war challenges after the second world war where they're kind of like well everything's like pretty screwed like a lot of like London's a lot of rubble um so Plymouth where I live basically gets completely rebuilt because uh we've got dockyards which is completely the whole city center is just like gone it's kind of like we we can use the the reason that we need to rebuild everything is sort of economic stimulus that's loads of jobs that's loads of money moving through the economy um and that that kind of helps too um and then in terms of the kind of the other end of things um you know there there is a way of viewing this story I don't think there's a right answer here there's a way of viewing this story where we view it as you know the boomers of soaked up um all like a world that had built around them you know a world that had gone we've got loads more kids we'll build loads more schools and we want to get more people into university um uh we're gonna sell off all our council housing to to them as they get to that age we're then gonna in there was a period kind through the boomers' primes where you could discount the interest of your mortgage from your taxes.

19:48That kind of only existed for the period in which the boomers went through it. It doesn't exist anymore. DB pensions, triple lock even. Yeah, all of this stuff. There's a way where you can do this story. You can go, boomers have intentionally made, if we're looking at the UK lens now, they've made the world work in that way. There's another kind of maybe a little blamey way, but a little bit more friendly way of putting it, I guess, where we go, well, it's just a large voting bloc. And so, of course, we've now got triple lock on pensions because older people are a big voting bloc and who's going to be the politician that goes, we're not going to do that anymore?

20:34That's why the Rolling Stones are still on tour. That's what the guy said. That's genius. Yeah, big market as well. Because it's a big market. they're popular of that time they keep going because there's so many boomers still buying tickets so part of the thing of the kind of story of the boomers as this sort of like universalised story of what life looks like in the modern age or whatever is there's what I like to call the kind of boomer nostalgia porn industry where we, which I can think sort of Forrest Gump is like I heard him like Nick Agri, what's this?

21:12Starts taking notes. Which is this kind of like, like Forrest Gump is like the prototypical example of this, of you tell a story of someone's life and they, I mean, I think he's like a year out to be a boomer or something, but, you know, they're born just after the war and there's all the story that happens, but also you do a social history alongside it, right? And that's like kind of, yeah, what David Willett says when I chat to him in the film and he says, you know, yeah, the reason the Rolling Stones are on tour is that there's so, A, there's so many boomers around to go and watch them, but also because there were so many baby boomers and they've sort of had control of like the levers of cultural discernment for so long or whatever, like the ability to say what's good and what's not.

21:57It means that, you know, bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, all of whom are great. I love a lot of that music. Say what you think. But we get to... No, no, no. I genuinely love all that. I've not seen the Bob Dylan film yet. I would like to. But also we have this like, oh, that is the greatest music that has ever existed. Yeah. Which is, maybe some of it is. Maybe there's also a few that are kind of, you know, riding along on... Would people be listening to like The Monkees if it wasn't the... if that music hadn't come out when the boomers happens to be in their teens or whatever um uh that really fizzled out no no no i think it's great i think i think like what i've learned from your film it was really interesting like there's so much about the boomers that was special so it was like a perfect storm moments like with the war and then they did all the building and manufacturing and then that created more jobs and then they all started having more babies because of after the war, but also the medical advances meant that more children were surviving childbirth.

23:09So that's how they all had like, I thought it was just because, oh, the war's over, let's all just repopulate the country and like start having babies. But it was actually because like the medical advances as well at the same time, so they could have more babies. And most importantly, Sue was a very common name and both your moms were called Sue. Yeah, that's a bigger identifier of that generation to your mom than her age. With her, I tried to get to the bottom of that one. I was sort of like, what, you know, what, like, did my gran have, like, a good reason? Like, was it famous? Because sometimes you're like, oh, great.

23:41I don't know. I don't know if there's lots of Elses. But if there was, you'd be like, oh, brilliant. Like, Frozen came out, right? Or, but Ash was just like, there's quite a lot of them. It's funny how they're, like, a hive mind of boomers that, or whatever, just like, Susan. Just put a million Susans on the planet. That's going to be it. Because of the Mandis. Like, because, yeah. But okay, then there's a scene in it. I think I want to talk about wealth now because one of the key criticisms of the boomers is they got all the money. They got all the wealth, all the power as well. You're doing this scene where you've got Werther's Originals, I think, which I loved.

24:18I was like, I did a little nod to the elderly there. And you're filling up a jar and you show that the boomers basically in every Western economy control like a large portion of the wealth. And you've just said there that they're the biggest voting bloc as well. One question, first of all, shouldn't they have the most wealth and the most power because they've got the most lived experience? You know, they're going to be the best leaders. Should we not look up to our elders and go, you've got the wisdom? And they'll have the most money because they've been compounding it for longer than a 20 year old.

24:47Yeah, yeah. No. So there is there's always probably always going to be an extent to which older parts of the population will have more money, whether that's cash or whether that's wealth than younger people. right as you say if you've been saving or investing it's had longer to build if you bought a house and the value of that house has gone up then that's going to have happened um if you've been in your career longer yeah you're probably going to have had chances for um promotions and for um bonuses and pay rises and what have you um what we've seen is i don't have the exact figures on me but is that the proportion of the wealth that is kind of owned controlled what everyone's say by that baby boomer portion of the population or by the age cohort, which is now the baby boomers, has increased over time.

25:4420%. I've got it written here. So it's gone from 45 to 67.5 since, this is your stats, not mine. I'm just coming in and taking the glory, a bit like this guy, since 2005. So are you saying that's the problem, that 20 odd percent? And those might be US statistics if they're from the film. I mean, maybe it's, if it's America, if it's the UK, what you're saying is that there's been a huge shift since the millennium, basically, and the percentage of the wealth that that cohort holds as the total. And I think a lot of that is, I guess, to go into some marks accidentally, sort of wealth is as much like a social relation as it is a sort of thing that you have, right?

26:27So a shift in the way that we view housing actually can look up numbers like that and it can look like we have the same amount of stuff and it's just in different places. Whereas actually we can be in a place wherein what's actually happened is that our relationship with stuff like pensions and stuff like housing has changed in a way that shifts those numbers because the things that we do with wealth have changed. In actual fact, my mum has the same amount of houses as she had when she was like 30 years ago, right? She still has one house. The value of that house in relation to inflation or whatever has gone up.

27:09And therefore that appears in a certain way on paper in some of those statistics in a way that looks like things have moved around. Whereas actually what's happened is that, you know, there has been a shift in our relationship with pensions, our relationship with houses, rather than just like numbers moving around on the sheet, if that makes sense. Last time we recorded, Tomei, and you were having some real dramas with your accountant. So how's that been going, mate? They're sacked. So drama sorted. They're a big corporate firm. They didn't really reply to my emails very quickly, like took a week or two at times.

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30:38But it's almost like we imply it's a conveyor belt, whereas actually it's a completely different set of rules now, really, for someone in their 20s. Yeah, because a COVID hits or a 2008 hits or something like that. And yeah, things do change, but also the world around you changes. As you say, 30 years ago, having a certain amount of savings, that could have been even adjusted for inflation, maybe could have been a house deposit in a way that maybe it isn't now yeah i mean that's always the challenge with i guess planning ahead financially i guess in many other ways as well that the the world is going to kind of change around that it does you well not to look at too far ahead and go oh that's where i need to be because they have certainty around things like state pension yeah so for example they know that i'm getting that whereas we don't we don't know that so we can't like to them 50 to 60 percent of the uk population state pension is half of their retirement so it's a massive like safety blanket yeah you know to us we we probably have to plan that it's not going to be there it'd be very surprising if the state pension disappears yeah but i mean they might just they might just tomorrow yeah yeah but they might inflate it away there's a slightly long there's a much longer um trajectory to look ahead to yeah and a lot more time in which that could happen.

31:59So they could have a smaller retirement pot because of the certainty around the state pension, you know, or they've got a DB scheme or, you know. And that's really, I mean, it's worth saying, once to come back to the point that, you know, there was a lot of uncertainty in the boomers' lives as well. And, you know, when they got to working age, there was real challenges in terms of, or real worries at least in terms of, are this massive cohort of people are all going to be able to find jobs because suddenly like each year we've got you know we've got these big blocks people come through and at the same time as um the sort the period of time where women haven't worked is actually relatively short in the middle of the 20th century but um during the kind of period in which the boomers coming to age is also a period of time in which um a lot of women who 10 years previously uh maybe would have stayed at home to look after children in that kind of stereotypical heterosexual couple with the woman at home and are also entering the workforce.

33:05So you get kind of this double factor of just like a lot of people to find jobs for. And, you know, in actual fact, over time, more people with more jobs means there's more stuff you need to make. And that kind of worked itself out. I think one of the big shifts, and this will go back to the pensions point though is kind of around stability i think we've we've had this shift towards kind of a much more individualistic society but it's a much more individualistic way of looking at finance and economics um so yeah we've kind of moved away from that system of you know you you go you get a job and you get a kind of company pension scheme and you're kind of like yeah the work will sort it out and uh and you walk and you've got kind of maybe a state pension to back that up as well to a kind of system where one view of it is that we have a lot more freedom so i talked about i talked to david willett who's a um conservative lord uh in the film and he's like it's great you've got a lot more freedom in terms of choosing where you invest your pension or whatever which for some people i think is probably really important i i would imagine that the kind of listeners of this are probably a have kind of like selected into probably being the people that that maybe do value that going i'm gonna you know i want to make sure it's in a high risk high growth kind of pot rather than a rather than having it all in bonds or whatever um for most people whether they actually act on that freedom and whether that's something that they actually think is important and useful is maybe lower.

34:48But one of the kind of side effects of that has been that there is, I mean, as we were just saying about pensions, there is that lack of stability of if things go wrong, you're much more on your own as well. I think we've become a much more kind of succeed or sink kind of society. And we kind of see that in a lot of the kind of economics of the stuff we talk about. And we talk about housing as well in terms of, you know, in the throughout much of the 20th century, the shift within the UK was that we would build a system of social housing, which if you were in need and actually for a lot of the century, it was also like an option that you could choose.

35:36you could just go i don't want to own a house i actually want to i want to run a house from the council and it'll be i'll have some kind of i'll have decent tenants right are we reasonably affordable um we've kind of shifted away from that because you know enough people liked the idea that oh i can buy my house and this actually could be great for me like i could get really wealthy i mean how you um how housing wealth actually translates into real wealth is maybe a different question you can't eat bricks yeah you can't eat bricks um i think like i think it's mervyn king that said something about like it's housing wealth is like made up its number and other than the fact that it's money that you're not it's like money that you're not spending rather than the money that you have um which maybe that's all wealth but um but yeah we used to have all these kind of systems in place and and you know by my by my reading one of the things that that sort of enabled the boomers to have a reasonable kind of run at things well some of these fallbacks where we'd we'd go do you know if you end up in a really shit position and there's like you know there's a decent rented housing option that doesn't exist anymore um so i think you know there's probably an argument that you can sort of soar higher if you and some people would say that's you know if you have the plug and ambition some people say that's if you're in the right place at the right time um but i think we've unfortunately kind of got to a place where you know looking ahead up looking ahead at our potential hopeful retirements is a case of uh are we able to kind of get through or do we have a really bad time of it rather than do we have an all right time of it it feels like there's less wiggle room is you know people have less margin for error yeah another way that you showed this was um that i thought was something i hadn't really considered is the environmental impact in terms of future generations will be less can be less luxurious with their carbon output than the boomers were yeah so i mean this is uh we'll take credit this is something that david willis comes up with in the film as well and he says you know they've run the numbers and the amount of the amount of carbon that boomers burnt up through their lives is like relatively high and yeah if if we want to um keep our carbon within kind of the limits that have been suggested are going to at least ameliorate the effects or not ameliorate the effects of global warming, but stop it being the worst that it can be.

38:13You know, there are a level to which younger people are going to have to live slightly more restricted lives. And, you know, we hope that some of that will be through innovation, which will mean that um some of the things that have been done previously can still be done but in a slightly different way but but you know certainly at the moment we're at a point where you know if you want to do your bit or whatever you you have to think about well you know am i gonna do that extra flight am i gonna um drive or am i gonna get the train or whatever you know i mean in theory that's kind of our responsibility is you know the fusion generation but at the same But at the same time, like the boomers, like in the industrial revolution, everything, they, all their outputs for like emissions and like electricity and pollution went up through the roof.

39:01And now we've got a president in America who's saying, forget the environment, we're going to drill everything and close all these reservation parks and screw the fish. So like... Different kind of porn again.

39:15That is hilarious. but like what if i don't drive my car to here today is that really make a difference if donald trump's like we're gonna fish all the fish and we're gonna drill everywhere is me not driving my car gonna make a difference when the biggest cohort have just smashed up the planet and then now i little me has to take the bus because they've all done the damage so this this has always been one of the arguments one of one of the ones you'll see online quite a lot is you know china is still burning coal in certain places and i mean if we look at china actually the progress that they've made towards renewable energy has been exceptionally rapid.

39:53And, you know, what's going to happen in the US is a really fascinating, I'm sure to different people, exciting or terrifying thing to watch. You know, we've just had a couple of days ago, maybe it was yesterday, actually. Depending on when you're watching this, could be whenever, who knows? and the uh donald trump has like paused all government grants to everything which you know in terms of some of the kind of themes we're looking at throughout the film in terms of um one of the kind of big trajectories of the kind of second half of the second half of the 20th century was towards this world where we kind of don't really trust the government to do anything um you know it's not that it has a limited role to do in some places and and other places where you know we we want to have that sort of market choice and we kind of got to this place we were like i mean we don't think they can actually do anything like even the water pipe should be run by a private company just in a way that i think you you would really struggle to make a kind of good argument for um and we've seen like the real kind of taking that to the very extreme where yeah donald trump's kind of signed an executive order which got just gone we're going to stop doing any government grants until we kind of figure it out if that if if they don't bring some of these back i think we'll see like a real what happens when that experiment is taken to the to the extreme trump's a boomer trump is a boomer who made his money on new york property yeah he had a great time all this needs to stop now i read i mean i read a kind of uh an argument that he's like the the boomer the sort of the big boom the you know if you distill boomers down to that kind of like base sort of little consomme um and that's you know that's uh that's uh maybe an unfair look at it um you know in the u.s kind of politically boomers are relatively um divided around kind of between political parties and what that means for like specific policies i I think is maybe a different question.