Richard Hanania

Scott writes, and this is all focusing on the anti-boomerists' chosen topics.

You can find others where the boomers look downright saintly compared to their kids.

His results for strongly support democracy, with boomers over 60% and millennials under 40%, opposed censorship, boomers 70%, millennials under 50%, and political violence never okay, boomers 95%, millennials around 70%.

Scott writes, I don't think the boomer-millennial difference in most political opinions is big enough to matter much either way.

3.

There's a more developed theory of boomer hating.

The more developed theory goes, boomers are plundering the young.

We know this because their share of resources is high and keeps increasing.

They use their large population share and good voter turnout to vote themselves ever higher pensions at the expense of working taxpayers.

How might we investigate this theory?

We can't use total social security spending because the number of elderly has gone up.

Can we use social security spending per elderly person?

No.

The amount of social security paid out depends on the amount paid in.

If each year's retirees earned more during their career than the previous years did, this is true, then each year's will get a higher social security payment, even if the system's generosity stays the same.

We might start by looking at change in social security payment divided by change in median income.

Over the past 50 years, average social security payment in inflation-adjusted dollars increased 60%.

If we expect these payments to reflect earnings 20 years before disbursement, we can look at real median personal income from 1953 to 2003.

This also increased 60%.

There is no increase in generosity.