Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Astral Codex X podcast for the 6th of January, 2026. Title, Highlights from the Comments on Boomers. This is an audio version of Astral Codex X, Scott Alexander's Substack. If you like it, you can subscribe at astralcodex10.substack.com.
The original post was Against Against Boomers.
Before getting started, first, I wish I'd been more careful to differentiate the following claims. 1. Boomers had it much easier than later generations. 2. The political system unfairly prioritizes boomers over other generations. 3. Boomers are uniquely bad on some axis like narcissism, selfishness, short-termism, or willingness to defect on the social contract.
Anti-boomerism conflates all three of these positions, and in arguing against it I try to argue against all three of these positions, I think with varying degrees of success.
But these are separate claims that could stand or fall separately, and I think a true argument against anti-boomerists would demand they declare explicitly which ones they support, rather than letting them switch among them as convenient, than arguing against whichever ones they say are key to their position.
Second, I wish I'd highlighted how much of this discussion centres around disagreements over which policies are natural or unmarked versus unnatural slash marked.
Nobody is passing laws that literally say, confiscate wealth from Generation A and give it to Generation B. We're mostly discussing tax policy, where Tax Policy 1 is more favourable to old people, and Tax Policy 2 is more favourable to young people.
If you're young, you might feel like Tax Policy 1 is a declaration of intergenerational warfare, where the old are enriching themselves at young people's expense. But if you're old, you might feel like reversing Tax Policy 1 and switching to Tax Policy 2 would be intergenerational warfare confiscating your stuff.
But in fact, they're just two different tax policies, and it's not obvious which one a fair society with no intergenerational warfare in quotes would have, even assuming there was such a thing.
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Chapter 2: What claims about Boomers are differentiated at the start?
We'll see this most clearly in the section on housing, but I'll try to highlight it whenever it comes up. I'm in a fighty frame of mind here and probably defend the boomers and myself in these responses more than I would in an ideal world. Anyway, here are your comments. 1. Top comments I especially want to highlight.
Soko writes, There's a link to a Wikipedia article about the United Kingdom's pension system. There is a lot of similar things in France that I could dig up, such as all attempts to tax benefits being defeated, end quote. Scott writes, many Europeans chimed in to say this, including people whose opinions I trust. I find this pretty interesting.
We all know stories of American opinions infecting Europeans, like how they're obsessed about anti-black racism, but rarely worry about anti-Roma racism, which is much more prevalent there. I'd never heard anyone argue the opposite, that the European discourse is infecting Americans with ideas that don't apply to our context. But it makes sense that this should happen.
I might write a post on this. Kevin Munger, who blogs at Never Met a Science, linked here, writes, quote, But it is emphatically false that boomers were a perfectly normal American generation. They have served far more terms in Congress than any generation before or since.
And we currently have the oldest average age of elected officials in a legislative body in the world, other than apparently Cambodia. They have dominated the presidency, look up the birth date of every major party candidate since the 2000 presidential election. They controlled the commanding heights of major companies, cultural institutions, especially academia.
They are a historically unique generation for three intersecting reasons. One, they are a uniquely large generation. Two, they came of age as the country and its institutions were maturing. And three, they are sticking around because of increased longevity.
These are analytical facts, and they produce what I call a concentration of our society's resources in one older generation that increases the tension we're experiencing from technological innovation. Our demography is pulling us towards the past, the internet is pulling us into the future, and I think this is the major source of the anti-boomer frustration.
On the specifics of social security and why we might think boomers have played things to their advantage, not because they're specifically evil but because they have the political power to do so, the key thing is that they have prevented forward-thinking politicians from fixing the inevitable hole in social security that comes from our demographic pyramid.
It would have been relatively painless to increase the rate or incidence of the social security payroll tax at any point in the past 25 years. The looming demographic cliff was obvious and the increased burden could have been shared more equally. Instead, they prevented reforms and all of the fiscal pain from the demographic shifts will be borne by younger generations.
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Chapter 3: How do tax policies create perceptions of intergenerational warfare?
Phased in over time? Or is that going too far in my demagoguery? End quote. Scott writes, I answered that I agree there's an argument for forced house downsizing, but I also think we're the types of people who the right calls rootless cosmopolitans and that people with more attachments might not be so amenable.
My grandparents-in-law built significant parts of their house with their own hands and lived in it for around 50 years. They planted saplings in the garden and lived to see them become trees. They know the neighbours and probably knew the neighbours' parents before them. Their daughter, my mother-in-law, lives a few blocks away.
When I last visited, they could show me their son's old bedroom, their daughter's old bedroom and the bedroom where their granddaughter, my wife, used to stay with them.
Until recently, my grandfather-in-law was cognitively about 70% there, to the point where he could live on his own, but only through having a very predictable routine, knowing where everything was and being in an ultra-friendly and familiar environment. Their area has now skyrocketed in cost.
I can see your side of the argument, but I also can't blame them for being against some hypothetical policy that would force them to move to a strange apartment in the nearest affordable town 50 miles away, far away from their only family or caretakers, so that some striver-dink couple could turn their spare bedroom into a gym. James answered, quote, And it should hit everyone equally.
It's just about measuring productive use of houses. But it would end up falling hardest on boomers, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on one's perspective. But this is maybe more reasonable as a policy idea than Lynch the boomers, which is perhaps the Bailey you're arguing against. I don't want to be the Mott, just this is, I think, an actually good policy. End quote.
Scott writes, I responded that yeah, I understand it's just higher property taxes. I'm saying there's no way my retired and slightly demented grandfather-in-law could afford normal property taxes on his house he bought in what was basically farmland in 1970 but has now grown into a desirable California college town.
He's been coasting off whichever California proposition it was that says old people's property taxes don't go up while they own the home. although age has taken its toll and he now lives in a nursing home, so this is more of a hypothetical example drawing inspiration from a real situation.
James answered, quote, Of course, with housing policy, the core issue is that bad outcomes for those already there are salient, and for those not already there, they are much less so. I mean, my grandparents have had similar issues. I agree there would be pain. It's just about finding the right balance on the margin. But individual stories shouldn't necessarily guide policymaking.
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Chapter 4: What are the highlighted top comments regarding Boomers?
The best example is probably dating and sexual liberation, in quotes.
The best of all dating worlds is to grow up in the 1950s when everyone is strongly habituated to forming stable marriages, then be given the opportunity to defect out and have tons of free love, in quotes, in your 20s, then settle down in your late 20s into a stable relationship because, well, all your peers came from stable families with strong marriage norms and three to seven years of free love, in quotes, isn't going to overcome that cultural background.
Once the next generation rolls around and gets raised in a free love culture though, rather than the stable marriage norms of the 1950s, marriage starts to break down. It doesn't take much to notice how horrific modern dating is, yet it's worth noting that even by the 1980s it was obvious that something was wrong. Divorce was skyrocketing and Gen X got hit hard.
Scott writes, Here's a graph showing divorce rates over time. There's a big peak in the early 1940s at the end of World War II. So the period where it climbs up begins with the Great Depression and ends with the end of World War II. Then it drops down to about the previous trend level. Then there's a point marked No Fault Divorce Laws, which causes it to skyrocket.
And that upward swing starts in the 1970s. Scott writes, people tend to imagine the divorce trend as being about hedonist swingers trying lots of free love, but I think this is imaginary.
My impression is that it's more about moving from a regime of naively or romantically marrying your high school sweetheart, discovering later that he was emotionally unavailable and abusive and you hated him, but sticking around anyway for the children, in quotes, to a new regime of unromantically optimising for a compatible partner no matter how long it takes.
Boomers ended up right in the middle of the regime change. They married their high school sweethearts, then were told it was unacceptable to have an unhappy marriage, and so suffered very high divorce rates during the transition period.
Everyone after them got the new regime from the beginning and never married their high school sweetheart in the first place, unless their high school sweetheart was unusually compatible with them.
I think that the people scorning the boomers for their hedonistic free love ways wouldn't like being married to an emotionally unavailable and abusive partner who they hated any more than the boomers did.
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Chapter 5: What insights are shared about housing policies affecting Boomers?
Their families were too important. They lived for their grandkids. They really were a great generation. Now it's the boomers' turn to be grandparents. Cool, they had some great role models. How did that turn out? For the most part, they not only never help their kids as adults, but they also blame them for everything that has turned out less than ideal in their lives.
They don't offer loving or even useful guidance. They are supremely disinterested in their grandchildren beyond new photos every year for their condo in Florida. Did I mention they moved away as fast as they could and absolutely will not return to where they left their kids, who can't afford to leave, and grandkids?
Nor are their families welcome to visit them at their home, which is too nice for little kids to ever enter. They're nasty, antisocial parasites. If it is in fact the case that they haven't hoarded most of our culture's wealth, it's not from lack of motivation to do so.
This is not a universal description, obviously, but it's very close to the experience of a large fraction of the children and grandchildren of boomers. It's not about charts and graphs and economics or even demography. They're assholes. And we knew and deeply loved their parents. We were there and we saw it happen. End quote. Scott writes, Chance Johnson writes, quote, quote,
Ethiopia was an economic basket case in the early 1980s. Thanks to warfare, their economy is again doing poorly. But in between, they had a miraculous recovery. I read that the catalyst for their resurgence was radical land distribution quickly followed by the return of a capitalist government.
A government that enforced free markets and relatively strong rule of law, but refused to undo the redistribution of their Marxist forebears. This combination of redistribution plus free markets was an accident of history, of course. No Marxist ideologue would admit that a one-time redistribution was the only necessary Marxist policy.
Nor would a capitalist ideologue initiate even a one-time redistribution or admit that the benefits of such a program would outweigh its moral hazards. So recreating the Ethiopian miracle would be a tall order. But dammit, I wish we could try it here.
I really believe that if everyone had an affordable place to live where they didn't have to worry about getting evicted for purely financial reasons, this security would enable them to be more effective in our capitalist system. Didn't we do something like this more than once in American history? When the feds issued sweeping amnesties for squatters and public land?
This security is oblique to the question of ownership versus renting, and it deserves much more consideration. End quote. Scott writes, I realise this is almost totally unrelated to boomers, but I'm signal boosting it anyway to make sure Richard Hanania sees it, since it supports my side of an email argument we had a few weeks ago. Specifics writes, quote, Scott writes, 7.
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