A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

Overview

In his "remarkable" (Men's Journal) and "controversial" (Fortune) book—written in a "wry, amusing style" (The Guardian)—Bruce Cannon Gibney shows how America was hijacked by the Boomers, a generation whose reckless self-indulgence degraded the foundations of American prosperity.

In A Generation of Sociopaths, Gibney examines the disastrous policies of the most powerful generation in modern history, showing how the Boomers ruthlessly enriched themselves at the expense of future generations.

Acting without empathy, prudence, or respect for facts—acting, in other words, as sociopaths—the Boomers turned American dynamism into stagnation, inequality, and bipartisan fiasco. The Boomers have set a time bomb for the 2030s, when damage to Social Security, public finances, and the environment will become catastrophic and possibly irreversible—and when, not coincidentally, Boomers will be dying off.

Gibney argues that younger generations have a fleeting window to hold the Boomers accountable and begin restoring America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316395793
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	03/06/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	87,388
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Bruce Cannon Gibney is the author of A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. A venture capitalist and writer, Gibney began as an attorney specializing in securities litigation and financial regulation. He was an early investor in PayPal, and later joined Founders Fund and co-founded Carmenta Management. He and his colleagues have funded Facebook, Spotify, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Lyft, AirBnB, Coupang, and DeepMind.

Table of Contents

Foreword xi

Introduction xxi

1 The View from 1946 1

2 Bringing Up Boomer 13

3 Vietnam and the Emerging Boomer Identity 27

4 Empire of Self 52

5 Science and Sentimentality 71

6 Disco and the Roots of Neoliberalism 96

7 The Boomer Ascendancy 116

8 Taxes 131

9 Debt and Deficits 155

10 Indefinitely Deferred Maintenance 176

11 Boomer Finance: The Vicious Cycle of Risk and Deceit 193

12 The Brief Triumph of Long Retirement 215

13 Preparing for the Future 239

14 Detention, After-School and Otherwise 258

15 The Wages of Sin 282

16 The Myth of Boomer Goodness 301

17 Price Tags and Prescriptions 326

Afterword 347

Appendices 357

Acknowledgments 363

A Note on the Numbers and Conventions 365

Notes 369

Index 419

Editorial Reviews

"Sure to be controversial."—Fortune

"Informative, provocative, and entertaining reading for those interested in political economy and U.S. social and economic history."—Booklist

"Gibney lays into the 'Me' generation for cashing out their children's future and leaving the planet looking like a rock star's hotel room.... Timely."—Esquire

"A Generation of Sociopaths is a polemic, but what a polemic: filled with data, rich in anecdote, deadly serious yet wickedly funny."—Alexandra Wolfe, author of Valley of the Gods

"The core of Gibney's argument, that the boomers are guilty of 'generational plunder,' is spot-on. He accuses them of 'the mass, democratically-sanctioned transfer of wealth away from the young and toward the Boomers,' and he's right."—Dana Milbank, Washington Post

"Remarkable .... Impressively weighted with hard numbers and specifics, the volume serves as both an indictment of and rebuttal to a Woodstock Generation that has gleefully celebrated themselves for decades while gradually running the country into the ground ... Gibney paints a persuasive and frequently hilarious portrait of the Me Generation."—Men's Journal

"Like Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Bruce Cannon Gibney's A Generation of Sociopaths proceeds from a deceptively simple premise: that the gains made by the American middle class in the period after the world wars of the previous century were a fluke.... A damning, searingly relevant indictment."—The Globe and Mail

"[Gibney] has a wry, amusing style and plenty of well parsed statistics to back him up ... Read A Generation of Sociopaths and hope for the best. Gibney is more optimistic than those who predict an imminent third world war, than the scientists who warn of sudden climate shifts and the end of antibiotics, and even - in one sense - than the evangelicals who believe in the Rapture. He also has a better sense of humor."—Jane Smiley, The Guardian

"[Gibney] maintains that the Boomer Generation, privilege incarnate, exhibit all the traits associated with that clinical pathology: 'deceit, selfishness, imprudence, remorselessness, hostility, the works.' He argues the case well."—Toronto Star

"Uproariously funny but rigorously argued and researched.... Intellectually invaluable..... Re-fram[es] the dysfunction in our politics as less a consequence of partisan factionalism and more as a grand agreement between privileged Boomers across the political divide to enrich their present rather than vouchsafing the future."—Lawyers, Guns, and Money

From the Publisher

2017-01-03
A cri de coeur against baby boomers, who "unraveled the social fabric woven by previous generations in the interests of sheer selfishness."Having made a fortune in social media (PayPal, Facebook) and leveraging other people's property (Airbnb, Lyft), venture capitalist Gibney is now ticked at having to shoulder the debt of that vast population—75 million, at last count—born between 1946 and 1964, "a swaddled youth [that] fostered sociopathic entitlement." So what did these now-old flower children do to provoke the author's barrage of epithets? For one thing, they took all the benefits of the New Deal welfare state and added on to them, piling on generational debt in the trillions of dollars. (Boomers, of course, complain that the Greatest Generation did the same to them, especially with respect to health care.) Moreover, they "dominated political and corporate America—squandered its inheritance, abused its power, and subsidized its binges." A little Thomas Paine goes a long way, and the endless, broadest-possible-brush harangue gets uglier when one substitutes, say "Jew" or "African-American" for "baby boomer." That said, Gibney does have some points, all of which would have been better made without assigning damning agency to them: of course health care has to be restructured, and of course taxes have to be raised if the nation is to escape insolvency. His prescriptions on those fronts are sound, though some are surely controversial; he has already decided that boomers would fight his suggestion that the retirement age "be raised for anyone reasonably able to work, including the younger Boomers, by at least three years." Gibney also suggests that the IRS be funded to go after the evaders and the newly dead, advocating a stiff estate tax that the Republican establishment—who are, of course, all baby boomers—would never go for. "This is a deeply negative portrayal, but a certain negativity may be what's required." Maybe so, but if this polemic makes wounded millennials feel better, it likely won't reach older ears, who may be more sympathetic than Gibney imagines.

Kirkus Reviews