{"id":34,"date":"2005-04-07T09:44:56","date_gmt":"2005-04-07T13:44:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/ecclog\/2005\/04\/07\/on-generations\/"},"modified":"2005-04-07T09:44:56","modified_gmt":"2005-04-07T13:44:56","slug":"on-generations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ecclog\/2005\/04\/07\/on-generations\/","title":{"rendered":"On Generations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a602'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Toasty has joked that I&#8217;m too obsessed with the concept of generations<br \/>\nas destiny, or generation as a component of one&#8217;s psyche, but here we<br \/>\ngo anyway:<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know what the significance is of it yet, but I believe that the<br \/>\nongoing generational shifting has accelerated lately.&nbsp; On the<br \/>\nmacro-level, with Pope John Paul II&#8217;s passing, the only Pope that my<br \/>\ngeneration has known is gone.&nbsp; Also, during the past year, nearly<br \/>\nall three networks have lost their nightly anchors.&nbsp; Brokaw,<br \/>\nretired.&nbsp; Rather, forced resignation.&nbsp; And now, even though<br \/>\nhe has not thrown in the towel, Jennings has lung cancer, so his<br \/>\nmortality is apparent as well.&nbsp; Though no one watches the nightly<br \/>\nnews anymore, I still view this as a signifier that the plates are<br \/>\nshifting.<\/p>\n<p>On the micro-level, someone pointed out to me, that we&#8217;re in the midst<br \/>\nof the greatest transfer of wealth that our nation has ever<br \/>\nknown.&nbsp; With the passing of the WWII generation, vast sums of<br \/>\nmoney are moving to the Baby Boomers.&nbsp; Hence, the GOP&#8217;s pressure<br \/>\nto do away with the inheritance tax (I&#8217;m actually neutral on this<br \/>\nissue).&nbsp; Oddly, with this shift, we are simultaneously losing the<br \/>\nvalues of frugality instilled during those lean years of the Great<br \/>\nDepression and WWII, and the Boomers are gaining the material wealth<br \/>\nrequired to power their lifestyle, since I think that many Boomers have<br \/>\nalready maxed out their lines of credit and home equity lines while<br \/>\nplaying catch-up with the Joneses.&nbsp; But what this all means, I really can&#8217;t say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Toasty has joked that I&#8217;m too obsessed with the concept of generations as destiny, or generation as a component of one&#8217;s psyche, but here we go anyway: I don&#8217;t know what the significance is of it yet, but I believe that the ongoing generational shifting has accelerated lately.&nbsp; On the macro-level, with Pope John Paul [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[186],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-legalese"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ecclog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ecclog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ecclog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ecclog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/121"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ecclog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ecclog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ecclog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ecclog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ecclog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}