“These kids today” is as old as the United States. And that’s bullish. It’s something to keep in mind as Hoover Institution senior fellow and Global Liberty Institute co-founder Scott Atlas becomes the latest, but surely not the last conservative to lament the state of young American adults.
Writing recently at the Wall Street Journal, Atlas indicted a whole generation that he’s part of (the Baby Boomers) for what they allegedly did to their kids. Boomers, along with the Gen X, Millennials, Gen Zs and others will perhaps be confused by the portrait of American devastation painted by Atlas.
In Atlas’s words, “My generation – the baby boomers – made a catastrophic mistake. We watched our parents sacrifice, we struggled to move up, and we vowed our children would have it easier. When that time came, we gave them trophies for showing up. We meant well. But in freeing them of the need to struggle, we deprived them of something essential. We raised a generation insulated from failure, from consequence, from the experience of working for something, failing and trying again.”
There’s no other way to respond to such an overwhelmingly pessimistic outlook than to wonder if Atlas meant to write about the youth in some other country, but even there it would be difficult to find younger generational cohorts that resemble what Atlas describes.
Considering the American generations that followed Atlas’s Boomers alone, the first Gen Xers began to exit U.S. universities in 1988. At the time the Dow Jones Industrial Average rested around 3,000. Today it’s 50,000+.
To which Atlas might reply that much of the growth in the 1980s was authored by Boomers, but surely not what followed. Jeff Bezos is GenX, so is Elon Musk, so is Peter Thiel, and so are Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Too anecdotal for you? Too immigrant focused?
Ok, but the trend continues. When the 21st century dawned the Millennial in Mark Zuckerberg (born in New York) was still in high school, so was Millennial Dario Amodei (born in San Francisco). So was Gen Zer Sam Altman (born in Chicago). Again, more anecdotes, and Atlas might say they were raised differently. Or perhaps they didn’t get the memo about not producing on a herculean scale, all the while failing with great frequency along the way. Did they hire Boomers only?
More broadly, surely Atlas knows that investment is a look ahead. This is important as he writes of the visible results of Boomer-style parenting in the form of “young voters” who “are electing socialist candidates who spew hatred of those who achieve greatness.” No doubt all this exists, and is happening, but investors with actual skin in the game continue to overwhelmingly direct their wealth to the very country and cities within that country where greatness is allegedly disdained. Which is the point: the information-pregnant markets that Atlas rhetorically favors have never mirrored his deep misery about the United States.
It’s seemingly lost on Atlas that youth is an ass. Furthermore, what he says about American youth so “catastrophically” raised by his fellow Boomers is what the Scott Atlas’s of old said about his fellow Boomers. It’s called progress, and the day young people are as serious as their elders is the day we should be very worried about the U.S.’s future. Put another way, there are no AOC’s, Mamdani’s, Sanders’s, and Warren’s in Bangladesh.
For now, progress continues in “socialist” cities that attract talent along with the investment that follows talent. Those “coddled” youth may not talk and look like Atlas does, but their desire for greatness is boundless.
