Lifecourse Blog

Very nice piece in the NYTimes by an officer who is almost certainly a Generation X (born 1961-1981) (he started serving too early to be a Millennial (born 1982-200?), and he is not high enough ranking to be a Boomer (born 1943-1960)). Any survey of generational divisions in today’s the armed forces uncovers Xer officers who feel bollixed by their Boomer superiors. The Xers want to decentralize decision making, reduce the bureaucracy, give more initiative to leaders on the ground, make decisive choices, and embrace risk rather than shun it.

Why all the smothering oversight? To reduce American casualties, of course, say Boomer and Silent (born 1925-1942)elders. To create an idiot-proof (Boomer-speak for Xer-proof) safeguard against bad headlines for political leaders back at home. But, counter the Xers, what if this approach simply ensures that America’s effort is ineffectual and that we are still there ten years from now, still slogging around and suffering casualties?

Speaking of the Nomadarchetype at war, I am reminded of the memorable scene in the movie “Patton.”  Omar Bradley (who was given all the best lines because he advised the director) got owned in one exchange after castigating George for being too aggressive in a particular attack in the Sicilian campaign and suffering needless casualties. Patton’s response—and I loosely paraphrase from memory: “Sure, Brad, some died. But we broke through, didn’t we? We brought this war closer to an end, didn’t we? If we did it your way, we might still be pinned down there, dying as we speak.” It is an interesting question whether the war would have been over in Europe in 1944, instead of 1945, if Patton had remained Bradley’s superior during and after D-Day. Germany might never have been divided, and the Soviet postwar domination of Central Europe would have been much weaker.

Ulysses Grant was another famous Nomad warrior who understood better than his elders (except for a few, like Lincoln and his friend Sherman) that sometimes you have to take risks, including the risk of losing lives, to get the job done. This is how the midlife Xer-in-charge pushes the mood toward the Fourth Turning (Crisis).

The final remarks in this article explicitly and eloquently point to the tethering of Generation X leaders:

“The culture of risk mitigation could be countered with a culture of initiative. Mid-level leaders win or lose conflicts. Our forces are better than the Taliban’s, but we have leashed them so tightly that they are unable to compete.”

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This is really a nice video featuring Jeff Gordinier who wrote “X Saves the World”. Very Generation X (born 1961-1981), both substance and style. Love the black shirt against the black screen. Nice of him to use dates that are closer to ours (starting in 1961) and to give the generation close to twenty years.

This interesting article in the New York Times describes how hard-hit the self-employed are in today’s economy.

As a generation, Generation X (born 1961-1981) has hugely expanded the relative share of the workforce that is self-employed–and even, for the employed, the share of total income consisting not of “wages,” but of commissions, tips, bonuses, stock options, etc. This is the type of employment and income that goes up fastest when the economy is booming and falls fastest when the economy is contracting. It is all at the margin.

As usual, Gen X makes the market economy function, by taking the punishment while the rest of the economy adjusts. Keep in mind that the old saw during the Great Depression, “it didn’t hurt if you had a job,” was literally true. Because prices fell during the 1930s, and because most wages (esp for large manufacturing and public agencies) cannot be cut in nominal terms (“sticky downward” say economists), most wage earners experienced rising real incomes throughout the Great Depression. Indeed, the very fact that employers could not cut their wages–but simply had to lay them off when their marginal product was no longer worth the wage–gave rise to Keynesian “macroeconomics” as a new field with a new set of rules.

Ironically, most economists now say that the humanitarian appeals by Hoover (especially) and FDR to businesses not to cut their wage rates were completely wrongheaded. At a time of falling demand and monetary supply, cutting wage rates is the one thing that might have kept workers employed. Telling businesses not to cut wages forced them to simply fire workers instead, which directly reduced production and deeply exacerbated the cycle of demand collapse.

As the free-agent share of the workforce rises, the economy should be more resistant to the kinds of demand collapse that characterized the Great Depression. And over the last two decades, many economists attributed the economy’s “great moderation” (the tendency of recessions to become milder and shorter) to the growth of flexible non-wage labor income. Of course all talk of a great moderation is dead now, since we found out we could have really bad recessions for other reasons, like debt bubbles and the collapse of financial institutions.

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