As children, the boomers helped shape the culture of domesticity and family of the 1950s – and the consumer culture that went along with it as young adults, they created a youthful culture of rebellion in the 1960s and 1970s (even if most did not actively participate in it) in the 1980s, we watched shows like ‘thirty-something’ as boomers dealt with the angst of finally growing up and now, as boomers drift through their fifties, we get to read books about how they are going to revolutionize the way we age. We ought to be used to the fixation on the boomers by now. Like the most famous Canadian work of the genre, Boom, Bust and Echo (which is now an industry unto itself), The Long Baby Boom concerns itself not with the youthful experience of this generation but with the economic and political ramifications of its aging population. Goldsmith’s book is another addition to the ever-popular genre of Baby Boomer studies, those works that explore the demographic reality of – and the subsequent cultural fascination with – the surge in North American birth rates that followed the Second World War. Of course, I got a job and he got to retire. When this professor retired we lost his experience and wisdom we lost his taxes and his continued involvement in the economy and he lost the continued health and personal benefits that come along with continued work. But in The Long Baby Boom: An Optimistic Vision for a Graying Generation, Jeff Goldsmith tells us that my own gain was a societal loss. Personally, I am rather happy that a 65 year old professor decided to go against Goldsmith’s wisdom and to retire (something the removal of the mandatory retirement age in Ontario did not oblige him to do). If Jeff Goldsmith had his way, I’d be out of a job. Jeff Goldsmith, The Long Baby Boom (The John Hopkins University Press 2008)
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