The wrong lessons from the Baby Boom

We built schools and churches when we should have addressed long-term care

As we approach the end of the year, content marketers everywhere are going to write blog posts about their predicted trends in their industry for the next year, so that when people search “what is the outlook for X industry” they will get that blog post instead of actual hard data or sophisticated forecasts. And most of those trend stories will simply extrapolate events from this year and assume that they carry over into next year. I know, because I have written my share of them over the years.

We miss all the big things. Events that lead to real societal change are hard to predict. On some level, we all knew that a pandemic was a possibility because we had heard stories from our elders about the 1918 flu pandemic or about dealing with polio outbreaks, but no one would have written that the world would shut down in March 2020 in a 2020 forecast written for in November of 2019.

But there’s one societal change that could have been identified with simple extrapolation that has been ignored, and that is the aging of the population. It was clear by 1956 that a lot of people were born in the US after World War II, and it was equally clear by 1976 that these people were having much smaller families than their parents did. And yet, we’ve arrived at 2023 and we have no comprehensive, efficient, affordable, and high-quality system of eldercare.

It’s ironic, really, because we knew this was coming but ignored it. Yet in the 1950s, people rushed to build new churches that have been largely empty ever since, because they assumed that people would continue to have large families, move to the suburbs, and show up in the pews on Sunday.

And now? Inner-ring suburbs have barn-like structures for the twenty or thirty people in the pews on a typical Sunday.

I’ve been doing a lot of work on eldercare recently for a story that should come out in a week or two, and the numbers are depressing. Baby boomers have more wealth than any other generation, but it won’t be enough to care when the cost of a year in a skilled nursing facility approaches $100,000. There aren’t adequate government resources, and those that do exist require a lot of time and patience to navigate. Retirees have smaller families, so there are fewer people who can do unpaid caregiving.

I have no great answer, no great conclusion. What are your thoughts?

The Whatever Years is taking Thursday off. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!