Very interesting article. It's a bit long but I would love to get your thoughts on it.

Story by Nick Lichtenberg

"In 1974, New York Times humorist Russell Baker identified a “pig in the python” working its way through the economy: the bulge of 76 million Baby Boomers squeezing through America’s economic system, distorting everything they passed through. When Boomers flooded the labor market in the 1970s, they created a competitive squeeze that never fully released — leaving the generations behind them without the wage rebound economists had predicted. When they bought homes, prices soared. When they took the top jobs in business, culture, and civic life, they held them — and held them, and held them.

For half a century, the Baby Boom generation has functioned like a slow-moving wave through the American economy — and as the last of them cross into retirement age, the country is discovering just how much of its future they’re still holding in place. In the labor market, four decades of Boomer dominance suppressed wages and opportunity for younger workers, and their accelerating exit now threatens a worker shortage businesses are unprepared to absorb. In housing, empty-nest Boomers sit on a disproportionate share of the family-sized homes that millennial parents need but cannot find or afford. And in the corner offices, executive suites, and corridors of political power, Boomer leaders have spent years building monuments to their own indispensability rather than successors capable of replacing them — leaving institutions to manage their decline rather than their transition.

Sponsored

The pig, as the Times once put it, is finally leaving the python. The question is whether anything is ready to take its place.

Now, as the last of the Boomers cross into their late 60s and early 70s, the question America is finally being forced to confront is: what did they leave behind? What will the python look like next?

The labor market: Two-way squeeze

A study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers a rigorous accounting of what the Boomer generation cost — and what their departure may now unlock.

Steven Ruggles, a demographer at the University of Minnesota, tracked U.S. labor-force flows decade by decade from 1910 to 2040. His findings are arresting. The sheer size of the Boomer cohort suppressed economic opportunity for young workers throughout the 1970s and into the 2010s. Economists had long predicted a rebound: as Boomers aged and smaller generations entered the workforce, competition would ease and wages for young workers would recover. It never happened. Female labor-force participation and immigration filled the gap, keeping competition high and young workers’ incomes depressed for an extra three decades beyond what models anticipated.

But Ruggles’ most striking finding looks forward, not back. Boomer retirements — now accelerating — are about to trigger what he calls “a radical reshaping of labor markets” in which new workers will be in extremely short supply through 2040. The pig is finally leaving the python. And the python, it turns out, is not ready.

Businesses that spent 40 years operating in a buyer’s market for labor — plenty of workers, modest wage pressure — now face the opposite. The generation that made it hard to find a good job for four decades is now making it hard to find workers at all.

The housing market: Empty nests, locked doors

The labor market is an abstraction. The housing market is not.

Baby Boomer empty nesters own nearly twice the share of American homes with three or more bedrooms — 28% — compared to millennial parents, who own 16%, according to a recent Redfin analysis of 2024 Census data. There it is: the spatial expression of the same generational hold.

The pig in the python: Baby Boomers are strangling the economy they built by refusing to move or retire

The pig in the python: Baby Boomers are strangling the economy they built by refusing to move or retire

Millennials, now the largest generation of parents in America, need the space. Boomers, whose children left years ago, have it. And most Boomers either aren’t moving—or they’re moving into what used to be considered starter homes and are now ideal homes for downsizing grandparents to move close to their offspring.

“Empty-nest baby boomers own more large homes than millennials with kids in every major U.S. metro,” Redfin says, with millennial parents not reaching 20% of large homes anywhere in the country. The top cities are Austin and Columbus (19.2%), with Minneapolis (18.9%) just behind. Empty-nest boomers, on the other hand, own at least 20% of large homes everywhere in the country. Grandma and grandpa are having the whole family visit, but those bedrooms are sitting empty most of the year.

Sponsored

Many Boomers are mortgage-free or locked into low rates that make any transaction financially painful. Others cite family ties, routines, or simply the daunting task of emptying a home accumulated over decades. The result is that millennial families run into both a supply shortage and an affordability wall simultaneously.

What gains millennials have made came largely from absorbing homes vacated by the Silent Generation, the cohort born before the Boomers. Boomer homeowners have barely budged, Redfin found. The pig hasn’t left the python yet.

The corner office: No succession plan

Perhaps nowhere is the generational bottleneck more acute — or more deliberately ignored — than at the top of American institutions.

Writer and urban analyst Aaron Renn recently published a pointed essay cataloguing what he calls the “Boomer succession failure.” His case study is Anna Wintour, the 76-year-old editor who has dominated global fashion culture since 1988. When the New York Times recently explored the future of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, the answer was quietly revealing: Wintour is not replaceable. So instead of replacing her, Renn argued, the Met has spent years quietly building a quasi-endowment — seeded by the Met Gala itself — so the Costume Institute can run on investment returns after she is gone. This year’s gala added a record $42 million to that fund. There is no succession plan, just a life-support system for the post-Wintour era.

Renn argues this is not an isolated case but a defining pattern of Boomer leadership. Mitch Daniels, widely considered the most effective governor in modern Indiana history, invested in a leadership development program bearing his name — but produced no protégé of comparable stature. Tim Keller, the pastor who effectively invented the modern urban evangelical church movement through New York’s Redeemer Presbyterian, spent heavily training the next generation of clergy but did not produce a successor. After retiring, he used his star power to raise roughly $100 million — then split the church into three smaller entities, because no single person could sustain what he had built.

Renn didn’t look at the political dimension, but it’s well known that Boomers have had an iron grip on the presidency for decades. From Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 through Donald Trump’s current second term, the White House has been occupied by a Boomer for all but four years. Clinton, George W. Bush, and Trump were all born within a two-month window in 1946 — the very first months of the Baby Boom — and Obama was born in 1961 at its tail end. The Silent Generation, sandwiched between the Greatest Generation and the Boomers, was essentially skipped entirely in presidential politics, with the lone exception of Joe Biden and Gen X has yet to hold the office. The jump will likely go straight from Boomers to Millennials.

Sponsored

Trump was born June 14, 1946, making him one of the oldest Boomers, not merely a typical one — the man currently in the Oval Office is among the very first members of the generation that has never relinquished power.

Boomers are 43% of Congress despite being only 23.7% of the U.S. population — a representation ratio nearly 2-to-1 relative to their actual share of the country. But when you zoom in on the Senate, Boomers still hold 61% of seats in the more influential chamber. In raw numbers, that’s 233 Boomer members versus 196 Gen Xers and just 84 Millennials, who are roughly 25% of the population but only 16% of Congress. Any way you look at it, one generation holds the cards.

The common thread, Renn writes, is cultural. Top Boomer leaders surrounded themselves with people who would subordinate themselves entirely to the boss’s vision — loyalists, not heirs. They saw themselves as irreplaceable, and so they became irreplaceable. Now the institutions they ran face the same choice the Met made: endow the decline or find a way to rebuild.

Back in 1974, Baker argued in the Times that as the Boomers pass reach retirement age, “both the childless and the childbearing factions will probably make common political cause against the diminished young population, which would be increasingly hardtaxed to pay retirement benefits for the aging majority.” That sounds very much like a generation voting itself, largely via the Boomer-dominated Senate, ever more generous benefits on a surging $39 trillion national debt as large as the economy itself, while kicking the can down the road so the next several generations can figure out how to pay for it.

In the labor market, the Boomers crowded out opportunity for 40 years and are now leaving a workforce ill-prepared to replace them. In housing, they are sitting on the family-sized inventory that the next generation needs and cannot access. In the institutions that shape culture, commerce, and civic life, they are now engineering managed retreats rather than genuine transitions.

It’s a lot to digest.

Bunch of cry-baby nonsense.

The Greatest Generation is widely credited with building the foundations of modern global prosperity.

Afterward, the Boomer Generation propelled the Nation

to economic heights, cementing it's status

as a Global Superpower.

It's bs. have more kids. We are a big generation so you there, have more kids.

Getjobs.

Work harder.

Buy small houses.

Cook at home.

I second what WMH and RB said. From the tail end of the Boomer generation we actually got jipped out of a lot of things. There's a YouTube video that explains how people born in 1960 got totally screwed when it comes to the stock market. I entered the job market in 1978 officially and it was hard to even get a job at Burger King due to the Carter Administration ruining the economy.

Gen Z and most of the Millennials have it easy and a soft life so that leads to a lot more whining. The children that grew up around world wars had it the hardest.

(insert Gen-X gets forgotten joke here)

One of the interesting things since the 90's-00's is that people are hitting stages of their career that they would have spent a lifetime building up to in the 40's/50's/60's/70's.

Compare the resources (income, outgo, spend, etc) of a Millennial with the resources of a Boomer at the same stage of their life--- the Millennials are getting the fancy toys decades before their Boomer counterparts. They're also prioritizing experiences over stuff-- like, friends in their 20's are talking about their trips to Iceland and stuff.

The part that rankles, though, is that it expects people who have paid off their homes as having an obligation to sell it and move on from it so someone else can live there, because they might "need" it more.

Looking in a 2-hr radius around my house, I see about 40,000 3/2's-and-up for sale. Not all of them are going to be new build, or in the "right" location. Lots will be way too expensive, or in need of significant repair. But there are still options for people looking for a balance between price, location, and amenities.

One of the rules of thumb was, if you want to make a boatload of money, figure out what the Boomers want. During the 80's and 90's, it was recreational stuff-- golf courses, resorts, cruise ships, whatever, as they became financially stable retirees looking to have fun. During the 10's and 20's, it's become healthcare as they continued to age.

Didn’t read the whole whiny, snot-nosed article, cuz this boomer, who lives in a beautiful, 3/1.5, 1100sf home that was an absolute dump when we bought it 30 years ago, is busy helping our daughter’s 2adult/4kids family get ready for their big move to another state, for a promotion she worked her tail off to get. They are moving from a 3/1.5 980 sq ft home in the city, to a 2700 sqft 4/3 in the burbs. ( not quite a fair comparison square footage-wise; the house in Milwaukee has a full, unfinished basement, the house in Indy has no basement, or even crawl space. So, no arts & crafts space in basement, or sewing space in basement, play space or weight-lifting space like they have now. So, formal living room will be sewing, craft, playroom.

Anyhow, one of daughter’s biggest challenges in her employment career has been finding workers who can pass a simple drug test. And once they pass the test, showing up to work on time. Simple right? Oh, and her company pays well, and they send employees for frequent training, company expense. And, they have multiple avenues of move-up opportunities. Yet, she struggles to find employees, as most cannot get past the drug test. She works in an industry where drug screening is essential, as employees spend a good bit of their day driving company vehicles on public roads.

But, yeah, just keep calling us Boomers PIGS, while ya complain we wrecked everything for everyone behind us. (not 6x6, but the whiners who wrote the article, or who view boomers as the cause of younger generations lack of ‘adulting’)

Finding workers who care is the unicorn right now, at least around here.

I'm one of those who live in a too big house now that the kids are gone. I'm not planning on moving in the near term and don't feel guilty about it. The place is paid for and there's no place to move where I wouldn't be paying through the nose, so the plan is to say put.

The whole thing about being able to pass a drug test is completely true, but you don't have to even take it that far. How many people do you have to go through to find one decent tenant? To me that's a mirror of the drug test thing and everything else concerned with the generations coming up behind us.

Good points everyone.

So why is the stage set for AI to grow so quickly?

It sounds all nice that wages will suddenly shift with the marketplace. I am not completely convinced.

GKARL, I too live in a house that is too big for us. It is paid for as well.

We do not even use the lower half of it, except for the mechanical room. I need to set a reminder to run water in the bathroom drains down there.

Yes, us boomers are supposed to move out of our nice, well-kept homes, that WE repaired, updated, so some idjit who doesn’t know how to mow a lawn or swing a hammer can move in? Yet houses in ‘less desirable’ neighborhoods, the ones like my husband and I were willing to live when first married, the neighborhood like my daughter and her husband moved into, neighborhoods we helped stabilize by bringing up ‘the worst house on the block’ and by getting annual block parties going and getting to know our neighbors- those neighborhoods get regarded with distate by many first-time home buyers.

Busy, LOL.

In 15-20 years, when Boomers are dying at record rates, and there is so much housing available as a result, and prices start dropping as a result, you won't see all the younger generations complaining about it then.

My mother-in-law moved to CA when I married her daughter. She was trying to start a new life.