The secret ingredient is lead poisoning. The Baby Boomer generation spent over half their lives sniffing leaded gasoline fumes.

They still do. General aviation still uses 100LL aka low lead

While lead pipes were banned in 1986, millions of lead service lines remain in service across the US to this day...

Lead pipes are less of an issue that it would seem, as the pipes quickly develop a layer of calcium salts on the inside, preventing the water from actually coming into contact with the lead.

By all means, they need replaced. But they're nowhere near the contributor that leaded gasoline was. That stuff probably fucked up 6 distinct generations. If you lived in a city, you were inhaling lead constantly.

I guess it's to be expected. Boomers were raised in pure bliss, spent half their lives relatively stress-free. Everything was easy and cheap. When you live an easy life, you get used to being dumb, uninformed and lazy. The same would have probably happened to all zoomers in the same situation.

Note that this is mostly specific to North America, Western Europe, Japan and maybe a few other countries. Pretty much everywhere else boomers aren't all that different from zoomers, save for regular intergenerational differences.

I guess it’s to be expected. Boomers were raised in pure bliss, spent half their lives relatively stress-free. Everything was easy and cheap. When you live an easy life, you get used to being dumb, uninformed and lazy. The same would have probably happened to all zoomers in the same situation.

I'm not a boomer, but this isn't quite a fair characterization. Yes, they had cheap college, affordable cars, housing, lots of upward mobility that most of us would love to have today, but they lived through some shit too. Boomers were in their youth when humanity had its closest brush with global nuclear war when the bombers were in the air flying during the Cuban Missile Crisis. They lived everyday with a really good chance the world was going to end in nuclear war. They were the last generation to see a compulsory military draft and many know high school friends that were drafted and died in Vietnam. We think interest rates are bad these days making borrowing expensive. No shit they were having to get mortgages with a minimum of 18% and 19%:

source

This says nothing about the many racial and sexual discrimination issues that those groups faced making basic life even harder. In Canada it wasn't until 1964 that a woman could open her own bank account without her husband's consent. In the USA, redlining preventing people of color from buying homes in better areas denying them untold billions of dollars of generational wealth from real estate appreciation.

Absolutely give the out-of-touch boomers that are dismissive of the problems young people are facing today the shit boomers deserve. They did so much to harvest the benefits of the last century and leave the bill to the younger generations while simultaneously destroying environment for the later generations to thrive the way they did. Just don't forget that each generation has its problems too and there hasn't been a generation yet that has been entirely carefree.

Lead pipes are less of an issue that it would seem, as the pipes quickly develop a layer of calcium salts on the inside, preventing the water from actually coming into contact with the lead.

This right here.

If people remember the lead in drinking water contamination in Flint Michigan, its because they had lead pipes that were well coated with the protective layers and had no trouble with lead in water. Then the newly elected city manager changed water sources to cut costs against the advice of the water engineers in the city. The other source of water was more acidic and stripped out all that protective coating and suddenly there's huge amounts of lead in the drinking water from the pipes.

Just using the interest rate is an unfair comparison. You have to go get median house prices and median incomes as well to make a proper comparison. Just saying the rate was higher at some point is useless if we don't also compare the prices and incomes because what really matters is affordability. Not saying your whole comment is wrong, just trying to say that this particular part seems to be biased in favor of the Boomers.

Median home price to median household income ratio
This ratio is a key indicator of housing affordability. It measures how many years of the median household's income are needed to purchase the median-priced home.
Period Median Household Income Median Home Price Price-to-Income Ratio
1980 ~$21,000 ~$65,000 ~3.1x
2024 ~$85,000 ~$415,000 ~4.9x
Comparison of mortgage payments
Even with the high interest rates of the 1980s, the lower home values meant a smaller overall loan and a monthly payment that took up a smaller percentage of the median household income.
Here is a side-by-side comparison of a hypothetical mortgage for a median-income household in 1980 and 2024:
Mortgage metric Early 1980s 2024
Median income $22,000 $85,000
Median house price $47,000 $415,000
20% down payment $11,000 (~50% of annual income) $83,000 (~98% of annual income)
Loan amount $36,000 $332,000
Interest rate 13% 7.5%
Monthly payment $397 $2,321
Payment as % of gross income

Just using the interest rate is an unfair comparison. You have to go get median house prices and median incomes as well to make a proper comparison. Just saying the rate was higher at some point is useless if we don’t also compare the prices and incomes because what really matters is affordability. Not saying your whole comment is wrong, just trying to say that this particular part seems to be biased in favor of the Boomers.

I'd written a big post already, and diving into all the details and nuance was too much to put in the initial post. You're right that the interest rate alone isn't a determining factor, but I'd also disagree that its objectively in favor of Boomers, perhaps subjectively though. Another factor to consider is that in the downpayment requirements. Today we talk about the "best practice" of putting 20% down on a home, but that's today. The alternative of putting less-than 20% down and using PMI didn't even exist as a concept until 1971. It grew in popularity later, but in the early days it wasn't common. Further, with higher interest rates it meant that much lower pay down of the principal was occurring in the first few years of the mortgage because of amortization. It was the beginning of the age of moving more frequently for jobs, which meant less equity build up as each house sale cycle robbed them of that benefit of wealth, arguable the most valuable investment asset of the working class.

Median home price to median household income ratio This ratio is a key indicator of housing affordability

I appreciate you doing and sharing that analysis.

I think we both agree that its difficult to do an absolute comparison on the home buying/owning experience between the Boomer era and today's Millennials (or GenZ) simply because so many conditions are different. We didn't talk about Stagflation or unemployment rate in 1982 being 10.8% compared to today's 4.3%. I pointed out the interest rate being higher because most folks approach new information as "all else being equal" conditions. The audience already knew that housing price was less in the Boomer era, additional it was known that income was higher proportionally to living expenses than today's Millennials (or GenZ), what I doubted was common knowledge was the sky high interest rates compared to today. Thats what I was communicating.