Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

A promising argument spoilt by bad history and more stretching than Mr Fantastic This book mixes two arguments, one of them reasonable, interesting, and plausible, and the other one tendentious, insulting, and crude. The first argument is this: the unusual generational power of the Baby Boomers has given them undue weight in American society, leading to policies that have favored Boomers as they aged, from the rewriting of tax codes to the defensiveness around entitlements for the elderly today. Boomers were born into an unusually prosperous era and squandered some of its potential through selfish politics. The second argument - and, unfortunately, the one most of the book is devoted to - is this: the Boomers are an unusually selfish, indeed, sociopathic generation whose every action, from marriage to politics, reeks of self-interest. Why is this second argument bullshit? Well, for starters, the central conceit that Gibney hangs the book on - that Boomers are 'sociopathic' - completely misinterprets the scientific literature on sociopathy. Sociopathy is a defined disorder in a very small part of the population, not something you can smear tens of millions of people with. What I suspect started as a metaphor becomes a thesis that Gibney tries to defend by flinging every bit of mud he can at the Boomers - sometimes on frankly bizarre moral and ethical grounds. Thus we learn that breaking the law is always wrong, and so the Boomers' love of weed and other illegal drugs shows their sociopathy. This argument, of course, makes the Americans who were adults between 1920 and 1933 the most sociopathic generation of all - thanks to a massively flouted Prohibition. Boomers are also sociopaths because the Catholic ones don't follow every part of Church doctrine but instead challenge it - which is strange, because it seems fairly obvious there might have been rather cogent reasons for American Catholics to challenge their church, like, say, the massive child abuse. (Let's note here that the exposure and challenging of institutional child abuse, from churches to schools, was largely led by the Boomer generation.) . It's striking that a book so keen to accuse others of sociopathy seems to have so little empathy. As for the grasp of prior American history - well, it's ... um ... shaky at best. Apparently America before the Boomers was rational and loved Science, until they came along with their Feelings. Thus, of course, the rise of the Know-Everything Party, the Scopes We-Love-Darwin Party, and the cool, calculated rationalism of racial science. (Seriously, the idea that the Boomers were the first American generation to value their own feelings above 'reason' is absurd nonsense; 19th century American politics is full of rank sentimentality, curdled self-interest - chiefly racial - and appeal to raw emotion.) For a man who likes to talk about things being 'rational,' Gibney seems pretty shaky on the idea that correlation doesn't equal causation. Every failing of the last 40 years, from Vietnam to Watergate to the War on Drugs (even though drugs are for SOCIOPATHS because BREAKING THE LAW IS ALWAYS WRONG), is blamed on the Boomers - whose responsibility (and even who counts as a Boomer) seems to stretch whenever needed. The Boomers are blamed for America's failure to reach the levels of growth of 1945-1970 - even though that same historical pattern is repeated across modernizing societies. (See Marc Levinson's "An Extraordinary Time" for a far more sober and informed take on this). The crime rise that peaked in the mid-90s is blamed on the Boomers, even though the overwhelming majority of crimes are committed by 18-30 year olds, suggesting a very different historical cohort. It would, of course, be grossly unfair to suggest that Silicon Valley is filled with a generation of mildly autistic men who have been fooled by the unusual luck of their success into thinking that they posses an objective and rational view of the world*. But by God, this book would be a decent piece of evidence for the case.