Field Note: The Boomer Economy and Our Expectations

It’s hard not to look back at the post-World War II economy and wonder if it was just an anomaly. For the baby boomer generation, that economy was practically a golden ticket: move out, go to college, get a car, mortgage a house, start a family, all before turning 30. Maybe they couldn’t pay everything off by then, but the interest rates weren’t insane. And somehow, that whole lifestyle could all be done on a single income, sometimes even in a retail job.

Was that the expectation all along? That things would stay like that? Was that supposed to be the baseline for adult life?

Because now, looking at where things are, it’s hard not to feel like our expectations have been warped by something that maybe wasn’t sustainable to begin with. The economy that made all that possible came out of very specific, very dark circumstances. Like, it pretty much required a global war that left most other industrialized nations devastated and reliant on us. The U.S. was the only major economy left standing, so of course things boomed. We had the factories, the labor force, and the world’s demand.

That’s not the situation today. The global playing field has leveled out. There are billions more people on Earth now. And technology, especially automation, is getting better at doing the jobs people used to rely on. So when we talk about building a new version of that “golden era,” it’s hard to imagine how that happens without those same brutal conditions repeating themselves.

And if we can’t recreate that kind of economy, at least not ethically, then what does that mean for the expectations we’ve inherited from that era? Were they ever realistic for us? Or have we been measuring ourselves against a time that was never meant to last?