The Boomers Did It! They Caused the Panic of 2008. They Got Old!

As I start my day at 5:00 PM EST, the worldwide economic panic spreads into its second day. The Martin Luther King holiday spared the U.S. yesterday, but at this early hour it appears that the panic will hit us today like some awful flu bug with a vengeance.

This happening should not be much of a surprise. It was entirely predictable – decades ago!

A long time age, someone came up with a clever metaphor to describe the impact of boomers on the marketplace. They called boomers “the pig in the python.” As the pig moved along the python’s gut, its body ballooned. Companies experienced outsized sales growth in one product line after another.

The pig entered the python’s mouth in 1945 when the first wave of boomers to see their first daylight in 1946 – the first birthing year of boomers by most accounts – were in the bellies of their expectant moms who started buying stuff for their darlings to come.

Teething rings, tiny toys and toddler togs all went through fabulous increases in sales. Delivery of Tonka trucks, Barbies, GI Joes and countless other artifacts of child’s play into the hands of millions of the burgeoning young boomer population brought new names into the marketplace for children’s needs and desires to become giant, sprawling enterprises: Toys R Us, Mattel, Hasbro and dozens more.

Then boomers began enter the teen years of roiling hormones, affectation, exaggeration and swooning drama. The pig in the python writhed to a new beat churned up by Elvis, Chubby, the Beatles and an army of other sweaty, pumping, thrashing musicians. It was called rock. Out of the largest adolescent mass in U.S. history came names like The Gap, The Limited, Urban Outfitters and Nike.

For upwards of 60 years, America’s economic growth was pushed upward more by the boomer pig in the python than by any other force.

But alas! All good things on this earth must end. Behind the pig in the python is an empty alimentary canal. That was the metaphor I coined nearly two decades ago to stand for a coming event for which there is no precedent: population implosion.

In 1798 the father of demographics, Thomas Malthus, said that great tides of famine would soon sweep over the whole of Europe as a result of overpopulation induced by the industrial revolution that was just getting a full head of steam.

Malthus’s nightmare of population explosion has been replaced by the economic nightmare of population implosion. Age cohorts following the pig in the python are smaller. It’s happening all across the world among the one-billion population family of developed nations. It was an event that was predictable in the mid-1960s, when the Pill brought on a precipitous drop in the fertility rate, and predictable with even greater certainty in the mid 1970s in the aftermath of Roe vs. Wade which drove births below levels sufficient to replace the expiring population.

But who cared what economic calamity the future held? The grasshopper mentality was pervasive during the times of plenty that rode silhouetted spine of the boomer pig in the python. 

A few posts ago I promised to provide some thoughts about how to survive and thrive in the challenging days ahead. I’m later getting to fulfill that promise than I intended. My plate has never been fuller, but I will get on with my commitment you, my readers, in the next few days. I just thought that given the historic upheavals taking place in world markets in this first moth of 2008, I’d share some thoughts on the situation.

So take a deep breath, tighten your belt and get ready for a helluva ride this year in whatever your markets are.

 

Comments

[David Lively]

To me the most interesting sentence in this entire post is the title. While you use many cute phrases in this post-fact is being a memeber of the boomer crowd you continue to focus on yourselves.

It is my sincere hope generations to come can figure out, they are not in control of every outcome here on Earth.

You boomers are becoming a sad group of people to watch age and die.

Why you might ask?

Because you are no longer relevant to future culture yet as a group your over inflated egos will not allow you to see this truth.

The lights on your generation will officially become dark at the end of 2008. Enjoy your Dennis and Dylan commercials while you can. Because in just eleven months the final faint heartbeat of your generation will quiet once and for all.

The boomers will spend the rest of their lives watching a generation of young people living out the happtalk horseshit vision the boomers failed to complete.
For you it was all about you! For them it really will be about the greater good.

[David Wolfe]

DAvid,

First, I'm not a boomer. I'm a member of the so-called "Silent Generation" -- so named because it allegedly did nothing of distinction. Hasn't even produced a president. However, the "Silents" fomented the cultural revolution of the 1960s and '70s through the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Nader, Bobby Kennedy, Gloria Steinhem, Stokley Carmichael ... I could go on and on. You cannot find one boomer name in any list of thought leaders of those times. But, as you correctly observed, everybody (including boomers, themselves) gives boomers the lion's share of credit for putting America on a new cultural course.The participated, for sure, and they provided a lot of the energy that enabled the "Silents" to lead the charge toward systemic change in the zeitgeist of the '60s and '70s.

All that being said, in view of your words, "Because in just eleven months the final faint heartbeat of your generation will quiet once and for all" I must respond.

Aging boomers are accounting for a huge shift in how age is being viewed and cognitively processed in our culture. They are far from being ready to go "quiet once and for all."

Most of the people in the professional circles I travel in are aging boomers. I hear and see first hand every day how they are not only transforming how we look at aging, but how their widely awakened interest in their legacy is driving changes on a global scale such as is being done by boomers Al Gore, Bill Gates, Bono, among many, many others I could cite. They are far from going quiet.

Thanks for your comment.

DBW

[Shama Hyder]

I am loving this series because in addition to being a marketer-I am lover of history. I suppose that's a good combination.

Anticipating your "how-to deal with the times" series!