impressed........................

 

For practical purposes, the financial memory should be assumed to last, at a maximum, no more than 20 years.  This is normally the time it takes for the recollection of one disaster to be erased and for some variant of the previous dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind.  It is also the time generally required for a new generation to cone on the scene, impressed, as had been its predecessors, with its own financial genius.

-John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria

Interesting................

 

..............Us boomers are now outnumbered by our kids.  Back story is here.

Gotta love........................

 

.........................................The Bee:

One generation......................

 

...................................after another:

Or perhaps, “beneficiaries of the accumulated hard work of those who came before them in a way that leaves them able to spend their days solving new problems.”

transmissions..............

 

     We have said that a great civilization does not entirely die—non omnis moritur.  Some precious achievements have survived all the vicissitudes of  rising and falling states: the making of fire and light, of the wheel and other basic tools; language, writing art, and song; agriculture, the family, and parental care; social organization, morality, and charity; and the use of teaching to transmit the lore of the family and race.  These are the elements of civilization, and they have been tenaciously maintained through the perilous passage from one civilization to the next.  They are the connective tissue of human history.

     If education is the transmission of civilization, we are unquestionably progressing.  Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

In praise (sort of) of........................

 

...............................us baby boomers:

It’s also true that Father Time is undefeated.

Hey.....what?....wait a minute...........

 

I’ve seen all sorts of estimates for the coming wealth transfer from baby boomers to the next generation.  $16 trillion. $84 trillion. $124 trillion. . . .

Here’s the one part of this conversation we’re not really touching on — The Great Wealth Transfer requires that the baby boomer generation dies off. Death and taxes, right?

-Ben Carlson, from here

Context matters...........................

 

When you’re younger, you are swept up in the drama of your own life: leaving home, making a career, creating a family. As you age, unless you are either a world-historical genius or self-deluded, you begin to realize that whatever you accomplished doesn’t actually amount to all that much. The meaning of your life has more to do with your place in a direct chain—proceeding, obviously, from you down to your children and grandchildren, but also, less obviously, from you upward through generations of people you may not have known or even have heard of. They’re your context. You need to know about them in order to understand your own life fully.

-Nicholas Lemann, as culled from this story

the generational circle of life...........................

 

...........this Boomer is rooting for the Millennials.

How did they build................

.............................all those cathedrals?

 Despite the acceleration of technological progress, indeed because of it, one of the few scarcities in the future will be a long attention span. There will be no shortage of amazing materials that can do magic, astounding sources of energy to make anything happen, and great reserves of knowledge and know-how to accomplish our dreams. But the gating factor for actually completing those big dreams may be the distractions that any society feels over the centuries. What your parents and grandparents found important you may find silly, or even embarrassing.

-Kevin Kelly, from here

Classic......................

 ................................Christopher Hitchens:

Tell me which decade you love, or hate, and I'll tell you who and what you are.
-1990

I must say that I've always found the generational emphasis on the way that my youth was covered to be very annoying.  There were a lot of other people born in April, 1949, and I just don't feel like I have anything in common with most of them.
-2001

responsibilities...................

      It's more important to be good ancestors than dutiful descendants.  Too many people spend their lives being custodians of the past instead of stewards of the future.  We worry about making our parents proud when we should be focused on making our children proud.  The responsibility of each generation is not to please our predecessors—it's to improve conditions for our successors.

-Adam Grant,  Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

We must be part of the same...............

 ............................................generation.

hey, that's my generation................

 . . . the liberationist ethic of what is sometimes called "the 1968 generation" perhaps paved the way for our increasing dependence.  We're primed to respond to any invocation of the aesthetics of individuality.  The rhetoric of freedom pleases our ears.  The simulacrum of independent thought and action that goes by the name of "creativity" trips easily off the tongues of spokespeople for the corporate counterculture, and if we're not paying attention such usage might influence our career plans.  The term invokes our powerful tendency to narcissism, and in doing so greases the skids into work that is not what we had hoped.

-Matthew B. Crawford,  Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

On the importance of .........................

...................................change and risk:

 Increasing health and falling fertility has been making our world older, and I think this is a big reason for the many ways it has been decaying and declining. Old secure folks are less willing to allow risky innovations or changes. They care more about keeping what they have than about maybe getting much more. Problem is, without sufficient change even what we used to have will slowly fade away.

for a war of their own....................

 Things move slowly, for a long time, and then very fast. Europe has long become a museum to its own past; which is why we love it. We walk the cobblestone streets; dine in the ancient taverns under empty castles drinking wine that was made when life was lived then, raging all around and not in the rear view mirror. When people looked to the future, not the past for their ideas of the west.

-Joel D. Hirst, from here

Good question.................

 .........................Given decline or growth, who doesn’t choose growth for their kids and grandkids?

demand...........................

 War has long been a rite of passage, with new generations feeling a need to prove their courage and earn the right to supplant their elders.  Clay's generation grew up on the hero tales of the American Revolution—the stories of boldness in the political arena and valor on the battlefield.  Often implicit in the stories, as in the stories of every generation of elders, was skepticism that the younger generation had what it took to match the elders' feats.  Where was the George Washington of the younger set, the general who could smite the British as Washington had done at Yorktown?  Where were the Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, whose words inspired a nation and brought down an empire?  Where were the James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the framers of a new government for a new nation?

     Henry Clay had heard the stories and felt the skepticism.  He was burdened with no conspicuous personal sense of inferiority, but he reckoned that an ambitious young politician could do worse than demand that the country complete the work commenced by the generation of the founders.

-H. W. Brands,  Heirs of the Founders:  The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster

Money...........................

. . .  I think independence is one of the only ways money can make you happier. The trick is realizing that the only way to maintain independence is if your appetite for stuff – including status – can be satiated. The goalpost has to stop moving; the expectations have to remain in check. Otherwise money has a tendency to be a liability masquerading as an asset, controlling you more than you use it to live a better life.

-Morgan Housel, from this post on the quick disappearance of the once unfathomable wealth of Cornelius Vanderbilt 

About history.......................

I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton