The only real models we have to base our “normal” on for the post-depression post-WWII, modern postindustrial society are the Greatest and Silent generations. I

The only real models we have to base our “normal” on for the post-depression post-WWII, modern postindustrial society are the Greatest and Silent generations. It’s not like the Boomers broke with long-standing tradition. What they inherited was a world and economy unknown just a couple decades earlier. They probably did fail to move us forward, socially and in terms of long-term large-scale planning and saving (on the scale of nation-states, I mean—welfare fund-building and other things that ought to have happened in the “good times”) but it’s not like there were 200 years of people dealing with a similar situation before them.