Student Union
OK Boomer and Peter Pan, It's Wealth Not Age
On one side of the TikTok split screen was a middle-aged man, ranting that “millennials and Generation Z have the Peter Pan syndrome.”
“They don’t ever want to grow up,” he said, referring to the fictional character who fights adulthood.
On the other side of the split screen, a teenager contemplated the rant before silently holding up a notepad, and the phrase “OK Boomer” was born.
Since 2019, the hashtag #okboomer has been used 3.7 billion times on TikTok and has sparked debate between Boomers — born 1946 to 1964 — and Zoomers — born in the 1990s to the 2010s, and who use the video conferencing app Zoom liberally — about whether age and generation are to blame for society’s ills.
Some observers think the debate is fundamentally illogical. “Generations are pretty bogus. The labels we use to casually slice up society — boomer, millennial, Gen X, Gen Z — are a nearly useless way of thinking about politics, culture or business in America,” wrote journalist Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times in 2019.
“The very idea that tens of millions of people across different classes and races and geographies might hold similar views on a range of subjects just because they happened to be born during the same 20-year span of American history — the whole thing sounds a bit too much like astrology, doesn’t it?” he asked.
Niraj Dawar, professor emeritus of marketing at the Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, agrees, calling generational labels “obsolete.” Labels are helpful if the generation shares characteristics, behaviors or events — like a world war, he said.
Even then, generational labels cannot always be used to predict how people within the same age range will behave, or buy, or vote, he said.
“You have two groups of millennials, one that plays golf and the other doesn't,” he messaged to VOA Student Union. “It's very likely that their golf playing is a better predictor of their other consumption than being a millennial.”
“And, in fact, being a golfer may mean their consumption is more similar to other golfers [say boomer golfers] than non-golf playing millennials,” he texted.
Generations used to be counted as every 20 to 30 years because people generally followed the same life milestones: getting married near age 20, having children soon after, buying a house at 30, having grandchildren at 50, and retiring around age 65.
This enabled economists and academics to organize societies in a way that most people could relate. But in the 1970s, those milestones started to change, with marriage and childbearing happening later in the U.S. Throw globalization into the mix and grouping people for demographic, academic or marketing purposes became less useful.
And some, like lawmakers Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez, see increasing wealth disparity rather than pages on a calendar as the root of conflict between younger and older.
In the 1980s, U.S. tax laws under President Ronald Reagan made it easier for people with money to keep it and shifted collective public burdens, like higher education and infrastructure, to individuals through fees and tolls.
And gaps in income and wealth between richer and poorer households continue to widen, states the Pew Research Center in Washington.
Upper-income families were the only ones able to expand their wealth from 2001 to 2016, adding 33% at the median, Pew reported in January 2020. At the same time, middle-income families saw their median net worth shrink by 20%. Lower-income families experienced a loss of 45%.
“Increasingly, life after age 65 in the U.S. is a ‘two worlds of aging’ experience, with the well-off older adults doing better and the less well-off part of the income distribution doing worse,” said Stephen Crystal, professor in the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research and the School of Social Work at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
“Based on the economic experience… of people who are now in their middle years and will make up the future elderly, we can expect this problem to become worse, not better,” he said.
Senator Warren, a Baby Boomer, and Senator Sanders, who is actually older than the Boomers, say the inequities have to be addressed to enable all Americans to live with fewer financial burdens.
On March 1, Warren proposed the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act to reduce wealth inequality. The act would impose a 3% annual tax on the net worth of households and trusts exceeding $1 billion, and 2% annual wealth tax on households and trusts ranging from $50 million to $1 billion. Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-Seattle) and Representative Brendan Boyle (D-Pennsylvania) were co-sponsors.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has also strongly supported the idea of a wealth tax. In 2019, she called for raising the tax rate to 70% on incomes over $10 million.
Ralph Sonenshine, assistant professor of economics at American University in Washington, says the global reach of today’s tech companies has a greater impact on the economy than age.
“Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were a generation before Mark Zuckerberg,” Sonenshine noted. “Microsoft for example went public in 1987 versus 2012 for Facebook. The growth of e-commerce and overall globalization enabled some companies and individuals to build fantastic amounts of wealth.”
So while the proposed wealth tax would fall on Boomers in their 70s and 80s, it would also impact people like Chad Richison, 49, who founded Paycom; Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder, 57; Tesla founder Elon Musk, 49; Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, 47; and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 37, all on lists of the world’s wealthiest people.
Higher taxes on wealth and income have opponents too, like Donald Boudreaux, chairman of the economics department at George Mason University in Virginia. He says tax cuts in the 1980s spurred wealth through hard work.
“I am actually a fan of Reagan’s tax cuts because one consequence of the tax cuts is that it allows productive people to keep more of what they produce,” said Boudreaux. “And so by encouraging people to work harder and longer, and by encouraging people to invest more, that increases wealth for everybody.”
Still, some see the country’s economic problems through a generational prism.
“I’m not a fan of baby boomers,” wrote Sean Illing in an online conversation with fellow millennial Helen Andrews, a senior editor at The American Conservative, who penned “Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster.”
Andrews argued that millennials are imitating Boomers.
“At a certain point you have to stop blaming your parents and also stop blaming yourself, and just say, where do we go from here?” Andrews suggested. And her answer?
“If there’s hope, it lies with Gen X,” she said, referring to the age group sandwiched between Boomers and millennials, born 1965 to 1980. “So even though Gen X is aging now, we still have not yet seen all that they can do.”
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College athletes push for voter turnout while largely avoiding controversy as election nears
Lily Meskers faced an unexpected choice in the lead-up to the first major election she can vote in.
The 19-year-old University of Montana sprinter was among college athletes in the state who received an inquiry from Montana Together asking if she was interested in a name, image and likeness deal to support Sen. Jon Tester, a three-term Democrat seeking re-election. The group, which is not affiliated with the Tester campaign, offered from $400 to $2,400 to athletes willing to produce video endorsements.
Meskers, who is from Colorado but registered to vote in Montana, decided against the deal because she disagrees with Tester's votes on legislation involving transgender athletes in sports.
"I was like, OK, I believe that this is a political move to try to gain back some voters that he might have lost," Meskers said. "And me being a female student-athlete myself, I was not going to give my endorsement to someone who I felt didn't have the same support for me."
Professional athletes such as LeBron James, Colin Kaepernick and Stephen Curry have taken high-profile stances on hot-button topics and political campaigns in recent years, but college athletes are far less outspoken — even if money is available, according to experts in the NIL field. Being outwardly political can reflect on their school or endanger potential endorsement deals from brands that don't want controversy. It can certainly establish a public image for an athlete — for better or for worse — or lead to tensions with teammates and coaches who might not feel the same way.
There are examples of political activism by college athletes: A Texas Tech kicker revealed his support for former President Donald Trump on a shirt under his uniform at a game last week and a handful of Nebraska athletes a few days ago teamed up in a campaign ad against an abortion measure on the Tuesday's ballot.
Still, such steps are considered rare.
"It can be viewed as risky and there may be people telling them just don't even take that chance because they haven't made it yet," said Lauren Walsh, who started a sports branding agency 15 years ago. She said there is often too much to lose for themselves, their handlers and in some cases, their families.
"And these individuals still have to figure out what they're going to do with the rest of their lives, even those that do end up getting drafted," she added.
College coaches are not always as reticent. Auburn men's basketball coach Bruce Pearl has used social media to make it clear he does not support Kamala Harris, Trump's Democratic opponent in next week's presidential election. Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy once caused a stir with a star player for wearing a shirt promoting a far-right news outlet.
Blake Lawrence, co-founder of the NIL platform Opendorse, noted that this is the first presidential election in the NIL era, which began in July 2021. He said athletes are flocking to opportunities to help increase voter turnout in the 18-to-24 age demographic, adding that one of his company's partners has had 86 athletes post social media messages encouraging turnout through the first half of the week.
He said athletes are shying away from endorsing specific candidates or causes that are considered partisan.
"Student-athletes are, for the most part, still developing their confidence in endorsing any type of product or service," he said. "So if they are hesitant to put their weight behind supporting a local restaurant or an e-commerce product, then they are certainly going to be hesitant to use their social channels in a political way."
Giving athletes a voice
Many college athletes have opted to focus on drumming up turnout in a non-partisan manner or simply using their platforms to take stands that are not directly political in nature. Some of those efforts can be found in battleground states.
A progressive group called NextGen America said it had signed players in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Virginia to encourage voting among young people. Another organization, The Team, said it prepped 27 college athletes in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona and Michigan to lead volunteer voter participation opportunities for students. The organization also said it got more than 625 coaches to sign a nonpartisan pledge to get their athletes registered to vote.
The Team's executive director is Joe Kennedy, a former coach who coordinated championship visits and other sporting events at the White House during President Barack Obama's administration. In early October, it hosted a Zoom event during which panelists such as NCAA President Charlie Baker and WNBA players Nneka Ogwumike and Natasha Cloud gave college athletes advice about using their platforms on campus.
In its early days, The Team seized upon momentum from the record turnout seen in the 2020 election. The NCAA that year said Division I athletes could have Election Day off from practice and play to vote. Lisa Kay Solomon, founder of the All Vote No Play campaign, said even if the athletes don't immediately take stands on controversial issues, it's important for them to learn how.
"It is a lot to ask our young people to feel capable and confident on skills they've never had a chance to practice," Solomon said. "We have to model what it means to practice taking risks, practice standing up for yourself, practice pausing to think about what are the values that you care about — not what social media is feeding into your brain, but what do you care about and how do you express that? And how do you do it in a way that honors the kind of future that you want to be a part of?"
Shut up and play?
Two years ago, Tennessee-Martin quarterback Dresser Winn said he would support a candidate in a local district attorney general race in what experts said was very likely the first political NIL deal by a college athlete.
There have been very few since.
The public criticism and fallout for athletes who speak out on politics or social issue can be sharp. Kaepernick, the Super Bowl-winning quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, hasn't played in an NFL game since January 2017, not long after he began kneeling during the national anthem at games.
Meskers, the Montana sprinter, said political endorsements through NIL deals could create problems for athletes and their schools.
"I just think that NIL is going to run into a lot of trouble and a lot of struggles if they continue to let athletes do political endorsements," she said. "I just think it's messy. But I stand by NIL as a whole. I think it's really hard as a student athlete to create a financial income and support yourself."
Walsh said it's easier for wealthy and veteran stars like James and Ogwumike to take stands. James, the Los Angeles Lakers star, started More Than a Vote — an organization with a mission to "educate, energize and protect Black voters" — in 2020. He has passed the leadership to Ogwumike, who just finished her 13th year in the WNBA and also is the president of the Women's National Basketball Players Association. More than a Vote is focused on women's rights and reproductive freedom this year.
"They have very established brands," Walsh said. "They know who they are and they know what their political stance is. They know that they have a really strong following that -- there's always going to be haters, but they're also always going to have that strong following of people who listen to everything that they have to say."
Andra Gillespie, an associate professor at Emory University who teaches African American politics, also said it is rare that a college athlete would make a significant impact with a political stand simply because they tend to have a more regional platform than national. Even celebrities like Taylor Swift and Eminem are better at increasing turnout than championing candidates.
"They are certainly very beneficial in helping to drive up turnout among their fans," Gillespie said. "The data is less conclusive about whether or not they're persuasive – are they the ones who are going to persuade you to vote for a particular candidate?"
Athletes as influencers
Still, campaigns know young voters are critical this election cycle, and athletes offer an effective and familiar voice to reach them.
Political and social topics are not often broached, but this week six Nebraska athletes — five softball players and a volleyball player — appeared in an ad paid for by the group Protect Women and Children involving two initiatives about abortion laws on Tuesday's ballot.
The female athletes backed Initiative 434, which would amend the state constitution to prohibit abortions after the first trimester, with exceptions. Star softball player Jordy Bahl said on social media that the athletes were not paid.
A University of Montana spokesperson said two athletes initially agreed to take part in the NIL deal backing Tester. The school said one withdrew and the other declined to be interviewed.
For Meskers, deciding against the offer boiled down to Tester twice voting against proposals to bar federal funds from going to schools that allow transgender athletes to play women's sports, a prominent GOP campaign topic. Tester's campaign said the proposals were amendments to government spending packages, and he didn't want to play a role in derailing them as government shutdowns loomed.
"As a former public school teacher and school board member, Jon Tester believes these decisions should be made at the local level," a Tester spokesperson said. "He has never voted to allow men to compete against women."
Meskers said she believes using influence as college athletes is good and she is in favor of NIL. She just doesn't think the two should mix specifically for supporting candidates.
"I think especially as student athletes, we do have such a big voice and we do have a platform to use," she said. "So I think if you're encouraging people to do their civic duties and get up and go (vote), I think that's a great thing."
