| I don't think this is a generational or age thing strictly speaking. There are several confounding variables or you could say non-orthogonal axes. There's a "human nature" axis that interacts with the money axis. People, no matter the age, tend to take credit for their successes a lot more than their failures. For example if you have a lot of money, you'll overstate the hard work that went into it, and understate all the good luck you had. Meanwhile if you have no money, you'll overstate all the bad luck (including blaming the system, and I'm not saying the system doesn't suck) and understate any faults or foibles of yours. To the extent that this becomes your paradigm, you'll also use it to judge other people. So the richer person (who thinks they got rich through hard work) sees a poor person and assumes they're poor because they didn't work hard. And the poor person (who thinks they're poor because of luck), will see someone rich and assume they got rich through luck. (Hopefully it's obvious this paragraph is less a "truth" than a trend or tendency.) Moving on, there's a political axis that interacts with the money axis. People on the Republican side tend to espouse a belief in self-reliance while the Democratic side talks more about helping each other. (Notice that I say "espouse" and "talk about," cleverly avoiding having to talk about what their policies actually accomplish.) There's a power axis that quite obviously interacts with the money axis - As people become rich they use money to get more power, and as they become powerful they use power to get richer. Finally (and here's where the age correlation comes in), older people tend to be richer because they've had more time to make money. And older people right now I suspect tend to be richer than older people at other times in history, because they reaped the benefits of industrialization and the fossil-fuel boom. |