The pig in the python: Baby Boomers are strangling the economy they built by refusing to move or retire | Fortune

In 1974, a “pig in the python” metaphor described how 76 million Baby Boomers moved through the economy, squeezing what came before and after. When Boomers entered the labor market in the 1970s, competition intensified and wages and opportunity for younger workers did not rebound as expected. Boomer home purchases drove up prices, and Boomer leaders accumulated top roles in business, culture, and civic life, staying in place for years. As Boomers now reach retirement age, their exit threatens worker shortages, while empty-nest Boomers hold family-sized homes needed by millennial parents. Leadership transitions are also strained because institutions built around Boomer indispensability may lack successors, forcing management of decline rather than planned transition.

"When Boomers flooded the labor market in the 1970s, they created a competitive squeeze that never fully released - leaving the generations behind them without the wage rebound economists had predicted. When they bought homes, prices soared. When they took the top jobs in business, culture, and civic life, they held them - and held them, and held them."

"For half a century, the Baby Boom generation has functioned like a slow-moving wave through the American economy - and as the last of them cross into retirement age, the country is discovering just how much of its future they're still holding in place. In the labor market, four decades of Boomer dominance suppressed wages and opportunity for younger workers, and their accelerating exit now threatens a worker shortage businesses are unprepared to absorb."

"In housing, empty-nest Boomers sit on a disproportionate share of the family-sized homes that millennial parents need but cannot find or afford. And in the corner offices, executive suites, and corridors of political power, Boomer leaders have spent years building monuments to their own indispensability rather than successors capable of replacing them - leaving institutions to manage their decline rather than their transition."

"The pig, as the Times once put it, is finally leaving the python. The question is whether anything is ready to take its place. Now, as the last of the Boomers cross into their late 60s and early 70s, the question America is finally being forced to confront is: what did they leave behind? What will the python look like next?"

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