Steve Krause and Matthew Paull: Why Are the Children of the ‘Greatest Generation’ So Selfish?

Steve Krause is the Director of Finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Matthew Paull retired from the CFO position at McDonald's Corporation in early 2008 and now serves on several boards.

In his book The Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw paid homage to the generation that emerged from the Great Depression to fight Hitler and other forms of tyranny. Their efforts were all about sacrifice so that their children could enjoy a better life. They sacrificed on the front lines of battle and back home in the factories that produced what was needed to wage war.

We, on the other hand, are members of the Baby Boom generation (the authors are both 60 years old)—a cohort that is hardly known for its selflessness—and we can’t help but wonder: What, exactly, happened to the children of the “Greatest Generation?” Where is our willingness to sacrifice so that our children can enjoy a life even better than ours?

So how did the Greatest Generation, known for its sacrifices, produce a generation so focused on economic self-interest and so seemingly unwilling to sacrifice for the good of the country? That is a bit of a mystery, but we will put forth two theories.

First, our generation generally avoided military service. As we baby boomers became adults, less than 1 percent of the population served in the military. In WWII, that figure was over 10 percent. Two of the great lessons of military service are one, country before self and two, trust in leadership and authority. With relatively few of us sharing the bonds, lessons, and sacrifices of military service, perhaps there is little widespread experiential counterbalance to each of us pursuing only our self-interest.  

The second theory, on the other hand, goes deeper into our country’s structural economic problems—those that have precipitated the decline of a middle-class majority and the ascent of more powerful, but divergent self-interest groups....