Boomers Could Cause a Silver Tsunami. Is It a Crisis or an Opportunity?

Mad about the price of eggs? How about the dearth of new homes, skyrocketing cost of gold, global warming, the fiscal deficit, prescription drug access, student loan debt, mortgage rates, the decline in (or perhaps the persistence of!) public union rolls, that promotion you didn’t get at work or the soulless corporate hegemony of America’s downtowns?You could try to parse the interlocking, complicated sociopolitical factors that have convinced many Americans that the economy is in poor straits, and that their lives will be less fruitful than their forefathers’.Or you could blame the baby boomers.How it’s pronounced/ˈsil-vər (t)su̇-ˈnä-mē/It’s increasingly convenient — and not without some merit — to pin much of the credit or blame for the economy on the generation born in the roughly two decades after World War II.

This is somewhat a matter of mathematics: An estimated 73 million boomers, ages 60 to 78, live in the United States, making them roughly one-quarter of the population.Their departures from the work force will amount to a “silver tsunami,” in the words of financial analysts and economic researchers, that will upend life, work and retirement.An uptick in use of the barometrically inflected term nods to what some see as an unstoppable demographic disaster caused by the confluence of a wave of retirees and relative dearth of young people.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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