Are boomers really selfish greedy sh*ts? + Silicon Valley's trope to humanise AI + Lucky Jim's Iran moment

Hi

My clients are all brilliant thinkers, and when I work with them, we’re always trying to sharpen their ideas so they land with key audiences.

In this edition, I look at three case studies in the news that highlight sharpening techniques – the villain-victim-hero frame, anthropomorphism, and kairos time – that bring ideas to life and make them much more effective at building authority and influence.

Ben

Villains and Victims: Are boomers really greedy sh*ts?

I had a coffee with a friend recently, and he surprised me on two fronts.

“I’m a baby boomer,” he said.

I had always assumed, like me, he was Gen-X. (He looks 45ish.)

But then he surprised me again when he launched into a rant about his own generation.

Boomers were “greedy”, he said, they had “f-ed the country for young people” and “we deserve everything we get”, including higher taxes on their fat assets.

My friend is a highly rational economist, and I was surprised at his vehemence.

But I shouldn’t have been.

Because this is now the dominant all-pervasive narrative: that greedy boomers have rigged the economy and tax system at the expense of younger generations.

We’re now facing terrible ‘intergenerational inequality’.

All sorts of activists – and of course Treasurer Jim Chalmers – are using ‘intergenerational inequity’ to promote various ‘reforms’ and tax grabs.

There is, of course, some truth to intergenerational inequality.

House prices are disgustingly unaffordable for young people; our top marginal tax rates punish ambition and hard work; research shows young people are divided, anxious and feeling helpless. And there is no doubt that boomers have benefited from surging asset prices.

But to blame all our economic woes on boomers is, as some describe it, a lazy myth.

This universal tale of woe is much more nuanced. Consider just a few things:

· Intra-generational inequality is just as important – Some 25% of Australians over 50 are living in poverty, as are 27% of Australians aged over 75.

· Meanwhile, while some boomers are struggling, many young Australians are doing extremely well.

· Much of boomers’ wealth is due to simple compounding. (To have a comfortable retirement, a 30-year-old earning $90k needs to have saved in their super today just $9900. They are rich in time.)

· Similarly, the value of young Australians’ human capital – their future earnings – is enormous yet never mentioned as part of their balance sheets.

· The greedy boomer narrative ignores other causes of surging inflation and unaffordable housing, most notably mass immigration.

· Many older Australians experience homelessness and age discrimination in employment.

· Boomers, rather than greedily blowing their kids' inheritance, will transfer $3.5 trillion of wealth (as high as $5.4 trillion) to younger generations in the next 20 years.

3 powerful frames

But that nuance won’t matter because the ‘intergenerational’, ‘greedy boomer’ narrative is so powerful.

It is powerful because it is based on several extremely effective framing techniques:

1. Villain-victim-hero frame

This frame neatly casts an issue into three groups:

· The Villains – In this case, greedy baby boomers.

· Victims – Struggling young Australians suffering from inequality.

· Heroes – Whatever reform or tax grab that will ‘save’ young Aussies from boomer greed.

It’s almost impossible to argue against this framing. If you oppose ‘heroic’ tax reform, or defend boomers, you’re clearly on the side of ‘villains’.

In our therapeutic/psychological age, which places such a big emphasis on victimhood, this is a particularly egregious offense.

(Some, including former Liberal MP Jason Falinksi, are attempting to reframe the tax reform debate with another villain: government spending. The Centre for Independent Studies’ Parnell Palme McGuinness argues that the Government should move away from victimhood and frame tax reform as giving young Australians greater personal control and agency.)

But the villain-victim-hero frame is powerful because it also implicitly incorporates other frames.

2. The rigged/broken system frame

Inherent in the villain-victim-hero frame is that the current system is broken or rigged.

The narrative is that Australia’s economy and tax system used to work (when those lucky boomers were young, what with their free uni and all), but young Aussies are suffering because the system is now broken.

Similarly, the system should be fair, but it isn’t – young Australians can’t get ahead because it is rigged against them.

Therefore, we need to fix the system to make it fairer.

Who, apart from a cold, uncaring person, could argue against that?

3. Moral framing

And of course, there is a moral dimension.

The modern consciousness is obsessed with equality … and therefore it is obsessed with (real or perceived) inequality.

‘Intergenerational inequality’ taps into this deeply held belief.

In the moral frame, if you oppose tax reform, you oppose equality itself, which in this day and age is a serious moral failing.

Divisive and static

In the context of economic and tax reform, there are pros and cons to this framing.

The intergenerational frame is so strong that it is likely to trigger some form of tax reform, like lowering the capital gains tax (CGT) discount.

But there are several downsides.

Because it singles out one group as villains, the villain-victim-hero frame is, by definition, divisive. (That, of course, benefits Labor because it pits younger left-leaning generations against more conservative older Australians.)

The greedy boomer frame also provides cover for Jim Chalmers to keep spending like a drunken sailor and fund it through poorly planned ad hoc tax grabs and financial repression.

(We’ve already seen many ad-hoc handouts to help young people, including free TAFE, student debt reduction and the first-home-buyers deposit scheme.)

The biggest problem is that this simplistic frame does not lend itself to articulating and selling a comprehensive framework for a system-wide tax and economic reform package.

Dividing Australians into villains, victims and heroes is a static, zero-sum game of winners and losers. The real goal is comprehensive reforms that get all parts of Australia moving and dynamic and growing so we can expand the whole pie and benefit all Australians.

But as they say, whoever sets the frame usually wins the debate. And Jim Chalmers is so far winning with his intergenerational victims frame.

***

Human? Silicon Valley’s trope to spruik AI

The power of the villain frame discussed above is that it personalises what could be an abstract issue.

The AI and tech industry is another party that’s stealthily persuading us by dressing up inanimate objects in the cloak of humanity.

In this case, Silicon Valley is using the old trick of anthropomorphism – giving human traits to objects – to sell AI. It’s one of the most powerful persuasive tropes available.

It starts with the name itself. As psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist points out, we shouldn’t be calling AI artificial intelligence, we should be calling it artificial information processing.

That’s not only more accurate but also demystifies the whole thing.

But much of AI has been made more vivid and compelling by bringing it to life.

AI is machine “learning” that can “hallucinate”; we use “ChatGPT” and interact with “chatbots” (there’s nothing more human and harmless than chatting); we “train” models; and now AI is “colonising” our minds.

Anthropic’s CEO even recently said a datacentre could soon have the intelligence of 50 million brilliant people, or as he neatly put it, a “country of geniuses/PhDs”.

I admit to a mild fear gripping me when I first heard that. What a powerful image. When you hear it, you think – how on earth could we humans compete against that? We’re f**ked!

But of course, a datacentre, although no doubt having impressive computing power, is nothing like a country, let alone a genius. It is a big, soulless warehouse with cables, racks of servers and chips.

And anyway, as respected computer scientist and tech journalist Cal Newport notes, the Anthropic CEO’s claim that AI has reached such dizzying power isn’t quite true, and most AI reporting is a beat-up.

***

Kairos time: Chalmers exploits his Iran luck

“Never waste a good crisis” is the mantra of seasoned political strategists. It means that smart operators can exploit chaos and uncertainty to drive change.

And Jim Chalmers certainly isn’t wasting the oil crisis caused by the US-Israel war on Iran.

Firstly, the crisis has given him cover on inflation and interest rates. Rather than blaming his rampant, out-of-control spending, and Labor’s productivity-killing policies, Chalmers is now blaming the Iran conflagration for accelerating inflation and the RBA’s decision to hike rates.

But he’s also using the Iran crisis to press for more ‘reforms’ (tax grabs!), such as lowering the capital gains tax (CGT) discount, in his upcoming budget.

Chalmers is arguing the Iran conflict makes ‘reform’ more, not less, urgent.

This highlights an important issue: our arguments are more effective when we deliver them at an opportune moment. (The Greeks called it kairos time, the ‘exact or critical time’ to argue.)

In a fast-paced world, it’s tempting to just shovel out information. But it’s often more effective to be patient and wait for a powerful trend or news event to come along, to which we can hitch our ideas and arguments.