Book Review: A Generation of Sociopaths by Bruce Gibney

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by Bruce Cannon Gibney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A Generation of Sociopaths by Bruce Gibney aims to show "how America was hijacked by the Boomers, a generation whose reckless self-indulgence degraded the foundations of American prosperity." and "acting without empathy, prudence, or respect for facts--acting, in other words, as sociopaths--the Boomers turned American dynamism into stagnation, inequality, and bipartisan fiasco."

The primary premise within this book is that "as a generation, the Boomers present as distinctly sociopathic, displaying antisocial tendencies to a greater extent than their parents and their children." And it certainly is a bold premise, promising to provoke enough controversy to propel sales. It does not work as serious methodology, no matter how seriously Gibney tries to sell or it how honestly serious most of Gibney's economic and social policy diagnoses are. That is a shame. The seriousness of the discussion in the later chapters is overshadowed by the ridiculousness of the starting premise.





Contrary to what a cursory google search might suggest, diagnosing sociopathy is a more complicated matter than Gibney presents, after all sociopath is itself a colloquial term. Diagnosis is something better left to expert opinion, something which Gibney's background in venture capital and Silicon Valley ties do not grant him. Making such a diagnosis on a statistically large population isn't something people serious about psychology or sociology or even public policy do.

It is not until the afterword that Gibney admits that Boomers aren't actual sociopaths. It's a contrivance he has invented to make Boomers a mythical and political Other to make common enemy and inspire younger people to unite and fix the problems he's spent a book diagnosing. As much as Gibney positions himself as the serious adult in the room ready to diagnose the super serious problems facing the country, his own methodology is not of the kind a serious analysis would use. It's a detriment to his policy discussion, proposals and advocacy.

The initial chapters attempt to explain why Boomers are sociopaths (even though Gibney eventually admits it is a contrivance). These chapters are full of sloppy pop-psychology. Gibney discusses Dr. Spock and permissive parenting, the rise of television and bottle feeding. The whole exercise is sloppy and gives the easy impression Gibney is out of his element here. And of course it doesn't really even matter much when it isn't sincere.

Perhaps if we are to grant the premise of this generation of sociopaths as a contrivance or a metaphor to explore antisocial decisions and policy preferences of a large, temporally related statistical population we would find a lot of Gibney's policy discussion interesting.

There is an interesting chapter on Boomers and the Vietnam War, for example. Gibney makes a striking argument about broad support of then young Boomers for the war itself, even while they tried to evade the draft.

The bulk of the book is about entitlement spending, specifically social security and medicare. Social security in particular becomes Gibney's secondary target. He hammers his point home about it's looming financial shortfalls. So much so, in fact, that the tone of the main chapter on entitlements is highly discordant with the prescription he eventually recommends. You'd think he wanted poor seniors out on the streets, but he just recommends raising age eligibility and broadly raising taxes in the present.

There are other chapters on education and anti-empiricist culture, but Gibney is less in his element here. He clearly has no expertise for fixing the education system as a whole and as far as deriding anti-intellectualism, he seems ignorant of the force's near constant historical presence in American thought.

To sum up: A Generation of Sociopaths is a highly contrived work, with a premise that you could take as a useful metaphor, even though the author takes it seriously until the end. It's exactly as smug in tone as you expect from a venture capitalist with Silicon Valley ties talking about entitlement spending to be. It diagnosis serious problems, sometimes with good policy prescriptions. But it is hard to take seriously with an unserious premise.

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