Supply-Side Nation.(World Affairs; THE MONEY CULTURE)

Byline: Daniel Gross

The post-boomer career path--at nearly every level of the income ladder--is more like a maze than a straight line.

Regardless of the outcome of the U.S. presidential primaries, itas clear that a post-boomer politics is beginning to take shape. By the same token, itas clear that a post-boomer economyaand economicsamay be doing so as well. Generalization is the great professional privilege (and pitfall) of every columnist. But itas not too much of a stretch to note that those of us under a certain age (this writer was ushered onto the world stage in 1967) operate with a set of baseline assumptions about how the world works, about work, trade, globalization and economic relations, that differs sharp-ly from the operating manual of our boomer forebears.

After all, the earth-shattering changes that forged our world were simply part of the landscape in which we learned to walk. History didnat end in 1990, as Francis Fukuyama argued. But for all intents and purposes, economic history did. The long-raging battle of the 20th century between the forces of market capitalism and government control essentially ended in those exhilarating days in the fall of 1989 when everything we learned in college about political economy crumbled along with the Berlin wall.

Since those peaceful revolutions, the global economy has been in the throes of a continuous revolution that has turned what used to be a collection of largely independent systems into a single, massive, integrated one. And so we travel the globe and work for more foreign-owned companies and read about the exploits of oligarchs and get better cell-phone reception in Mombasa than in Milwaukee. The falling of trade barriers and the integration of billions of humans into a single system has created enormous economic benefits. For post-boomers, recessions are like bell-bottom jeansaa relic of the 1970s. Since 1992, the United States has suffered a single, shallow recession. The flip side, and the fundamental dichotomy, has been microeconomic turbulence amid macroeconomic stability.

Itas common to hear boomer politicians marvel at the fact that the typical worker will change jobs seven times before the age of 35. For post-boomers, the response is: duh! aFor a lot of the boomers, the sense of having a job for life was a default bedrock assumption about the kind of world theyad have, and when it didnat pan out, they felt affronted and cheated,a says Walter Russell Mead, senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations. aThe new generation starts out with that as a baseline.a Along with that goes assumptions about benefitsa401(k)s, not pensions; health insurance, maybe. My colleagues in graduate school didnat expect to enter into tenure-track positions ...