The pig in the python: Baby Boomers are strangling the economy they built by refusing to move or retire

In 1974, New York Times humorist Russell Baker identified a “pig in the python” working its way through the economy: the bulge of 76 million Baby Boomers squeezing through America’s economic system, distorting everything they passed through. When Boomers flooded the labor market in the 1970s, they created a competitive squeeze that never fully released — leaving the generations behind them without the wage rebound economists had predicted. When they bought homes, prices soared. When they took the top jobs in business, culture, and civic life, they held them — and held them, and held them. For half a century, the Baby Boom generation has functioned like a slow-moving wave through the American economy — and as the last of them cross into retirement age, the country is discovering just how much of its future they’re still holding in place. In the labor market, four decades of Boomer dominance suppressed wages and opportunity for younger workers, and their accelerating exit now threatens a worker shortage businesses are unprepared to absorb. In housing, empty-nest Boomers sit on a disproportionate share of the family-sized homes that millennial parents need but cannot find or afford. And in the corner offices, executive suites, and corridors of political power, Boomer leaders have spent years building monuments to their own indispensability rather than successors capable of replacing them — leaving institutions to manage their decline rather than their transition. The pig, as the Times once put it, is finally leaving the python. The question is whether anything is ready to take its place. Now, as the last of the Boomers cross into their late 60s and early 70s, the question America is finally being forced to confront is: what did they leave behind? What will the python look like next? The labor market: Two-way squeeze A study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers a rigorous accounting of what the Boomer