Which Boomers?

When the boomers leave, we are told, the labour market will lack three qualities. What will really be missing is not on the list.

I. A text that keeps coming back

On 25 October 2026 the German tech magazine t3n published an article entitled “When the boomers leave: these three qualities will be missing from the labour market”. It is not new. It first appeared in March 2024, ran again in May 2026 as “Bye-bye boomers”, and under the same article number it can be found under at least seven different headlines. That is no reproach to the author. It shows what kind of goods are in demand: texts about generations get read because everyone finds themselves in them, or can be annoyed by the others.

The authority cited is the sociologist Heinz Bude, author of the book “Abschied von den Boomern” (Farewell to the Boomers, Hanser 2024). According to him, three things will be missing: a pragmatic approach to work, composure, and the ability to work in a team.

II. What Bude says and what he does not

The quotations are genuine. They come from a conversation the t3n author Matthias Kreienbrink had with Bude: “The boomers have always experienced being too many.” “Boomers have learned not to take everything so incredibly seriously.” “It is less about the stability of the job than about the stability of one’s own competence.”

One thing, however, is wrong from the outset. The article counts everyone born between 1946 and 1964 as a boomer. That is the American definition. In his book Bude means the cohorts from 1955 onwards. In Germany the baby boom set in later than in the United States, only with the economic miracle of the mid-1950s. Someone born in 1947 is a boomer for t3n, but not for Bude.

The “too many”, on the other hand, is well documented. In 1964, the year with the most births in German post-war history, 1,357,304 children were born. In 2025 there were 654,241, fewer than half as many. Whoever grew up in these cohorts sat in classes of more than thirty children, in overcrowded lecture halls and later in long queues of applicants.

Criticism of Bude’s book is aimed mainly at its method. Stefan Reinecke wrote in the taz that Bude declares his own milieu to be the whole. The sociologist Katja Schmidt, writing for Soziopolis, considered the generalisations barely supported by empirical evidence and asked whether Bude was speaking for his circle of friends or for a generation. Women, working-class children and immigrants hardly appear. Bude himself concedes that “the paths and worlds of East and West are really very far apart”. The t3n article leaves that out too.

III. Three qualities, checked

Pragmatism. The cohorts from 1955 onwards entered the labour market in the early 1980s, in the middle of the first major unemployment in the Federal Republic. In 1983 more than two million people were out of work. Whoever relied on their own competence rather than a secure job at that time did so not out of character, but because the secure job did not exist. In the East, 1990 came on top of that: those in their mid-thirties often lost their job, their workplace and their career path all at once. “We’ll get through somehow” is the sentence of those who got through.

Composure about digitalisation. Bude says the boomers “brought the digital world into being in the first place”. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were indeed both born in 1955. But they were in California. In Germany the same cohorts ran the authorities in which the public health offices were still reporting infection figures by fax in 2020. Composure and backwardness lie close together here.

Teamwork. Whoever sat in a seminar with 150 others, Bude says, learned to combine competition and cooperation. That may be. In 1982, when the first of these cohorts were looking for jobs, the Society for the German Language chose “Ellenbogengesellschaft”, the elbow society, as its word of the year. The same crush teaches both, consideration and elbows. No year of birth tells you which prevails.

IV. Which boomers?

A generational portrait describes what people experienced together. It is silent about what divided them. The daughter of a dentist in Freiburg and the son of a miner in Gelsenkirchen may have sat in equally crowded classrooms. Their lives afterwards had little in common.

This becomes clearest at the end. In “The Swapped Conflict” we showed that around 400 billion euros are inherited in Germany every year, and that half of it goes to the richest ten per cent. The boomers are the first post-war generation to inherit and bequeath on a large scale. At the same time, almost one pensioner in five is at risk of poverty. It is the same generation, but they are two different old ages. Whoever says “the boomers” turns a conflict between rich and poor into one between old and young. The bill is then presented to all the old alike, although it does not fall on them alike.

V. What will really be missing

What will be missing when these cohorts leave is less a set of qualities than hands. Bude himself gives an example in the Freitag: if the boomers’ craft businesses all closed now, the energy-efficient renovation of houses would be at risk. This is not about an attitude, but about roofers, electricians and heating engineers whose businesses no one takes over.

And what is missing is what was not built in the decades of this generation. The KfW municipal panel of 2026 puts the investment backlog of German municipalities at 231.2 billion euros, 68.9 billion of it in schools alone. That is not the guilt of a generation. It is the result of political decisions in which all cohorts entitled to vote took part. But it falls in the decades in which the boomers increasingly set the tone in parliaments, boardrooms and town halls.

In “The Little Apple Tree” we asked who is still planting today. The boomers harvested many trees that their parents had planted during reconstruction: motorways, schools, power stations, the pension system. Which trees they leave behind themselves is not found in any list of three qualities. You can see it in the schools their grandchildren attend.

Further reading: The Swapped Conflict · The Structural Redistribution Between Generations · The Demographic Bomb · Youth Is Our Future · The Little Apple Tree