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our generation benefited from an education system that was the envy of the
world and which taught us the "tools of the trade" for life. Peace, love and
happiness, equality for all, rich/poor, male/female liberalism of the post
1960s baby boomers, has robbed our children‘s generation of an education that
would have equipped them to stand on their own two feet."
But for the youngest Ellis child, Jack, 19, higher education is desirable
primarily as a way on to the property ladder. "If I go to university, I‘ll take
a great life experience away with me and a chance of getting a better job, in
turn allowing me to save for a house a lot quicker and easier." These thoughts,
these anxieties, these dramas, these obsessions are being played out across
Britain and the developed world. Dinner-party conversations may start with the
banality of the "property ladder", but soon spread to wider issues of guilt and
responsibility. The baby boom the generational bulge that followed the second
world war created demographic cohorts that were very different from, even
remote from, their predecessors.
"We were all so much more detached from our parents," says Maureen."Our
parents in general," says John, "did not help with homework or take much
interest in our education as they generally believed the schools were doing a
good job, or they themselves hadn‘t been educated to the same standard we were."
The boomers are not detached. They fret and fuss over their ambitions for
their children, as if unaware that they are simultaneously bleeding them dry.
The big, destructive points about boomers are that there are too many of them
and they simply haven‘t the good manners to die. The rise in birth rates that
ran from the late 1940s to the early 60s, was followed by an equally sharp fall
as boomers either put off having children or had fewer. This means that our
demographics have become an upturned pyramid with ageing boomers squatting on
top of the much sparser population of their children. Meanwhile, the boomer
death shortage is becoming critical. The massive increase in longevity in the
20th century was expected to level off in the 1970s, but it didn‘t. Life
expectancies have continued to rise. It means the boomer bulge will continue
well into the future with elderly boomers continuing to exert political power
over the young.
They‘re good at this. As the West boomed in the 1950s and 60s and government
created vast programmes of state welfare and free education, boomers enjoyed
spectacular pensions, free university places and ever more generous health
provisions. Rising property prices underpinned the very characteristic boomer
sense that the future would look after itself. Their parents, who had seen
depression, war, austerity and endless sacrifice, murmured a few protests. But,
in their hearts, they shrugged. The happy, timeless present of their children
was exactly what they had fought, suffered and died for.
But now all the boomer chickens have come home to roost. The house-price
explosion that kept their dreams afloat has inflicted a double burden on their
children. First, they can‘t get on the housing ladder and, second, it has left
them with a dangerously unbalanced economy. A report from the National
Institute of Economic and Social Research (NESR) suggests that the boomers‘
boom means that the real national debt is, in fact, 130% of GDP, not the 40%
claimed by Gordon Brown. And Martin Weale of the NIESR also estimates that the
boom amounts to a transfer of assets from the young to the old of Pounds 1.3
trillion since 1987. Weale writes: "Working through the chain, the capital
gains of the house-owners are transfers from first-time buyers. The political
appeal of this situation is easy to grasp. The burden of rising house prices
falls on current and future first-time buyers."
Understanding this is crucial, because it casts serious doubt on the common
boomer habit of using their homes as their pension fund. If they simply held on
to their houses and passed them on to their children, its cash value would be
much less important. What would matter is they had passed on a place to live.
But, if they consume the value of the house in the form of a pension, then they
deny their children both the cash value hence the staggeringly high figure of
Pounds 1.3 trillion and the home, thus burdening them with the need to get on
the housing ladder as quickly as possible. Boomers are thus leaving their
children in a society catastrophically in thrall to the idiot God of property
values. No less than 21% of the average household‘s income goes on mortgages;
in 1996 it was 11%.
Pensions, meanwhile, have collapsed. Boomers now retiring with their final
salary schemes intact will seem fabulously affluent to their children when they
retire. Workers will now retire on less than half their salary: on average they
will receive little more than the minimum wage. An under-40 "Generation X-er"
on the average wage of Pounds 447 a week can expect Pounds 223 in retirement.
Again, the full implications of this need to be understood. Lower pensions,
combined with lower savings in general, mean that boomer children are heading
for very impoverished retirements. This will produce intense political pressure
over the next few decades for government to intervene by raising state
pensions. So boomer irresponsibility is creating a huge liability for the next
generations.
Even welfare generosity has backfired. Higher education for the masses, for
example, now means tuition fees leading to debt a further barrier to getting
into the homeowner club.
"Everyone has a bloody degree," says Daniel. "To differentiate yourself and
get a job requires further education, which costs time and money, with the
outcome that you ironically end up working for some lucky git who went into
work straight after university and is less qualified than you but has more work
experience."
Boomer children are anxious and trapped in a future that stubbornly declines
to look after itself. At the personal level, there are all the problems defined
by Elisabeth and Maureen and their families and, at the global level, there is
the threat of environmental disaster, the apparent restarting of the cold war
with Russia, the confrontation with terrorism and uncertainties about food,
fuel, water and the pressures of globalisation and mass migration. So now is
the time for the boomers to ask themselves a very awkward question: have they
wrecked the joint with their freedom and fun and left their impoverished,
anxious children to make what they can of the wasteland that remains?
Economists, sociologists, philosophers, environmentalists and politicians are
deep in debate about this. How we value the future, what we are prepared to
sacrifice for our children, is one of the most intriguing and urgent debates of
our time. But what are we prepared to do now?
"We have had a period of gradual incremental change following the shocks of
the world wars in the first half of the century," says Avner Offer, professor
of economic history at Oxford, "but now new shocks are in sight climate change,
ageing, energy depletion, globalisation, immigration, runaway technology and
maybe nuclear war. These cannot be dealt with by the means of changing prices,
which is the current economic orthodoxy. I think we know what to do but we
don‘t have the willpower to do it."
This is unlikely to remain a merely academic debate for long. At the global
level, the environment is raising questions about how much we are prepared to
sacrifice in the present to protect the future. At the personal level, young
people are protesting about the political power and greed of the boomers. In
Germany Dr Jorg Tremmel, 35, runs The Foundation for the Rights of Future
Generations (FRFG).
"Because of the labour market in Germany," he says, "the present young is
known as Generation Internship because they can‘t get paid jobs. In 1970 a 30
year-old was earning 15% less than a 50-year-old. Now the gap is 40%."
Precisely the same income gap between young and old has opened up in France
over the same period. Unemployment among the young has soared with a quarter of
all graduates without a job. In the recent presidential election campaigns,
both candidates were falling over themselves to soothe the anxieties of
increasingly disaffected youth Sarkozy with interest-free loans and training
allowance, Royal with more housing and guaranteed jobs. Meanwhile, savings
ratios among the French young have collapsed. A group Impulsion Concorde has
been founded to give young people a say in their future. One of their slogans,
significantly, is, "We will not pay your debt". As in Britain, young people are
forced to stay at home with their parents 45% of Italian 30-to 34-year olds are
still at home as property prices keep them out of the housing market and ageing
boomers fail to die and pass on their wealth.
The FRFG is campaigning to change the constitution of Germany to make it
mandatory to consider the rights of future generations. This was tried by
Chirac in France, but Tremmel says he just set up a committee of old
professors. In Israel there is a Commission for Future Generations designed to
take "a comprehensive view of the legislative picture with regard to any
potential negative effect on the needs and rights of future generations
together with the means to prevent such legislation from taking place". And, as
our own David Willetts, shadow secretary of state for education and skills, is
fond of pointing out, the Iroquois, an American-Indian tribe, has, as a part of
their Great Law, the idea of Seven Generation Sustainability. Every decision
has to be taken in the light of its effects on the next seven generations. At
the moment the FRFG is a small operation and Tremmel says there is not enough
activity elsewhere. But he is sure the idea will spread as the young realise
how much they have been expropriated by the old.
This, as Tremmel says, is a confrontation that is only just beginning. We are
used to class wars, but are facing an inter-generational battle. Realising
their predicament, the young will want to fight the expropriations of the old.
Avner Offer welcomes this. He sees it as a way in which the political market
can offset the baleful effects of the economic market. In the end, he points
out, the old can‘t go on stealing from the young for ever. "How can the old
seize everything? The young will rebel... They‘ll simply go on strike."
This will mean the boomers will have to be deprived of some home comforts.
There are any number of ways of doing this. Gordon Brown‘s 1997 raid on the
pension funds might just be the beginning. One obvious way would be a massive
liberalisation of the housing market by allowing new building on an
unprecedented scale. This would slay the idiot god by driving down house prices
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