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https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2026/mar/08/did-baby-boomers-eat-all-pies-john-lanchester-truth-generation-gap>
"Intergenerational relations, or lack of them, is a subject I’ve been thinking
about, on and off, since the financial crisis. I’ve read up on it, too – things
such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ report on intergenerational earnings
mobility, which is wonky but full of fascinating information which needs some
parsing. (Example: “While the educational attainment of ethnic minorities
growing up in families eligible for free school meals is often higher than that
of their white majority peers, their earnings outcomes show no such advantage.”
Why not?) Another good source of data is the Office for Budgetary
Responsibility’s (OBR) report on intergenerational fairness – which,
interestingly, is about the bluntest statement of fiscal unfairness that you
can find. The OBR makes the point that “a current new-born baby would make an
average net discounted contribution to the exchequer of £68,400 over its
life-time, whilst future generations would have to contribute £159,700”. In
plain English, people’s lifetime contribution to the state is going to double.
That number is from 2011, and will definitely have got worse. In 2019, the
House of Lords published a report on “Tackling intergenerational unfairness”,
which doesn’t even bother pretending that the problem doesn’t exist. Mind you,
not everyone agrees. A 2023 report from Imperial College Business School argues
“there is more solidarity between generations than the ‘Millennials versus
Boomers’ narrative would suggest”.
So this is definitely a question you can address through data – though there is
a risk that you can use numbers to cherrypick your way to a conclusion you
already held in advance. The other way of thinking about it is through lived
experience. Not necessarily just your own. I often find myself thinking about
the range of experiences and expectations in my own family, going no further
than one generation back and one generation forward. I’m on the cusp between
boomers and generation X. My children, both in their 20s, are firmly in
generation Z. My parents were born in the 20s, in the west of Ireland and in
South Africa. Between us, it’s a wildly different set of life stories, and
chucking it into the capacious carpet bag labelled “generational differences”
seems to me to be a violent oversimplification.
For one thing, generational divisions aren’t what they were. People my age and
people my parents’ age wore different clothes, listened to different music, ate
different food, lived differently and had totally different attitudes to
questions of gender and sexuality. The defining experience of their youth was
the second world war. The defining experience of ours was the fall of the
Berlin Wall. They had different expectations about material comfort. Neither of
my parents were brought up in houses with running water or electricity. The
equivalent divides between generations we’re experiencing now are much smaller.
We like the same clothes, music and food, and have a similar sense of what to
expect from the basic material amenities of life. The one area where there is a
particular division is around gender identity – and that, I think, is one
reason that debate is particularly heated. It’s not that the two generations
don’t agree about anything. It’s that we agree about pretty much everything
else. Attitudes to minorities, access to opportunities for minorities, and
recognitions of women’s rights, gay rights and ethnic minority rights are
incomparably more progressive than they were in the generations before the
boomers had power. If the boomer rap sheet is long, it needs to acknowledge
that the credit balance has significant entries on the other side."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
