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.
double quotation markIf the boomer rap sheet is long, it needs to acknowledge that the credit balance has significant entries on the other side
Another quibble I have about intergenerational comparisons is that they’re not quite comparing like with like. This is a grim time to be in your 20s, no question. The job market is difficult. Local politics are depressing, global politics are terrifying, and it feels almost impossible to find reasons for optimism about pretty much anything. Guess what? It was exactly the same in the early 1980s. When I graduated, there seemed absolutely no prospect at all of getting a job. I don’t mean a job doing something I wanted to do – I mean any job. There were 3.3 million unemployed: 13.4% of the workforce, versus 5.2% today. Mortgages were very difficult to get, and when I did eventually get one, it charged 14%. In terms of the daily texture of life, things were constrained and restricted in ways that seem impossibly distant. Sundays were unbelievably grim: absolutely everything was closed. Pubs, restaurants, shops, museums, galleries, cinemas, you name it. People didn’t look forward to Sunday as a cherished day off, they slightly dreaded it, and the difficulty of getting through Sundays was a big topic.
As for what was going on inside our heads, for one thing we were actively scared of nuclear holocaust. I have friends in CND who now say they regret the emphasis they put on scaring the living shit out of people. The tactic was highly effective. Many of us used to have nightmares about nuclear war. I remember my favourite English teacher, a man who had fought in the second world war and who chose his words carefully, saying, when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, “I think he’s a maniac who’s going to blow us all up.” He was speaking calmly and levelly, and he meant it. And then in other areas of life the differences are so great that they’re easier to blank out than think about. A whole generation of gay men is simply missing. “Only” two of my friends and contemporaries died of Aids. But I know several men who’ve been living with HIV for their entire adult lives. I don’t know anyone in that category who is five or 10 years older. All of them are dead.
Some other intergenerational comparisons are more complicated. Take the question of travel. This was incomparably harder than it is today, for multiple reasons – it was much more expensive, for one thing, and bureaucratic, and it’s almost impossible to put into words how much easier it is now to find out about routes and fares and hotels and transport and schedules and options. You could lose entire days on the phone trying to find out information that today is freely available, from anywhere, in a matter of seconds. (Phones: there’s another thing. We complain about our smartphones today and the brain rot they enable, and rightly so, but the basic ease of communication and contact, and its extraordinary cheapness, is a colossal boon that is very easy to forget.)
double quotation markThere’s more profit in noticing the ways in which we’re different than there is in noticing the ways in which we’re similar
As a result of the complexity and expense, many of us used to rely on hitchhiking as a basic mode of transport. My standard route was from Norwich, where we lived, to London, a trip I hitched dozens of times. I also went hitching around northern Europe in the summer before going to university. (This seemed normal at the time, but if someone gave me a time machine, after I had completed the usual chores of travelling back in time to kill Hitler, etc, I would make a side trip to apologise to my parents for the extraordinary amount of worry this must have caused them.) I spent hours standing by the side of roads promising myself that if I ever learned to drive, and had a car – both things which seemed unlikely, not least because of the cost – I would always pick up any hitcher I saw. But I never do, because there aren’t any. Hitchhiking has completely gone away. The reasons for that are: one, because travel today is much easier; and two, because hitchhiking is unbelievably, madly, recklessly, crazily dangerous.
At least, that’s what you would think. But perhaps it’s more complicated than that. Perhaps hitchhiking was safe but now isn’t because the basic level of trust in society is lower. People used to feel comfortable getting into a stranger’s car, or vice versa, and now don’t – which could mean the disappearance of hitching isn’t a sign of society getting richer, but of it becoming less trustful and more atomised. Another way of looking at this is to point out that today people get in strangers’ cars all the time, but the transaction is mediated through a San Francisco-based company with a market value of $150bn. Does that mean things have improved, or got worse?
There’s one more reason to be sceptical about the generational differences. Part of the increase in talk about generation gaps comes from the increased importance of marketing in our society. Marketers love to divide people into segments and categories. Not just by age and gender and economics and geography and ethnicity, but by an extensive range of lifestyle metrics, too. Anyone who denies this should have a quick look online at Experian’s Mosaic model, where the effort and energy that goes into categorising us could not be clearer. (Turns out we are made up of “18 groups and 68 types”.) It’s not so much divide and rule as divide and market. Or divide in order to market. We should be wary of all forms of discourse that are keen to separate our society, to chop us up and categorise us into convenient little boxes. There’s more profit in noticing the ways in which we’re different than there is in noticing the ways in which we’re similar.
John Lanchester: ‘I think about the range of experiences and expectations in my own family.’ Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
All these caveats and complicating factors aside, it seems to me fair to say that there is an unfair settlement between the generations in the UK. The first and most glaring reason is laid out in that 2011 report from the OBR. The old today are getting much more from the state than the young ever will. There is a rightwing critique of state pension schemes that claims they are a Ponzi scheme. That’s because payments into the system aren’t invested now to be paid out in the future, but immediately disbursed on current spending, much of it to elderly people. Pensioner spending is 48.3% of the welfare budget, excluding disability spending and spending on health, and all those numbers are going to increase as our population ages. The original idea behind national insurance (NI) was that it would be a fund attached to each individual taxpayer, in effect invested to cover the future costs of looking after us in old age. But it doesn’t work like that: the state runs as a “pay as you go” system, in which current taxes (including NI) are swallowed up by current spending. Not only is there nothing left over for the future, the current take is smaller than the current outlay, and the difference is made up by borrowing. Who is going to pay off those debts? The taxpayers of tomorrow. In other words, the young. The system’s future liabilities are vast and unfunded. A central part of the welfare state is the young and youngish paying for the old and oldish. It might be unfair and politically opportunistic to call this a Ponzi scheme, but it’s not exactly the opposite of one. And by the way, it doesn’t mean that pensioners in this country are well off; we have one of the lowest state pensions in Europe, and people who live on it with no other source of income are on the edge of poverty.
double quotation markWith Brexit, older people with secure retirement incomes put their cultural anxieties ahead of future generations’ economic needs
The out-of-control increase in house prices is another big source of inequity between the generations. In 1999, the median house price in England was 4.4 times annual income. By 2024, it was 7.7 times income. That number is even higher in more expensive areas of the country, and in London has hit 12 times income. That makes home ownership in the capital the exclusive preserve of the rich, which in turn widens the gap between London and the rest of the UK. Quantitative easing (QE), the magic trick that the Treasury resorted to in response to the financial crisis of 2008, was a way of printing money without quite admitting that’s what they were doing. The result was lots of money swishing around the system, most of it in the hands of the already rich. When the rich, who are in general older than the young, have money, what do they do with it? They buy assets. What happens to the assets that people are buying? The price goes up. Economist and former trader Gary Stevenson has campaigned loudly on this point, and he’s right: QE has directly increased wealth inequality, in particular property prices. I’ve talked about some of the ways in which it was hard to be young back in the 80s. But when I got my first job in London, earning £5,000 a year for three days a week at a literary magazine, I was able to live in a flatshare in Parsons Green. When I got full-time work, on £8,000 a year, I moved to an unshared rental in Camden. That, and the whole version of life it implied about possibility and openness to opportunity, has been killed by house prices.
At this point in the argument about intergenerational fairness there is another plot twist. Yes, there is intergenerational inequality in property ownership. But one day the boomers will die, and then their children will inherit their wealth, much of it property-based. It’s already begun to happen, and it’s being called “the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth ever”. That Imperial College work I cited earlier, on the “Millennials versus Boomers” narrative, is focused on this question, and does some sums to estimate that the intergenerational transfer will amount to something in the region of £4tn. At that stage, the question of economic disparity between the generations will look different. What will replace it is a huge chasm that is not intergenerational but intragenerational: the gap between people who inherit property wealth from their parents and people who don’t. Friends and colleagues and peer groups, who all think they’re on roughly the same economic level, will suddenly realise that, in fact, they aren’t. Some of them have won the lottery by having parents who bought houses in particular postcodes, with the consequence that their descendants, a few decades later, become suddenly rich. The unprecedented intergenerational transfer will turn into an equally unprecedented jump in intragenerational inequality.
Put those things together, and there is a risk that we have created a society with different versions of the social contract for different generations. David Willetts, head of the Resolution Foundation, wrote a book called The Pinch that was summarised to me (pretty accurately) in six words: “Baby boomers ate all the pies.” That isn’t a full account of every aspect of life and culture in modern British history. But from an economic point of view it is, broadly, true.
There is, unfortunately, more. Brexit, by killing free movement to and from the EU, caused the biggest voluntary loss of rights in British history, and economically was somewhere on the spectrum between a mistake and a disaster. Leave voters in the Brexit referendum skewed heavily towards older people with secure retirement incomes. People in work and the young overwhelmingly voted remain. The upshot is that the old put their cultural anxieties ahead of future generations’ economic needs. The old voted to jeopardise the economic prospects of the young. The generational imbalance in the vote was so grotesque that if the referendum were rerun, and only people who voted last time were allowed to vote again, and they had to duplicate the vote they made in 2016, remain would now win – because leave voters were older, and have therefore died at a faster rate. Have an entirely fresh vote, and the gap would be much bigger. The pollster Peter Kellner has calculated that if the referendum were rerun today, instead of a leave win by 1.3m votes, remain would win by 8m. There’s no historic parallel for the injustice of that. And then we had Covid, which saw the young, who were not significantly at risk, making sacrifices of their own needs for socialisation and education to protect the old. Where are the calls to redress the intergenerational balance? To give something back to the young in return for what they gave the rest of society? Or even, simply, to acknowledge that this is what happened, and say thank you?
But there’s one other factor, the most troubling of all, in the differences between generational prospects. It concerns the climate. Climate change is going to impact the world in some ways that we can predict and that are already becoming apparent, and in many ways that we can’t and aren’t. It could happen slowly or quickly, but the outcome will be that future generations inherit a world that is fundamentally different. It’s not just a different version of the social contract; it’s actually living on a different planet. This is a change that will make many of our current cultural and political preoccupations seem trivial. It may make our current sense of the difference between generations seem trivial also. Our children’s generation may find themselves looking back with nostalgia on a world where the only things they were furious with their parents about concerned house prices.
In 2020, the great American SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson published a novel called The Ministry for the Future, in which a catastrophic heatwave kills so many people that the UN creates a body to represent the interests of future generations. The basic idea is that the people of the future have rights, just as we do. I’m not advocating this as a practical measure for rearranging Whitehall: the last thing the British state needs is additional layers of process. Besides, all ministries are supposed to be ministries for the future. The fact is, though, that much of the time, in this country, they aren’t. Our state, our politics, behaves as if the past and the status quo are more important than the future. But the future is more important than the past. The settlement between generations needs to reflect that truth.
Look What You Made Me Do by John Lanchester is published by Faber on 12 March at £20. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com