Yesterday’s FT article by Philip Stephens was about the problems facing yoof. Mr Stephens is a bit of doom and gloom merchant but there is some truth in his observations. (Sorry, it is subscription only).
Here are a few extracts from his article:
Britain's baby boom generation is gliding gently towards pampered retirement. The children of post-war prosperity have never had it so good. Alas, the same cannot be said with any certainty of prospects for our children and grandchildren.
During the post war period kids access to education was widening. Society would be ever more mobile. Children would naturally rise above the social class of their parents.
And now? Insecurity and inequality are the modern condition. Globalisation and its associated tumultuous advances in technology have generated huge rewards for the educated, the industrious and the fortunate. The gains, though, are unevenly distributed and obviously so. Economic insecurity is ubiquitous.
The most visible inequalities are horizontal, or intra-generational.
Half of Britain's £6,000bn of financial wealth, he points out, is in housing. Who owns it? The baby boomers. What is more, they bought their property cheaply and then saw their borrowings written off by high inflation. Half of the rest of this wealth lies in funded pension schemes. The beneficiaries? A post-war generation that now intends to exchange the security of jobs for life for over-generous retirement incomes.
Perhaps the ultimate selfishness has been the baby boomers' reluctance to disturb their present enjoyment by having enough children to sustain the population.
Talk to young people and you can sense the resentment. There is, I think, something else. For all that the baby boomers grew up in the shadow of the cold war, they were confident that the world belonged to the west. That has changed. Power is shifting to Asia. Tomorrow, in other words, belongs to someone else in more than one respect. That will be hard. Dick Stroud
Britain's baby boom generation is gliding gently towards pampered retirement. The children of post-war prosperity have never had it so good. Alas, the same cannot be said with any certainty of prospects for our children and grandchildren.
During the post war period kids access to education was widening. Society would be ever more mobile. Children would naturally rise above the social class of their parents.
And now? Insecurity and inequality are the modern condition. Globalisation and its associated tumultuous advances in technology have generated huge rewards for the educated, the industrious and the fortunate. The gains, though, are unevenly distributed and obviously so. Economic insecurity is ubiquitous.
The most visible inequalities are horizontal, or intra-generational.
Half of Britain's £6,000bn of financial wealth, he points out, is in housing. Who owns it? The baby boomers. What is more, they bought their property cheaply and then saw their borrowings written off by high inflation. Half of the rest of this wealth lies in funded pension schemes. The beneficiaries? A post-war generation that now intends to exchange the security of jobs for life for over-generous retirement incomes.
Perhaps the ultimate selfishness has been the baby boomers' reluctance to disturb their present enjoyment by having enough children to sustain the population.
Talk to young people and you can sense the resentment. There is, I think, something else. For all that the baby boomers grew up in the shadow of the cold war, they were confident that the world belonged to the west. That has changed. Power is shifting to Asia. Tomorrow, in other words, belongs to someone else in more than one respect. That will be hard. Dick Stroud
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