Baby boomer guilt is in the air.

I've just finished reading The Pinch by David Willetts, the Conservative MP and minister for higher education in the coalition government. It's a thoughtful analysis of how the demographic wave of the 1945-60 baby boom has fundamentally affected the economy and the financial arrangements in UK society. I wholeheartedly agree with the main point. “The central argument in the book is that we are not attaching sufficient value to the claims of future generations,” Willetts writes (p266). The blurb sums it up neatly:

Willetts argues that if our political, economic and cultural leaders do
not begin to discharge their obligations to the future, the young people
of today will be taxed more, work longer hours for less money, have
lower social mobility and live in a degraded environment in order to pay
for their parents’ quality of life.

He's sceptical though about whether greedy boomers will care enough to do anything about their legacy. Yet he doesn't have a list of specific recommendations – although, as one would expect for a Conservative politician, he places much weight on the role of the family, and the mutual obligations between different generations within it.

One of the most fascinating chapters is the first, which traces back some of the specifics of Anglo-Saxon society, including small family sizes and greater mobility than in many other countries, to laws of heredity dating back to the middle ages. Willetts cites the French demographer Emmanuel Todd, whose After the Empire I greatly admired. Todd is one of the few scholars to explore long-lasting demographic characteristics of different countries, such as the north-south gradient in birth rates in Europe – higher the further north and west one travels, contrary to what one's expectations of the Catholic Mediterranean might have led one to expect.

Willetts also has an interesting section on the size of different generations. Conventional wisdom always used to be that it was better to be a member of a small generation as there would be less competition for resources. Until I read about the phenomenon of large generations being lucky in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, the only other person I knew to have explored in any way the benefits of being part of a boom was Harvard economist Michael Kremer (whose 1993 paper on why large populations are good for growth I describe in The Soulful Science). I think the evidence is clear – and Willetts sets it out – that the economy as a whole does better during the prime of a large generation, whose members also hold the most political sway.

The Pinch also looks at the impact of the ageing baby boom on the housing market, savings, education and the job market. It sets out the issues very clearly, and draws on its author's fount of knowledge and research about all kinds of relevant science and social science. I'd recommend it highly as a survey of the problem, but was surprised that a politician didn't offer more by way of solutions. Although having said that, it actually makes a refreshing change and perhaps speaks of Willetts' openness to ideas now he's in office.

Anyway, no sooner had I finished the book than Will Hutton popped up in today's Observer with a long feature about the iniquities of the selfish baby boomers and the bill they're leaving younger generations. (It seems to have been prompted by his 60th birthday, a good age for reflection.)

And inter-generational inequity is in a different way a big theme of my forthcoming The Economics of Enough, out early in 2011. As I noted, it's in the air.