Baby boomers

I have just listened to a radio programme called 'Baby Boomers on Trial'. It was mostly smug self-justificatory propaganda on behalf of the Baby Boomers, suggesting that they haven't been so selfish after all. So I'll address some of the arguments they presented.
When it comes to the housing boom, partly this is to do with all of them wanting housing, where once people apparently accepted renting. So they suddenly demanded it, houses were built, builders made a profit and new owners experienced positive equity as the demand stayed high after the change in culture. It was a one-off conversion of countryside into more monetary value, combined with population growth. That makes them a lucky generation, and one might suggest that this wealth could be shared.
The argument that house prices are now too high for new owners partly because of the intermediate generation between the Baby Boomers and the new one doesn't spoil the fact that whereas wealth was created for these previous generations, it's still in their hands. New generations can't access new houses because they're owned already and there are strict planning restrictions keeping what remains of Britain's countryside safe. So it was a one-off wealth grab for two generations, including the Baby Boomers. What was lost was countryside.
The solution offered in the programme is to allow others to do as they did: relax the planning restrictions. However, justifying injustice by allowing others to do the same is not a good argument. When it comes to sacrificing the future for current wealth, it's the same argument the Baby Boomers apply to environmental degradation and national debt.

From housing, the programme moved on to inheritance, explaining that despite David Willett's assertions, it looks like wealth is being passed from generation to generation: that people can inherit wealth from their parents, allowing them to get on the property ladder and sharing the wealth of the Baby Boomers. There was the decency to acknowledge that life spans are increasing even faster than predicted, and that Baby Boomers do seem to be finding ever more ways to fritter away that inheritance. However, I think that it's a more fundamental point that if society has a high 'entry threshold' for a prosperous life, the fact that this threshold can be passed by inheritance doesn't make a high threshold a decent or acceptable thing. Inheritance might be an indicator of more wealth mobility than if there were no inheritance at all, but it's appalling for social mobility.
If you must inherit wealth from your parents to have a hope of accelerating yourself into wealth, then only those with rich, caring parents will get anywhere. That is not a good thing.
Similarly, the fact that grandparents are caring for their children and grandchildren does not change the problem that this care is necessary, and that the grandparents' generation created it. Social mobility is highest, I think, when people are able to stand alone and cope by themselves. Society should be aiming to help every man be an island (except for his dependence on society), not ensuring that everyone needs friends, family and rich parents.
Good family bonds are, I have no doubt, a rich and wonderful thing, and that Baby Boomers are keeping them strong is very worthy of them, but it's not enough. Society should not rely on these things, and a process that has taken society from one in which a person can fend for himself to one in which support is necessary is a bad process.

The programme even brought up the argument that old people retiring and drawing pensions is a good thing, because it frees up their jobs for the new generation. If jobs were a finite resource, it might be a good argument. But since both the old and new generations should be working, it holds no weight at all. Jobs can be created, and should be. I don't know how long they searched for young people suggesting that old people should retire, but it's a stupid and entirely flawed argument, and to trot these people out as justification for the excessive pensions burden is not a real response to the sensible arguments being made. Pensions were introduced when people lived a year beyond the retirement age (on average). People now live 20 years beyond it. It's no wonder that this great pyramid scheme is looking unsavoury. Adjustment of the retirement age is vital to prevent this giant injustice from burdening the coming generations.

Finally, of course, we get to the spurious and specious arguments about quality of life. Let me summarise them: 'since they're going to have better lives anyway, we can't have done anything wrong'.
It's the same argument that would justify a thief stealing from a rich man, a drug addict burgling a house or a soldier deserting during the race to Berlin. The rich man will have a better life despite the thief. The home-owner will probably still be happier and wealthier than the addict, and the war will be won nonetheless.
However, those things are irrelevant to whether it's right or wrong to do the actions I've mentioned.
Living standards have risen each generation (probably with an exception or two) for hundreds of years. With each technology that's invented, more possibilities arise for how to spend one's free time, or how to fend off the mishaps of life. This is a normal process, and the fact that the newest generation will have better lives (in this respect) than the Baby Boomers does not justify the reckless squandering of the environmental and financial future. This is in addition to the consideration that GDP growth is hardly a useful measure of anything except environmental destruction. The Baby Boomers should probably be paying even more for raising GDP so high.

The march of technology is separate from a generation's duty to pay for itself; it is not collateral for the pile of debt and pensions obligations that the Baby Boomers have left the future. When they were enjoying the boom times, they voted for more spending, and now the recession has made the country borrow hugely, building debt that should have been paid off in the boom.

As with the housing boom, this programme tries to present it as perfectly natural that instead of leaving none of one generation's debt for the next, the one-off change of rules is fine and decent. The generations before them kept (or at least believed that it was right to keep) their debts as their own, and left technological progress as a legacy that they had enjoyed and others could enjoy.
The Baby Boomers built new houses and enjoyed a housing boom, unlike the previous generation or the subsequent ones. This was a one-off shift from restraint, protecting the countryside, that benefitted one generation, and now that the boomers have enjoyed this one-off use of the country's potential, they are justifying the new generation's housing problems by looking back at previous ones.
Previous generations tried to leave a good financial system; the boomers are leaving a mess and a lot of debt, and are now justifying it by suggesting that new generations can leave debt to their children, by pointing to the economic growth that they achieved and from which they hugely benefitted, and to the technology that has been created in this time.
The shift from all previous generations' attitude that economic growth and technological progress are things to enjoy and pass on, to the boomer's suggestion that they are things to enjoy, and take payment from the future for, in exchange for having produced them, benefits only one generation; the one that successfully gets given progress for free and yet does not give it for free. Curiously enough, it is these people who are justifying it. If they really think that technological, financial and social progress is good collateral for debt, then they owe so much to the generations before them (especially the generation immediately preceding them, that fought in two wars!) that they should probably give away all their wealth at once.

They didn't get on to denying climate change, as a justification for burning all the fossil fuels, or to addressing other environmental problems, like over-fishing or intensive agriculture. It wouldn't justify it, even then, since the utility future generations might be able to get out of fossil fuels is enormous, given that we anticipate continuing technological progress. Therefore the use of fossil fuels for immediate, quantifiable benefit must be weighed against the vast benefits that the future might get.

I suppose that the radio programme could have been alright, if only it had been billed as the feel-good programming it was, not as an episode in the objective and factual 'analysis' series.