Sunday Times Magazine


 The baby-boomers‘ culture of hedonistic consumerism has left their offspring
with the crumbs from their table. And 65% of them say their children‘s lives
will be worse than their own. But are they bothered, asks Bryan Appleyard
Elisabeth a 51-year-old financial analyst has banned her four children from
using the sentence "I‘ll put it on my CV." A child of the 1960s, a baby boomer,
her youth was one of freedom and fun. Now she watches in dismay as her children
fret anxiously about their futures.

 "My generation," says Sally, her 20-year-old student daughter, "is faced with
a huge amount of pressure to plan a career early on in life. Many of my friends
at university are simply getting a degree as a stepping stone to work in the
City."

 Sally asked her mother what she should do for her summer holidays that would
look good on her CV. "I flipped," says Elisabeth. The brightly coloured 1960s
of her youth had given way to the grim noughties of her children‘s.

 Elisabeth is not alone. The boomer generation is suddenly waking up to the
terrible truth that their legacy to their children is a nastier, tougher and
more anxious world than the one they knew. And the young are waking up to the
fact that it has happened thanks to the unthinking greed of their parents.
Battle lines are visible in the sand; an inter-generational war is brewing.

 "When I speak to my parents," says Daniel, Elisabeth‘s 21-year-old son, a PhD
student, "I hear stories of how they campaigned against war, government, for
freedom of speech, etc. No one my age seems to believe that what they do will
have any impact on how the world is run."

 Money offers them no hope of salvation. Pensions can‘t be trusted and property
prices have put houses beyond the reach of the young.

 "I was lucky," says Maureen Ellis, a 55-year-old mother of three and a manager
at a transport consultancy, "because I worked in a merchant bank and was able
to buy a two-bedroom house in South Wimbledon. That house today would cost
Pounds 350-400K if one of my children wanted to buy that house they would need
to be earning Pounds 80-100K. Even a one-bedroom flat is way beyond their
means."

 As a result, their children live at home. And pay rent. "I‘m paying off
someone else‘s mortgage when I could be saving for my own," says Holly, their
26-year-old daughter.

 The Ellises (Maureen‘s husband, John, 57, is a joiner) were mis-sold pensions
in the 1980s, but, like many of their contemporaries, have come to think of
their home as their pension fund, a safety net denied to their children. "We‘ve
always regarded our house as our pension," says Maureen, "which means the
booming housing market is great for us but not for the children. We‘ve already
decided we will have to help them out when they‘re nearer to being in a
position to buy somewhere. As we don‘t have lots of savings, we‘ll need to take
equity from the house. We‘re very lucky that even when things got really bad
financially when the children were small, we managed to pay the mortgage. I
know people who had to sell their houses to pay off debts."

 "I haven‘t even thought about a pension yet," says Patrick, her 25-year-old
son who has gone into his father‘s business. "I need to get somewhere to live
first."

 The ageing boomers fear even more for their children as their own mortality
looms. Maureen has contracted diabetes. "It‘s funny getting to middle age and
losing what you‘d never valued previously. I was hardly ever ill, and overnight
I became this sick person. I try not to let it get me down as I don‘t want to
be defined by my poor health, but I often get very tired and worried about how
things will work out for them all."

 Her husband, John, blames his own generation for utterly failing to equip
their children. "It‘s always those who‘ve had a privilege that wish, in their
twisted sense of egalitarianism, to seek to deny others, and this is
particularly relevant to post-baby-boomer education for the majority. I feel
our generation benefited from an education system that was the envy of the
world and which taught us the "tools of the trade" for life. Peace, love and
happiness, equality for all, rich/poor, male/female liberalism of the post
1960s baby boomers, has robbed our children‘s generation of an education that
would have equipped them to stand on their own two feet."

 But for the youngest Ellis child, Jack, 19, higher education is desirable
primarily as a way on to the property ladder. "If I go to university, I‘ll take
a great life experience away with me and a chance of getting a better job, in
turn allowing me to save for a house a lot quicker and easier." These thoughts,
these anxieties, these dramas, these obsessions are being played out across
Britain and the developed world. Dinner-party conversations may start with the
banality of the "property ladder", but soon spread to wider issues of guilt and
responsibility. The baby boom the generational bulge that followed the second
world war created demographic cohorts that were very different from, even
remote from, their predecessors.

 "We were all so much more detached from our parents," says Maureen."Our
parents in general," says John, "did not help with homework or take much
interest in our education as they generally believed the schools were doing a
good job, or they themselves hadn‘t been educated to the same standard we were."

 The boomers are not detached. They fret and fuss over their ambitions for
their children, as if unaware that they are simultaneously bleeding them dry.
The big, destructive points about boomers are that there are too many of them
and they simply haven‘t the good manners to die. The rise in birth rates that
ran from the late 1940s to the early 60s, was followed by an equally sharp fall
as boomers either put off having children or had fewer. This means that our
demographics have become an upturned pyramid with ageing boomers squatting on
top of the much sparser population of their children. Meanwhile, the boomer
death shortage is becoming critical. The massive increase in longevity in the
20th century was expected to level off in the 1970s, but it didn‘t. Life
expectancies have continued to rise. It means the boomer bulge will continue
well into the future with elderly boomers continuing to exert political power
over the young.

 They‘re good at this. As the West boomed in the 1950s and 60s and government
created vast programmes of state welfare and free education, boomers enjoyed
spectacular pensions, free university places and ever more generous health
provisions. Rising property prices underpinned the very characteristic boomer
sense that the future would look after itself. Their parents, who had seen
depression, war, austerity and endless sacrifice, murmured a few protests. But,
in their hearts, they shrugged. The happy, timeless present of their children
was exactly what they had fought, suffered and died for.

 But now all the boomer chickens have come home to roost. The house-price
explosion that kept their dreams afloat has inflicted a double burden on their
children. First, they can‘t get on the housing ladder and, second, it has left
them with a dangerously unbalanced economy. A report from the National
Institute of Economic and Social Research (NESR) suggests that the boomers‘
boom means that the real national debt is, in fact, 130% of GDP, not the 40%
claimed by Gordon Brown. And Martin Weale of the NIESR also estimates that the
boom amounts to a transfer of assets from the young to the old of Pounds 1.3
trillion since 1987. Weale writes: "Working through the chain, the capital
gains of the house-owners are transfers from first-time buyers. The political
appeal of this situation is easy to grasp. The burden of rising house prices
falls on current and future first-time buyers."

 Understanding this is crucial, because it casts serious doubt on the common
boomer habit of using their homes as their pension fund. If they simply held on
to their houses and passed them on to their children, its cash value would be
much less important. What would matter is they had passed on a place to live.
But, if they consume the value of the house in the form of a pension, then they
deny their children both the cash value hence the staggeringly high figure of
Pounds 1.3 trillion and the home, thus burdening them with the need to get on
the housing ladder as quickly as possible. Boomers are thus leaving their
children in a society catastrophically in thrall to the idiot God of property
values. No less than 21% of the average household‘s income goes on mortgages;
in 1996 it was 11%.

 Pensions, meanwhile, have collapsed. Boomers now retiring with their final
salary schemes intact will seem fabulously affluent to their children when they
retire. Workers will now retire on less than half their salary: on average they
will receive little more than the minimum wage. An under-40 "Generation X-er"
on the average wage of Pounds 447 a week can expect Pounds 223 in retirement.

 Again, the full implications of this need to be understood. Lower pensions,
combined with lower savings in general, mean that boomer children are heading
for very impoverished retirements. This will produce intense political pressure
over the next few decades for government to intervene by raising state
pensions. So boomer irresponsibility is creating a huge liability for the next
generations.

 Even welfare generosity has backfired. Higher education for the masses, for
example, now means tuition fees leading to debt a further barrier to getting
into the homeowner club.

 "Everyone has a bloody degree," says Daniel. "To differentiate yourself and
get a job requires further education, which costs time and money, with the
outcome that you ironically end up working for some lucky git who went into
work straight after university and is less qualified than you but has more work
experience."

 Boomer children are anxious and trapped in a future that stubbornly declines
to look after itself. At the personal level, there are all the problems defined
by Elisabeth and Maureen and their families and, at the global level, there is
the threat of environmental disaster, the apparent restarting of the cold war
gWww Mortgagereductionmortage Tag Political Satire Mortgage Reduction Mortage 
 Because we‘re worth it
 n p q Future Mortgage Reduction Mortage
wWww Mortgagereductionmortage Tag Political Satire Mortgage Reduction Mortage 
 Because we‘re worth it
 r d d Mortgage Reduction Mortage z Mortgage z Reduction Mortgage Reduction Mortage