One for Rick Chasey, and the generational divide... (plus a bonus Brexit reference)
https://www.theguardian.com/inequal...all-pies-john-lanchester-truth-generation-gap
" 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."
"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."
"
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."
