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Can we achieve fairness across generations in an ageing society?
In
the UK we have tended to avoid more intense forms of political
competition for resources by age-group. While groups such as pensioners
have learned to shout louder than they used to for fair treatment,
we've not had the American phenomenon of generations seeing themselves
as sectional interests competing for resources: education dollars
versus pension dollars. Over here, the age lobby themselves are keen to maintain a
sense of "intergenerational solidarity", and older people think about
the well-being of their grandchildren.
However, the theme of
intergenerational justice has been surfacing recently, in the context
of adults today "mortgaging our children's futures" through our
excesses. Escalating consumption first produced huge private debts and
then, when these started to go bad, large public debts to prevent a
financial collapse. Our children will need to pay these back, as well
as to bear the costs of our overconsumption of natural resources and
degradation of the environment. The "boomer" generation that produced
these excesses is further attacked as having won benefits - like free
higher education and generous pension schemes - which were not really
sustainable.
In a presentation to
a conference on this theme organised by the age and equalities bodies,
I argue against seeing these issues in terms of competition between age
cohorts or age groups. The "lucky boomer" idea is deeply flawed and
ahistorical: I show that each cohort has had advantages in some
respects and disadvantages in others. More fundamentally, in creating
sustainable systems of reciprocity across age-groups in the context of
changed demography, it's more helpful to think about how such a
settlement works in everybody's interest across their lifetime, rather
than serving one group or another.
Theme: Ageing