If those in their 20s and 30s had a proper stake in our country’s wealth, they may be less inclined to tear it down
Daily Telegraph
I’m all for respecting private property; the privacy part and the property part, which means I entirely agree with the rights of people to get stinking rich, or accrue substantial assets, and so long as they are operating within the law and paying taxes, to do what they like with it.
Even so, I can’t help but think that there are reasons, potentially existentially important ones, for encouraging boomers to give up a decent chunk of their cash to their children.
The facts are these: boomers are rich and the young are relatively poor. The median boomer’s wealth went up by a whopping £112,597 between 2010 and 2020, compared with £6,471 for the median millennial.
Moaning about how unfair this is is pathetic and the war on boomers is often ugly in its assumptions.
But that does not mean they shouldn’t be incentivised to be a bit more, how should I put it, generationally generous.
Put bluntly, millennials (whose elders, yours truly included, are in their early 40s now) are low on assets and boomers are pretty high on them… and also, it seems, very stingy.
The International Longevity Centre found that between 2019 and 2020, just 6 per cent of over-20s surveyed said they had been given anything worth over £500 in the past two years and, as the Centre points out, the older you are, the less likely you are to be given anything from a parent or grandparent (barring anything passed down through inheritance).
So, boomers: open those pockets. Be generous. Not because Britons under 40 account for only 4 per cent of the nation’s wealth, down from 7.5 per cent in 2010. And not because wealth or income “inequality” is somehow a moral sin that justifies the “eat the rich” mentality so many Labour types have (often hypocritically).
No, be generous because poor young people, or at any rate young people who look enviously at the apparent ease of the historic asset-accrual of their elders, are becoming politically and economically dangerous.
They are grabbing hold of noxious unreconstructed ideas about political economy, whose history they seem ignorant of, and they are beginning to vote such ideas in. They are, to use the emotionally sensitive term, suffering from “economic exclusion”: a toxic mixture of high youth unemployment and “wealth inequality”.
Think of ultra-millennial hipster New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who wore a dress to Manhattan’s Met Gala in 2021 emblazoned with “tax the rich”.
She captured a zeitgeist among 30-somethings who seem to think extreme forced income redistribution is an untried and genius idea. Never mind that it would soon kill off things like Deliveroo, luxury scented candles and the vegan ready-meals that they love so much.
Numerous recent reports show younger people swinging not just Leftwards, but towards positions commensurate with deep disillusionment. All too many hold destructive beliefs.
According to the Institute of Economic Affairs, the majority of young people blame capitalism for their difficulties in getting on the housing ladder or securely renting a home in an affordable but still decent way.
Seventy-five per cent believe the climate “emergency” is “specifically a capitalist problem”, roughly the same number want sweeping nationalisation and a disturbing 67 per cent say they want to live under a socialist system. More intriguingly – and worryingly – research has shown that young Americans too are turning on the imagined behemoth of “capitalism”. Hence the success of Ocasio- Cortez’s dress.
In some ways, it’s easier to succeed now than it was in the boomers’ heyday. Anyone can learn anything, to any depth, thanks to the internet. There is far less, if any, discrimination now facing women or people from ethnic-minority backgrounds who want to get on courses, or trainee schemes, start businesses or generally throw their hats in the ring.
But Western economies have shifted in response to the explosion in higher education, and thus dramatically expanded competition, plus soaring prices, regulatory strangleholds and poorly managed public messaging about entrepreneurialism and hard work.
Austerity, then Covid, took the wind out of Britain’s sails, while a great deal of taxpayer money is wasted by governments obsessed with performative climate and woke politics.
The result is indeed that there is a shortage of decently paid jobs and housing affordable to the average person, particularly in the south.
Things can feel hopeless, because the amount a person in their 20s or 30s can earn, unless they are the most ambitious banker or lawyer, will be peanuts next to property prices. And culturally, there is a feeling that nobody should have to work all that hard anyway to make ends meet – and meet nicely, too.
The result is an incredible hotbed of bad feeling about money, aka “capitalism”, “neoliberalism”, “inequality” and so on.
If boomers were able to get some of their wealth into the hands of these angry young people – incentivised by tax relief, of course – the taste of a bit of ease, a bit of cash and the selfish responsibility that goes with ownership of any private property worth anything, could soften my generation’s point of view.
Thus boomers who can, should give gifts and handouts to their young. It’ll be good for them, good for the economy and good for the world. The alternative could be very worrying indeed.
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