The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved, Baby Boomers have knee-capped the prospects of future generations

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

Thanks to their sheer numbers, Baby Boomers have always had an outsize effect on politics and policy. When they were young and liberal, society became more liberal. As they got older and more conservative, conservatism made a comeback.  So, given their power over the decades, how much blame do Boomers deserve for society’s current problems? Many younger people look at the political and economic choices Boomers have made over the course of their lives, and they see a selfish generation that has taken care of itself at the expense of everyone else.  They point to many examples: Housing policy that has increased Boomer wealth but left homes out of reach for young people; governments that opened up the coffers when Boomers were in school but now cry poor, leaving today’s students riddled with debt; and a purging of the planet's resources that has accelerated the effects of climate change. But Boomers are fighting back against the attacks on their record. Many of them argue that their critics conveniently forget some of the challenges Boomers faced when they were young and life back then wasn’t nearly as rosy as millennials seem to think. Boomers fought hard for social and political changes that today’s youth take for granted. Arguing in favour of the resolution is Eric Lombardi. He's an opinion writer and contributor to The Hub and the Toronto Star.  Arguing against the resolution is Sean O’Grady. He is the Associate Editor of the Independent UK, where he writes editorials and columns about politics and economics.   SOURCES: MSNBC,  Five-Thirty-Eight   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths  Vote on who you think won this debate on our website www.munkdebates.com.  To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 50+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Producer: Daniel Kitts Editor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We've tried socialism all through the 20th century, and it failed every time. We should restore dignity to the working class and stop saying you need a credential in order to achieve the most basic, modest version of the American dream. Netanyahu is the worst leader the Jewish people ever had. He should be impeached. Genocide is the latest modern blood liable that anti-Cemites use to justify their anti-Zionism. We should prioritize making sure that no more Ukrainians do. die that this war is brought to an end. All parents want to help children with their feelings, but I argue that not every feeling is worth paying attention to.

Why are these students covering their faces? I think it says something about their movement, about their ideology, and also simply the fact that they're also cowards. Young people today face challenges that are a result of the decisions that our parents made and have resulted in declines, particularly in the milestones that young people are able to achieve. Baby boomers should be thanked for creating the world that the younger generations see all around them today. Welcome to the Monk Debates. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day.

Our goal with each and every program of the Monk debates is to arm you with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved, baby boomers have decap the prospects of future generations. All these babies are born and all of a sudden this entire economy springs up around babies. Then they have to go to school and all of a sudden you've got to build all these schools and then they get older and you've got to figure out where you're going to have them work. Like all these things, the entire country reshaped to accommodate the baby boom. As journalist and author Philip Blump describing the enormous impact baby boomers have had on the economy, politics, and culture from the day that they were born. Given their outsized influence on the direction of society, how much blame do boomers deserve for society's current problems? For many, especially young people, the answer is a great deal of blame.

Critics look at the political and economic choices boomers have made over the course of their lives, and they see a selfish generation that is taking care of itself at the expense of everyone else. From housing policy to taxes to choices on government spending, the critics say baby boomers have always made it about themselves and their interests, and that's left their children and grandchildren at a serious disadvantage. Here's New York University Stern School of Business Professor, author, and friend of the Monk Debates podcast, Scott Galloway. Two biggest tax deductions, capital gains, and mortgage interest.

Who owns homes and stocks, people my age, who doesn't know, who rents and makes their money from current income, young people. So we've decided that the wealthiest people in the world should get exceptionally more wealthy. Minimum wage stuck at 925. Stock market is screamed up. The average 70-year-old is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago. The average person under the age of 40 is 24% less wealthy. We are purposely transferring more wealth from the poor and middle class and the upper class

to that's super rich and from young to old. But boomers are fighting back against the attacks on their reputation and record. Many of them argue that their critics conveniently forget some of the challenges boomers themselves faced when they were young. Life back then wasn't nearly as rosy as many millennials seem to think. Bumers had to fight for the things that today's youth take for granted. On this installment of the Monk Debates podcast, we challenged the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved.

Baby boomers have kneecapped the prospects of future generations. Arguing in favor of the resolution is Eric Lombardi, opinion writer and contributor to the hub and the Toronto Star. arguing against the resolution is Sean O'Grady. He is the associate editor of The Independent, a UK-based paper where he writes editorials and columns about politics and economics. Eric, Sean, welcome to the Monk Debates. Hello.

Hello. Well, let's get this debate underway. I'm excited to see where it goes and what we learn. Our resolution today is simple to the point. Baby boomers have kneecapped the prospects of few. future generations. Eric, you're arguing in favor of the motion. Let's have your opening statement. Yes. Of course, the baby boomers have been one of the greatest generations in all of history, but they're also one of the wealthiest generations in all of history and have delivered a lot of

good, particularly on the social front for young people. However, despite that, young people today face challenges that are a result of the decisions that our parents made and have resulted in declines, particularly in the milestones that young people are able to achieve. Across the Western world, young people are grappling with what I would call a milestone recession. The requirements to enter the job market from an education perspective take longer. Financial stability is becoming more elusive at an earlier age. The proliferation of social media has increased feelings of depression and advocacy that have not been addressed by institutions. We're seeing skyrocketing costs of housing worth wage growth that is not kept up.

As a result of that elusiveness of financial stability, people are forming relationships and having kids at a later date. All the meanwhile, while we're having seen a decline in the overall state capacity of many of our countries and our inability to build infrastructure, housing, or capacity in our healthcare systems, and so forward. The World Happiness Report, particularly for Canada, has reported. that young people are the 50th, 58th happiest globally in comparison to their baby boomer parents over the age of 60 who report being the eighth happiest. This trend is across the anglosphere.

And so it is incumbent on us to talk about the many ways that the boomer generation did not advocately vote in favor of policies that enable prosperity for future generations in the ways that they were able to enjoy it themselves. Thank you, Eric, for that succinct. and to the point opening statement. Okay, Sean, your opportunity now to weigh in on our resolution. You're arguing against the motion, be it resolved, baby boomers have kneecapped the prospects of future generations. Well, quite the contrary. This is the richest generation there's ever been, and there's no reason to believe that the coming generations won't be even richer.

In every way, young people today have it far better than their forebears. There are no serious wars in the Western world, we're talking about outside of the Ukraine and Middle East at the moment, which involve our younger generation in the way that the first and the second world wars did, for example, with widespread conscription, or even the Vietnam War that the baby boomers fought. If you think about holidays, if you think about cheap air travel, you think about the motor car available to all now,

if you think about cultural life, if you think about restaurants, out leisure, cinema. All are in real terms cheaper than they ever were before. So standards of living are better than they ever were before. There are more young people going to university than there ever were before. And we have the internet, which nobody ever had before. We are living in a materially rich world. And if happiness hasn't resulted from that, then maybe people should think again about the conditions that their forefathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers and so on lived under wars, famine, pestilence, poverty, no welfare state. So the baby boomers should be thanked for creating the world that the younger generations see all around them

today and the generation that created and invented so many of these breakthroughs. That's what they should be thinking of that. I think at the moment. Well, said Sean, okay, let's get into rebuttals. Eric, you're up first. You can react to Sean's opening statement. I don't deny that there have been improvements in quality of life on various aspects of living. But the baby boomers did not create many of the institutions that they benefited from. Their parents, the silent generation, the post-4 generation, helped create those institutions that they then benefited from.

We can also see if we look at the data. that things are not necessarily improving for many young people in material well-being. So in Toronto, for example, for those aged 25 to 34 in year 2000, incomes were about $47,000 Canadian. In 2022, it was $46,500, a decline. In London, this equivalent number in pounds is 45,200 in 2000, and in 24, it's 46,900, an increase of less than 10,000. But if you look at housing prices in both of these major cities that are attractive, Toronto's housing prices have tripled relative to income, and in London, they've more than doubled. This has materially impacted the ability for young people to achieve the types of standards of living and living situations that were available to prior generations. If we look at our ability to build infrastructure, these things, whether it's subways, healthcare system capacity, etc., the Western world is losing some of its,

ability to deliver on these items. We've seen a proliferation of regulatory capture on businesses and markets that once read increasing consumer surplus that have enabled us to live in the way that we do today. In many cases, this regulatory capture has benefited the older generation. And so while I do not deny that there have been many benefits to technology and progress over the last generation, in many ways, what we are faced with as a society, is the prospect of a decline in material living standards. And that is not something that young people voted for. It's something that the boomers,

and the responsibility to caretake our institutions and increase the prosperity for the younger generations, have failed in their course to do. And they have failed on that responsibility to us. Thank you, Eric. Okay, Sean. Your rebuttal, you can react to Eric's opening statement or what you've just heard.

Yeah, well, I can react to, mostly the last remarks. I mean, as to the problem with stagnating living standards and poorer productivity across all the Western economies, that's something that's got nothing to do with the baby boomer generation. They can't be blamed for that. You can't have a generation being blamed for what happens in the economic cycle and for trends in investments and that sort of thing. And there's no reason why that won't pick up in the future. And that links to the second point, which is that the younger people of today, by the time they get to my age and older, they will have the benefits of artificial intelligence, and they are mostly benefits.

They will have robots to do the work. They may not have to work at all, or at least ways the work that they do will be much more fulfilling and liberating than the work that my generation have so often had to do. there are vaccines for cancer that are arriving soon. They will live even longer than this generation. And they should be happier as a result. So I would say all those things. And if they cannot derive happiness from all the, as I say,

all the material and the social and the cultural changes that have happened in the last 20, 30, 40 years when the boomers have kind of been running things, I don't know what to do. I grew up in a world where there was homophobia. where there was racial discrimination. For a lot of the time, it was perfectly legal. Feminism had made hardly any progress. And all of those things have not been swept away, but they have been greatly diminished. And that is greatly to the advantage of people who are coming into adulthood now

and don't have to deal with those things in that particular way. And those are also enormous benefits to the coming generations. Thank you, Sean. Let me join the debate now with some questions top of mind for our audience. And come to you first, Eric. You know, there's many facets of this debate. I want to move through them. There's an economic dimension, a cultural dimension.

There's a philosophical dimension about, you know, what is intergenerational fairness? But let's start with economics, Eric, because it's something you write about a lot. what do you see as the particular kind of economic crisis that's facing younger people today? And why do you think the baby boomers have played a role in creating that crisis? The primary challenge facing young people is what I'd call an increased challenge to launch into adulthood. So those markers of adulthood that were much more attainable in previous generations are slipping away from young people in significant ways. and the statistics bear this out. The age in which a young woman has their first child

has set from about 28 in 1990 to 31 in both the UK and in Canada in just the last 30 years. If you actually ask young people who want to have children in Canada, they say that they would like to have 2.4 children. They're not even getting 1.4 children today. And in many ways, there is a factor here of how our social contract has changed, over time and between generations. Some of the factors that are important for fertility in

general is financial stability and the ability to afford a reasonable space and the ability to do so near the communities and networks that make it possible to raise families near where your parents live, et cetera. And in many ways, particularly in the anglosphere, the ways of planning and regulatory landscapes have made housing nearly unaffordable to almost anyone who cannot inherit wealth. And this transcends into other areas of our economy, where we're seeing a new neo-feudalization of the Western world in which the ability to get ahead is predicated on the wealth of your parents that they're willing to bestow onto you. In many ways, this is logical for a lot of boomers in their generation. And why wouldn't they want to help their kids? It makes tons of sense.

But from a broad social overview, the ability to have that mobility between different classes and our societies is declining. When we look at the advent of most technology, well, I do believe it's going to broadly improve living standards. I don't think it's going to fundamentally change what's breaking in our social contract, but even more importantly, what's breaking down in overall social capital in generations. If you look at even for young people, young people spend on average 25 minutes per day less with their friends than they did even 15 to 20 years ago. And we are not, young people in particular are not necessarily responsible for the governing decisions that they are now faced with the consequences of. And so when we look at these declining indicators of happiness, of social mobility, of milestones, it is a crisis. that needs to be addressed because it's an inheritance of policies that have led to this conclusion. Okay, Sean, let's get your reaction to that. There is an indictment here that baby boomers are

exiting after a long period of time, you know, the commanding heights of public policy, of the economy, of in a sense the theory of the case of how and why modern life should be lived the way it is. Young people are now struggling with that legacy. So baby, boomers have some culpability in terms of the happiness, the extent to which younger generations can proceed in the same life course that baby boomers themselves thought was one of their key entitlements, owning a home, having a family, being a happy, productive member of your society. Sean, you would concede that for a younger generation, those aspirations seem to have become less attainable, at least in the perceptions, maybe not the reality, but the perceptions

of many younger people today. Well, it's certainly true about perceptions, which is why we're having this debate and why these strange arguments about intergenerational fairness crop up, and I hope we'll be able to return to the sort of philosophy of that. A lot of the issues about opportunity and so forth really relate to housing. And there's a reason why. housing was cheaper some years ago compared to where it is now. And it was never that cheap. And it was never that easy to obtain a mortgage.

And when mortgage rates were much higher than they are today, a lot of people went bust. And the second reason is that the places which people nowadays live and are rather sheep neighborhoods were rather rough neighborhoods in those days. you know, quite large parts of London, which are trendy now, were completely run down and say no one would want to live there. There was a reason why you could buy a flat cheaply, which is because nobody else wanted it,

and it was a bit dodgy. And that's much less true today, because the world has transformed because of the way that the boomers have been running the world in that time. Now, there is the downside of that. I perfectly well appreciate that. But that brings one, again, to the sort of philosophical point about fairness, about expecting that word expectations about living standards.

Why should they be higher for every generation than the previous generation? That's not a sort of God-given right or a human right, for that matter. It's something that's only happened since the Industrial Revolution. For the preceding millennia, living standards rose very, very slowly indeed. Sometimes they fell. And as I say, in some generations, it's not even a question of living standards. Some generations have to go and fight wars, get conscripted and die in huge numbers. So I don't think that the younger generation have a right to higher living standards than previous generations, no more than the boomers did.

And the boomers had hard times. The 1980s were incredibly hard for a lot of people. I remember them well. It's when we had a big increase in homelessness. for what were then the coming generation, my generation, it's a time when you couldn't get a job. That's why houses and flats were cheaper. So you have to take into account the entire economic context of these trends

and not look to blame any particular sort of group of people. It's very divisive. There are rich people in the younger generation. There are poorer people in the younger generation, just as they're on the older generation. To some extent it's luck. to some extent it's good management. But that's where it is.

Thank you, Sean. Eric, anything you want to take up with what Sean's just said? And then I'm going to move on to our next topic. I think, you know, there's a couple things that Sean said here that were just indicative of this argument. One thing being that young people aren't entitled to rising living standards versus the boomer generation. That would be the first generation since industrialization. and then Industrial Revolution in which one generation has handed lower living standards to another. And so in some ways, that's an admission of a challenge.

But even if we look at data, and I have data for London right here, for those age 25 to 34, in the year 2000, 57% of individuals considered themselves a homeowner. They own their homes. In 2022, this rate was 28%. So it's not just that housing was a lot cheaper. it was more attainable because we can see it in the facts that prevail. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, the executive director of the Monk Debates. Well, if you're enjoying the kind of civil and substantive conversations that we have at the debates,

where we're really trying to get at the big issues and ideas that are driving the public conversation, I want to urge you to check out the Hub. The Hub is Canada's fastest growing digital and news outlet. And like the Monk debates, it's focused on those important conversations and bringing them to you in ways that are enlightening, enriching, and again, focused on civility above all. You can check out The Hub right now at triplew thehub.ca or open your favorite podcast app and type in The Hub Canada. You'll go to the Hub's channel and see all kinds of great interviews, roundtables, discussions with thought leaders from a around the world. So, Monk Debate community, check out the hub. We think you'll like what you see, listen, read, and hear. Do that right now at triple w, thehub.ca. Now let's get back to our

monk debates program. Let's move on and take up some of these bigger kind of philosophical arguments because that's what we like to do here at the Monk debates. And I want to get to this concept of intergenerational fairness because it's one that seems to have a lot of currency and resonational. today. So Sean, let's begin with you. Why do you think intergenerational fairness is either a kind of a distortion of what's actually going on or a kind of falsification of a reality that you see quite differently than Eric in this case vis-a-vis the struggles, the plights of millennials and Gen Z in today's society? Well, I think it's a matter of understanding. the concept of fairness, which is related to justice.

And justice means that you sort of have to make a choice, or you have to pay a penalty or something like that, if you happen to have done better than a previous generation. So as I say, I don't understand why the generation that fought in one or two world wars, I don't see why they should be regarded as especially fortunate or unfortunate or something. something, it's just happens to be the years that they lived in. And what happened to them, perhaps, was due to the previous generation. But even if you accept the idea of intergenerational fairness, and you accept the idea that, you know, the boomers are sort of responsible for the,

the plight of the young, which, as I say, is much exaggerated and misunderstood, where do you go with that? I mean, what you're really talking about is a sort of redistribution of income. You're, you're talking about taking the wealth away from the boomers and giving it to the younger people, but for no very good reason except this concept of fairness, which doesn't work across generations. If you look at it the other way around, if we have poorer than half a parent's generation, we should not expect them to give us the money. And apart from inheriting it, which does happen. And we'll happen with the coming generation, with the millennials and the generations.

Z, so-called. A lot of this huge amount of wealth and prosperity will eventually, I wouldn't say trickle down. It will sort of cascade down generations. It doesn't die with the generation that created it. It stays there. And the infrastructure and the institutions and the social attitudes that the generation, my generation, if you will, created should sustain. And if they don't sustain, it will be that generation's fault for failing to protect them and failing to uphold and defend them, which is what we've tried to do. And it's getting more difficult. You can feel the rise of the hard rights and that sort of thing in the world and the rise of people like Putin, the hard men, the strong men, the wall makers. They have to be stopped.

And that's up to a generation as well. We won the Cold War. And there was a certain amount of hardship and difficulty and fear involved in the Cold War, but this generation will have to fight their own wars. So I just think it's a very strange, a very strange concept that sort of gets you absolutely nowhere. Thank you, Sean. Okay, Eric, let's hear from you on this question of intergenerational fairness.

You know, what is fair? What are we owed from one to another? Do you take Sean's maybe contention interwoven through his argument that, you know, the baby boomers didn't seem to claim some kind of share or something owed from what we usually call the greatest generation, the generation that lived through the Great Depression in the Second World War. Instead, they thanked and revered that generation for their incredible service and sacrifice. Is there something new, in other words, that's happening here, Eric, with your generation, a claim.

of fairness that if we want to be a little bit blunt about it can come off at times to older generations like special pleading. Well, I mean, that's exactly what I would argue has happened with the boomer generation is they think that they are owed something from young people and have built systems that systematically funnel the future wealth of young people to themselves. So I want to make something clear. Boomers did not fight in the world wars. Their parents fought in the world wars, returned home and built welfare states and institutions that functioned quite well and gave a generation rising living standards to the boomers. Once boomers became into power from a voting block perspective, they had opportunities

to curate and manage our institutions to deliver for future generations. And now that they are handing off those institutions to new leaders, and there's plenty of reasons to be optimistic for the reasons Sean has outlined, in many ways we see institutions that have not been well managed. Meanwhile, the things that have been created in the interim, especially around pensions and obligations to the elderly in retirement, are actually becoming enormous fiscal drains on young people. So if you look at Canada, for instance,

about half of all new projected federal funding until 2030 is going to be dedicated to just old age security and guaranteed income supplements for the elderly. If you look across Europe, the unfunded pension obligations are an enormous future financial burden that hasn't really been addressed by any country. Meanwhile, almost all of them have enormous fiscal deficits that are only adding to the collective public debt and will carry enormous interest just to pay to maintain the infrastructure and services that we're going to need to support a generation as it ages. So in many ways, I'm not calling for redistribution of wealth from young to old, but I'm calling for as a recognition that the current system actually funnels wealth

of the future to become present, whether it is through the fiscal deficits, whether it's through pension obligations, whether it's through maintaining a system in housing, that increases asset values by restricting the ability to build housing both within cities and within Greenfield. And so that really is the economic case. And from a social perspective, we are in this era where people are losing trust in our political institutions to deliver the outcomes that we need for prosperity, because in many ways, we've allowed them to become poorly managed. We've made it difficult to have conversations about how these institutions should be structured. Why or why not that they might not be delivering? And we've sat fairly idly by as our ability to deliver state

capacity, particularly in the Anglosphere, has declined. And all of these challenges are now the problem of the incoming generation to fix. I am personally an optimist about the future. I do think AI is going to do potentially wonders for us. I do think most of the most of the future, of our problems are solvable. And I do think there's a lot of reasons for young people to be optimistic. I think boomers have been some of the most open-minded generations in history. I'm a gay man, and I'm able to proudly say that. And that change happened because of boomers. But if you actually look at the institutions and the politics that are being handed to this next generation, we have seen an overarching decline in their capacity. And we've also seen a decline.

in our ability to talk about our political challenges and our institutional challenges and to be able to solve those problems. Thank you, Eric. Well said. Okay, Sean, let's have your follow-up to that. I think we're getting at the core, the essence of this debate. I'd like a focused rebuttal, please. I think the only argument you can make in the sense of intergenerational fairness

with the, on the pension example, is that the boomers didn't have enough. enough kids because the whole, the reason why pensions are harder and social care for that matter is harder to manage in Western societies is because the birth rate's gone down so much. And it's true that we had to support an older generation in terms of state pensions and social care. And we did it quite well. It's got more difficult in recent times, but it's purely a function of. the birth rate. And I don't think you can blame people for not having more kids and worsening the ratio between the working population and the elderly dependent population. I don't think that's a

sort of sensible way of looking at it. As we move towards closing statements, let's just spend a second talking about possible solutions, because we always like to, at the Monk debates, kind of push our minds towards how do we address different sets of issues that both of you've identified. So Eric, to come to you first, what would a solution to this quandary, this conversation we have or having look like? Is it some targeted redistribution of the wealth that boomers have acquired to younger generations? Is it challenging some of the boomers' assumptions about what their so-called golden years could or should look like in terms of the allocation of state resources to programs and programming for older age cohorts versus

younger age cohorts. Give us a little sense, Erica, what your policy prescriptions could be. So I think the biggest thing in my mind is, you know, not blaming boomers for not having enough kids. I blame them for seeing the challenges that future generations are going to face. Economically, we didn't even get to talk about climate change and then punting off the things that we could do to make those things easier on us earlier. And I think from a solution standpoint, there are some fairly obvious ones that aren't really about redistribution, at least in that sense. the Western world really needs to go through a reformation and how it approaches land use and permitting processes that have benefited boomer real estate assets, boomer jobs, etc.

So build a lot more housing and allow neighborhood change. And this has been sort of a generational difference. And one of the hardest challenges is housing. So addressing the housing crises is important. I think from a pension obligation perspective, there's probably different solutions for different countries. Raising the retirement age or the benefit age limits does actually help a lot with economics of state pensions that are coming forward. So, you know, moving requirements to, you know, 65 in place like France, you know, 67 and Canada, all of these things are reasonable courses of action. I do think when we look at things like climate change, a willingness to embrace policies that I think are more free market, like proper Pogovan carbon taxes, to do better industrial policy, look at nuclear energy, solar, wind, and properly plan for those investments, I think is necessary.

One final thing that I would note, we talked a bit about education and seeing the rise in university completion inherently as a positive. But I do think in many ways there has been a amount of credential inflation where it has simply become necessary to pursue education, where you might not even work in that field and take on pretty strong debts in order to do so. And this has delayed the ability for young people to enter the workforce on. their terms. And so pursuing, you know, policies towards credential reform, looking more at the merit of individuals and their inherent capabilities versus, you know, did you go through a two-year education to get, become a hair clutter, right? We need to look at some of these things and make it easier for people to be able to work and change industries and have more flexibility in people's journeys through life.

Thank you, Eric. Okay, Sean, your opportunity to put forward some policy prescriptions, some possible solutions to what I guess you would see not so much as a question of correcting intergenerational fairness, but, you know, possibly creating more equanimity, more of a sense of a kind of sympathetic understanding between older and younger generations. I think that's fair, but nonetheless, I think if you think, as I do, that intergenerational fairness is a deeply flawed concept, one way of dealing with it is to stop talking about it. Because what we've created is arguments between groups based purely on how old they happen to be, on these rather arbitrary dates that they use to define millennials, Gen Z, the great generation, the boomers, whatever.

As I say, an awful lot of these arguments come down to housing and the way you get more houses built. I mean, in Britain, one of the things that has held it back, you could say it was the baby boomers, but I think it goes much more widespread. It's not just on age. It's planning, and the new government's engaged on radically reforming planning and allowing many more homes to be built

and taking the breaks off that. and also infrastructure, by the way, solar farms and onshore wind and that sort of thing. And I think that if we cracked housing, that wouldn't solve the whole problem if it exists of intergenerational fairness. It would just make us all better off because as you move up the housing ladder, you know, if there are more houses and bigger houses for the wealthier boomers, they can have an even nicer home than the one that they've got. and the younger people can have a flat of their own that's much nicer than the one that they'd be left with at the moment, having to try and afford or not being able to afford at all. So I think housing is the crux of the matter, and I think it can be dealt with the right sort of policies.

I think it's quite a pragmatic thing. And as I say, it would mainly help younger people, and I think that would be a wonderful thing, and it would help them have families sooner. it would give them that stability in their life and it would give them a stake in society and the chance of accumulating capital. All those things are wonderful, but it would help everyone in society as well. Agreed. So, and I like these policy ideas. This is what we're all about, trying to find some moments of conciliation and self-understanding.

So let's go to closing statements for this excellent debate we've been having, be it resolved. Baby boomers have kneecap the prospects of future generations. Eric, I'm going to ask for your kind of two-minute sum up. What's the key argument or idea you'd like to leave our audience with? The core idea that I think it's important to understand is what affects us today, particularly from the institutions and systems that impact our day-to-day life, are a outcome of decisions that have been made in the past. And so with the challenges that we're experiencing,

and particularly in the Anglosphere as it relates to housing, as it relates to productivity, as it relates to governance and other areas of the social contract. These are inherited policies that were a responsibility of the past generation of leaders to have the foresight and ability to make the choices to ensure that prosperity continues and that the next generation would also benefit from the same rising living standards that benefited the last generation. And the reality is those rising living standards and that rising prosperity isn't being seen by young people right now. And there are some enormous challenges ahead that the past generation had an opportunity to alleviate just how challenging they're going to be. Climate change in particular comes to mind that this generation is going to have to deal with,

and it's going to be much harder than it would have otherwise been. What I will say is baby boomers did benefit this generation in a number of ways. I think the first one is the open-mindedness of the generation, particularly to different types of people, openness to LGBT, women's rights, etc. has laid a social foundation for freedom in these countries that will enable young people who are now coming into power and influence to have a foundation to change the systems potentially to fix these challenges. Thank you, Eric, for that closing statement.

Okay, Sean, we're going to give you the last word in this debate. What's a key message or idea you'd like us to conclude on? Well, I think as I say, intergenerational fairness is a flawed concept. And I think that the policies that younger people need to help them prosper and flourish in society to start a family and all the rest of the things that they want, those are the solutions that we need. We don't need to take from one generation and give to the next. I mean, what if this coming generation found that the generation after them was even more disadvantaged and felt even more badly treated, would they then be handing over their wealth, such as it is to that generation? It makes no sense. As I say, the policies that would make the lives and prospects of young people better are very largely the policies that would make the whole of society better, better housing, education,

pension systems, social care systems that are sustainable. those are not easy things, but they're not achieved necessarily by redistribution, and certainly not redistribution between generations, redistribution between rich and poor, yes, redistribution between old and young or vice versa, no. And old people have trouble enough with their health and the well-being of their own parents who are now getting into the very old age, without having to make even more sacrifices. and they've made. So I think it's an unfair treatment and also one that makes no sense to talk about generations, having entitlements and so forth. It just doesn't work. Thank you, Sean,

and thank you, Eric, for a fascinating, far-ranging debate. We covered all the key concepts and issues that I hoped we would. So on behalf of the Monk Debates community, thank you so much for coming on the program. Thank you for having us. Thank you. That wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Eric and Sean. You've certainly given us a lot to think about. A friendly reminder that you can vote on today's debate by simply going to our website, triplew monkdebates.com and unk debates with an S.com. Become a free member and cast your vote. Who won? Eric or Sean. If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard, we always like to hear from you. Please drop us an email at podcast at

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