Baby boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1964, get a lot of flak from younger generations. The argument goes that boomers had every advantage younger people don’t and likely won’t when they are older: cheap housing, free university, jobs for life, lower cost of living, triple-locked pensions, and so on. Boomers are the wealthiest generation ever to have lived – and, younger people contend, they got that wealth simply by being born at the right time.
But boomers point to huge shifts which happened as they grew up that suggest the opposite – the volatility of the 1970s, deindustrialisation, unemployment, the threat of nuclear war – and say that young people who followed them have had more choices available to them at every stage of their lives.
So, were boomers just lucky? Writer Ian Martin, journalist Julie Burchill and economist Hamish McRae give their perspectives.
Was I lucky? It depends on what you mean. If you mean, “Boomer – were you lucky to come of age during the 1960s?” then yes. I was nine years old when the Beatles broke and 17 when they broke up. My adolescence was soundtracked with the greatest popular AND classical music ever written. Motown, folk revival, rhythm and blues, Britten, Dylan, Hendrix, Shostakovich, Joni, Dusty, Sandy, soul, reggae. Top-quality sounds, man.
