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 70s, 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.
Luck isn’t just about money. It’s about living in a peaceful, orderly society. So, in one sense, all baby boomers were massively fortunate. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they did not have to fight in a World War. But, in purely economic terms their experience was mixed.
Early boomers, those born in the latter 1940s, had a very different experience from those born in the early 1960s. And anyone who was lucky enough to go to university had much better prospects than school-leavers who went to work in a factory or down a coal mine.
