Jilted Generation vs The Pinch

Hello internet,

I finally got around to reading those two books, and after some time, I am finally getting around to writing about them.

Firstly, let me briefly set the scene. It's 1945 and Britain has just won World War II. It feels like a victory, but if you look a little closer, it's a little more complicated than that. Something happens. The old ruling elite finds itself challenged, and the Labour party, representing the underpriveleged many, wins a landslide majority. With this mandate and with the money lent to them in the Marshall Plan, they set up the National Health Service and other features of what is recognisable still as the British welfare state.

Britain won't have an easy time of it. Rationing carries on, only to end in the Fifties. Strikes and shortages, uncompetetiveness and forced devaluation will mark this turbulent period. The Empire collapses, Britain is humiliated abroad in the Suez crisis, and all her old allies and rivals storm ahead in productivity and quality of life. Yet, in all this, the national debts are paid off. Life gets easier. Wages rise. But something else has happened, too.

From about 1945 to 1965, the Baby Boom occurs. An identifiable cohort is born which is millions larger than any before or since. The legacy of the Baby Boomers is what The Pinch (by David Willets, Conservative Universities minister and a Baby Boomer himself) is all about. It explains how one generations, have already benefited from their frugal parents paying off the enormous WWII/Marshall Plan debts, then vote themselves lower taxes, the right to buy their council houses, and unfundable tensions. Without realising it, they have eaten tomorrows bread, today.

Jilted Generation has a different story to tell. Following the hapless fiasco of Generation X, hopelessly failing to live up to their elders the Boomers expectations, we have the 1979 to about 2000 generation. Though often unimaginatively called Generation Y, Jilted Generation eponymises it. It sets out how the current generation of young people-roughly 10-30 year olds at the time of writing, are having and will have a particularly hard time.

The two books take rather different approaches, not least because The Pinch is written by a Conservative minister and Jilted Generation by angry (though civilized), left-liberal journalists. The most obvious difference is the prevalence of Thatcher-bashing in the latter and not the former. Furthermore, The Pinch adopts quite an academic, cultural-historically sensitive approach. It discusses in greater depth the relevant theories in sociology and political philosophy: in fact his and my reading lists for undergraduate PPE seem not to have been too dissimilar. He takes his time, and in the end his book is almost as much about the general case of the relationships between generations as it is about the Baby Boomers in particular.

Jilted Generation is much more about the day-to-day realities faced by todays young people. Jobs, housing and pensions take centre stage. What's more, though, it actually provides us with a richness of its own as the authors spell out in detail the consequences of these imbalances. The most shocking revelation is the impacts on us as a society that simple little things like age inequality have. Young people put off having children, settling down, taking on any big projects, because they cannot get a good enough stable job and prices for a decent home are too high for them. An apparently trivial economic fact actually tears at the fabric of society itself.

Between them the books paint a stark picture. The situation is a tough one. Any proposed solution will have many losers, and thus will be controversial. The environment is given passing mentions, but the authors of these books have hit on a problem which unlike that of climate change has received remarkably little attention. But solutions must be found. These books should be read by anyone wanting to make sense of the problem faced by our generation, and how it came about. Where both books fail, however, is in their lack of powerful ideas to solve this problem. I suppose that's where the rest of us come in.

Caleb