The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future - And Why They Should Give It Back

by David Willetts

The baby boom of 1945-65 produced the biggest, richest generation that Britain has ever known. Today, at the peak of their power and wealth, baby boomers now run our country; by virtue of their sheer demographic power, they have fashioned the world around them in a way that meets all of their housing, healthcare and financial needs.

In this original and provocative book, David Willetts shows how the baby boomer generation has attained this position at the expense of their children.Social, cultural and economic provision has been made for the reigning section of society, whilst the needs of the next generation have taken a back seat. Willetts argues that if our political, economic and cultural leaders do not begin to discharge their obligations to the future, the young people of today will be taxed more, work longer hours for less money, have lower social mobility and live in a degraded environment in order to pay for their parents' quality of life. Baby boomers, worried about the kind of world they are passing on to their children, are beginning to take note. However, whilst the imbalance in the quality of life between the generations is becoming more obvious, what is less certain is whether the older generation will be willing to make the sacrifices necessary for a more equal distribution.

The Pinch is a landmark account of intergenerational relations in Britain. It is essential reading for parents and policymakers alike.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Economics, Finance, Sociology, History

384 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2010

Reviews

[Mjstevens1 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't know what rating to give this book, as parts of it are 4 stars - it is well written, far more interesting and drawing on far wider sources than most economic treatises would, and full of many reasonable and perceptive analyses of economic developments over the past 50 years. However, there are two elephants in the room which are never addressed and my disappointment is reflected in the 2 star rating.

Firstly, the lack of solutions. David Willetts is not just a socio-economic researcher, but an elected politician and part of the current government (the opposition at the time this book was published). As such, he can't just point to problems but must also lay out how he and his party would fix them, and this is never done - all through the book I was thinking 'yes, I agree with much of this, now what will you do to sort it out?'.

The second issue is that the book seems to completely ignore Conservative Party thought and policies 1974-2003 (the end of Iain Duncan-Smith's leadership). In appealing to a contract between the generations, and the idea of wealth as a trust to be passed on much like our great woodlands or Victorian buildings, I can see how Willetts' views fit in with traditional Toryism. But in condemning short-termism, the distortion of the housing market and selling off national assets to make a quick profit, the book seems to totally ignore which group did most to advance this - the free-market idealogues encouraged by Margaret Thatcher and her heirs. Admittedly the administrations of Blair and Brown did not stop it, and the book is quick to put the boot into them for not 'fixing the roof while the sun was shining', but the omission of a serious look at the 1979-1997 period is startling - the book instead concentrates on the 70s and the recession of the Brown years. Ultimately, I was sad to find not a comprehensive analysis but a work of electioneering.

[Isaac · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title is slightly misleading.
Most of the book deals with "contracts between generations" in British history, and it only gently argues that the baby boomers are responsible for the grim future prospects of today's youth.

This book is really aimed the baby boomers themselves I think to inform them of their advantageous position in regard to housing, pensions, and debt in contrast to the upcoming younger generation.

Indeed, "Those aged over 50 now own 4/5ths of the nation's wealth".

The best thing I can say is the book sustains a scientific intellectual rigor throughout.

Though this is often boring to the reader, it is fitting given the seriousness of the topic.

[Chad Jeeawock · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book overall. The evidence produced and analysis was insightful, and although it handled the subject matter with rigour it stayed on the side of being very readable.

However, I felt this was largely aimed at baby boomers themselves and sometimes it trod an attempt to avoid an intergenerational war too carefully to the point that it almost seemed like an attempt to exonerate baby boomers’ responsibility for the vast wealth inequality between the generations.

Throughout the book there is a nod to baby boomers’ animosity to new housing developments, support of privatisation of public assets (assets they benefitted from for free once), portrayal of a younger generation that is flippant when it comes to saving, spending and working (which Willetts shows to be untrue) against their own grit, determination and hard graft (which Willetts also shows to be untrue), but Willetts doesn’t really develop these ideas. This was particularly true for housing. Opposition groups to new housing developments largely comprise baby boomers and it’s a tangible example of baby boomers’ unconsciously of consciously enjoying the benefit of a social policy and then pulling up the drawbridge behind them but isn’t talked about in much detail. We see this play out at election time too. Whilst it is clear we need to scaling up house building, given how transformational this would be it’s actually been relatively low down on the policy agenda at the most recent generations. Largely, this is because the demographic with most voting power, baby boomers, already own their homes.

Instead, Willetts focuses on an ‘inter-generational contract’ that is under threat and appeals instead to a moral obligation to ensure that opportunities and wealth be passed on to younger generations. This is fine, but for the 30 something I am who’s having to move to a different county to purchase my first home this overarching theme just seems a bit aloof given the urgency of the situation. We’re talking about future generations facing the prospect of diminished opportunities for a fulfilling life. The solutions in the epilogue corroborate with this, and again place younger generations prospects in the hands of baby boomers’ who are asked if they’ll choose to accept higher taxes to help fund their social care which is one of the biggest burdens on the NHS and local council. Arguably this is diplomatic and pragmatic given baby boomers’ voting power, they’re the ones who will be choosing the next government after all. However, given their past record I’m not holding out much hope that they’ll go with the options that Willetts hopes they will.


Finally, there was a disappointing lack of discussion of how politics in the past 40 years have conspired to generate this state of affairs. We’ve had largely neoliberal Tory policies, save for a mixed bag from Labour in the late 90s and noughties. This matters I think, because as Willetts points out the baby boomers hold so much voting power and indeed its government policies that have enabled this inequality to flourish. Willetts points out that as baby boomers have aged they’ve increasingly voted Conservative, and the Conservatives have increasingly curried their vote with policies that have sustained their immense privilege. If you want a tangible expression of ‘how the baby boomers took their children’s future’, this to me would be it.

I really did enjoy this book and learnt a lot I did not know. The problem for me is that whilst baby boomers cannot be said to have actively conspired again their own children and grandchildren, they’re not passive either. Instead we have a kind of attempt at a vindication of baby boomers’ and hope for a different path, which the evidence in the book doesn’t seem to me to lead to and which gives doesn’t really involve younger people. Oh, and climate change is pretty much totally absent. Baby boomers have contributed most to it, are least likely to accept the scale of the issue or change their behaviors and yet it’s now an existential threat that is going to be passed onto generations after them. Perhaps there wasn’t enough room in the book for it, but my goodness what an omission.

[John King · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a fascinating collection of statistics only flawed by the Author's defective grasp of their meaning. He can see the unfairness of distribution of wealth across generations whilst being totally unable to see the unfairness of the distribution of wealth by class. There is a book available on Amazon "Inequality and the 1%" by Danny Dorling which Mr Wiletts has been careful to avoid. I recommend that both these books need to be read to reach an understanding of modern Britain unavailable to Mr Willetts.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting analysis, particularly on the housing bubble, but lacking in potential solutions.

[John Hayward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Choice and freedom are everything. We might argue about whether we like it or dislike it but the liberal progressives and the moral pessimists agree on the trend. Then there really is little chance of society meaning much apart from perhaps, if we are lucky, a feeble agreement on how we are going to disagree with each other.' (David Willetts, The Pinch: How the baby boomers took their children's future - and why they should give it back, p.33) Tracing the changes in intergenerational relations in Britain from the days of Bishop Wulfstan in 1014 through Tocqueville to Schumpeter and Giddens, with their predictions that as material wellbeing and a consumer culture spread people would abandon investing for the future in favour of living for today, David Willetts' book 'The Pinch' reads like one that could have been penned by Dale Kuehne under the title 'Money and the iWorld'. Like Kuehne's landmark 'Sex and the iWorld', Willetts draws upon modern advertising slogans to explain recent trends: 'a modern consumer society takes the waiting out of wanting.' Safe sex during the 1960s, Willetts writes, meant safe for women, as a man was expected to marry a woman if he got her pregnant, with the consequence that the years before the advent of the Pill saw both the highest ever birth rate and the highest level of first marriages. / 'Kings and queens among consumers' / Although 'The Pinch' is not about sex as much as it is about money, the theme is established strongly in the early chapters and keeps resurfacing; for 'childhood obesity, high rates of personal debt, and teenage pregnancy are not really different problems, but are the same problem - the difficulty we all face trying to resist our appetites of today in the cause of something better in the future.' The book summarises the lot of the baby-boomers as being 'kings and queens among consumers ... you will be able to spend your life in a generational bubble, always outvoting and outspending the generations before and after you ... unless of course you see yourself as part of a wider network of obligations that tie you to other generations.' Like Kuehne's thesis, it also insists that 'every man for himself (and every generation for itself) is not a well-founded account of what it is to be fully human and to lead a good life.' 'The Pinch' contains a vast array of fascinating demographic insights, such as the negative impact of a low median age population similarly observed both in the world's most unstable countries and in Britain's toughest housing estates. Or the fact that while immigration appears to solve the problem of how to make pensions affordable in an ageing population, the increased workforce also results in higher infrastructure costs in other areas, such as education. And the way expansion of university education has had a far greater impact on women than on men but with the unintended consequence of reducing social mobility, causing Willetts to summarise, 'Feminism has trumped egalitarianism.' Beneath all the tables and trends though it presents and calls for a simple issue of justice to be redressed. 'The Pinch' shows how even an apparently prudent financial rule like balancing the budget over the economic cycle can deliver a generational imbalance. It also demonstrates how the cost of public commitments is set to grow as the baby boomers move into retirement and become heavy users of the welfare state. It further highlights how we should have been reducing government debt while this generation was at the height of its prosperity, not shifting the burden of paying for today's public expenditure on to the next generation. /Time for children/ Encouragingly it notes that family ties at least are becoming more important to us. Although we tend to work harder, contrary to popular myth, we also have greater time with our children – largely as a result of labour-saving household appliances, which in turn appears to have improved cognitive and emotional development for our children; as Willetts puts it, 'The microwave oven has raised IQ.' Nevertheless, trust in others has declined and the pressure to be better parents has made us worse citizens as parents withdraw from civic activities. Moreover, the unusual dependence of British teenagers on their peers might, despite their earlier advantages, affect their subsequent cognitive development. All of which, Willetts decides, means new school providers must be able to enter the maintained sector if we are to provide fairer opportunities to the next generation, teenagers must have access to better careers advice, our vocational training system must be reformed, and, most crucially, we must invest in the nation's infrastructure and reward saving so as to begin the slow and painful process of adjustment over the next decade. Even beyond material issues such as energy security, food shortages and water stress, the 'collapse of confidence in a cultural canon and the rise of militant Islam' makes the challenge of conveying our culture from one generation to the next seem much harder. But good politics, he concludes, is about a contract between the generations in which the interests of the present generation should not automatically come first. Dealing with such vast issues requires all of us to value the claims of future generations. This link between generations – cultural and economic, personal and ethical – is offered as a source of meaning to a 'world where unreflective obligations to institutions or ways of doing things are eroded.' Ultimately, Willetts' analysis is astute and the book's endnotes are a rich source of social data but, unlike Kuehne's vision of the 'rWorld', in which a larger web of healthy social relationships provides the most personally fulfilling context for relational well-being, 'The Pinch' does not really tell us how we might achieve a society in which a balance in intergenerational relations is once again restored. In that sense, perhaps we can look forward in a future year to a sequel from the Shadow Minister for Universities and Skills: 'Reciprocity: Placing the principle of fairness between generations at the heart of the political agenda'.

[Joanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was annoyed by the lack of solutions offered, and became quite depressed halfway through thinking about how bad it all seemed for people my age (23) and how it will likely only get worse.

A lot of things are going to need to change for us to avoid a major crisis in the coming years and ultimately a revolt of young people who feel completely let down by the current system.
Definitely worth a read if you enjoy thinking about the interplay of society, politics, history etc. and how they will impact the future

Of course, as this is such a politically relevant topic there are omissions and slants towards the author's views. Other comments have mentioned the lack of insight as to the Tory policy decisions of 1979-1997, for example. Clearly there is more to discuss and consider about this topic, and it highlights the need to be discerning in who and where you are getting information from!

[William Weir · Rating 2 out of 5]

Largely written to convince readers of the issue, providing evidence, without really suggesting any means to better ensure generational wealth transfer. Has a central belief that family is fundamental and in doing so feels parochial. It also omitted some areas I expected to be touched on, such as the role of wealth taxes in redistributing capital. Perhaps that represents the book being written before these came to the fore.

[George Pickthorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book hits the mark. Assets create choice, demographics matter within their context and we have a serious problem on our hands when it comes to wealth inequality, demographics and public spending.

Emotional arguments on the inter generational contract maybe worked less well but maybe that proves his point, this book is awesome.

[Kathryn Hall · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book long and tedious to read. Maybe it is because I borrowed it as an eBook.

[William Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well thought out, evidence and articulated argument however lacking in real solutions and steadfast in the overton window of today. Does miss a glaring area of wealth transfer- rent.

[Jonny Brick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written before austerity cocooned wealth in those who already had it. The book is an exercise in wishful thinking.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is hard to trust the conclusions presented in the book as some of the data presented within the first 40 pages is incorrect and essential to the argument. European countries with gini coefficient lower than the UK do not have a average household size smaller than the UK. I could not find any country remotely close to the data presented in the book. Maybe inequality isn't correlated with the existence of a nuclear family structure as the author presents it to be...

[Mohammadreza Roshan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very insightful. The author looks into the generational contract in the western world. But you can see similar issues arising in other nations.

[Vendo Papas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy clarificador. Aunque se escribió en UK en 2008 en españa todos sus miedos se hicieron realidad y a mucha peor escala 💀

[Raphe Langdon · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of interesting ideas but it gets bogged down in the research to support the analysis. An abridged version of one third of the length would be ideal and I would have scored it a 4 or 5.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is quite a brave book for a Conservative politician, although it has to be noted that 'two-brains' Willetts seems to have been somewhat sidelined by his party since they came into government. This book will find few friends amongst those aged 55+ who are most likely to be the sort of people who might buy such a book, as it is rather critical of perceived selfishness in the post-war generation. Although the problems are well described and supported with plenty of evidence the solutions presented are weak, after all it was a market system which got the UK into this mess (especially with regard to housing) and as a Tory the author cannot really be seen to be seriously proposing anything else.

[Sarah Harkness · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well-written, amusing in places, and not much to disagree with. I was expecting some more prescriptive passages - answers to the huge problems he identifies, and although I agree with his view that we need to adopt a new philosophy and a more responsible attitude to taking political decisions if we are going to attempt to solve any of these issues, I had hoped he might have some more practical suggestions!

[James Gale · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It's full of data and largely well reasoned. Whilst not exactly a definitive 'history of the world regarding baby boomers', it raises some very interesting questions and has some great concepts.

That said, some analogies didn't quite work, and I felt that the first third of the book was better than the rest. Still, a really good read.

[Peter Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has an interesting central concept that the baby boomer cohort is so big that it has prospered at the expense of everyone else, particularly their own children. The argument is convincingly made but I would have welcomed more analysis on this phenomenon could be addressed by policy makers.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. Tackles the subject matter well and keeps the readers interest with little sories and examples. Unlike some books of a similar subject matter it didn't get too bogged down in jargon and as such it made it a highly enoyable and easy read.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Using a good combination of hard data, interesting facts and amusing anecdotes Willets makes the argument that the inter generational contract is under threat. The threat comes from the size and thus political and purchasing power of the baby boomer generation. It's a convincing argument.

[Alun Salt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful and an attempt to make a positive case for political action instead of simply berating the opposition. It's a bitter irony that his current role has include foisting unprecedentedly high tuition fees on younger generations to keep tax bills down for baby boomers.

[Angela Randall]

Mentioned in this article on how the baby boomers are making housing unaffordable for their kids.

[Edzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super book. Puts a lot of development in the demographics and in the choices as an society in perspective. from healthcare, education up to pension schemes. Top read.