 Welcome to what I think is the first public event that we've held here under the auspices of our new Intergenerational Centre. So this is a way of sustaining the Resolution Foundation's interest in intergenerational issues. We of course produced a big report on the subject last year and we want to carry on digging away at it, both with empirical research and also as today, something a bit more unusual and ambitious for us, kind of conceptual research about what the whole concept of intergenerational equity means and we've got three fantastic speakers who are going to help us on that. But let me begin by briefly setting the scene and because this being a Resolution Foundation event there's got to be some slides and there may be some more coming later from Hannah, but let me just give you a tiny bit of evidence about one way in which we might think about how we value the interests of future generations. One way would certainly be thinking about our interests in the future and this is just telling you how long the different generations are going to live for. So this tells us that a 65-year-old baby boomer is likely to live to the age of 89 and given that we have in the UK at the moment a median age of 40, this is telling us that about 80% of men and women who have reached median age today will still be alive in 2040. So if you think of all the kind of extinction rebellion protests which we have had around here for the last couple of weeks, part of it is simply an appeal to our own long-term self-interest. Most of us will be around on climate change forecasts when the increase in global temperatures could reach 1.5 degrees. Even many boomers, even people of median age today will be around. The secondly, we might think about the interests of the younger generation who are already born and that's because of the both we might attach importance to the value of the lives of our children and grandchildren. It's also because they're very important for intergenerational exchange and that's what a very important issue which I just want to bring to the fore. This is a lovely quote from the great economist Paul Samuelson which I think gets to the heart of the social contract because he says what looks like at any moment an exchange between different generations can we also be thought of as a way in which one generation smooths out its consumption and income over the life cycle. And here is an account of what government does which kind of confirms that. So this tells us that when we're young we are heavy users of the education system. They spend a bit on us as we go through our education. When we're middle-aged that blue line we pay a lot of tax and then as we get older we become heavy users of the healthcare system. We receive social security benefits and as our incomes fall our tax falls as well. And you might imagine in a completely stable world with life expectancy stable with the size of generation stable that this nets out to balance over the course of an entire life. But what we're really doing is that we are receiving from the older generation when we're young. We're contributing to older and younger generations when we're middle-aged and receiving again when we're old. So what looks at any one point like an exchange between the generations is also income smoothing. And I think that's a really good way of thinking about how the social contract between the generations holds a society together and works for the benefit of each individual generation as they work their way through the life cycle. I guess beyond that there are there is the deepest issues of all brought out by some of the moral philosophers such as Derek Parfit which is whether it makes sense to attach any weight to people who are not yet born to what extent can a moral philosopher include the interests of people as not yet who are not just born in their calculations. And that is a deep question. Edmund Burke certainly thought you could. He extended the concept of the intergenerational contract. So it's a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are living those who are dead and those who are yet to be born. That is the most ambitious and profound formulation of the contract between the generations. So we're now going to hear about it from people who have thought about it and researched it very hard. We'll first hear from Professor David Runciman, the Professor of Politics at the University of Cambridge and of course he also co-hosts the podcast Talking Politics which many people follow. We'll then hear from Jenny, Jenny Bristow, who is a visiting research fellow and senior lecturer in sociology at Canterbury Christ Church University and is one of my severest critics. I always enjoy Jenny's challenges and she herself writes on this subject and I get sent to the books to review. So we have a lively exchange indeed in the current prospect. There's a duel between us. Duel is prospects term. And then thirdly we'll hear from Hannah Shrimpton who is the Research Manager of Ipsos-Mauri and will bring us back down to earth with empirical evidence about exactly what Ipsos-Mauri's research on public attitude shows. So what is the empirical evidence behind the wider debates in political theory? And if I may end with a shameless plug, if you do want to investigate this subject further, I did write a book about it called The Pinch, which came out 10 years ago and next month, the second edition comes out. This is the first one I've just had from the publishers. It'll appear in the beginning of November and it tries to touch on the issues that I hope we'll be discussing this morning. Thank you very much. David Runciman, over to you. So no slides from me but some empirical evidence just without pictures. So you have to believe me when I say it's true. So we're going to talk about intergenerational questions and political representation. I think it's fair to say if you look at political conflict around the world, it's now pretty obvious that generational strike is at the heart of it, more or less everywhere. So if you look at the protests in Hong Kong, and if you had to use one word to sum up who the protesters are, what they are, apart from angry, it's young, not all of them, but most of them and some of them very young, little school kids. Climate protest is increasingly framed in generational terms. The climate strikes, Greta Thunberg. It's class terms too with extinction and rebellion, but also intergenerational. American politics is increasingly divided. On generational lines, if you look at the polling people's attitudes to the Trump presidency are massively divergent, depending on how old they are, the young unsurprisingly are much more critical. But America highlights one of the anomalies here and I'm going to talk about the UK in a second, which is this great generational struggle in American politics as it plays out in the next US presidential election. People probably not certainly, but probably get a choice between septuagenarians. All of the candidates are in their 70s. So the 73 year old Donald Trump may face the sprightly 70 year old Elizabeth Warren, or the less sprightly Joe Biden, who's 76, or the even less sprightly Bernie Sanders, who's 78, who is the most popular candidate among the radical young. And now there's talk of a new entrant coming into the field to really shake it up, the 71 year old Hillary Clinton. There's something weird about political representation that intergenerational politics produces this outcome. In the UK, you just think of the last two party conferences, the Labour conference, that was an intergenerational struggle between the old man who run the party and the young members who want to move it in a different direction on Brexit. But again, it's played out through their proxies who are both old men, Corbyn and McDonald. And yet they are representing different sides of this divide. The Conservative conference differently with a very elderly membership, probably further ahead of its party leadership in wanting a harder Brexit, the only constituency that's yet been found where there is a clear majority for a no deal Brexit Tory party membership. So these divides are there. And we know that they were there behind the Brexit vote. So there was a lot of evidence that the Brexit vote correlated very strongly with age. So each step you take up the age cohort with a Brexit vote, the more likely people were to vote leave from their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. And then it's really important to remember it's not just 65 plus, 60s, 70s, 80s, and beyond. The complication with the Brexit vote, and again, there's been a lot written about this, is that it correlates very strongly the age divide with the education divide, which is a real complication for understanding what's going on. Because the other thing that's clear is that the longer someone has been in education, the more likely that person was to vote remain. And again, it just tracks sequentially. So leaving the school with no qualifications with a level or GCSE equivalent, a level attending university, graduating university masters, right up to PhD, each step makes it more likely that that cohort voted remain. But it does. So correlation is not causation, but it correlates very closely with age because, for instance, if you are 75, the chances that you were in school at 17 are one in 10, because only 10% of people in 1953 who were 17 were in school. If you are 25, the chances that you were in school at 17, more like 80%, and now it's semi compulsory to be in school until you're 18. With university, 50 years ago, in the early 1960s, roughly 2% of the population went to university. So if you're 75, the chances that you went to university are about one in 50. If you're 25, the chances that you went to university are about one in two. So education and age, if these two things map onto each other, it's not clear are older people more in favor of leave because they didn't go to university? Or are people who went to university more in favor of remain because they're younger? It's a complicated question. I'm not going to explain it now. I'm not sure anyone exactly knows. But it seems to me a couple of really interesting things follow from that education, age gap in our politics. One of which is the young and the educated are both minorities in our politics. So despite the fact that 50% of people now of 25 and under are at or have attended university, there are still many more voters who didn't go to university than did go to university in this country, which is one of the reasons why Brexit won. But also, much more unusually in the sweep of human history, there are more older voters than younger voters in this country. So 50 years ago, people in their 20s, 30s, early 40s could easily outvote people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, but now they can't. So it used always to be said that the reason that governments pay attention to older voters is that older voters bother to vote and younger voters don't bother to vote. So if only younger voters weren't so lazy and would actually go down to the polling station then pensions would be cut, tuition fees would also be cut and so on. Well, if all the younger voters and all the voters, older voters voted today, the older voters would win. If you look at the shapes of age cohorts, I mean it depends where you count old, but given that, I'll come onto this in a second, given that the voting age starts at 18, so you've got to leave out the kids, the older voters can outvote the younger voters. But there is a big divergence then when you come to think of political representation. So the easiest way to illustrate this is with Brexit. So if the university educated can be outvoted by the non-university educated leading to Brexit and then that advisory vote gets passed back to a parliament, the university educated have a consolation which is they're pretty well represented in parliament because 90% of MPs now have a degree. So that partly explains what's going on with Brexit, because we know I think in a free vote that most MPs would vote not to leave the European Union and it's partly because they are university educated, but young people do not have that consolation so it's literally the opposite. So when you think about political representation, if the young feel that they're regularly being outvoted, which they are, losing the votes, they lost their old man candidate Jeremy Corbyn lost, they can't look at parliament and think well at least we have the consolation that we lose in the popular vote but we're well represented in parliament because they're not. So there aren't, there are a handful of MPs in their 20s, there are a fair number in their 30s, but the average age of members of parliament is the same as it was 100 years ago, which is roughly 50, always been 50. In a population now where young people are being outvoted by older voters and then I think young people could say there's a third discrimination here, so I think the young are triply discriminated against in contemporary politics and it is important to think about how recent this is. I've made this argument in other things that I've said and written. I'll do it very quickly but the basic setup of representative government is it rests from Burke onwards on an assumption about the way human societies are structured statistically which is there will always be a majority of three groups in any human society. The poor, the less educated and the young. All human societies by definition must have more young people than old people, poor people than rich people, less educated than educated, so you'll stuff parliament full of educated old rich people to balance out the fact that otherwise the poor, the ignorant and the young might vote for crazy things. That is the principle of representative democracy roughly and now we live in a society where these things, I mean I'll leave out poor and rich, but educated less well educated and young old, it's not true anymore. You don't have to have a parliament for the old people because the young people would otherwise vote for all of these crazy redistributed policies because they will lose. So there is something strange going on here and then the third discrimination, so the young lose the popular vote, then in parliament they have no one like them and then they're expected to speak for the children and the future generation. So young voters who you just have to read David's book to know they've got enough on their hands just fighting for their own interests and yet they're also supposed to speak for the unborn because they care about the future because they're going to live in it. 20 year old voters are somehow meant to be responsible for their own interests, the interests of the kids at school, the unborn because they care about the environment in a system which massively discriminates against them. I think it's really, really unfair. What can you do about it? Tell me we've got two minutes. So I proposed last year lowering the voting age to six, which turned out to my surprise to be thought to be an incredibly provocative thing to suggest. So I got inundated with emails from people saying stop trolling us with your crazy ideas. I don't think it's a crazy idea and I haven't changed my view about it. I don't think it's ever going to happen. But I think there's this assumption that if you say let six year old vote, six year old voters vote, we will be governed by six year old. No, we won't. Like the old people will still outvote them. It's not like if all the six year olds voted for six year old MPs, that's what we'd get. I mean, if voting changed anything, it would be illegal. Letting more people vote doesn't, these are the same arguments that we use against votes for women. You still get the same people in parliament, but you get a more dynamic politics. You get better and fairer representation. You get politicians who have to take account of a different constituency. I also genuinely believe, given that there's a real concern about the way that elections are abused and the way that normal voters, adult voters are treated badly by the information environment we live in, if you allowed voting in schools, we would get better elections because we take the protection of children seriously. We don't take the protection of adults seriously. So if you thought, wow, we really need to be careful about the information we're giving voters because kids are voting, we'd all be better off. So that's one possibility, lowering the voting age to six never going to happen. All 20 year old shortlists because that's the biggest discrimination of all. There are no 20 year olds in parliament. Again, it's never going to happen. But it's at least worth thinking about. I think there are so many forms of discrimination and unfairness in our representative system, and we're familiar with most of them around issues of gender, ethnicity. It's not like parliament is this magical thing, apart from the age issue. But the age one is the one that seems to me to be really buried in this. And it's worth taking seriously. I also think it's an argument for forms of democracy that go beyond political representation. Because I think political representation is structured to create this. I think it was actually for the last 200 years, it's been designed. I mean, that's the point of elections. The people who invented this system in the 18th century worked out pretty quickly that if you have elections, it's really, really hard for young people, less well educated people, and poor people get elected. Because on the whole to win elections, you need experience, money, and education. For a long time, in the terms of political representation, it made a kind of sense, but it does not make sense in societies like ours, where just the balance between these groups has fundamentally changed. I think the educated are fine. I don't think the educated have a problem. I mean, the other thing you could argue is that our parliament is most fundamentally unrepresentative of all on the university, non-university educated issue because I don't think anyone's going to be advocating non-university educated short lists. But 50 years ago, the trade union movement, the army, other routes for non-university educated people into parliament were alive and well, and they've all now been closed off. But the young person issue is just as important. I think our parliament would work much better if it had 100 MPs in their 20s in it. It's really hard to create it. But also, I think this is an argument for deliberative democracy, for other kinds of assemblies, for communication across generational lines, and also if we're not going to give the votes to children, let children have their voice some other way in assemblies that really have some cloud. Because otherwise, it's not going to happen. And the last thing I'll say is that if you had deliberative assemblies or other kinds of gatherings of citizens and children aren't voters, but they are citizens, other kinds of gatherings of citizens across the age span, of course, the other thing you would notice very quickly is it's not a binary divide. It's not old versus young. There are three, four generations at play here, well, probably four at the outside. And communication across those divides just does not happen in parliamentary politics is my feeling. So I think there are lots of reasons for institutional reform around this. But it is, in some ways, the great neglected injustice of representative politics, the discrimination against the young. And I think we should do something about it, or otherwise we're just going to get more of what we have now, which is frozen, acrimonious, miserable politics. Thank you. Thank you very much, David. And that was fantastic stuff. And a vivid definition of democracy there, of what representative democracy was. I was just checking our own estimates at resolution, just in terms of actual voting, is that for every member of the boomer age cohort in any year, there's another 530,000 boomers voting. And for every millennial of any particular year, there are another 400,000 millennials voting. That's partly the size of the birth rate. It's also propensity to vote. And people say this propensity to vote show a lower propensity to vote amongst younger people show somehow they're not interested or don't care. Our research, led by Laura Gardner, showed that the main factor was the increasing number of young people in private rented accommodation, where it's an environment where it's hard to register to vote. And once you're allowed to the fact that there was low likelihood of registering if you're in private rented accommodation, that on itself largely explained lower voter turnout amongst younger people. So interested, but in circumstances, absolutely confirming David's account, which makes it harder for them to express their democratic voice. So thank you so much. Now, Jenny, Dr Jenny Bristow, visiting research fellow at the Centre of Parenting, Culture, Studies, and Lecture and Sociology at the Canterbury Christ Church. Over to you, Jenny. Thank you. Shall I stay here or go there? Electo. Oh, wow. Makes me feel more important. OK, so as David Willits said, we've been arguing about the whole intergenerational equity cause for several years now. And I think, I mean, what's fairly clear to both of us is that we really come at this issue from very different perspectives. I think David sees the problem of generations in its modern form as problems of economy and policy, largely. I see the mobilisation of the intergenerational equity cause more as a problem of culture and politics. My research indicates that economic and political problems are currently being presented as generational ones. I don't think that's right. I don't think it's helpful. I think it evades tackling problems. I mean, there are, obviously, as we know, big economic problems at the moment, which do affect young people. There are also big political upheavals happening all around the world, and particularly in Britain, America and Europe. But I think posing them as problems of generational conflict in the way that David Runciman did, it just sort of actually evades getting to the heart of what's going on there. I think a lot of these are they are divisions of opinion about values and the future and how people see their world rather than neat divisions between old and young. I think also a problem with marshalling the idea of intergenerational equity, it sort of presents itself as a kind of response to divisions between generations that wants to heal this divide. I actually think this narrative is divisive. I think it really does a damage to young people to encourage them to sort of believe that their future has been stolen, that it's been taken from them by older people, and that they're kind of doomed to this life of just having to live through the grim consequences. I mean, I don't think that's true. I don't think that's what history tells us despite the very real problems that exist today. And I think we should also be very well aware that this is an argument that comes from the elite. It doesn't come from young people themselves. Young people are being socialised into believing that adults have really screwed things up for them on a whole range of issues, which I think can have some very damaging consequences to how young people see themselves. But also to the conversation between the generations. I think underlying all of this in a nutshell is actually quite a significant confusion about adults and children. Who's what? Who's an adult? Who's a child? How do we how we define them? And what our responsibility as adults, by which I mean anyone over the age of 18 for the sake of sticking with all the kind of conventional definitions, our responsibility of adults is to children. David Runciman alluded to the problem of when you're looking at discussions of voting, you know, that question of how you define old being a fairly slippery category. I've just done some research on the narrative of what I call post-Brexit boomer blaming in the British media followed, well, just leading up to and immediately following the referendum result. And, you know, I mean, honestly, the categories are so slippery and amorphous. You get age and generation being used interchangeably. Youth seems to mean whatever you want it to mean, depending on who you're trying to blame and who you're trying to big up. There's one article that talks about, actually it wasn't about this, it was about the election that Corbyn lost less badly than they thought he would and was then called the result of a marvellous youth quake. And one article talks about a youth quake that extended up to the age of 45. Now, I'm 44. I'd love to think I was still youthful, but I really don't think I can get away with it. So I think there's not a clear bright line between old and young. What generation means is a very nebulous category as I write about in my own work. And so I think this really does kind of confuse what we're talking about when we're talking about whose responsibility is it to or what the problems are and whose responsibility it is to deal with them. My view is that young people need leadership and guidance. You know, if we really care about young people and we're really worried about their future, we need to behave like adults, we need to take responsibility for the world. We need to talk to young people, absolutely, but talk to them openly and honestly rather than sort of manipulate them into being voiced mouthpieces for other kind of agendas. And that I think is going on in a very widespread way at the moment. I really don't believe that if young people, if three quarters of the youngest section of voters had voted leave in the referendum, that parliament, which is pro-remain, will be going around talking about how, you know, actually, yes, we've got to listen to the young people and let's wait for all the old people to die off and then we can do it all again. I just don't think that that will be the case. There are other agendas that are being used whenever people talk about, you know, how important the youth vote is or how bad the so-called grade vote or senior vote is. I've also been, frankly appalled, I've got teenage children by the way in which the so-called school strikes have been kind of treated around the cause of the environment where schools seem to be basically encouraging kids to bunk off their lessons as a mark of good citizenship. And everyone's sort of saying, well, let's listen to the children, let's listen to the children. Now, what the children seem to be saying insofar as they're the ones associated with this actual movement rather than the whole group, most of whom aren't associated with this movement, the kids seem to be saying, we're terrified, we are terrified. We want you to tell us what's going on, we want you to give us some solutions. And instead, everyone in elite circles seems to be sort of applauding and going, well, listen to the children, listen to the children. I think the idea that we're basically encouraging young people to see that, taking a time out of their own education, let's face it, it's not a strike. It's not gonna harm the profits of the school if they take a day off their lessons. It's encouraging them to think that that is a good and responsible thing to do. And filling them with this kind of anxiety about the world ending is really not, in any way, a youth-oriented approach. So I really do think that intergenerational equity isn't the way forward. What should be the way forward is for adults, actually, to grow up a bit and take some genuine responsibility for young people. Thank you. Thank you, Jenny, for that challenge. Now we're going to hear from Hannah Shrympton, Research Manager at Ipsos Moria. And I have to say we've had a fantastic collaboration between Resolution and Ipsos Moria, who did a lot of the attitudinal research behind our Intergeneration Commission. And Ipsos Moria themselves produced really interesting evidence on attitudes, millennials, myths, and realities, generations and beyond binary. So it's great to carry on that collaboration through the Intergenerational Center. Hannah, over to you. Thank you very much, David. So yeah, I'm gonna take a very traditional Ipsos Moria approach to this, which is public perception on intergenerational inequity. So this is largely based on work we did with the Resolution Foundation in 2017, quite a large survey of great British public, as well as qualitative workshops with generations to actually really get into the wise and wherefore of what they think. And really the objective of the research is that exact question, and what do the public think on intergenerational inequity? Do they think it's a problem? What do they think it actually means? What do they think the causes are? And what do they think could or should be done about it? And it was also trying to test hypotheses around whether there is actually intergenerational blaming, is there starting to be resentment between the generations. So this will be a very short whistle-stop tour through what we found. And firstly, yeah, they broadly agree with the principle on that there should be generation on generation improvement. So if you ask them whether every generation should have a higher living standard than the one that came before, then you get strong agreement, you get six to 10 agreeing with that statement, less than 10% disagreeing with it, and somewhere on the fence. And that's across all generations, all age breaks broadly in agreement with that principle. But they don't think it's happening now. They think it's actually stopped for millennials. So when you ask them whether young adults in the UK, aged 17 to 36, i.e. millennials in 2017, will have a better or worse life than their parents, or will it be about the same? Only a quarter think it will be better. About half think it will be worse. And this actually reflects a real switch from optimism to pessimism in the last 15 years. This wasn't always the case with public perception. So you rewind to 2003, and this is what people thought, where actually about 43% were actually quite positive about the future of young people, and only 12% were negative. So this is a relatively new perception, and kind of switch came around the economic crash. And millennials are more pessimistic. So if you break it down by generation, everyone is overall very pessimistic about the outlook of what millennials' living standards will look like. And millennials are more negative about their own life. And so much so that if you ask them about when they would like to have grown up, so would you prefer to live at the time when they were parents were children, or would you like to be born now? Actually a decent chunk said they prefer to have grown up at a time when their parents were, and that 33% are saying this, despite social, economic, broadly economic improvement and technological advancement. And on the flip side, if you ask baby mummies kind of 1955 to 1975, born between those years, would you prefer to be a young person growing up today than when you were a child? They say, no, thank you, actually. Only 13% would prefer to have grown up today, which is really quite telling of the pessimism at the moment. But of course, having high living standards is quite a broad category. We asked them to break it down. What do they think specifically will be worse for millennials or better for millennials? Generally, economic prospects and safety are the key concerns. So here's what it looks like when you ask them about different aspects. So we look at the net difference here, the proportion you said better life minus proportion worse life. So the higher the negative figure, the more pessimistic. And right at the top there, you can see it's being able to own your own home that is the most, people are most pessimistic about being able to live comfortably at retirement, have a secure job and global stability and safety from war are the top four concerns. And right at the bottom, there's some more surprising things, having access to affordably priced goods and services, having access to good healthcare. Actually, the balance isn't one of overwhelming pessimism, but it's still one of pessimism overall. And then you ask them, why? Why do you think that millennials will have a worse life than their parents? And there's broad consensus on what the key culprits are. And they're more broad economic concerns, wider issues. They think it's increasing house prices. They think it's lack of stable job opportunities at the moment. Brexit. And the world is more dangerous. And those are the top four issues. But when you start to look at the less important causes that people thought, there are some differences between the generations. And actually that's where you see some blaming, but not that much. So if you compare millennials with baby boomers looking at statistical significance between the two of them and what they thought about what the key causes were, decisions to leave the EU is a much bigger issue for millennials, which is not surprising, as David alluded to. And the same with baby boomers. Actually, another age-driven perception is often around immigration rates. And again, baby boomers are more likely to think that is the cause of an issue with millennials outlook at the moment. But then also millennials are more likely to say it's decreasing starting raises, government policies favoring older adults and older people taking a greater share of wealth and income. The important thing to put out here is that only 16% and 12% respectively of millennials actually said that these were the important issues of why I don't think my life will be better. So actually there's very few minorities of millennials actually looking at baby boomers with resentment. And that also came out in the qualitative workshops. For baby boomers, there's also a greater proportion thinking it's poor at work ethic of younger people for their own predicament. Young adults not saving enough for housing deposits and not saving enough for retirement. And actually there's about what in five a baby boomer's thinking that. So if there is any resentment, it's coming from baby boomers down to millennials not the other way around. But it's not just going to doom and gloom. There are some things that they actually think millennials will have a better life than their parents about. So it's having access to information entertainment, being able to travel abroad, being free to be true to themselves and having a good education. So it's not everything is gonna look bad for millennials. But when you ask them what can we do about it, actually the overwhelming majority of people thought that there is something the government should and could be doing. There are things that the government should be focusing on. And the things that they thought were most important were kind of broader things, broader improvement of the whole landscape if you like. So making jobs more stable and secure, supporting growth in the economy as a whole, improving the availability of health and care services and increasing the number of houses available to rent or brought by. So there's kind of sense that we need to improve everything for everybody. The least important things that I think the government should focus on are anything which is directly relating to intergenerational rebalancing. So anything, any kind of policy that purposely is trying to specifically rebalance things. So things like reducing welfare benefits available to retired families, shifting the balance of taxation from young to old, increasing welfare benefits available to working-age families and improving security and stability in private rented housing. And that top one there is the most interesting one and actually came out very strongly in the quantitative workshops. We kind of presented different potential policies that we could do to perhaps rebalance some of the youth, some of the intergenerational inequity. And actually, when you're talking about things like fuel allowance and TV licensing, you might have well have said that David Willis would personally arrive at their grandmother's door and wrestle their bus pass from their grandmother's old frail hands. It was incredibly, it did not land well. And I'm being flippant, but also reveals a true difficulty when presenting policies like that to the public because it's actually quite difficult to unpick and it also gets quite an emotional, personal reaction or things like that. So there's much, much more in the report. Do please have a flick through. We are going to rerun some of these questions again in early 2020. So I really welcome any one's thoughts about what we missed and what you would like to look into. And I will also leave you with my favorite quote from the workshop from a millennial which actually nicely sums up that last point. If you're a grandma and a million pound Kensington house, you get a winter allowance and fair play to you. I'm not going to take it away from you, why would I? You're rich, you and it, you'd probably release the dogs on me anyhow. Thank you. Very much, Hannah, your quote reminds me of what I think is about the best definition of Brexit though, which was we heard from David had a significant age element to it. And of course some of those older people who voted Brexit say they were doing it for their kids to liberate them. And one young person described the Brexit vote as granny's worst ever Christmas present. You know what I mean? It's like the striped pull over the thing that she means well, but you can't have it as you're ever wearing. Anyway, some fascinating presentations from all of our panelists. Now, an opportunity for you to put comments or questions to them and we have roving mics and if you could give your name and organisation, that'd be fantastic. Yes, guy there. Yeah, in the middle over there on the left. Yep. And then over there, yeah. I'm Peter Ellis from Homes Within Homes. First of all, it's lovely to meet up truly as a generation economist because my son loves your podcast and I'm asking a question today. My first question, pulling together various things that all the panelists said, was, is where's the anger? Where's the anger of the young generation? And when you talked about discrimination, I wonder if the discrimination that it's in part suppressed by the weight of the economic discrimination of imperfect markets. And as an economist, I'd be very interested in your view on how markets discriminate against the young. I'll give you one example and it came out in all the evidence and what was presented today. Take housing, which is the biggest driver of inequality. It's not because it's an inequality that affects the young when we talk about causation. It's an inequality that affects the young because it affects relatively poor people and relatively poor people are gonna be young and low on private rented accommodation. When we therefore address policy, maybe what we need to do is filter policy through the requirement to consider the intergenerational consequences. Take housing as an example. How can you drive down across the housing? You give massive tax benefits to older people with spare living space to create separate living space for tenancies that are both secure and they're constructed to a high standard on terms that include household costs and it can drive down the cost of rent. But what we have to do is approach the problem wearing an intergenerational hat. And markets discrimination. Very good, thank you. Then over here, yes. Hi, I'm James F. And if you look at the best literature, it always focuses about the rest of the critical issue. The idea that you do for your children when their parents are confused. Now, trying to make that implementable to come very quickly, but in my mind, the best way of getting at it is to strive for the wealth of the next generation to rise in line with general living standards. Now, I think we have to recognise, if you accept that, that actually living standards are rising more slowly or expect to rise more slowly in the future. And therefore, it's a lot above that. Very good, thank you, James. Well, we've only had two questioners, but we've got about five questions. David, shall we start with you? Yeah, there's a lot there. So, on the university strike, there was also struck by the fact, it gets this point about representation and people having to find their proxies where they can find them, that the students joined the strike, many of them. They went on strike, we're talking about, which was slightly weird. But it was partly because they wanted an outlet for some of their frustration with other things going on in higher education. So, they find themselves lining up behind the people who in the long term actually were asking for things that were not in the students' interest, which is why, I think we agree, we need to find much more direct forms of representation for younger voters. And I think something that connects the two questions, and I would agree, is that though it isn't always about generational conflict, it's often a proxy for something else. Could be education, could be lots of other things. And sometimes it's very damaging to make it generational because it stokes the kind of anger which maybe is not there, which we saw from some of the data. It is sometimes useful. It is sometimes a way of reframing the argument. It connects with people, particularly I think with families, that sense that there are things that we owe to younger people, and even if younger people here are standing in for other kinds of groups, don us well off in relation to housing. So, I think it cuts both ways. I think we have to be aware it can be divisive, but it can also be galvanizing to do it just to pick up on the talks as well. So, something that does really annoy me in relation to things like the climate strike, there's this assumption that, and so Greta Thunberg sort of said this a bit, but the big division here is between the people who are going to live in the future and the people who are creating the future but will be dead. I think that's a really bad argument and I also think it's not true. So, when you look at the evidence, if you ask older voters how big an issue for you is climate change and older to younger, so not that there's a cut-off of 45 but on a sliding scale, as you go up the scale, it gets less important. And sometimes it's presented because the closer people are to death, the less they care about the future. There is no evidence of that. Families are divided on Brexit because the grandparents and the parents both say we were doing it for the grandkids. And on education, if you ask people how important is education to you, there is no drop-off. People over 80 think education is just as important and people are 20. People over 80 are about to go back to school and benefit from it. It is much more of a cultural thing. I think it's to do with education information. It's to do with how people experience the world and so on. I think that's the argument that I really think is damaging because it's just not true. In the same way it clearly isn't true that young people are blaming the older people. So I do actually have a lot of sympathy with the idea that it's being misrepresented and particularly this thing that there's a cut-off point. You flip. Tory voters are always used to be the question. It's now like, when do nice people become nasty people? 45. That's not a good way to do it. But there is overwhelming evidence on these attitudinal measures. It is a scale and it's remarkably consistent up the scale how people's attitudes shift. But we should see it as a sliding scale not on either or. First of all, when you say up the scale attitude shift, do you think that is a life-cycle effect or is it a cohort effect? Are you saying that as people go to the life-cycle their attitudes will change? And that relates to a particular point on the Brexit referendum where is there an acceptable way of making the point that older voters who voted Brexit are gradually being replaced by younger voters who were in balanced prayer remain? Someone calculated at the point last year when just demographic change assuming no change in attitudes shifted the UK to a remain majority. And I think Polly Toynbee wrote an article about it and got a little push back. You can't talk about things like that. Do you think that is a legitimate point to make? And if so, how do you make it? I think it's legitimate in the sense that it always used to be thought that at a certain point people left their left-wing idealism behind. And joined the golf club. This is not that. A lot of it has been driven by education and educational attitudes and I should say I don't think that people with more education voted remain because they were better informed about the European Union. I work in the university where pretty much everyone voted remain but no one knows how the European Union works. It's cultural, it's tribal. The educated are a tribe. But there is I think a lot of evidence that those attitudes stay with people. So I think it probably is true that a Brexit referendum now is pushed. I don't think it's a good democratic argument. Just in the same way I would just say one more thing and it was related to what about the last slide. So when I said votes for six-year-olds various people said to me that's crazy what we should do is go into nursing homes and take votes away from people who are no longer capable of exercising their democratic rights because we're living in a culture of dementia. Which to me is a much worse idea. I mean that is properly incendiary politics. You know, I'm a democrat. You never ever ever take votes away from people that you've given the vote to unless you want a revolution. But it's interesting that people seem to think, I mean I think that's the way this has become toxic. That people think that that is a good argument. No, and I also say therefore thinking well a lot of people who voted for Brexit in 2016 are now dead. It's true. It's not a good democratic argument. There is a difference. I can remember. Let's hear from our other panelists. Jenny. Yeah. I do think we we have to be really careful about this kind of political affiliations thing. I mean you were talking about the Trump election and millennials really got it in the neck for the Trump election because they didn't turn out for Hillary in the way that it was assumed that they would. Now why didn't they turn out for Hillary because she alienated them as well as Trump and there's been quite a lot written on that. I think also you know I mean the whole kind of Tory Labour youth vote divide thing in Britain. People go on about it as though it's a given. MPs can't remember what party they stand for. Let's face it. I mean the crossing side of the house all the time. I mean politics is really being shaken up. I think you know I do think actually that because the leave remain thing tapped into deeper questions of how people were orientated to you know ideas about the future and everything else. I do think it is possibly enduring. At the same time the European Union is changing. There's shocks going on all around Europe. I don't necessarily think that either leave or remain mean what they used to mean three years ago. And we're in the middle of this intractable mess where I think actually people of all generations just really really fed up with politicians not doing anything. So I think there's a whole load of stuff that needs unpacking when we talk about voter preferences. And we can't really read anything off the past. I do think the third way has gone. And we're in new terrain politically which you know is obviously discomforting and unsettling but I think for the sake of you know if we're looking at how to support young people in that it's to kind of recognise that yes there are new challenges but not that you know not kind of this sort of idea that you know the world is falling in because it's all changing. Can I talk about the USS strikes briefly? Because I thought they were really interesting as well. I mean because the argument's about we can't afford pensions for old people. Let's take it. Let's reduce it. It really didn't fly. You know you had these strikes that actually the older academics were the ones who were going to lose the least from reforms to USS but they were the ones out on strike in support of their younger colleagues. The students as you said were also out. I wouldn't call this a strike. They weren't on strike but they were sort of supporting the academics against this notion that you know universities are about everything but the people who teach in them. I think that was what was going on there. And that kind of sense of disaffection about what is a university for you know I think the tuition fees thing is very interesting because you know young people are being sold this kind of idea that you know you have to invest in yourself through tuition fees and this is all for your own good and everything else. Now they know that that's not true and we know any of us who's honest who works in a university knows that the sector is actually deeply unstable and probably broke. There's a lot of problems going on there which are sort of being kind of evaded through discussions about whether it's pensions or precise levels of tuition fees or whatever and I think the USS strikes were great because they were a real moment of intergenerational conversation albeit within that fairly kind of rarefied world of the pre-1992 university sector and it wasn't every university that was involved in that because of different pension schemes. I think you know it was also a great opportunity to have that conversation with young people about what do you think higher education should be for? How should it be funded and why? And a lot of those questions are still left unanswered so yeah I thought that was a good moment. Yeah the USS strike is a fascinating example I think of a wider phenomenon that there are some pension schemes that are very generous for the members but aren't those kind of schemes not available for younger workers and often these schemes have deficits and in companies so it's a bit more complicated at universities in companies the younger employees of the company is part of the revenues they generate for that company are being used to plug deficits in pension schemes that they're not even members of and there was a version of that in the USS issue but perhaps as David said there is a generation scheme fascinating subject there it is there's a topic for another day any observations that you want and particularly these issues about from James that he raised about kind of what does the intergenerational contract mean and are people realistic in their expectations? Yeah I think that's a really interesting question because there's kind of this perception that younger people should or could be angry towards older people obviously that's not happening I do think that your point is a very important one that it is sometimes a toxic environment for it and the reason I want to rerun those questions is my hypothesis that resentment has increased partly because of that rhetoric of millennials versus baby boomers and actually that's really important for things around how millennials actually make plans for their life if they are actually so negative and what I'm also interested in is whether it's just old people always disliking young people which does tend to happen and always will happen or is this something actually about the millennial generation because of that rhetoric of baby boomer versus millennials and when you ask people what words do you associate with baby boomers what words do you associate with millennials baby boomers are ethical they work hard they're community orientated millennials are lazy they're narcissistic, selfish and tech savvy but millennials also describe themselves in the exact same way that was their top answers as well which I think is also particularly interesting and then there's also something about okay but are they representative enough do they have enough political clout to make a difference to them and one thing to really bring up is that obviously voting is an age thing the older you get the more like you are to vote that's definitely the case but something that's happening with generation as seen cohort on cohort decline is political party identity millennials do not associate themselves with either party in any way in high numbers as previous generations did which completely turns its head slightly on politics and that's where Romain versus Lee does come in because obviously there's more tribal demands two very very quick things on the Trump thing and it is important to do some international comparison here because it's often assumed populism because of Brexit if we want to use that word in Trump is a phenomenon of older voters it's not true everywhere so Modi's vote is overwhelmingly young much more young than old in India even though he's a very Trumpy politician Marine Le Pen in France completely different profile of her support relative to here where education is the key divider and non-university educated young people in France voted for Marine Le Pen I agree with you in this country it's not helpful to think of Labour as the party of the young if it was as simple as that politics would be more simple but we do now have a party of the graduate classes the Liberal Democrats I think the Liberal Democrats are now effectively the party of the graduate classes and Thomas Piketty the great economist his current study is on trying to work out voting patterns and how they change particularly generationally and he says if you want one thing that just sums up how politics has changed is that the parties of the workers have become the parties of the graduates I don't think that's true it's more complicated than that but there are some parties of the graduates as you say a party affiliation is becoming looser but the Lib Dems I think have made their pitch yeah do you agree I think it certainly our analysis does show how important age is now and the and the disappearance of class belonging to social class A and B is now almost evenly distributed across Conservative and Labour vote but there's now a much wider gap on age I think we owe a response to the points that were made on housing which also helps answer James' question and this is why I do think that the in disagreeing with Jenny that the generational analysis is relevant it's impossible to do it without provoking intergenerational conflict you said Sir well the real issue about housing is being poor the real issue about housing is that in the last 20 or 30 years assets, the wealth of the UK has risen relative to the GDP, the income of the UK and we here at Resolution Foundation think that's one of the biggest single changes in the British economy that means that the wealth holders the people who were property owners 20 or 30 years ago have enjoyed a surge in their wealth and almost by definition those are older people and the fact that wealth is now so much more significant relative to income the point at which the rubber hits the road that ceases just to be a macroeconomic fact and becomes a personal reality is when someone is trying out of their earnings out of their income to acquire an asset a house as we saw from Ipsos Moray that is the most vivid form of the intergenerational inequity and turning to James when he asks about living standards it depends how you measure living standards of course there's GDP per head or some of the long term performance of the economy but if you look at living standards as experienced by people which is their household income after housing costs given the fact that many more of these young people are privately renting often themselves private rents that are transfers to older asset holders and that rents have shot up so much because the value of the house has shot up so much you can see there that the living standards of younger people are lagging behind even the rather mediocre performance of the economy so living if younger people felt that they were at least going to enjoy living standards whose growth matched the performance of the economy that would actually be a significantly better offer than what they are currently experiencing if they are paying rent privately as many of them are and it's very hard to that account heavily is influenced by how old you are whether you were old enough to be likely to have been a property owner when property was easier to acquire so it is as David said in his opening remarks as well as gender and ethnicity and all the things that we are sensitive to the age framework is relevant now let's see if there are some other interventions yes gentlemen there and then here David Sharp from M&G just picking up on your point David wealth is concentrated in the older cohorts dependency ratios are rising but over the next 20-30 years there is going to be a massive transfer of wealth from one generation to another as the baby boomers start to die off given the question of equity between generations what's the most effective way to bring that about is that through government policy is that through some taxation based around life cycles is that just going to happen right, very interesting about inheritance then I think there was yes gentlemen there Mark Williams WPI Economics at the beginning we saw from David a very simple model of a social contract that smooths income and expenditure over someone's lifetime given that for the young generation we probably can't expect to see as generous state benefits in old age and we already didn't have people older than us pay for our higher education does that model still apply and if not what are the consequences for that right, very interesting question yes behind was the right yes Margaret Doyle from University of Essex School of Law I just had two small points related to research on children and young people that I think might support something David said and something Jenny said as well I support your proposal to give six year olds the vote some research on how children in primary school understand the law that was carried out at University of Leicester was really interesting in terms of both how much they may be able to understand the law as it relates to their lives and also how to do that and how to work with children on that and I assume the same thing could be done for politics for instance and on Jenny's point about how divisive it can be to set this up as intergenerational equity issue I just want to refer to some research that I carried out on special educational needs and disabilities and the reforms that came in 2014 which gave 16 year olds the legal right to challenge decisions of local authorities basically transferring it from their parents to them but it's a right not being exercised and one of the issues that came out of that is that if we frame these as children's rights autonomous children's rights or disability rights issues it's really problematic because it pits one group's rights against another so young people's rights against carers rights for instance which are often women and women's right to be able to work if their young person is not in education that sort of thing and what came out of it is that we need to look at these as more relational rights and really not pit one against the other but look at the value of the relationships and the value of trust and actually that young people and I think this was demonstrated in the protest on send funding that young people look to adults they won't have a voice but they look to adults to actually be the leaders in a movement of protest like that This issue of younger votes and how David dismissed his own idea was kind of impossible but is that any attitudinal evidence on that and there was of course a variant of David's proposal which is that parents should get an extra vote on behalf of their children where you would, David might not regard that as insufficiently radical but you're supposed to say them hang on you are also the sodium of the interest of your kids and you get, so you do have 60 million votes but the parents discharges them, any attitudinal evidence at all on those sort of things So we do do a schools on the bus where we go and do surveys with kids every year and I put some questions on there and the only thing I would say about giving votes to 6 year olds is they may vote in a way that you might not expect, what came out of the attitudes was that they're very conservative with a small and big seat I think they would vote like their grandparents not their parents would you mean by grandparents spending more time with them anyway they were very conservative, particularly with a small seat around things like social rights actually environmentalism as well particularly younger kids didn't weren't that bothered actually and it gets, as you get older obviously so there's a huge gradient of 11 year olds extremely conservative 18 year olds super super liberal compared to all the populations so the ageing curve is one of very wanting to be like everyone else and then becoming slightly more socially minded so I would support it just to actually it's very because when I made this I did get a lot of response but with lots of people wanting to come up with alternative schemes not just taking votes away from older people but more votes for parents I do think one person one vote is the key principle of democratic politics and you shouldn't tinker with it and the great thing about enfranchising children and again there's this thought well maybe you should enfranchise them but we need to educate them first it's like votes for women it's like votes for people with that property you start with thresholds and then you realise it doesn't matter just let everybody vote nothing terrible will happen and the thing that really struck me is people kept saying it would be so risky to let children vote we're doing lots of really risky things at the moment that is not the most that is not but it's a sign of how conservative we all are about democratic institutions actually across the board and I think it's weird that we experiment in so many areas of our lives do such radical things and with democratic institutions we're so resistant to it as long as you keep the basic principles of democracy intact and there is something odd about the way people respond to this idea I do think it's interesting and it's not just it's always framed votes for six year olds it's votes for six year olds and seven year olds and eight year olds not just enfranchising year one that would be weird Jenny I just don't understand why you would want to do that it seems to me recently I completed a research project on students, sixth formers and undergraduates on their expectations and experiences at university and one of the things that's come out of that it's not particularly surprising but it's just it's kind of really helped understand a bit more how an 18 year old today is not the same as an 18 year old used to be how could they be, they are actually they do have to stay in education or training until they're 18 in England and then 50% of it, 50% now go to university this is a phenomenon in the book we've described a schoolification of the university because obviously then at university who are quite different to when young people used to go to university like with the baby boomers there was only 8% of them their peer groups, a lot of them would have left school at 16 and be working or they'd be leaving school at 18 so the context was very different now what strikes me in relation to the student population is that we have that on ease and anyone who works in a university knows this that you're formally dealing with these young people as disabled learners but you know that UCART is not fair because they seem quite young and there's a lot of tensions around about that now going to voting I mean why would we want to say to children okay you know what is your responsibility I mean it seems to me that's a further abdication I'm not particularly worried about which way they would vote but I suspect that the reason why votes for children are sort of taken on is because of this idea actually it's because they're in education they're more malleable and they can sort of be instructed to vote the right way the problem is they don't always play ball as we know and also I think we do have and this just relates to the point that you made previously about I think we do have a question about what does the division between educated and non-educated mean in this context where 50% of young people I mean the graduate there are divisions within people who have degrees and particularly the more it expands the divisions of class particularly and these are not homogeneous groups that we're dealing with so I do think it's a kind of the kind of proposal, the votes for kids proposal is the kind of thing that people might find blows back up in their face and I share your concern about children's rights by the way as a sort of you know it's inherently divisive this notion that children have distinct rights and interests separate from those who exercise them on their behalf I think it does lead to some quite difficult problems we didn't touch on the more economic question I was just going to say one thing and I would be really interested to know if there's polling data on this it's not quite connected to these but there is also there is an expectation among younger people that certain things are free that we thought we would have to pay for particularly in the way that not just information but forms of entertainment and other goods are provided the trade-off for that is what's now called surveillance capitalism so there's also a price to be paid in terms of privacy there is a feeling that there's a big generational divide on this that younger people are much more willing to make that trade-off than older people are I think it's a really important field of study for this centre that basic question about some things are now free that weren't free and younger people are more likely to appreciate the benefits of that but the trade-off may seem very different and it is as we move into a surveillance capitalism world which I think we sort of are it would be really important I think to understand how people value the new free goods relative to the price because after all we could pay for those goods and keep our privacy and older people tend to be more comfortable with that but that's partly because they could afford to Right, what I'm going to do I'm going to take a last batch of questions then the panellists can conclude Yes Yes, gentlemen there Yep Anybody else who wishes to get in Yes, after that we'll go to the lady over there Thank you I would like to raise a point on the housing crisis as I see it the elderly are quite prepared to release their wealth to the younger generation and they are not prepared to release their houses this is quite understandable releasing your wealth through the bank of mum and dad does good it gives your kids seven years to keep you alive as well so it helps releasing your houses puts you through the downsizing process which is far worse than uprising because of the problems involved Convincing stress put me in a resuscitation unit two years ago there is a great need to change the way that we move house for everybody in this country and this is particularly so for the older generation because we are in great danger of having the perfect storm where the wealth gets released through equity release which is now preferable to downsizing to the younger generation but the houses don't so the people can't move up to family houses and such like when we end up with one or two elderly rattling around in family houses and we didn't properly engage with the earlier question on inheritance which we must pick up on the final remarks over there from the ILC kind of just touched on that point actually the last question I was going to raise but I just was interested in the fact that it's very likely that there will be huge chances of assets from the older generation to the younger generation so should we maybe frame the debate more in terms of widening inequality between each generation so there will be a large concentration of assets among richer people and would that be kind of a less toxic way to view this and secondly a lot of talk about using equity release to pay for rising age-related fiscal costs for instance social care that's been discussed and just wondering what your views are on this and how that will touch upon this transfer and then the final question here you're just getting the mic you're just coming over Frank for guys back off England just picking up on a point James made regarding growth you made regarding the welfare state the future of the welfare state and then you had he said older people care as much about education as younger people none of these questions also from Ipsos seem to be asked in a constrained way I mean if you were given the choice would you give up your pension in order that a young person would get a better education I don't know what the answer would be are you asking these questions too because that would answer your question regarding the future of the welfare state it's ultimately and unfortunately it's about dividing a pie and that's how you can be discussed here how the first question was about giving huge tax allowances to elderly people to release equity this is all about who pays or doesn't pay tax and then who benefits in the welfare state yep thank you for a reminder of real politics and real economics is when there are trade-offs and not everybody can have everything Jenny and this is an opportunity just for some finalities is the this is when the panel brilliantly pill together the threads of the discussion so far I thought I'd actually try and answer some actual questions that's a bonus that's fantastic as well I mean as I said in my opening comments I think the problem I have with the intergenerational equity narrative is that I think economic problems and political ones are being posed as generational ones and I think I just wanted to restate that I mean I think economic growth is the key here you know I mean if you are if your life is going forward and you have opportunities and you know the world productivity is improving and all of those things then you know you're not going to feel pessimistic particularly about the future in the same kind of way you're not going to be kind of counting off the days until you can get Granny's inheritance you know which is where I think that there is this you know I mean that is a sort of attention I think inheritance is neither the solution nor the problem I mean when I wrote my new book called Stop Mugging Grandma and you know I mean I do think there is a sort of policy mindset at the moment which is like ha there's all these assets out there how do we get them how do we get them you know and it's not even a redistributionist strategy it's just a sort of an attempt to try and plug some kind of shortfall in welfare spending and I'm not surprised that people feel defensive about it but I think that's the last star as with the dementia tax in the last general election and so I think that I think we need to sort of stop looking at these kind of individualist individualised strategies and bring the discussion back to you know how we can promote economic growth general taxation what should be funded and shouldn't be funded and actually have those arguments out we should stop talking about old people's houses as assets by the way I mean they might be formally but they're old people's homes unless you're going to move to a really cheap one it's very difficult as I think this gentleman said it's very difficult to realise the money and I think what you have is older people living in these properties who aren't at all rich but being made to feel guilty because their property happens to be worth a lot of money and they're made to feel that you know I don't know they've got too many bedrooms or that they shouldn't be inhabiting that house because really the money should be going to their children so they've had a kind of you know drop off the mortal coil really quickly and I just think that this is all this is what contributes to the toxicity so yeah I mean with housing basically if I were in charge I would scrap up to buy which I think is a nonsensical thing it's like what do you do when you've got a recession that's caused by a massive housing bubble you create a new one I think it's silly I think we should get rid of help to buy build a whole load of social housing and start bringing the discussion back to a properly democratic one about what we as a society want and need Thank you very much, Hannah Yeah so on your point actually about whether do we give people the trade off no we don't because the answer is people can really struggle with the idea that there is a pie I mean a lot of these policy concepts around pensions and housing are actually very difficult to unpick for someone who hasn't got their head in a policy book 24-7 and certainly in terms of what we discussed with people I think it's very much reflecting your thoughts actually that was pretty much not that you are a baby boomer but the baby boomer thought process during the qualitative workshops was I really hard for it and I was actually promised this why should I give this up which is in many ways a fair argument and kind of the only other thing to say is that it's also works on the flip side as well that millennials also think that's the case so I do wonder whether if we are thinking about these policies it's also worth thinking about how it's potentially going to land thank you David very briefly it's not just that the pulses don't give people the trade-offs the politicians don't either and if there's one lesson from the 2017 election that probably will be the lasting legacy which was whatever you think of the policy party that was 20 points ahead and thought we'll take a chance and in their own mind do a little bit of trade-off politics never again so we're not going to get more of that I think it is and again it might be interesting to research this in the context of what you're doing here I think loss of version is really important a feature of all human beings we all suffer from loss of version but older people not just in terms of assets but in terms of experience have more to lose and I think a really interesting test case of this is going to be people's relationships with cars as we move into a green new deal if you just think of the generational difference so my 20 year old son no intention of ever learning to drive you can't see what the point of it is he has no relationship with cars he has a relationship with Uber but that's not in his mind relationship with cars older generations including myself have a very very different life experience of cars and when a policy comes in which will which will not just be to nudge us but probably slightly more than nudge us to having a different relationship with transportation whatever you think about the unfortunate side effects of it there will be a generational divide green new deal politics is going to be very very generationally divisive not because older people don't care about the future because they're going to be dead but because they have different life experiences and I think that's really important some final observations on the questions I mean this inheritance and housing question first of all we know that the peak age for inheriting is about 61 62 so people are quite old when they find to receive this inheritance and going back to what I said earlier about the rise in value of wealth relative to GDP we are indeed a society where inheritance is growing relative to earnings and that is a big social change and it does indeed mean that in the long run your chances of home ownership are going to be increasingly dependent on inheritance and less linked to your earnings which I think is a retrograde step I think is behind some of this polling evidence of people being thinking things are tougher for the younger generation but boomers do all have these narratives around how everything they've got they've earned by their hard efforts and the reason why their house is shot up in value is entirely because they saved hard to build a conservatory and has nothing to do with the fact that they restricted planning permission for any housing in their area and there's been a massive increase in QE and the money supply so they think they do think and similarly that their pensions are all because they worked hard and that's why these admittedly heroic estimates but which John Hills has done at the LSE and which we have drawn on an advance here at resolution on trying to calculate on stable policies cohort by cohort how much tax you will have paid during your working life and how much you will take out from the welfare state in benefits and services and it does show there are some lucky cohorts going back actually slightly pre boomer because of the way the welfare state was created at the end of the Second World War who are clearly going to get out more than they put in whereas it looks as if on current policies the some of the younger generations will put in more than they pay out and the usefulness of those calculations is they do get back to these people who just think that their own personal N.I. pension contributions have generated enough to pay for the pension they receive they don't, it is part of its generation exchange and it's fine so long as each generation successfully gets a fair deal and whilst there are of course inequities within generations we are sensitive to all those other forms of inequity the fact is that are also big equity issues now between generations and I actually think this is not a matter of generational warfare let's try to end on a note of harmony I actually think that this is one of the uniting issues in the society and one of the reasons why I got interested in all this and wrote the book was that we are, if you can't appeal to shared religious belief shared historic understanding if a lot of the historic unifying factors that a political party could appeal to have gone actually across age groups and across most religious and other loyalties there is a belief we want our kids to have a better life than we've done so I personally think the appeal to the interest of the young is a unifying appeal not a divisive appeal and people I think are genuinely, are correct to be worried when you look at all the economic evidence that we've assembled RF and elsewhere that we're failing to deliver that kind of promise which is what whatever your age you do think is what a modern liberal democracy stands for thank you all very much indeed for coming on, particular thanks to our panellists for a lively and interesting exchange and I look forward to legislation on votes for people age 6 and over