 We often talk about the social contract underlying the welfare state, particularly in Europe but also in the United States. What we sometimes forget is that there's also an implicit generational contract that underlies the welfare state. When we're young, we pay in and the expectation that we will receive benefits in return when rolled. And it's the sustainability over time of this generational compact that supplies the glue to the social contract. And if young people begin to think that they're getting the short end of the stick, that does raise the potential for generational backlash. Pays you go social insurance systems have sometimes been likened to chain letters. They work great so long as you can get new people to join. The problem is that the developed countries are running out of new joiners because of the shifting demographics. And these tensions, generational tensions, are already beginning to come to the surface surprisingly and unexpectedly. In places where you wouldn't necessarily expect to in Germany, the head of the youth wing of the Christian Democratic Party a year or two ago suggested that old people should pay for their own false teeth and hip replacements. He was soundly chastised for this, but if you look at the polling data, there's a rising disquiet and resentment among young adults in many countries about how much is being asked in return for benefits which were inevitably going to be much less generous. The other side of the equation of course is not just whether youth will quote-unquote rebel. It's whether elders will insist on getting the deal that they've been promised. And there you need to move beyond simple life cycle demographics and think about the changing generational constellation. And here oddly, I see a silver lining in the retirement of the much maligned baby boom generation, often referred to as the me generation. Actually, in the United States, the senior welfare state was built by and for the World War II generation, which everybody agreed deserved civic reward in exchange for civic sacrifice. They survived the Great Depression, they won the Second World War and the Cold War. Nobody questions the entitlement. Baby boomers, I don't think, feel the same sense of entitlement in what's perhaps more to the point. Gen X coming behind them doesn't think they deserve it. So I actually think there's a potential for rewriting the contract. And that as the generational constellation shifts and boomers move into old age, not just in the United States but in Europe, that the existing deal will become renegotiable and that we won't have the same resistance that we've had in the past, that Social Security will no longer be the third rail of politics.