“…As the postwar baby boomer generation begins to enter comfortable retirement … their children face a future of massive debt and uncertainty.
The baby boomers.
Born between 1945 and 1955 … they are busy ignoring the biblical calculus that a man’s span is three score years and 10.
Having enjoyed a life of free love, free school meals, free universities, defined benefit pensions, mainly full employment and a 40-year-long housing boom …
… they are bequeathing their children sky-high house prices, debts and shrivelled pensions.
A 60-year-old in 2010 is a very privileged and lucky human being – an object of resentment as much as admiration.
I’m at the heart of all of it – guilty as charged.
Born 21 May 1950, I’m the quintessential baby boomer.
And for the last three months, while most of the rest of the world has been getting on with their lives …
… I’ve been wrestling with the implications of my new seniority.
Sixty may or may not be the new 50 … but it is a significant milestone; …
… I’ve been on the planet for an awfully long time.
What sense can I make of the decades I have lived through?
To what extent am I and my generation unfairly lucky?
What is the best way to live my life from now on?
To a degree I have some sympathy with the resentment … marshalled in a cluster of recent anti-boomer books.
Individually, we may not have been the authors of today’s flux, uncertainty and lack of social and cultural anchors …
… but we were at the scene of the crime…”
(and..)
“…But when you trace the arc of the past 60 years … I am not so sure that where we have reached is especially stable.
If the launch of the SDP marked the beginning of an era in British politics, the coalition government defines the end.
The SDP and Lib Dem politicians who wanted to reinvent the left have ended up reinventing the right.
Yet the big question of our time, after the financial crisis and the prospect of years of low growth and high unemployment …
… remains what it was in 1968.
Capitalism cannot continue as it has at home and abroad.
There needs to be a countervailing force to hold it to account and keep it honest.
CEOs cannot enrich themselves for ever, without limit, with no wider economic and social consequences.
If today’s market economies cannot create jobs and prosperity for the mass of the working population …
… the restiveness will grow..”
(recommended-read..)
go to source/story>>>The baby boomers and the price of personal freedom | Society | The Observer
