婴儿潮一代的好日子到头了

The protests on the streets of France once again voiced that familiar complaint: the baby-boom generation occupies the best houses and most of the stocks, and draws generous pensions.

What is left for young people is expensive housing and unstable work.

Samuel Moyn of Yale University published "Gerontocracy in America" in June, giving this resentment a name.

But this picture is already out of date.

An analysis covering thirty-two rich countries found that in twenty-six of them, the elderly are falling back relative to the working-age population.

The world may already have passed "peak boomer".

In America in the mid-1960s, nearly thirty percent of people over sixty-five had incomes below the threshold needed to meet basic living needs.

Among the working-age population, that share was only ten percent.

From the 1980s onward, governments made pensions more generous, indexed them to wages or prices, and expanded health coverage.

By the mid-2010s, the incomes of British retirees had almost caught up with the working-age population.

That catch-up eventually went too far.

The median income of elderly American households after tax and benefit adjustments was only fifty-seven percent of that of other households in 1979.

By 2012, that figure had risen to ninety percent.

Now the direction has reversed.

Greece's working-age population now earns nearly twenty percent more than pension recipients.

British retirees now earn ten percent less than the median of the working-age population.

The wealth in older people's hands is still considerable.

According to Federal Reserve statistics, Americans over seventy make up thirteen percent of the total population but hold about one third of private wealth.

But since the late 2010s, the growth of their wealth share has been slower than the growth of their population share.

There is more than one reason the elderly are losing ground.

Apart from the brief downturn in 2020, rich countries have not had a synchronized recession for twenty years, which has propped up wages and employment.

A paper by the European Commission found that post-pandemic inflation hit pension-age households almost three times as hard as working-age households.

The paper points out that the reason is that defined-benefit pensions pay out a fixed nominal amount.

The flow of public money is also changing.

Until the 2010s, Americans over sixty-five received ten times as much federal funding per capita as other age groups.

By 2024, that multiple had fallen to six.

Before the pandemic, Italy's spending on the elderly was almost fifteen times its spending on families and children; now it is less than ten times.

Retirement itself is also changing.

OECD statistics show that reforms in the 1990s pushed the average retirement age down from around sixty-five to sixty-one.

Over the past decade, the average retirement age for Italian men has been pushed back another four years.

In 2025, China raised the retirement age for the first time in more than seventy years.

Under the plan, by 2040 the retirement age for men will rise to sixty-three, and for women to fifty-five to fifty-eight.

Britain, meanwhile, plans to reform the pension triple lock.

This mechanism raises the state pension by the highest of inflation, wage growth, and two point five percent.

Governments are also starting to spend more on young people.

The average age of the US House of Representatives at the start of the current Congress was 57.9, down from 58.4 in early 2021.

Policy still tilts toward pension recipients, and the costs of health care and long-term care will also be very heavy.

But weak growth and high public debt make endless pension increases no longer possible.

Low fertility rates keep parents out of the workforce, and the cost of that is equally high.