婴儿潮一代的好日子到头了

In France, protesters are still complaining about the same old thing.

They say the baby boomers took the best houses and most of the stocks.

What's left for young people is expensive housing and unstable jobs.

Samuel Moyn of Yale University published a book in June this year.

The title is very direct: "Gerontocracy in America."

An analysis of 32 rich countries found that the situation has already changed.

In 26 of them, the elderly are falling behind relative to the young.

This may mean the world has just passed the peak of the "baby boomer" generation.

Baby boomers are people born between the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s.

To understand this turning point, we must first go back to an era when the elderly were still poor.

In the United States in the mid-1960s, nearly 30% of the elderly had incomes insufficient for basic living.

Among working-age people, that proportion was only 10%.

From the 1980s onward, governments made pensions more generous.

Pensions began to be indexed to wages or prices, and healthcare coverage also expanded.

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

The problem is that this round of catch-up went a bit too far.

For elderly households in the US, after-tax income went from far behind to close to the average level.

In Greece, retirees even came close to surpassing young people at one point.

Now the direction has reversed: in Greece, working people's incomes are nearly 20% higher than retirees'.

British pensioners are 10% below the median, whereas under the old trend they should have been 10% above.

Of course, the elderly still hold a lot of wealth.

In the US, people over 70 make up only 13% of the population.

But they hold about one-third of private wealth.

So why are the elderly losing their advantage?

One reason is that rich countries have not had a synchronized recession for twenty years.

Apart from the brief downturn in 2020, wages and employment have held up.

Another reason is inflation, which has hit the elderly particularly hard.

The European Commission found that the cost-of-living crisis has hit pensioner households the hardest.

Fixed pensions pay a fixed amount; when prices rise, their real value shrinks.

Government money is also changing direction, slowly shifting from the elderly to the young.

In Italy, spending on the elderly relative to spending on children has been declining in recent years.

Reforms in the 1990s lowered the average retirement age, and now it is starting to rise again.

China has raised its retirement age for the first time in over 70 years, with men's retirement age gradually extended to 63.

Britain plans to reform the "triple lock," the rule that makes pensions rise every year.

Tax money is also starting to flow to families with children.

Germany, Ireland, Japan, Poland, and South Korea have all expanded child subsidies in recent years.

Policy overall still favors the elderly, and spending on healthcare and long-term care will be very heavy in the future.

But with slow growth and high debt, pensions cannot keep rising forever.