[danielf]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

You can find bits about it all over the internet.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...-voting-muscle
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/book...-WILLETTS.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/c...se-prices.html

An interesting debate both ways can be read at http://www.totalpolitics.com/opinion...-selfish.thtml

The point isn't the relatively great prosperity, it's that all the money from that prosperity has been spent, along with more, and some of that 'more' has been saved up in PFI for future generations to pay, along with the distinct lack of signs of that prosperity.

Rather than saving up for pensions they covered current pensions, as generations do, and spent more than they were putting in despite the North Sea oil revenues and the relatively low cost of education and health care. Their parents paid for their education, my generation will pay for their health care and pensions in retirement.

Had they done something like this there would've been little cause to complain.

Prosperity doesn't mean house prices rocket, they were fairly flat until 1997 despite periods of extremely rapid GDP growth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_property_bubble

I don't have time to read all of it, but to be honest, I'm still having a hard time with the notion. It seems a bit easy to me to take the current situation (intergenerational inequality) and conclude that it must be the fault of the previous one, unless it's clear that the previous generation was deliberately irresponsible. For one, hindsight is a wonderful thing. Secondly, coming up with things like the cost of climate change seems ludricous to me, as it's simply not the case that these costs were envisaged 20 or 30 years ago.

All in all, it seems to me people were doing what seemed prudent at the time (and they were doing it all over the world). Playing a blame game when circumstance have changed doesn't achieve much.