“The Economist” is the latest in a long list of newspapers, think tanks, analysts and influencers who blame babyboomers for everything that goes wrong in Europe these days (“Grey expectations; or how boomers screwed Europe”, May 30th); extracts: “boomers granted themselves generous pensions (which) costs turned Europe lethargic, (…) they have locked the young out of home ownership, (they) expect the current tax owners to pick up the tab for their retirement plans, (…) some of it financed by government deficits, which the yet-to-be-born will also have to repay one day, (…) that means less capital for Europeans firms, one reason why there are so few big ones in areas like tech… Today’s (European) grandparents inherited a continent rebuilding itself after war; they will pass on one in need of repair after the damage they helped wreak”.
Ouch!
Well, the only good thing about boomers is that they will die en masse in a short period, the same way they came to life. By 2040/2050, when most of them are dead, one of the biggest transfer of wealth would have taken place through inheritance, national budgets won’t have to finance anymore massive pension and health costs, there will be a lot more young people at work than retirees and Europe won’t need to import petrol and gas (RE, hydrogen, nuclear fusion…). All this will certainly make the burden of national debts much easier to bear and may even help to reduce it. Thus, it could be expected from gen X, Y, Z, whatever, to be patient for fifteen to twenty years, work hard and plan for early retirement with an even higher pension than their parents and grandparents had enjoy.
Many of them will probably show impatience and some could even wish that boomers would die sooner. In France there is a kind of reversed mortgage, the viager, in which the buyer of a house or an apartment pays the aging seller (s) to stay at home until he (or they) die, when the buyer becomes the rightful owner. Of course, there has been countless attempts to expedite their death (s), including one case when a crook contracted multiple viagers and offered poisoned water bottles to sellers (he was unsuccessful in killing them, his plot was uncovered and he is now in jail). In 1968 Alain Resnais, a French filmmaker, shot a film called “Je t’aime, je t’aime”, in which the young were chasing the old to kill them, as a legal and much publicized sport. God forbid!