In recent years we have witnessed the proliferation of discourses on intergenerational conflict. Young people versus older generations, millennials versus boomers, and, more recently, Generation Z confronting the generations that preceded them. These discourses did not arise from nowhere. They have their roots in debates that gained momentum from the 1980s, in a context marked by the fiscal crisis of the welfare state and by uncertainty about its sustainability.
In developed countries, the maturation of the major welfare programs had generated a growing volume of beneficiaries of public services and transfers. Citizenship had acquired new social rights and, in particular, millions of workers had accumulated long contribution histories during a prolonged period of economic expansion. At the same time, since the late 1970s there had been what some authors called an “explosion of needs”: a wave of unemployment associated with deindustrialization and the accumulation of new social problems linked to modernization processes —urbanization, drug dependence, international migrations, aging—. In the face of this expansion of social needs, in a recessionary economic climate, states faced increasing fiscal difficulties.
“The maturation of the major welfare programs had generated a growing number of beneficiaries of public services and transfers”
In this context of fiscal strangulation, certain discourses about intergenerational relations began to take center stage, both in the academic sphere and in public conversation. Researchers, essayists and journalists began to relate the institutional transformations of the welfare state to the problems experienced by new generations as they transition to adulthood. Many of these analyses combine the portrait of new social risks with a critique of the inherited welfare state: its supposed inability to respond to emerging problems, its inefficiency or even the possibility that some of its interventions produced perverse effects.
A line of argument was gaining particular relevance. It connected these criticisms with the neoliberal discourse that consolidated during the 1980s and 1990s under Reagan and Thatcher: the questioning of the capacity and desirability of the State taking on new responsibilities, the outsourcing of risks to individuals and families, and the expansion of market logics into areas previously regulated or protected by public institutions.
The Economist constitutes a privileged observatory for reconstructing this convergence between the liberal agenda and the discourse of intergenerational conflict. Following its articles over several decades allows us to observe how a problem initially framed in terms of the sustainability of the welfare state progressively took the form of a distributive conflict between generations.
“The following of its articles over several decades allows us to observe how a problem initially framed in terms of the sustainability of the welfare state progressively took the form of a distributive conflict between generations”
During the 1990s, warnings about the economic and political effects of aging began to proliferate in its pages. The rise in the number of pensioners appeared as a threat to the sustainability of pension systems and, more broadly, to the fiscal agreements on which the welfare state rested. The expression “demographic bomb” became a recurring formula to describe an imminent future.
What is interesting about this framing is that two demographic categories —young and old— began to acquire an explanatory power that went beyond their descriptive status. The internal heterogeneity of both categories fell outside the frame. Apparently, it did not matter whether older people were homeowners or tenants, rich or poor, long-time stable workers or people with precarious career trajectories. Nor did it matter whether young people came from well-off or disadvantaged families. What mattered was their belonging to a particular age category.
Thus a demographic question was transformed into a distributive problem. If the number of pension beneficiaries and health service users rose while the number of workers declined, someone would have to pay the difference. The conflict appeared as an almost inevitable consequence of demographic arithmetic.
The issue was not only how much the State spent, but who paid and who received. And, once framed in this way, the relationship between generations inevitably took on a political dimension: older people formed a growing bloc of voters able to defend their acquired rights, while young people, in their diminishing share, appeared doomed to be the present or future taxpayers who would have to finance ever-growing obligations. No one anticipated at that time the role of migration in sustaining the financial burden of the welfare state.
During the first decade of the 21st century, the framing began to undergo a transformation. It was no longer just an undifferentiated collective of young and old. More precise generational categories emerged: boomers and millennials. With this important shift, the problem came to be framed as a question of the distribution of resources, opportunities, and wealth between cohorts.
Over the past two decades, The Economist has incorporated new dimensions into this tale. The demographic weight of the elderly becomes political weight. In a society in which the median voter is aging, governments would have incentives to respond primarily to the demands of older voters: pensions, health care, and protection against certain risks. The argument thus extends beyond the state’s fiscal accounts. Resources allocated to the elderly could be diverting investment, innovation, and opportunities for the young.
Housing provides a new platform for this framing. The spectacular rise in real estate prices has allowed reinterpreting wealth inequality as a generational issue. Young people no longer manage to access housing and accumulate wealth with the same ease as previous generations. The problem is thus reframed again as a cross-cohort relationship: those who entered the housing market earlier would have benefited from conditions that are no longer available to those entering later.
“Resources allocated to the elderly could be diverting investment, innovation, and opportunities for the young”
What is significant is that, in certain versions of this narrative, the explanation shifts from housing market failures to policy decisions that favored some age groups over others. And the solution offered is, as one would expect from a liberal-leaning magazine, greater faith in the market and less public intervention.
The language has also become more explicit. In an article published last May, The Economist went so far as to headline “How boomers screwed Europe” (How the boomers wrecked Europe). It is a very forceful expression through which a generation shifts from a demographic category to a collective subject responsible for the problems of another.
In the United States, according to the magazine’s argument, the broader spread of private pension plans would have channelled large amounts of capital into financial markets, helping to finance corporate innovation and the development of new tech companies. The comparison thus serves to contrast two institutional models: one European, burdened by public commitments to older generations, and another American, more reliant on private accumulation and capitalization mechanisms.
The liberal interpretation contains elements worth bearing in mind. It has helped draw attention to social risks that affect young generations with particular intensity: job precarity, difficulties of emancipation, access to housing, wealth accumulation, or uncertainty about the future.
“The solution offered is, as one would expect from a liberal-leaning magazine, greater reliance on the market and less public intervention”
But the framing also presents significant gaps and distortions. When talking about generations, one must remember that they are not homogeneous social blocks. There are young people who transition to adulthood with relative ease thanks to the economic, cultural, political, and social capital of their families. And there are older people who reach retirement after discontinuous careers, precarious jobs, or long periods of informality, with few resources.
The risk of turning age into the main explanatory category is that other fundamental dimensions of inequality —social class, gender, territory, education, family background, or wealth— are relegated to the background.
A young person from a wealthy, homeowner family may share a generation with another who lacks housing, wealth, and family support networks, but their life opportunities are radically different. Similarly, a retiree who owns several homes and a pensioner with a minimal pension belong to the same statistical generation, but occupy very different social positions.
Intergenerational inequality does not, therefore, eliminate inequality within generations. And both can even reinforce one another.
“The risk of making age the main explanatory category is that other fundamental dimensions of inequality are relegated”
In Spain, many analysts have (have we) long debated these kinds of issues, though there are still those who prefer not to acknowledge it and strive to persuade us that we have begun national, or even international, debates. Ignorance is bold. As early as the 1990s, pioneering sociologists such as Enrique Gil Calvo, Teresa Jurado, or Javier Polavieja were outlining institutional mechanisms that conditioned processes of emancipation, access to housing or inequality in the labor market. Many more, from sociology and other disciplines, have contributed perspectives, concepts, analytical tools, and data.
On June 22, 2012, political scientist Belén Barreiro published in El País a brilliant article: “Regreso del futuro” (Return of the Future). In it she imagined the birth of a “Radical Party” that would champion the generational cause and denounce the neglect of young people’s problems. Barreiro placed its hypothetical birth in 2016.
In the real world, the birth came earlier. It was born in 2014 and was called Podemos. Led by younger faces than usual in a political party, for several years it was the preferred option for a large part of the electorate under 45, promising to tackle precariousness, cap housing prices, and topple the unjust political regime endorsed in a 1978 referendum by their parents. Its emergence occurred in the context of the economic crisis, the 15-M movement, and the wear of the two-party system. After a meteoric rise, however, its star soon began to decline and it never consolidated as a majority option, not even among the youth.
Shortly after, a second party emerged with notable appeal among younger voters, though drawing from different ideological sources. A well-known banker even christened it “the Podemos of the right.” Ciudadanos, from a liberal stance, advocated a reorientation of public policy that aimed to give more weight to the needs and grievances of the new generations. It did not seek the support of the same young people—the youth, as we have seen, is far from a homogeneous group—and its proposals were entirely different. It too failed. In the 2019 elections, the majority of young voters swung again toward the traditional parties.
The Barreiro article was not prophecy in the strict sense. It was a smart extrapolation of trends that the social sciences had been identifying for years: youth precarity, waning expectations, political alienation, and growing distance between the life experiences of different cohorts. Additionally, Barreiro warned of another possibility: that a generational mobilization could adopt an identity far less attractive and potentially more dangerous, under a label such as “National Union.” It is important to recall the publication date: 2012. There was no need for a crystal ball; what was needed, perhaps, was the author’s intellectual solvency and attention to debates already taking place in the social sciences and in other countries.
In collaboration with the “la Caixa” Foundation
