When did we start to think of society primarily as a collection of age cohorts? Take any recent attempt to capture the people of Britain and we tend to be shown a block strafed with three great horizontal divides: one canyon between 58- and 59-year-olds (generation X and boomers), a second great rift between the ages of 42 and 43 (millennials and gen X), and yet another unbreachable gap between 26 and 27 (gen Z and millennials).
Within each block, by contrast, you will be told that a group encompassing some 15 years and all levels of society is practically homogenous. Members of generations are accorded the same agenda, the same set of advantages and disadvantages, and even – like a new branch of astrology – the same personality. “I’m not a millennial,” a friend told me recently, though his date of birth put him smack within that cohort. What he meant, it turned out, was that he thought of himself as a stoic.
For the past decade or so, social problems have been framed increasingly as generational ones. Having identified these groups so vividly, it seems to be hard for us not to put every social analysis through this beguiling filter. Take, for example, the UK’s growing problem of wealth inequality. Rather than looking at it in terms of class, say, we now reach first for the generational sieve. Differences in wealth, particularly in housing, are framed as a gap between boomers and the younger generations.
This, of course, captures something important (generational analysis isn’t totally without merit): millennials do indeed hold considerably less housing wealth than their predecessors. But it also misses something else – the huge and growing inequalities within these young generations. The difficulties of property ownership are often framed as a problem plaguing millennials and generation Z as homogenous cohorts – a source of solidarity among them. Not so.
A new working paper by economists Paul Green and Ricky Kanbar at the University of Bath suggests that not only are there huge divides in wealth between members of younger generations, but that those divides yawn even wider than in previous cohorts. The most advantaged individuals born around 1980, for example, have accumulated housing wealth at an even faster rate than their wealthy predecessors. But for the most disadvantaged, the opposite trend is true. Privileged members of younger generations are doing better than ever; they are insulated from the woes of their peers. But the worst off are doing worse.
A generational problem has been hiding a class one. Or more precisely, what started as a generation problem has become a class one, as rich boomers have begun to hand on wealth to their children. This is the real source of the divide – the determining factor in whether millennials are wealthy is the wealth of their parents. Thirty-five-year-olds whose parents owned their own home and were highly educated are three times more likely to have bought their own place. And the richer the parent, the more expensive their child’s property tends to be.
It’s a big problem. Home ownership and housing wealth, the authors say, dictate the greater part of the wealth divide within generations. And if this trend continues, the relationship between the housing wealth of parents and their offspring is set to double in three decades. What to do about this? The instinct of the rich to feather the nests of their children seems to have overcome every social policy laid in its way, from the expansion of education which began in the 1960s to targeted policies like Help to Buy. Family background has only become more important in determining how rich you are.
It’s a difficult problem to solve because if we attempt to confront it directly we hit political trouble. The obvious solutions to this growing inequality would be a wealth tax or at least to ramp up inheritance tax. But this sort of thing is resisted by politicians, who surmise the public would not like it. They are partly right: the public tends to think of wealth as the product of hardworking savers and dislikes the idea of being “taxed twice” for it. But there’s another cognitive bias here, I think: a form of loss aversion. When trying to address wealth inequality, politicians tend to balk at the idea of actually removing privilege, preferring to concentrate on schemes to improve the lot of the less privileged.
You also see this in educational policy. Politicians like the idea of top universities opening their doors to more state school children, but dislike the thought that privately educated pupils might “lose places” as a result.
But this is foggy thinking. When we talk about social mobility, we are talking about how much your economic status moves independently of your family background. So, yes, this means bright, talented poor children doing better. But it also means less talented rich ones doing worse. You can’t have one group hoarding all the wealth and housing stock (or top jobs or highest-quality education) and expect to shift the social dial. But while politicians are perfectly happy to talk about social mobility in the context of helping the underprivileged climb the social ladder, they go quiet when it comes to the other side of the equation: helping the overprivileged climb down.
Until we address this problem, members of younger generations will continue to become less alike in all the ways that really matter. They may share fashions and slang but, in terms of wealth, housing and life chances, they will simply become exaggerated versions of their parents.
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
