The thing about boomers – the thing that no one ever says about boomers – is that they’re just so generous. The generation born between, roughly, 1946 and 1964 get a lot of stick: for being on the lucky side of the housing crisis, for feeling and acting entitled, for having voted to deny to their children a lot of things (free higher education, a European passport, a functioning welfare state) that they enjoyed themselves. But what we hardly ever acknowledge is quite how endlessly giving they are.
This week has brought two separate reports highlighting the full extent of boomer generosity. The first was a column by the Financial Times‘s economics editor, Chris Giles, with the – admittedly, pretty banging – headline of: “OK boomer, you’re more generous than we thought.” In it, he counts up the value of financial transfers between old and young: the £100bn a year that, according to Imperial College research, “flows down the generations in the form of bequests”; the £11bn of “lifetime gifts”; the unpaid childcare (£132bn) and social care (£57bn). This £300bn of “private welfare”, he notes, is “more than the public welfare bill for pensions and other social security of £261bn in 2022-23”.
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