Oh no, not again. Guardian readers deserve better than Phillip Inman’s tedious and hateful boomer-bashing (Boomers think their wealth came from wise choices – this myth needs busting, 20 September). This summer we’ve had his tax plans (tax boomers more), his suggestions for dealing with the housing crisis (kick boomers out of their homes), his idea for boomer “national service” built around volunteering, and now his attacks on older people’s occupational pensions. Goodness, Phillip, you really can’t let this obsession with boomers go, can you?
Economic inequalities – and with them social and health inequalities – are getting worse, and while Inman tells us with monotonous regularity that “it’s the boomers wot dun it”, it is in fact a little more complicated. Generation is a far less important factor than gender, race, disability and, above all, class, and if we don’t start looking at intra-generational inequalities we are going nowhere – not least because wealthy parents raise wealthy children, and support them financially to a value about 26 times more than poorer parents in the same generation, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Millennials are already tipped to become the wealthiest generation in history, far outstripping the baby boomers, but, crucially, it won’t be all of them, and that is why looking at economic inequality through the single lens of generation is not “myth-busting”, it is myth-making.
Now that the summer silly season is over, please could we have some proper economic analysis from someone who takes inequalities seriously.
Rosa Anderson
London
Phillip Inman’s article trades in ageist stereotyping rather than serious analysis. No evidence is offered to show that boomers as a group actually believe their wealth stems from uniquely “wise choices”. Attitudes to prosperity and inequality vary far more by politics and education than by year of birth, yet the article paints an entire generation with a single brush.
It is true that many in the postwar cohort benefited from advantages unavailable today: affordable housing, secure pensions and generous tax reliefs. But if intergenerational fairness is to be addressed seriously, it should be debated in terms of policy, not reduced to caricatures of older people as smug and self-deluded.
Peter Mather
Orpington, London
