Am I part of the luckiest generation in history?

ShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleEvan DavisPresenter on Radio 4's PMGetty ImagesI was born in 1962, at the tail end of the baby boom era. Does that make me especially lucky? Should I languish in guilt? The claim has been made that the baby boomers in general, and the late baby boomers in particular, have done rather better than the generations that followed. This argument has been bubbling for some years, but my interest was piqued by comments from the former foreign secretary William Hague, now chancellor of the University of Oxford - born in 1961 - who argued a few months ago that the early 1960s is one of the best periods in history in which to have been born. And recent arguments over the English student loan system have put generational fairness even more firmly onto the agenda. When I was young, I don't remember fairness between generations ever being given much thought, and the labelling of different cohorts (Generation X, millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha) wasn't quite the thing it is now. The baby boom was talked about, but more as a simple demographic phenomenon. Now, generational analysis seems to be everywhere; from TV comedies like Hacks and Only Murders in the Building, to office-place chitchat. But with generational identity politics alive and well today, let us examine the evidence. I find Hague's claim fascinating and plausible. But is it right? Have my schoolmates and I done well - too well? I can't cover everything, so I'll focus on England, and three key areas: higher education, pensions and housing. There's clearly a sense of injustice about the English student loan system. Martin Lewis, Britain's most prominent financial commentator, has criticised the terms attached to some of the loans as immoral. Indeed, the extra 9% "tax" on earnings paid by younger graduates is an obvious difference to the treatment I received. In my case, the government actually gave me an annual maintenance grant and covered the cost of tuition. Younger graduates feel this sharply. Natalie Whittaker, 27, told the BBC recently that debt from her bachelor's degree now stands at £75,500 (up from £52,000 when she graduated). "We were told… it's just the price of a coffee, you won't even notice it leaving your pay cheque," she says. But now she's making repayments and thinking, "hang on a minute, this isn't the price of a coffee". There are also suggestions that the state might actually be making a profit from graduates; recent work by the consultancy London Economics finds that the 2022 cohort of graduates will pay more into the exchequer through the loan system, over their lifetimes, than their degrees actually cost. But I wouldn't read too much into the overall profit the government is allegedly making (at a different time, the Institute for Fiscal Studies came up with the opposite result to London Economics). In fact, the student loans issue is much more ambiguous than often realised, because while today's students do pay far more than I did, a lot more of them have the chance to go to university. To quote the House of Commons Library, "overall participation in higher education increased from 3.4% in 1950, to 8.4% in 1970, 19.3% in 1990 and 33% in 2000". And then, by 2022/23, 49% of state school pupils from England had started higher education by the age of 25. What was once a privilege for a few has become an entitlement for half of young adults. So in this case, the victims of injustice are arguably not the students choosing to take out a loan and pay for college now, but the many people I went to school with who were never even offered a choice about whether to borrow and study at all. The English student loan system might look unfair, but has been designed precisely to make the growth of graduate numbers possible, while also being fair to the declining proportion of non-students. In other words, the loan system aims to provide for fairness between generations, not fairness across generations. There is one other very important feature of the student loan system though, which has angered some students. While it was not designed to be a big money-maker for the government overall, it is designed to make money out of some better-off graduates to cover the cost of subsidising some of the less well-off. This comes down to the fact that it isn't a true loan like a mortgage which you have to pay back over time regardless of your means. Instead, it is more like a personalised tax. And many will never earn enough to pay back the full cost of their higher education. The system is designed to cover the losses on those lower income graduates, from the profits made from higher income graduates. (Though, interestingly, the very-rich graduates have been penalised less than the quite-rich, because they can pay off their loan quickly and avoid paying the high interest rates.) So if you made it to university in the 1980s, you would have been much better off then than now. In my years, students were subsidise

Am I part of the luckiest generation in history?

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