Were baby boomers really history's luckiest generation?

Evan Davis was born in 1962, near the tail end of the baby boom, and he has spent the better part of his career asking questions about how the world works. Recently, he found himself asking a more personal one: Was he part of history's luckiest generation? The question arrived partly through William Hague, the former foreign secretary and now chancellor of Oxford, who argued a few years back that the early 1960s represented one of the best periods in which to be born. But it was sharpened by something more immediate—the mounting anger of younger graduates drowning in student debt, and the broader sense that the generations born after 1965 had drawn a much shorter straw.

Davis decided to test the claim by examining three pillars of material life: university education, housing, and pensions. What he found was a story far more textured than simple generational blame, but also one that confirmed, at least in part, that timing had been extraordinarily kind to those who came of age in the 1980s.

Start with university. When Davis studied, the government paid his tuition and gave him a maintenance grant. Today's graduates face a different world entirely. A 27-year-old named Natalie Whittaker, who graduated with a bachelor's degree, watched her debt balloon from £52,000 to £75,500 as interest accumulated. She was told the repayment would be painless—the price of a coffee, they said—but the reality proved far harsher. Younger graduates now pay an extra 9 percent tax on their earnings above a threshold, money that Davis never had to surrender. Yet here is where the story becomes complicated. In 1950, only 3.4 percent of young people attended university. By 2022, nearly half of English state school pupils had started higher education by age 25. What was once a privilege for a select few had become an entitlement for the masses. The loan system, whatever its cruelties, was designed to make that expansion possible. The real victims of injustice, Davis argues, were not the students paying loans now, but the millions of his own schoolmates who were never offered the choice to attend university at all.

Housing tells a starker story. Davis bought a flat in London in 1988. He lost money on that first purchase, but when he sold it in 1995 and upgraded, the new property soared in value over the two decades he held it. This was not skill or hard work—it was timing. House prices in England rose sharply relative to earnings from the early 1990s onward, meaning anyone who bought before the mid-1990s, as many boomers did, locked in substantial capital gains. A 29-year-old woman named Lauren Finch, earning £24,000 a year at a GP surgery, still lives with her parents and house-sits for friends just to feel a sense of freedom. Interest rates complicate the picture slightly. Global rates have fallen dramatically in recent decades, allowing younger buyers to borrow at far more favorable terms than Davis could when he paid 15 percent on his first mortgage. But there are only so many houses. Lower borrowing costs simply pushed prices higher, rationing the available supply. The real windfall went to those who bought during the transition from high to low rates—precisely when Davis and his cohort were entering the market. And London amplified the advantage. The capital's population grew 29 percent between 1996 and 2021, while new homes grew only 23 percent. Those who bought in London during the boom years became far wealthier than home-buyers elsewhere in England.

Pensions reveal perhaps the starkest divide. Before baby boomers reached retirement age, pensioners were the group most associated with poverty. Between 1995 and 2010, pensioner incomes doubled in real terms and have remained at that elevated level since. The state pension now pays vastly more than in previous generations, measured as a share of median earnings. But the real fortune lay in employer-provided defined benefit schemes—pensions that guaranteed a fixed proportion of salary for life. Davis worked in an era when such schemes were standard. Employers contributed 15 to 20 percent of salary annually to these plans. They became unaffordable as life expectancy increased, and they all but vanished from the private sector by the 2000s. Millennials and Gen Z workers now accumulate savings in personal pension pots, invested at their own risk, with employers typically contributing just 3 percent of salary. The difference is staggering.

Yet Davis resists the simple conclusion that his entire generation was lucky. Many of his peers never accessed a defined benefit pension at all. In 1997, before the mass closure of such schemes, they were still a minority luxury. What Davis actually was—a university-educated Londoner who bought property early and worked for an employer offering a gold-plated pension—was exceptionally fortunate. The late baby boom was not a lucky generation so much as a generation in which luck, when it came, paid extraordinary dividends.

There is one more factor that complicates everything. Since the financial crash of 2007 and 2008, economic growth has stalled. In the 1980s and 1990s, per capita growth ran at about 2 percent annually, meaning average incomes rose by roughly a third every fifteen years. Each cohort was comfortably richer than the one before. This century, growth has averaged closer to 1 percent, producing only a 16 percent increase in average incomes over the same period. That is not enough to ensure younger generations will be wealthier than their parents. Even if baby boomers were not the richest cohort in absolute terms, many lived and worked in a country that seemed to be improving, where things were getting better year by year. It is a peculiar form of luck—not necessarily wealth, but the experience of progress. To resolve the tensions between generations, Davis concludes, the country must find a way to restart the growth engine that has been sputtering for nearly two decades.