Maybe Don't ‘Kill the old’

Back in 2009, FT Alphaville’s Tracy Alloway published a piece with the admirably unsubtle headline “Kill the old”. Its inspiration was Long or Short Capital’s “Short Class Warfare; Long Age Warfare”, which argued that the important economic conflict was between people enjoying the present and people being volunteered to finance it. Alloway supplied the following grievance list: unaffordable homes, student debt, disappearing defined-benefit pensions and the prospect of paying for everyone else’s retirement before eventually being permitted one ourselves. The afflicted were the IPOD generation: Insecure, Pressured, Over-taxed and Debt-ridden. Seventeen years later, the iPod is obsolete. The grievances however have proved considerably more durable. Yet, some of those young people bought houses. Some received parental help. Some are still renting. A generational protest has had enough time to develop its own property-owning wing. Which makes an update overdue. A Resolution Foundation…