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David Willetts is a rare creature. Britain does not produce many public intellectuals. To find one lurking deep in the jungle of Westminster politics is little short of an anthropological miracle. But with this book, Willetts, a frontline Conservative politician, has confirmed his status as the thinking person's MP.
- The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future - And Why They Should Give it Back
- by David Willetts
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The Pinch sets out to show how the baby boomers – those, like Willetts, who were born between 1945 and 1965 – have "stolen their children's future" through their cultural, demographic and political dominance. Willetts does not quite succeed in proving this charge of intergenerational theft. But in marshalling his case he takes you on such a fascinating journey through British society that you do not feel remotely shortchanged.
His stated thesis is that the big generation of boomers has concentrated wealth, adopted a hegemonic position over national culture and failed to attend to the needs of the future. They have, in effect, broken the inter-generational contract. It is certainly true that the boomers have done well out of the welfare state, being set to take out, Willetts suggests, approximately 118% of what they'll put in. But this makes them no worse than previous generations, including those born between 1900 and 1920.
There is also no doubt that the monomaniacal British obsession with home ownership, while far from being a new phenomenon, has so far benefited the boomers rather more than the generations on either side. At the same time, the rise in immigration since the mid-1990s has held down wages for Generations X and Y (or those born between the mid-60s and the millennium) who would otherwise be benefiting from being in a smaller cohort and therefore a tighter labour market. It is also true that the boomers haven't been proactive enough on climate change – indeed, Willetts says too little about this – but it is hard to argue that they can be singled out on these grounds.
Willetts is unsure whether the boomers are a bad generation or just a big and lucky one. At one point, he insists that "generational name-calling" is unhelpful and that the issue at hand is simply a demographic one. But at other points, he labels the boomer generation a "selfish giant", which sounds like name-calling to me. The main problem facing him is the absence of hard data. There is good academic research in the US on "inter-generational accounting", but no equivalent here.
Willetts is candid about the fact that "there are no authoritative estimates of the distribution of the £6.7 trillion of wealth in our country between the different age groups" and relies instead on the assertion that "there are good reasons to believe" the boomers have got more than their fair share. There are some reasons to believe this, but it is also likely that the recent financial crash will alter any generational distribution of money, since the boomers are retiring just as the value of their pension assets has been sharply knocked down.
Willetts might have done better to take as his main theme the links between family, education and social mobility, since on these issues he is on firmer ground. In fact, his title could just as easily have been The Big Grab: How the Rich Are Using Money and Marriage to Buy the Future for Their Kids. His opening chapter is a tour de force, a brief, brilliant history of England's social architecture. He shows that far from being a modern invention, the nuclear family is a long-standing feature of Anglophone societies. (We are, he says, "the first nuclear power".) The idea that we used to live in big, warm, noisy My Big Fat Greek Wedding-type families is a myth. "Think of England as being like this for at least 750 years," he writes. "We live in small families. We buy and sell houses. We go out to work for a wage."
The English have a private, market-based idea of property, in contrast to the familial property forms of our continental neighbours. Over a 44-year period in Leighton Buzzard, more than 900 houses changed hands. Two-thirds were sold to someone outside the family, rather than being passed down. The years in question? 1464 to 1508.
By contrast, the large familial networks of continental Europe act as the institutional anchor for property ownership and transmission, as well as for the formation of businesses and the provision of welfare. Willetts speculates that the property-managing function of French families may explain why romantic love there is more often associated with extramarital relationships. The orientation towards family-owned firms in Germany helps to explain the strength of the Mittelstand, the medium-sized, locally rooted layers of corporations.
Willetts does not at any point fall victim to the awful if-only-we-were-more-like-the-continentals lament. He does not want to alter our social DNA. But our particular social economy has two important consequences. First, the smallness of our families puts a greater emphasis on non-familial civic institutions. Small families need civil society more. This is why medieval guilds, trade unions and churches have played such an important role in our history.
Second, the welfare role of government is greater in a society marked by a highly privatised notion of property and small families. Breadwinning men are less likely to have family resources to fall back on, so need out-of-work benefits. This system worked reasonably well until the rise in divorce rates in 1970s and 1980s. Then, millions of women, many with dependent children, suddenly became reliant on the state. As Willetts puts it: "A welfare system that was originally designed to compensate men for loss of earnings is slowly and messily redesigned to compensate women for the loss of men." And everybody – but especially women – ends up poorer. This is why Willetts, certainly no reactionary, is so pro-marriage.
Strong parental relationships also influence children's well-being, which in turn affects the chances of upward social mobility, another of Willetts's preoccupations. Drawing on the very latest and best research, Willetts shows how the middle classes are tightening their grip on the opportunities available for the next generation. The professions are all but sealed off from the poor: "The competition for jobs is like English tennis, a competitive game but largely one the middle classes play against each other."
In general, this is a remarkably non-political book; David Cameron is mentioned just once. But Willetts does argue strongly for a vouchers scheme in education, weighted in favour of the poor, in order to break the middle-class stranglehold on the state education system. And the explanation for the flat-lining of social mobility brings Willetts back to social structures and, in particular, the trade-off between gender equality and class equality. The principal beneficiaries of the expansion of higher education have been the daughters of the middle class. Six per cent of girls born into low-income families in both 1958 and 1970 went to university; for girls born into richer households, the rate rose from 21 per cent to 36 per cent.
"Educational upgrading" – the increase in the numbers of young people getting qualifications – accounts for 40 per cent of the fall in mobility for women between 1958 and 1970. This is, as Willetts says, a shocking statistic. The expansion of higher education, far from improving social mobility, has actually made it worse.
Women graduates marry male graduates and this trend towards "assortative mating" has increased in recent years, which means that on a household level, inequality is bound to rise. The narrowing of the gender gap seems to have widened the class gap. As Willetts puts it: "Feminism has trumped egalitarianism." And not just for one generation, either: just 5% of degree-educated mothers split up from their partner before their child's third birthday, compared with 42% of mums with no qualifications.
Willetts manages to synthesise these social trends into a coherent and engaging narrative, successfully mixing vignettes from South Park and The Simpsons with statistics from the British Household Panel Survey. Most important, when it comes to social and economic research, Willetts really does know his stuff.
David Cameron has lately been engaging fruitfully with external political thinktanks (including, I should say, Demos). This is greatly to his credit. Let's hope he recognises that in David Willetts he has a one-man thinktank right under his nose.
Richard Reeves is the director of Demos
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