The Pinch - Baby Boomers and Bust

David Willetts – “The Pinch: How the baby boomers took their children’s future – and why they should give it back.”

In a 44 year period in the town of Leighton Buzzard 900 properties changed hands, but only a third of these were between people in the same family. The rest were bought by purchasers from further afield – evidence surely of the vibrant home owning society we all live in.

When was this? Oh, between 1464 and 1508! Britain has, apparently, always been a home owning society of smaller nuclear families.

This is just one of the highly satisfying little nuggets of information in this beautifully researched account by Tory MP David Willetts on how those born between 1945 and 1965 have got a pretty generous slice of the financial, cultural and political pie at the expense of those born afterwards, and why.

Willetts is a rare public intellectual who consistently stands apart from his coalition colleagues by virtue of his obvious probity and analytical prowess. In this book he postulates that the baby boomer generation owes a debt of reparation to the young, likening them to a hunter-gatherer tribe with an acute demographic problem.

Imagine Homo-erectus living in an earlier tribal community. There are the elderly and the young who need taking care of and then the fit adults who provide for them. If, by some freak event such as a series of mild winters or an increase in food stocks, the providers have a slightly better time of it and the population of the young spikes upwards, what happens?

Well, when the abundant young turn into providers they will comfortably be able to support their elderly but what if the number of new tribe members being born falls again? Who will provide for abundant adults in old age when there are suddenly more elderly mouths to feed and fewer replacement adults to feed them?

This is Willetts’ central argument, and it is so well made that you feel inclined not to quarrel with it. He suggests that, on average, every baby boomer will have taken out from society about 118% of what he or she has put in, and that such a boom trails an inevitable bust.

He recreates the “tribe” scenario today – imagining a household where there are husband and wife, two children and an elderly mother all living under one roof. The husband is in well-paid full-time employment; the wife works part time and looks after the children and the elderly mother.

This household is, he argues, akin to the welfare state. The man’s earnings pass to four dependants across three generations and even if he is quite well off he will not feel affluent.



Willetts weaves it all seamlessly into his central narrative that fortune has tracked the boomer generation like a stratified sample fund. When they were of school age, spending on schools went up; when they bought their houses, mortgages had tax relief and property rapidly increased in value; when they hit their peak earnings years tax rates fell, and the coffers bulged so much that many employers bestowed generous final salary pensions on everyone, sweetened further by contribution holidays and index linking. How much of that was true for the generation that followed?

BY 2050 over 50% of the UK will be over 50. The same over 50’s already own 4/5ths of the country’s wealth. There is a flash point here. The boomers will be so abundant they will have real power at the ballot box – tempting politicians to pander to them further. This creates horizontal cultural links, between members of the same generation, rather than vertical ones across generations. That will leave a disaffected youth, over taxed and under rewarded. It is a cocktail for catastrophe.

The conclusions David Willetts reaches are not 100% water tight, but the journey to get there is a hugely enjoyable one. He is, after all, a right of centre minister and I felt justified being a little sceptical of any politician’s motives writing a book proposing large scale social change!

Yet for all that this book is very informative, concise and well written. Economics students will relish the sections on Keynes, Schumpeter and Marx whilst sociologists will salivate at all the well-organised data.

It’s a book I can recommend highly.

Beautiful Mathematics!

For many the very mention of Maths brings them out in a cold sweat and induces either ambivalence or an instant switch off! Why is this? I have always found that Mathematics has a beauty and even a fundamental perfection that can be every bit as thrilling as studying a poem or a painting – and yet so many people never experience this.

Don't misunderstand me - I am no professional Mathematician! I just love the beauty of playing with numbers and shapes.

The first time I remember this happening to me was at primary school. We had a maverick head teacher who just wouldn’t be tolerated today – his name was James Denny and he was a rotund, peppery but jolly Scot who would, on a whim, call the whole school together and teach them something en masse! The other teachers would be expected to just stop what they were doing and join him in the assembly hall.

One of these lessons taught us to count up to 31 on one hand using binary (I had no idea what binary meant at the time, but looking back I see that is what it was) the thumb was one, the index finger two, the thumb and index finger was three, the middle finger alone was four, middle finger plus thumb five etc. We all heard a story about a strange woodland elf that Mr Denny had met and who taught him this secret way of counting! Try it – it’s fun!

From this I discovered the rainy day activity that is Pascal’s triangle – my brother and I used to create these for hours. You know – you start at the top with 1, beneath that you write two more 1s and then continue down where underneath every pair of numbers you write the sum of the number above – so row 3 would be “1, 2, 1” and row 4 would be “1,3,3,1” and so on for whatever size the paper is. Fascinating patterns appear even if your writing has to get very small!

But the best fun of all is Geometry. Say the word “Euclid” and you get blank expressions (or ones of abject horror!) most of the time – but he is like the father of Mathematics in so many ways. His theories mean that even today every schoolgirl and boy has a compass and ruler in their Geometry set – and with them can draw almost any shape, angle or plan. Greek mathematics has endured in a way Greek Philosophy and Literature has of course, but arguably in a more prominent role.

What about Pythagoras? The sheer stultifying brilliance of the formula that expresses the relationship between the sides of a right angled triangle is so rewarding – first when you first try it out but then, if you go that far, when you learn how to prove it! The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Less well known is if you draw semi circles on each side of the triangle, or pentagons, the same is true! In fact any proportional shape will have the same relationship.

Plato showed how there are only five “solids” that can be generated by regular shapes – the Tetrahedron from a triangle, the Cube from a square, the Octahedron from the triangular pyramid, the Icosahedron from the triangle and the Dodecahedron from the Pentagon. Great for using as die in role playing games!

From here I remember exploring tessellation – basically using a repeating shape to “tile” an area! Some shapes tessellate easily but actually any four sided shape, if inverted exactly, can create a shape which will tessellate! That is pretty amazing in itself. Some of the most beautiful mosaic patterns in the world employ this principle. Interestingly, Islam where graven images were banned still created artistic beauty with mathematics in the tiled floors of mosques from Istanbul to Baghdad – in fact the Islamic nations were well ahead of the west in Mathematics for centuries.

Jack once told me that there are two types of tessellation – essentially with one you can ‘pick up’ a section, move it around and match it exactly somewhere else, and another type where this is impossible. The first is known as periodic tessellation and for years mathematicians tried to discover an example of nonperiodic tessellation. The person who achieved it was known in another field – it was cosmologist Roger Penrose with his “Dart and Kite” pattern shown.

There is no section of this pattern that is ever exactly repeated yet it tiles perfectly! Wonderful… Some even suggest that Islamic mathematicians may have discovered this 1000 years earlier…had religion not poisoned their progress we might have had the Internet in the time of Shakespeare!

Ahh, the beauty of Maths! Hardly even a scratch on the surface…