First published: The Globalist, 04/02/2009
The boomerangst generation faces a quartet of life-changing developments. First, it might find that parental wealth slips away into the financing of longevity and old-age care instead of into an inheritance pot.
Second, the boomerangst generation will almost certainly become directly involved in wider generational policy issues. These include the financing of age-related spending for parents and grandparents, a less-generous pension and tax environment, bigger pressures for self-provision in retirement and possibly higher inflation and less-buoyant property markets.
The face of depopulation
The whole character, look and feel of cities and neighborhoods, towns and rural villages is likely to change, reflecting both youth depopulation and growing numbers of older people and the shifts in social and family structures towards smaller units. In the past, there seemed to be a certain order to the way we grew up and to the way families evolved.
Typically, children grew up in families with at least one sibling and had a network of relatives, including two sets of grandparents as well as aunts, uncles and cousins.
They would go to university and or go to work and eventually have their own families and, with luck, inherit worldly goods and property from their parents when the latter died.
The old way…
In the decades following the Second World War especially, this sequential order became a bedrock of a…more
