The idea of a generational conflict has now become a recurring framework through which public debate in France is interpreted. Baby boomers, born in the immediate post-war period and now largely retired, are often portrayed as the beneficiaries of a system whose advantages they are said to have appropriated at the expense of subsequent generations, whose future prospects and retirement security have thereby been undermined. Should this indictment be regarded as an objective reality, or rather as the product of a contemporary myth sustained by clichés? Hippolyte d’Albis invites us to move beyond such oversimplified representations by drawing on the economics of age, now established as an autonomous field of economic analysis, grounded in the use of statistical data and national transfer accounts.
The value of this method lies in its ability to capture all the flows that contribute to individuals’ well-being throughout the course of life, whether these derive from the family, the market, or the state. In this respect, it departs from traditional approaches based on rigid administrative age categories—children, working-age adults, retirees—in order to privilege a functional reading of life trajectories. What matters is no longer belonging to a given age category, but rather the actual capacity of individuals to generate sufficient income to cover their current consumption, or conversely, the extent to which they find themselves in a situation of deficit or surplus. Such an approach makes it possible to better understand how generations are articulated with one another within the broader framework of collective production and redistribution. Since national transfer accounts have been available since 1979, it is possible to observe over the long term the transformations of these equilibria. Two major lessons emerge from this analysis.
The first concerns the evolution of the economic life cycle. Contrary to what one might expect, the age at which individuals enter the surplus phase has not been postponed. It remains fixed at 24, despite the lengthening of higher education. This apparently paradoxical result can be explained by the low incomes earned at the beginning of careers in the 1980s, which at the time delayed full economic autonomy. By contrast, the age at which individuals enter the second deficit phase has shifted markedly upward, rising from 58 in 1980 to 60 today, a change explained primarily by the increase in senior employment rates. Far from freezing generational positions, the analysis thus highlights the plasticity of economic ages.
The second lesson concerns the structure of well-being transfers. Since the late 1970s, the state has remained the principal provider of resources, with a relatively stable share of around 70 percent. At the same time, the role of the family has declined considerably, its contribution having been cut in half, while that of the market has tripled. This reconfiguration has not, however, taken place uniformly across age groups. The role of the state has strengthened in favor of the young, partly offsetting the erosion of family support, while it has diminished for older people, among whom market-based resources—especially those derived from assets and wealth—have come to occupy a growing place. Such an evolution directly contradicts the idea that baby boomers systematically benefit from more favorable treatment than younger generations. In reality, solidarity mechanisms benefit the young first and foremost, through spending on education, training, and labor-market integration. Older generations rely more heavily on capital income than on increased public support. The real source of tension therefore lies less in any supposed intergenerational appropriation of collective resources than in the effects of a particular demographic structure: the numerical weight of the baby-boom cohorts places specific pressure on the balance of the social protection system. But can one reasonably blame a generation for being numerous ?
Still, this clarification does not settle the normative question. For while it would be absurd to hold a generation responsible for its own demographic weight, it does not follow that current generations should bear alone the cost of the resulting imbalance. The demographic argument cannot suffice to justify an unequal distribution of effort. This is why some rebalancing appears inevitable—not in order to condemn past generations, but to restore a measure of justice between those that succeed one another.
Hippolyte d’Albis, Professor at ESSEC and Vice-President of the Cercle des économistes.
Ph Alezard