DW: On the economic front, there are indeed three or four different things that have happened. Globalisation was an international event of enormous significance, one of its consequences being for our jobs market. It has helped the people who are more prosperous and more secure, but it has provided real challenges to younger people getting into the jobs market. It had that effect. Was it plotted by a group of baby boomers? Probably not.

The pattern of inflation and low inflation is where I do think politicians respond to a political and electoral environment. The toleration of high levels of inflation in the 1970s and '80s, and a shift to a world in which people wanted much lower inflation does seem to match boomers' preferences. When the boomers were running up their mortgages, high inflation was a very useful device for eroding the cost of their mortgage, and now when they're saving more they care about low inflation. And, although I'm not a complete public choice theorist, I do think there is very strong evidence that the political environment shifted as the composition of the electorate shifted. So this is where some of the culpability of politicians does tie in with the interests of the electorate.

Third, we've got this debate opening up about raising retirement ages and people working for longer, and this is happening just at the moment when the baby boomers are facing retirement. The pressures on this to which politicians are responding are much greater than they were ten years ago, and this ties in with the big immediate first surge in the birth rate after the war in 1946 and 1947. So I do think that this relates to the demographic pressure of these people. 

When you go through it — and I'm not saying that baby boomers are bad people — it clearly does look as if these debates surface just at the moment when they're most relevant to this very large group.

DJ: But don't demographic arguments always slightly box you in, in a sort of fatalistic way, as though there's no escape? You argue that these generations have already been born and they're bound to do certain things. Isn't there a danger of falling into the Malthusian trap that you can predict the future and that it's bound to be doom and gloom, but actually that it doesn't always work out like that? I can remember in the 1990s when the baby boomers were taking over and the economic outlook looked grim, but then we had the longest sustained boom in modern history. Now things are looking very bad again, but will it still look as bad in ten or 20 years' time?

DW: I quote Keynes as saying in 1937: "We know much more securely than we know almost any other social or economic factor relating to the future that, in the place of the steady and rising population we have experienced, we shall be faced in a very short time with a stationary or declining level." Within ten years the greatest baby boom that Britain had seen had erupted on the scene. So you have to be humble and cautious. 

But I do think demographics is the most powerful non-Marxist structural explanation of what's happening to our country. Because people have already been born you can use what's already happened to help you look into the future. Now it's not one hundred per cent reliable, but I do think that you can see that a political debate is increasingly going to be shaped by this group of people. They are 45-65 years old, they're not all past it, so even if political office is going to pass on to the younger generation, the baby boomers are still going to have enormous voting power. They have a very high propensity to vote, they're going to be a big slug of the electorate. And as I said, I don't think they're bad people — they will be susceptible to things that appeal to their better nature — but they're going to be such a big group of voters for a long time to come that the kind of policies that they vote for is going to be a really big issue.

DJ: Isn't it characteristic that, as a baby boomer, you have written a book like this about the contract with the generations? It's in our time that we started worrying about the environment, pensions, demography. This baby boom generation has worried more about the future than its predecessors.