The war of the generations
We are living in a remarkable time, and a frightening one. Artificial intelligence is driving a transformation that gives us reasons for both excitement and fear. The world order that emerged after World War II appears to be coming apart. Whether another order will replace it, or whether we are heading toward greater chaos, is unclear. Meanwhile, climate change is beginning to make its power felt.
But beneath all of this is another transformation whose consequences, I believe, are greatly underestimated: the inversion of the population pyramid.
For most of human history, there were many young people and relatively few old people. Each generation could expect a larger generation behind it, helping to support society and care for those who could no longer work. It generation expected to be better off than the previous one.
That arrangement is changing.
Across the OECD, fertility is below replacement level in every country except Israel. Even India is now below that threshold. This does not turn a population pyramid upside down overnight. But combined with longer lives, sustained low fertility changes the balance between generations.
We built our institutions around one demographic reality. We are entering another. The implications go far beyond the financing of pensions. They reach into the distribution of wealth, political power, opportunity, and hope.
What happens when young people begin to believe that the society they are expected to support has no place for them? They face expensive housing and uncertainty about their working lives. They are asked to prepare for a future in which AI may eliminate or transform the very jobs they are studying to obtain. At the same time, they see people who already own homes, investments, and businesses enjoying advantages that seem increasingly beyond their reach.
I do not know whether AI will replace most workers. But I worry that it could generate enormous wealth while weakening the connection between work and economic security. We have no broadly accepted answer to how that wealth should be shared.
For someone starting out, the promise that hard work will lead to a better life may become difficult to believe.
Look at France. Protests that began over school conditions and teacher shortages have broadened into anger about inequality, living costs, and public services. These demonstrations involve several generations and many grievances. Yet I see in them a warning about what happens when young people lose confidence in the institutions responsible for their future.
My fear is that this loss of confidence will deepen as the demographic balance changes.
Democracy does not automatically resolve the problem. Politicians need to get reelected. Older voters are an influential constituency, and asking them to accept fewer benefits or contribute more so that younger people can have better opportunities is politically difficult. The politicians themselves are getting older. In the last fifty years the average age of someone in congress went from 40 year to 50 years.
Protecting existing promises brings immediate rewards. Investing in people whose influence is smaller, and whose needs will unfold over decades, requires a longer view than our political systems encourage.
I write this as someone who is in their 80s. I understand why people want security in their later years. Many older people have little wealth and depend on public services. Nor do all young people face the same disadvantages. Those who inherit substantial assets may have a very different future from those who inherit nothing.
But those differences do not remove the underlying tension. They may make it worse. A society in which opportunity increasingly depends on what you already owns will struggle to persuade young people that the system deserves their loyalty.
For generations, there has been an implicit agreement: the young support the old, with the expectation that their turn will come.
What happens when the young no longer believe that promise?
I can imagine a breakdown in which age becomes one of the defining lines of political conflict. Anger could turn toward pensions, property, taxation, inheritance, and the institutions that determine who gets what. Movements could gain power by promising to tear down arrangements that younger generations believe have excluded them.
This is the war I fear: a struggle between generations over who must sacrifice, who deserves protection, and who gets to have a future. It would unfold within countries, communities, and families. That could make it particularly bitter. Growing government debt adds another dimension to this generational imbalance. Younger people stand to inherit not only the private wealth accumulated by older generations, but also the public obligations we leave behind. The two inheritances will not be distributed equally: private wealth will flow disproportionately to those whose families already have assets, while the cost of servicing public debt will compete with education, infrastructure, research, and other investments in everyone’s future. Borrowing can make sense when it builds a more productive society. But when it primarily sustains current consumption, we are passing the bill forward without necessarily passing along the means to pay it.
I do not believe this outcome is inevitable. But avoiding it requires us to take the possibility seriously. We need to give younger people credible reasons to believe that they can build secure and meaningful lives, and that the gains from technological progress will reach them. That will require difficult choices from my generation as well as theirs. I know this is pessimistic. But it is what I think, and what I feel compelled to share.
A society cannot remain stable indefinitely when its young people believe their future has already been spent.
