.... not literally (they too old, weak and unhealthy to cause a riot). Bear with me.

I bash the boomers quite a lot here, individually and as a class.

It's only a little bit in jest; obviously I don't want to take anybody's stuff or commit senicide (like a proper Norseman), nor do I think every single boomer is a horned demon (or do I?!) but if there were a way to rewind the clock or press a button to take away their unearned gains/abolish Social Security or your equivalent Europoorean gov state Ponzi scheme (with the associated dividend windfalls reasonably distributed etc, etc.) of course I -- like any sane, sensible, thoughtful person -- would do that!

I do generally think boomers, as a class, have betrayed all that is good

#1388123

Short of impossible dreams, magical or political, it is possible for individual boomers to be better (#1598011): don't claim SS (or max it, and give it to someone who deserves it), give away most of your wealth (or even consume it... that's still work for someone else) or better yet, go out of your way to care for grandkids and pay for as much as you possibly can; remortgage your paid-off house to do it, if you need to.

Still, it's undeniable that the boomers, individually, have acquired unearned wealth and have, broadly speaking, failed any honorable morality test of an upstanding citizenry. #1598011, #1527198.

But when Niall Ferguson and Izabella Kaminska, establishment historian and journalist, respectively, say the same thing... it's a tad unnerving?

As I write, French schools are burning—set ablaze by high schoolers who say they want more investment in education but for some reason think they can achieve this by filling the streets with garbage, setting it on fire, waving Palestinian flags, and clashing with the police.

lol, SELF-OWN.

(obviously there's plenty of retarded peeps in my own younger generations, too; and god knows the troubles we'd be in if the green woke dystopia had not been balanced by more conservative, largely boomer counterweights.) But they're ignorant; quite a lot of the boomers are complacent, or downright evil (hence the horns...).

"it’s not just France. The kids are out in the streets of Madrid, too, incensed (they claim) about a growing housing crisis. In Brussels the burning issue is government budget cuts."

So what do the burning cities of Europe have to do with boomerism?

Well:

The fact that young people are setting wheelie bins on fire is in some ways a distraction from the root causes of all this political instability. For, despite the echoes of 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, and 1968, when youthful revolutionaries challenged Europe’s established order, the generational politics of 2026 is very different.

Today, by historical standards, the young are an endangered species. They are dimly aware that they are being screwed, but they don’t appear to understand who’s doing the screwing.

"A clue for the European young: It’s not Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu or whoever else you want to burn in effigy. Mais, non: It’s your grandparents."

Hot. Freakin'. Damn.

The French rioters say their principal grievance is under-investment in schools. But it should really be over-investment in French retirees.
...it has paid better in both [the UK and France] to be retired than to be employed....

PREACH.

Nice little econ recap of yields and oil prices.

France is not alone. In both Italy and the United Kingdom, the cost of government borrowing is higher than the nominal growth rate. What has gone wrong? Here’s where grandma and grandad come in. The French (and British and Italian) fiscal crisis is at root due to generational imbalances in welfare and tax systems, exacerbated by reflexive Keynesian spending every time anything nasty happens (a financial crisis, a pandemic, a war, an energy shock).

Guess I could have titled this "the Keynesians did it" too? #1476087, #1537872
(Because without them, and on a sound money, or with a small gov, the boomers could ever only have inflicted so much damage -- no matter their moral or cognitive failures)

Yup, we're pretty fucked: #1593563, #1590714

Europe has relatively generous welfare systems, which do more taxing and redistributing than their U.S. equivalents. It’s just that these systems were designed for 2.5 children per family and an average life expectancy of 62, not 1.25 and 79. With a few exceptions, the various European models are in the early phase of a nosedive into insolvency.

AND, let's not forget, aging populations (=boomers) living too long(!), didn't pay up enough, and have been stealing too much (as a class, anyway):

aging isn’t the sole driver of rising public debt. It explains about two-fifths of the increase since 2000. The rest is due to debt-financed spending in response to the financial crisis, Covid-19, and other crises; tax cuts and discretionary spending; and the rising cost of paying interest on the debt
This is not primarily a problem of public pensions—the original government welfare program, introduced by the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1889. The OECD’s latest projections have average public pension spending rising from 8.8 percent of GDP in 2023–2024 to 10 percent in 2050—not a crippling increase. This is because most countries (not all) have acted in various ways to cap the costs of public pensions, either by reducing benefits, restricting coverage, or raising retirement ages.

"politicians on both sides of the English Channel have gotten into the very bad habit of bribing seniors based on the observation that they are increasingly numerous and have relatively high turnout rates in elections."

EXCELLENT FUCKING PARAGRAPH:

The vocabulary of European politics rules out the sentence: “We need to reform seniors’ entitlements so that we don’t go bankrupt.” Instead, the left offers socialism and the right serves up national socialism. The left lays the blame on billionaires, whom they will tax to pay for yet more benefits. The right lays the blame on immigrants, whom they will deport as if that will help matters. Apart from that difference, there is a horseshoe forming in Western politics: At the extremes, socialism and national socialism are converging on economic issues (industrial policy, public ownership, rent controls), not to mention foreign policy (blame Israel for everything). Of course, these tired old ideas bear almost no relation to economic reality.

think young Europeans have been so successfully indoctrinated in school and college that they’ll blame almost anyone for their dissatisfaction, except the people who are actually responsible: namely seniors and the politicians who rely on their votes.

Incredible. Indeed: Fuck. The. Boomers.

oh, fuck: the only thing Europe is investing in ("Investing")... also boomers:

A shocking amount of European defense spending goes to—you guessed it—the pensions of retired military personnel.
Young people will set more things on fire; if not their own schools, then asylum-seekers’ hotels and synagogues as a rising share of young men swing to the far right. That will achieve precisely nothing, except to expedite the capital flight.

open access here: https://niallferguson.substack.com/p/why-europe-is-burning