please empty your brain below
At present the world is divided. Much of this world is still in a state that this country was two, three, four centuries ago. Lacking education, these people live a tribal existence with wars, extreme belief in supernatural gods, and with an unrestricted birthrate leading to hardship and famine.
The hope for the 21st century is education.
For what it's worth, I was born in 1981 and I have no desire to get mortgaged up as I like the freedom to move wherever I want to whenever I want
Of course with the increase in antibiotic resistance we may see a return to the 'good old days'.
But this is a post about the best year to be born, and infant mortality has a big part to play in that.
Let's just hope we manage to avoid the red for the foreseeable future. I fear some sort of European war has become more likely in the last couple of years. And climate change could screw everything up.
dg writes: The figures are an average of the two.
And presumably we're talking about someone born within ear shot of Bus Stop M.
Of course being brought up by a generation, which had known the horrors of war helped.
The future is unknown.
But with the rise of intolerance throughout the world, I wouldn’t bet on a peaceful future.
There are always greed and (the feeling of) unfairness in the society. Education may let everyone have more ability to improve their own life, but not everyone manage to succeed and they might think themselves unfairly treated.
The hope is not (only) education, but more ways (than education) to allow fair social status migration.
My parents were born in the 1930s and have had a wonderful life, including (so far) 25 years of comfortable retirement and enjoyable travel.
My husband & I are 1960s children and well and truly the current sandwich generation. Retirement seems a distant and rather worrying affair, wondering if there'll still be an NHS or elderly care left!
My children are 1990s/2000s kids.They already feel their lives have been screwed over, thanks to Brexit and now Trump. I worry for them, but they are all still in education at the moment, so "real life" hasn't quite started for them yet.
"They already feel their lives have been screwed over, thanks to Brexit and now Trump."
Why?
Assuming that is true, If I sell my property for even 50% of what it's now worth, I'll still be better off than most.
You filled the tank with Super National and whizzed off along the empty roads without a speed camera in sight. The future was only going to get better and better, robots would do all the drudgery, and getting a better job was was easy as changing buses. If you needed to see the doctor, you just popped along to the surgery before 10am, no appointment needed.
Property was affordable, and buying / moving wasn't a problem because stamp duty applied only to mansions and palaces.
In contrast, Generation Rent starts off crippled by student debt, looking forward to an Orwellian future where privacy is unknown, their pension age is far higher and their pensions are almost worthless.
The staggering lack of empathy that you and so many others seem to share truly astounds me (one of the 1990 crowd). We are written off as "the elite" and "overeducated" (term used the Times in their "how much an elite are you" survey) when in fact we are acting in everyone's best interests, not just our own. None of the Trump or brexit camp's lies will come true, and in 5 years when people have realised it will be too late to salvage my future, and that *hurts*. As if we will have £350M more to spend on the NHS on reverting to WTO rules because of macho nonsense ("no deal is better than a bad deal"), if it exists by then with May and Hunt doing their best to destroy it while hiding behind idiotic spin (hospital beds full because of gutted social care? Well if your GP was open on a Sunday that would solve everything...). Picking a convenient bogeyman (immigrants, the poor, whatever) while ignoring the real causes is not going to make things better.
Yes, with my "elite and overeducated" background I'm partially insulated from the economic shock personally (though my life faces upheaval and shattered dreams - I live and work in a non-UK country, my partner is from another and works in a third where we met) but I do actually care about other people. Until a few years ago, the future did look a rosy green, but in recent years there has been a rapid and terrifying rise of anti-intellectualism that is lapped up by a subservient public, spoon-fed by a media elite far more powerful and less conscientious than the academic elite they criticise. If that isn't a hallmark of bad things to come I don't know what is. How you can expect me to believe in a better future for everyone, while evidence on how to bring that about is shouted down by populists with no interest in planning beyond solidifying their grip on power, is beyond me.
I do find both are rather confused as to whether referring to a typical citizen of Britain, or a typical citizen of the world.
The former will be very much influenced by the Brexit stuff, the latter rather less so. Only Brits (or citizens of other developed country which have followed similar paths) can even be sure of enough to eat every day. Only the same subset will have been as affected by the so-called "World Wars". People in Vietnam, or Brazil, say, will have very different high and low decades.
But all the talk of the 2100s etc does rather assume that there will be civilised humans alive then. The failure to detect extra-terrestrial radio signals tells me that the average lifespan of a species which develops radio (and with it, means to destroy itself) must by very short.
People should stop lamenting the time is getting worse -- it's more strange if bad eras no longer come. After all, nothing -- even the Universe itself -- lasts forever.
'Most of our people have never had it so good' Harold McMillan, 1957. Can any subsequent prime minister honestly say the same about a higher proportion of our people?
From diamondgeezer.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/born-too-late.html : before 1950.
But a lot depends the weight placed on the chance of life being cut short (much less for those born after about 1945)
"None of the horrors of war, wondering if you'd even live through the night to see the next morning."
No major wars, but still plenty of fighting going on for the rest of the 20th, any of which threatened to erupt into something more at various points. And as someone born in '74, wondering if you'd live through the night was still an occasional nightmare up until the late 1980s.
One way that the 90s+ generations have it good is that they're the first generation not to even worry about being swallowed by war or obliterated by the Bomb. The resident 19 year-old watched Threads with us a while back, and while he still thought it was pretty horrifying it in no way affected him in the way it did for us. It was simply unimaginable, and therefore not as scary.
With bombers overhead, the fear of not living through the night must have been a very real prospect; indeed, it was a fate that befell thousands. I can't see how the theoretical fears of the 70s and 80s can be considered similar.
Even out in the relatively safe countryside it must have been heart rending to hear and see a V1 doodlebug buzzing along on its deadly way, realising that some people's lives were about to end horrifically in just a few minutes and there was absolutely nothing that you could do about it. And with the V2 terror weapon you didn't even have the chance to take cover before the rocket exploded.
Boomers definitely had it best, nothing worse than the last few years of rationing.
I doubt whether any under 25 year old has done anything to pay for the schools which he attended, or the roads he now uses, or the house in which he lives. This is even more true of any recent immigrants.
So please give due credit for the boomers and the pre-boomers, whose hard work and savings habits have done so much for the present generations.
All these facilities which have been created are going to need enormous amounts of upkeep in the future. Any more new houses, hospitals, roads etc etc are going to need even more upkeep. Just their maintenance will be a big burden, let alone any further increase in capacity.
Which is where the 'present' generations should come in and do their stuff. Remember that you get what you pay for - or what someone else pays for.
One of my parents was privately educated, and spent the War with relatives in rural Devon, where there was more risk from the condition of theancient school bus than from any bombs. The other lived in London throughout the war, moving house and school several times as homes or father's workplaces got bombed.
People under 25 and immigrants pay income tax and NICs and VAT, just like the rest of us. They tend to be younger and healthier than the rest of the population, and so make less use of NHS services than older people, but they pay the same taxes nonetheless.
The mentioning of "someone else is paying your blah blah blah" is already toxic enough. In some aspects, nobody is more reliable than oneself.
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