The gilded generation – why the young have never had it so good

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[/audioplayer]No one likes being told they’ve never had it so good. When Lord Young of Graffham tried it three years ago, he was quickly forced out of his job as David Cameron’s enterprise adviser. And rightly so, you might think, for it was an affront both to the evidence before our eyes and to our most basic human instinct: that the past was golden and ahead of us lies only misery, penury, falling standards, overcrowding and the on-going destruction of our once green and pleasant land.

This was the (hugely popular) theme of Danny Boyle’s London Olympics opening ceremony: the pastoral idyll of frolicking shepherds violated by the sinister phallic eruptions of the Industrial Revolution’s dark satanic mills.

It’s also the inspiration of the Occupy movement, of economics bestsellers from The Spirit Level to Capital in the 21st Century, of David Willetts’s The Pinch: How The Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future, and of dozens of impassioned articles by journalists on both left and right lamenting the fate of today’s Doomed Youth.

As the author of several such whinges myself, I wasn’t particularly overjoyed to be asked to speak in a forthcoming Spectator debate in favour of the motion ‘Stop Whining, Young People: You’ve Never had It So Good’. In common with 54 per cent of respondents to a recent Ipsos MORI poll, I thought it was an absolute no-brainer that the kids of today are going to be worse off than their parents’ generation, for any number of obvious reasons.

But as I researched the topic, I found something astonishing. Most of those reasons were false. Strip away instinctive pessimism, miserablist gut feeling and media-indoctrinated false consciousness and what you discover is something amazing and counter-intuitive: on almost every available metric it turns out that the optimists have got it right.