An older adult offers a house key to a younger person climbing toward an elevated home, while a younger and an older person wait below, amid blue leaves on cream paper.

Back in 2009, FT Alphaville’s Tracy Alloway published a piece with the admirably unsubtle headline “Kill the old”. Its inspiration was Long or Short Capital’s “Short Class Warfare; Long Age Warfare”, which argued that the important economic conflict was between people enjoying the present and people being volunteered to finance it.

Alloway supplied the following grievance list: unaffordable homes, student debt, disappearing defined-benefit pensions and the prospect of paying for everyone else’s retirement before eventually being permitted one ourselves. The afflicted were the IPOD generation: Insecure, Pressured, Over-taxed and Debt-ridden.

Seventeen years later, the iPod is obsolete. The grievances however have proved considerably more durable.

Yet, some of those young people bought houses. Some received parental help. Some are still renting. A generational protest has had enough time to develop its own property-owning wing.

Which makes an update overdue.

A Resolution Foundation study published in March examined 8.3 million potential first-time buyer families in Britain. Almost half could pass the income tests for a mortgage on a starter home. Only 15 per cent had enough saved for a 5 per cent deposit. Around a third of recent first-time buyers had received help from family or friends.

British potential first-time buyer families: 47% meet mortgage income requirements, 15% have a 5% deposit and 11% pass all modelled tests; deposit access also varies by income quintile.

So the problem is not simply whether you earn enough to service a mortgage. It is whether you possess enough money to be allowed to stop paying somebody else’s.

The Bank of Mum and Dad remains an unusually selective lender. Its principal eligibility criterion is difficult to improve through hard work.

This is also where the original argument’s dismissal of class starts coming apart. Older wealth can exclude younger people collectively while helping particular younger people individually. Parents need not be conspiring against their children for the system to disadvantage children whose parents have less.

Across the Atlantic, the entry price has been similarly unhelpful. Harvard’s 2026 housing assessment reports that American home prices in 2025 stood 54 per cent above their 2020 level, approaching five times median household income.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve’s wealth survey released this month shows inflation-adjusted median wealth among families headed by someone under 35 falling 23 per cent between 2022 and 2025. The Fed attributes the decline primarily to unwinding earlier business-equity gains. The same survey offers a more revealing distinction. Median homeowner wealth was $458,900; among renters and other nonowners, $10,600. That does not establish what buying a house causes—owners also tend to be older and have higher incomes. It does suggest that “young versus old” leaves rather a lot out.

Median US family net worth by age and housing tenure in 2025: $458,900 for homeowners versus $10,600 for renters and other nonowners.

Europe supplies several versions of the same difficulty.

Eurostat’s October release puts EU house-price growth at 4.7 per cent in the second quarter compared with a year earlier, with rents rising 3 per cent. But the consequences differ across countries. In Spain and Italy, Eurostat estimates that young people left the parental home at 30.2 years in 2025, against 21.8 in Denmark.

Living with your parents can keep the rent bill down. It is a less complete substitute for being able to establish your own household.

This is not evidence that every European generation is leaving home later: the EU average has stayed close to 26 since 2002. It is evidence that the route into independence depends heavily on national institutions, employment opportunities and family resources.

Estimated age of leaving the parental home across EU countries in 2025 and trends since 2002; Spain and Italy are at 30.2 years, compared with 21.8 in Denmark.

The education grievance has also survived.

Alloway’s original piece worried about roughly £20,000 of undergraduate debt. The latest English student-loan statistics put the provisional average higher-education balance among borrowers entering repayment in 2026 at £47,730 on a nominal level.

America’s Congressional Budget Office estimated a roughly $2 trillion federal deficit for fiscal 2026. The retirement-and-survivor trust fund is projected by this year’s trustees to exhaust its reserves in late 2032, when continuing income would cover 78 per cent of scheduled benefits.

That does not mean Social Security disappears. It means the argument over taxes, benefits and transfers from elsewhere becomes increasingly difficult to postpone.

The original article imagined a future bill arriving after the people who enjoyed the spending had departed. In practice, adjustment can begin much sooner, through higher contributions, later retirement, squeezed public services or less room for investment. There need not be a cinematic sovereign-debt crisis. A succession of disappointing budgets will do.

Continental pension politics make the allocation choices particularly visible.

Germany has extended its standard pension-level floor of 48 per cent through 2031.

France, meanwhile, has suspended until 2028 the scheduled increases in retirement age and contribution requirements introduced by its 2023 reform, with the changes applying from September this year.

Britain offers an important counterexample to the idea that pension protections can never be renegotiated. The government has announced an adjustment to the triple lock from April 2030. It retains the inflation and 2.5 per cent floors but changes the earnings component, with the stated aim of keeping pensions in line with earnings over time rather than repeatedly ratcheting ahead.

Harvard’s rental-housing report, using 2024 data, finds that 58 per cent of American renter households headed by someone aged 65 or older were burdened by housing costs. Being old is not much protection against being a tenant on a low income.

US renter households burdened by housing costs in 2024, by age of household head and income; 58% of households headed by someone aged 65 or older are cost-burdened.

Conversely, Resolution Foundation research published in June found that real weekly pay at 24 for workers born in the late 1990s was 12 per cent above that of workers born in the late 1980s. That rules out a conveniently uniform story of decline.

The sharper complaint is that a reasonable salary can still struggle to purchase independence and security.

There is one further correction to the 2009 thesis. Public borrowing is not automatically a raid on the young. They inherit infrastructure, knowledge and productive capacity as well as liabilities. They also benefit when emergency spending prevents a deeper recession: CBO’s assessments of the Recovery Act estimated higher output and lower unemployment than would otherwise have occurred.

The question now is what the borrowing buys, who benefits and who eventually pays.

Which brings us back to the trade.

Age matters because it influences whether you already own assets, have accumulated pension rights and participate in the institutions deciding what happens next. But those advantages can pass down the family line. They can also be acquired by yesterday’s excluded young people, who may discover that protecting property values feels rather different once they possess some.

A durable response would make entry easier: build housing where people want to live, fund retirement promises transparently, phase in adjustments early and protect people with low incomes across ages. It would also distinguish rising property prices from the creation of additional homes. Existing owners can enjoy the former while everyone else waits for the latter.

The original warning survives: a country can make its present look more comfortable by sending obligations into the future.

Its proposed coalition needs revising. The rich young and poor young do not necessarily share a balance sheet. Neither do the rich old and poor old.