Shopping till they drop

According to a survey by Eagle Star Insurance, 75% of retirees are intending to spend all their savings living high on the hog, while only a quarter plan to leave their children anything more substantial than some lame 60s memorabilia. I don't know why people should suddenly start being honest with their insurance company in surveys, when they never are on claim forms, but let's imagine for a second that this is accurate.

For the great majority of the younger generation, the only chance of a parental windfall will be if death catches their loved ones by surprise; if the lovable progenitors get any advance warning whatsoever, they'll be off on a gambling cruise before you can say, "But roulette machines are rigged!" Yes, the days of the walking, talking pension are over.

For centuries, mankind has known that You Can't Take It With You; it's astonishing how long it's taken for the logical conclusion to occur to anyone - well, then we may as well spend it. Once again, the baby-boomers have lived up to their reputation for innovation, iconoclasm, individualism and being greedy bastards.

Naturally, just as there are people in their 50s and 60s who possess no novelty clothing and somehow managed to miss the Beatles, so there are those who don't fall in to the Me-Generation. As their children, you can spot them quite easily: they get up to make you a sandwich every time you enter a room; they look forward to the arrival of grandchildren; they suppose, with amazing acuity, that you'd rather spend Christmas with your young friends; and they are extremely rare.

Parents like these would no sooner blow your inheritance than they would take an E just to see what it was like. Of course, they'll leave you with such a burden of guilt that the hard cash will amount to an hourly payment for self-flagellation, but that doesn't mean you can't buy a house with it.

And yet, there is a possibility that the baby-boomers are doing a favour to society. They may be the first to spend, spend, spend, but they won't be the last. Churlishness and a sense of Old Testament justice will propel us, their children, to get rid of our cash with even greater alacrity, just to dispel any chance that our own children might end up with anything we never had. This could spell the end of social stasis and break the whole cycle of wealth begetting wealth in a way that leftist politics never quite managed.

Living out one's youth waiting to inherit was once the preserve of the idiot aristo. You can detect the social anxiety that legacy has always caused in the classic literary topos of the 19th century - the landed bad guy who capers fecklessly, whoring and gambling, in anticipation of the cash that is always ultimately denied him in service of the righteous narrative. While wealth itself was - and is - seen as a decent, upstanding aspect of a person, the promise of wealth has always been seen as a destabilising agent, encouraging hedonism and social negligence.

Let's imagine that the gentry were experiencing a rare moment of clarity when they realised that waiting for a cash boon was bad for the soul; that would explain a lot about the key features of today's youth and middle-youth. This generation, owing to the ever-increasing differential between earnings and property value that has turned even modest houses into goldmines, is the one that stands to gain most from inheritance. It is also the most politically apathetic, the most difficult to mobilise, the least likely to be part of a union, the least likely to go on a demonstration and the least likely in the history of the world to devote any time at all to embroidering a banner with a colourful slogan along the lines of We Shall Overcome.

I had always thought we had been alienated from the process by politicians themselves, but maybe it's because there is too much money in the pipeline. OK, not for all of us, but for a fair few, rather than the minuscule elite of yore. Those with the promise of cash are being sapped of their political energy. Those without the promise of cash might still rail against the social iniquity, but they no longer have the boldness and force that comes with being the overwhelming majority.

The claims that baby-boomers make for themselves - that they invented teenagehood, the pill, rock and roll, indeed anything pertaining to enjoyment of a generally sexual nature - make them difficult to like en masse. So the idea of them now inventing some unprecedented fun and joy for their twilight years is fairly gutting. But imagine if all their cash disappeared into the leisure industry and their offspring had to start from scratch. We might find radical muscle that we never knew we had.

zoe.williams2@ntlworld.com