A Generation that has been left Behind?

the conflict was of the former type. By the mid-1990s, public speculation had clearly shifted toward a potential conflict of the latter type. The media, and political leaders of the mid-1990s, made routine reference to elder-imposed resource constraints on the young, including declines in living standards among young families, low rates of national savings, chronic federal deficits, mounting environmental liabilities, and public entitlement programs that directed most of their benefits to the old and were projected to impose stiff tax burdens on workers early in the twenty-first century. There was a rapidly growing academic literature on public policies that treat the young unfairly—examined under such rubrics as "generational equity" and "generational accounting." Whether this blunt economic language fore-tells a permanent trend toward self-preservation through material acquisition, as some have argued, is a question to be answered by the ascendant generations of the twenty-first century.