Welcome listeners to the First Things podcast, the editor's desk.

I'm Rusty Reno. I'm the editor of First Things.

And we use these podcasts to chat with authors of material in the recent issues of First Things magazine.

And it's my pleasure to welcome Philip Pilkinton, the author of Generation Against Generation,

a meditation on not the coming culture war, but rather the coming generational war. Welcome to the podcast, fellow.

Thanks very much, trustee. It's good to be home.

What is the driver of the war or conflict or you can maybe just say at least at this point the tension between the generations.

Well, I mean, the main driver is basically demographic change stemming from the reduction in

fertility rates that we've seen since the baby boomer generation was born.

So it's also their birth rates that are obviously falling.

But it seems to be getting worse with each passing generation.

This has been, as I said in the piece,

this has been a pretty long staple discussion in economic circles

and in finance circles, which is both in my background.

I'm an economist, but I worked in finance for

nearly a decade. And it's been pretty widely known there because in pretty standard economic

models, the size of the labor force determines much of your long-term economic growth. It's

the size of the labor force and technology. And in finance

circles, we're pretty much, I mean, most of finance is managing, at least the finance I worked in,

is managing pension funds. And so the demographic structure of the population is obviously

very important for that. So the demographic changes have been known for a while.

I'd say these discussions have been going on at least since the early 1990s, but they

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