雅思阅读 51: The Generational Bargain（代际契约）

改编由 OECD Employment Outlook 2025 / Population Europe / Cambridge University Press（2025）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/07/oecd-employment-outlook-2025_5345f034/full-report/setting-the-scene-demographic-change-economic-growth-and-intergenerational-inequalities_9d481169.html

Reading Passage

A. The social contract of the postwar decades was built on a demographic assumption: that each generation would be richer, healthier and more secure than the one before it. Young people entered a labour market that rewarded education, bought houses that appreciated, contributed to pension systems that supported their parents in old age, and expected to do at least as well themselves. That assumption has now fractured. Across most OECD countries, the generation that entered adulthood after 1990 has experienced slower income growth, higher housing costs, more precarious work and a pension system that, because it is pay-as-you-go, depends on a shrinking number of workers supporting a growing number of retirees. The OECD's 2025 Employment Outlook, published in July, documents the shift in blunt numbers: since the mid-1990s, older households have enjoyed faster income growth than younger ones, and the risk of poverty has moved away from the elderly and toward children. The report notes that household wealth held by the over-55s now exceeds that held by the under-40s in almost every member state, a reversal that no government predicted fifty years ago.

B. The demographic driver is familiar. Life expectancy in rich countries has risen by roughly ten years since 1970, while fertility rates have fallen below replacement in almost every European and East Asian economy. The result is that the ratio of working-age adults to retirees, which was around five to one in 1970, is heading toward two to one by mid-century. Pension systems designed when a worker could expect to live ten years after retirement now must support a pensioner for twenty or twenty-five years. The standard policy response — raising the retirement age — protects the pension promise to existing retirees but pushes the burden onto younger workers, who must contribute for longer before they can draw any pension themselves. The OECD report warns that continuing on this path "would raise serious fairness issues", because the intergenerational balance has already moved decisively in favour of the old. Healthcare spending follows the same trajectory: people over 65 consume three or four times as much publicly funded medical care per head as people of working age, and that gap widens as the population ages. Because the over-65s also vote at the highest rates, governments are reluctant to cut the services they depend on.

C. The housing market is where the generational divide is most visible. In cities from London to Sydney to San Francisco, house prices have risen three or four times faster than median incomes since 1990. The generation that bought before the boom — typically now retired or approaching retirement — sits on housing wealth that the young can only access through inheritance or parental help. A 2025 Swedish study published in Ageing & Society found that parents in higher social classes were not only more likely to provide financial transfers to their children and grandchildren than parents in lower classes, but that the gap between those who received family money and those who did not widened over the two decades of the study. Intergenerational mobility — the chance that a child born to a working-class family ends up in a professional one — has fallen in most rich countries as the returns to education and parental wealth have risen together. Parental help with a housing deposit, in particular, has become the single strongest predictor of whether a young adult can buy a home at all. In cities where the ratio of house prices to incomes has passed ten, inheritance rather than effort increasingly determines who builds wealth and who rents for life.

D. The picture is not uniformly bleak. A 2025 analysis of Swedish income-mobility data, published as an arXiv working paper, found that once researchers corrected for the "lifecycle" problem — young people's measured incomes understate their eventual lifetime earnings, because career incomes rise with age — intergenerational mobility in Sweden was stable across cohorts born between 1950 and 1980, and may even have risen slightly for the youngest group. The implication is that some of the widely reported "decline in mobility" in the United States, where similar corrections have not yet been fully applied, may be a statistical artefact rather than a real trend. Even so, the OECD data show that wealth inequality between age groups has widened, and that young adults without parental support are less likely to own a home than at any point since the Second World War. Education, meanwhile, has continued to function as an elevator: a university degree still confers a large lifetime earnings premium, but the cost of obtaining one has risen faster than the returns.

E. The political consequences are already visible. Younger voters across Europe and North America are less likely to support the centre-left and centre-right parties that built the postwar welfare state, and more likely to vote for parties promising either debt relief or drastic redistribution. Turnout among the young, which historically lagged behind turnout among the old, is rising — partly because the economic gap between cohorts is now large enough to mobilise them. Whether the welfare state can be renegotiated to share the costs of an aging population more evenly — through wealth taxation, pension reform, or a genuine universal inheritance grant — is the central political question of the next decade. The generational bargain, in other words, has not broken, but it is being renegotiated in real time, and the terms will be set by whichever generation turns out to vote. Older voters, who vote at twice the rate of the young, currently hold the balance of power; whether that balance shifts as the millennial generation ages into voting habits is the demographic question that will define the next election cycle. The OECD report warns that, unless policy responds, the result could be a politics in which age, not class, becomes the dominant axis of conflict.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The demographic driver and the pension arithmetic ii. Housing and the widening wealth gap iii. Why the picture is not uniformly bleak iv. The political consequences v. A history of the postwar welfare state vi. How housing prices are calculated vii. The Swedish electoral system

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. According to the OECD, since the mid-1990s which group has enjoyed faster income growth? A. Workers aged 25-34. B. Households aged 55 and over. C. Children under ten. D. Recent graduates.

6. What is happening to the old-age dependency ratio? A. It is falling from 5:1 to 2:1. B. It is rising from roughly 5:1 toward 2:1. C. It has remained constant. D. It is below 1:1.

7. What did the Swedish Ageing & Society study find? A. All parents give equal transfers. B. Higher-class parents gave more, and the gap widened over two decades. C. Transfers have fallen to zero. D. Working-class parents gave more than professional parents.

8. Why did the 2025 Swedish income-mobility analysis revise earlier conclusions? A. It showed all data had been fabricated. B. It corrected for the lifecycle problem that understates young people's future earnings. C. It found no mobility at all. D. It used tax records from the 1930s.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Since the mid-1990s, poverty risk has shifted away from older people toward children.
10. Life expectancy in rich countries has fallen by ten years since 1970.
11. House prices have risen roughly three to four times faster than median incomes since 1990.
12. The 2025 Swedish analysis confirmed that intergenerational mobility has collapsed in the United States.
13. The Green Party is the most popular party among young voters across Europe.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The OECD report warns that raising the retirement age to protect pension promises would raise serious (14) __________ issues, because the intergenerational balance has already moved in favour of the (15) __________.

答案与解析

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