Amol Rajan
speaker
3,997 appearances
23 recordings
6 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 16 Jul
Amol Rajan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 12.
Appearances
I thought it was so... It was the howl of a generation.
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And because we're in the same generation, I was sort of howling with you.
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And I say that very, very mindful, as you are very self-consciously in this book, and you sort of keep coming back to it, and you've talked about it elsewhere as well, that, you know, you're, in a sense, one of the lucky ones.
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And I'm one of the lucky ones.
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You know, we're, you know, might feel like our generation has to do a bit more for certain things than previous generations who...
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would also argue that they had it tougher than previous generations who served in the war and so on but basically the book has this kind of premise it's called Inheritocracy and I want you to explain what that is in just a moment but it starts from this feeling that basically people of your generation were sold a story sold a message about what they needed to do in order to have a certain life and then you get to your mid-30s and you're like well I've done what you said and it's it's not happening and it's not going to happen and this is my time and now I've got kids and what about them and you're very self-conscious in the book as well that
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Our generation, I'm 42, I'm not going to ask you how old you are, but we're roughly the same age.
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Our generation has it easier than the next generation, for whom my concern is off the charts.
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What, Dr Eliza Philby, is the Inheritocracy?
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You start by talking about three massive ruptures in the generational shift.
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So the book starts by talking about three ruptures in values, in education and in wealth.
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And it was interesting reading about these three ruptures because I realized that I've spent most of the last 20 years thinking about these ruptures and like you, kind of living them in a sense.
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The unspoken social contract was that life gets better.
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But each generation has it slightly easier.
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And that was really the norm for post-war Britain.
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But there was this generation called the baby boomers, many of whom listened to this podcast, and many of whom are self-conscious that in certain fundamental ways, they had it easier than their children.
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They were part of a rising tide economically.
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They had the demographic dividend of five or six workers to each retiree.
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They often had final salary pensions.
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And if they were lucky, like your mum, they bought houses in 1981 when a five-bedroom house in London cost £28,000, which in real terms, as a multiple of wages, was a lot lower than it is now.
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Showing 121–140 of 3,997 · page 7 of 200
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