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If you had to choose one moment in history in which to be born, and you didn't know in advance whether you were going to be male or female, which country you were going to be from, what your status was, you'd choose right now." This answer to his one-question test was used by Barack Obama in several of his speeches to demonstrate how humanity has made progress up until the present day.Is he right? Beyond asking people what their preferred birth year would be in the context of such a thought experiment, it is possible to compare the attractiveness of actual birth years (and thus epochs in which to lead one's life) from official statistics. There are already a handful of indices which are, if recorded repeatedly, usable for measuring the changes in quality-of-life circumstances over time, and thus the "position" of succeeding generations in the course of history.Jamie McQuilkin, who is the winner of the 2016/17 Demography Prize, derives an additional index from national statistics in the opening article of this second part of the IGJR double issue on "Measuring Intergenerational Justice for Public Policy". He combines nine indicators: forest degradation rate, share of low-carbon energy consumption, and carbon footprint in the environmental dimension; adjusted net savings, current account balance,and wealth in equality in the economic dimension; and primary pupil-teacher ratio, fertility rate, and GDP-adjusted child mortality in the social dimension. Unlike other index-builders, McQuilkin takes great pains to lay out all the premises, definitions and data sources of his account in as clear a manner as possible, which makes his article an accessible and instructive read.All-encompassing comparisons of the position of a generation in the "lottery of timing" are nonetheless notoriously difficult to draw. The two subsequent articles confine themselves to public policy. They both treat financial transfers between generations; but a deeper look reveals that their underlying rationale is quite different.Bernhard Hammer, Tanja Istenič and Lili Vargha use a framework of direct reciprocity between generations whereas Paul Kershaw (at least partly) builds upon a concept of indirect reciprocity. This is best explained when we look at the relationship between (familial) generations before the welfare state came into being. The directly reciprocal generational contract is the implicit expectation that parents will care for their children until they are old enough to care for themselves, and children will support their parents, in turn, when their parents can no longer support themselves. Here, the exchange happens between the same generational cohorts but while they are in different age groups.In their work, Hammer, Istenič and Vargha adapt this idea in the context of the welfare state, pinpointing the role of human capital-building and reproduction for the maintenance of generational contracts. The authors develop a new indicator to analyse whether there is a balance between transfers to children and transfers expected by the elderly population in the future. Their results indicate that, in most of the 16 EU countries analysed, the human capital investments in children are far too low to finance the necessary transfers to the elderly population in the future.In the final article, Kershaw writes within a framework of a different logic: indirect reciprocity. Imagine in pre-welfare-state times the members of three generations walking together. The daughter accompanies her mother and her grandmother as they embark on a ritual journey intended to end with the grandmother's voluntary death. The girl takes pity on her grandmother and convinces her mother to promise to care for the old woman until her natural death in exchange for a promise from the girl to do the same for her mother when the time comes. Here, the exchange does not happen between the same generational cohorts. The creditor generation cannot be paid back by the (then) deceased debtor generation. As the (previous) middle generation has become the debtor generation, the obligation is passed on the next generation (now the middle generation). Kershaw discusses three different approaches in this framework for Canada: the elderly/non-elderly spending ratio; intergenerational reciprocity; and the ability to pay of different age cohorts. Next to calculating some striking results, Kershaw further develops the elderly bias in social spending (EBiSS) as an indicator for the (un)fairness of intergenerational welfare state contracts. For the utility of cross-country comparisons, medical care spending (which is consumed disproportionately in later life) and education (which is consumed earlier) must be taken into account according to Kershaw. Kershaw's first two stages of analysis are complemented by a discussion about the fairness of the different treatment of generations in welfare states. Since some cohorts are born into favourable eras, and others are not, it is important to examine intergenerational public finances by reference to the standard of living inherited by different age groups, and the socio-economic circumstances they currently face. In response to this, Kershaw in the third stage of his research considers how the standard of living for contemporary seniors compares with that of elderly Canadians four decades earlier; and how the standard of living four decades earlier – when contemporary seniors were young adults – compares with that of young people today. In short, Kershaw suggests that the Canadian government needs to introduce policy changes to readjust the intergenerational imbalances that are negatively affecting younger generations.In the book review section, the first review assesses Birnbaum, Ferrarini, Nelson and Palme's The Generational Welfare Contract: Justice, Institutions and Outcomes. Again, the focus is on the redistribution of a welfare state's resources in time. Partly qualifying the "mainstream" thesis that public programmes, such as health care and pensions, are not affordable at their current extent in ageing welfare states, the authors put forward the hypothesis that intergenerational welfare state contracts can lead to positive-sum solutions.In the second book review, Michael Rose's The Representation of Future Generations in Today's Democracy, is brought to the attention of the scientific community. The book is written in German but of importance for the debate on specialised agencies for the future. Jörg Tremmel (University of Tübingen)Maria Lenk (FRFG)Antony Mason (IF)Markus Rutsche (University of St. Gallen)

Population ageing across the advanced economies (though not in large parts of Africa and Asia) has become a growing concern for academics, policy-makers and the public at large. More specifically, the question of the economic and financial sustainability and the intergenerational fairness of contemporary public policy constellations and socio-economic models has come to the fore against the backdrop of low or declining fertility rates and large cohorts of longer-living elderly citizens. Yet efforts to empirically conceptualise and measure intergenerational sustainability and fairness have often gone in different directions and have not always added to a greater cohesion, or clarity, of knowledge. This special issue on "Measuring Intergenerational Justice for Public Policy" aims to take stock of such efforts, and to provide an overview of where we stand today.The first two articles, both winners of the 2016/17 Demography Prize, focus on the dominant methodologies for thinking empirically about intergenerational fairness and sustainability.The first article is a general overview essay on Generational Accounting, authored by Laurence Kotlikoff, a founding father of this methodology. Kotlikoff notes that since David Ricardo's work, it took another century and a half for economists to develop models capable of realistically tracking the impact of policies on the welfare of current and future generations. Today, large-scale, dynamic computable general equilibrium models remain too stylised to provide much more than a qualitative sense of generational impacts. To fill this gap, Kotlikoff and others have pioneered the use of available data to directly measure the fiscal treatment of current and future generations. Kotlikoff's essay surveys these efforts over the past three decades to quantify generational fiscal burdens using both fiscal gap and generational accounting. On the whole, he is optimistic about the pace of progress, thanks in part to the acute if belated awareness by economists that intergenerational fairness is a topic of both policy importance and moral urgency. But Kotlikoff notes that conventional approaches based on concepts of national debt and deficits remain dominant in government practices even though governments are able to manipulate what to keep off their books. This points to the need to study power and governance in research on intergenerational fairness.The second article, by Natalie Laub and Christian Hagist, applies Generational Accounting to analyse whether and to what extent current policies put heavier burdens on the shoulders of future generations compared to current generations. Specifically, they study the impact of recent reforms in pay-as-you-go pension systems in Norway, Poland and Germany. They find that reforms have reduced the implicit debt to be paid by future generations in all cases, but the burden is shared differently. In Norway current pensioners have to contribute to enhancing financial sustainability, while Poland and Germany seem to be more politically constrained by the electoral power of pensioner-voters: reforms have put in place "grandfathering clauses" that protect current pensioners at the expense of younger generations.In the last article, Róbert Gál and Judit Monostori present an insightful and concise taxonomy of empirical indicators of economic sustainability and intergenerational fairness, summarised from their earlier wide-ranging survey of over 80 indicators.[1] They neatly organise their taxonomy along four different scope conditions: specific public programmes, the general government, the market economy, and the total economy, which adds the household economy (the output of unpaid household labour). The article shows that indicators of sustainability are based all too often on ad hoc partitioning of the life cycle, exemplified by the standard practice of letting adulthood start at 15 or 18, and old age at 65. Surveying significant advances in the measurement of ageing by Warren Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov and others,[2] Gál and Monostori instead propose indicators that mitigate or eliminate the ad hoc nature of partitioning. More importantly still, they demonstrate that the conclusions the observer is led to draw regarding sustainability and intergenerational fairness can be different, sometimes radically, depending on the level of analysis. Taking the five largest EU countries, they show that seemingly worrying levels of unsustainability in the pension system can go hand in hand with modest sustainability worries at the level of the economy. Building on earlier work by Gál et al.,[3] they also show that conclusions on the very direction of intergenerational resource transfers simply reverse when the scope of analysis moves from public policies to the total economy including households. In 17 European countries, the elderly population gets significantly higher per capita net transfers through public channels than children do. But if intra-familial transfers of cash and, crucially, time, are taken into account, this pro-elderly bias flips over entirely. Children now receive more transfers per capita than the elderly. The value of investments in human capital and other intra-familial transfers is so important that they frequently reverse the results of a more narrow public policy analysis. Thus the key message from Gál's earlier work is corroborated: Europe is a continent of "pro-elderly welfare states within child-oriented societies."[4] This highlights an important further conclusion we can draw from this special issue. Since different levels of analysis may lead to very different conclusions, discussing families of related indicators is the more cautious approach to measuring intergenerational justice.Pieter Vanhuysse (University of Southern Denmark)Antony Mason (IF)Jörg Tremmel (University of Tübingen)Markus Rutsche (University of St. Gallen)Maria Lenk (FRFG)Notes1 Gál/Monostori 2016.2 Sanderson/Scherbov 2013.3 Gál/Vanhuysse/Vargha 2018.4 Gál/Vanhuysse/Vargha 2018.ReferencesGál, Róbert I. / Monostori, Judit (2016): Indicators of economic sustainability and intergenerational fairness. AGENTA Public Deliverables 6.1. Vienna: Vienna Institute of Demography.Gál, Róbert I. / Vanhuysse, Pieter / Vargha, Lili (forthcoming/2018): Pro-elderly welfare states within child-oriented societies. In: Journal of European Public Policy.Sanderson, Warren C. / Scherbov, Sergei (2013): The characteristics approach to the measurement of population aging. In: Population and Development Review, vol. 39 (4/2013), 673-685.

In April 2019, Greta Thunberg made TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2019 list. The 16 year-old climate activist, who has also been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, started a movement that saw a multitude of student protests and school strikes around the world centred on action against climate change. TIME Magazine quoted her saying, "We can't save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed." With her engagement, Thunberg inspired thousands of youth activists to join her in her efforts and has thus put not only climate change on the political agenda but also the political participation and representation of the young. And this even though Thunberg and many of her fellow protesters do not yet enjoy (full) voting rights in their respective countries.Just like the previous issue of the Intergenerational Justice Review, this one is also dedicated to the topic of the underrepresentation of younger people in political decision-making. The first two contributions in this issue pay particular attention to the existence – or lack thereof – of networks and contacts in politics that seem to be important for political representation.Daniel Stockemer and Aksel Sundström's article titled "Youth's underrepresentation in the European Parliament: Insights from interviews with young Members of the European Parliament (MEPs)" reports results from qualitative interviews with 23 MEPs on the factors contributing to the success and failure of young people to enter the European Parliament. They find that, in general, three common themes or complaints amongst the successful young MEPs, irrespective of their party affiliation: "(1) a general reluctance within parties to nominate young candidates, (2) young candidates lacking the necessary contacts in parties to get elected, and (3) young candidates having too little experience to gain nomination for an electable seat." Despite these heavy criticisms of established politicians and (party) structures, the authors also summarise some more hopeful suggestions by respondents centring around the role of party youth organisations.The second contribution, by Emilien Paulis, also highlights the important role of networks and contacts, yet already at an earlier stage: when joining a political party. Drawing on social network and political participation theory and novel survey data from Belgium, Paulis explores what network patterns contribute to young people's enrolment in a political party. He discovers strong social ties between young party members and suggests that this indicates "a certain exclusivity in recruitment patterns of political parties".In addition, his analysis also points out that a highly homogenous network composition is a statistically significant predictor of joining a political party. Overall, Paulis, similar to Stockemer and Sundström, suggests a review of institutional processes and structures within established political organisations such as parties in order to promote a more diverse and above all younger profile of politically active citizens.The final contribution in this issue offers insights from an online survey conducted among young adults in Germany suggesting that these respondents were indeed politically interested and felt willing to assume responsibility through participation. As a consequence, Philipp Köbe concludes from his analysis that the supply-side of political organisations is the main problem in the underrepresentation and not so much young people's lack of engagement. His four specific recommendations to political organisations follow very much from this conclusion: (1) providing transparent and suitable information to meet young people's interests and demands; (2) lowering the electoral threshold for parties' parliamentary representation to improve the representation of minority opinions; (3) expanding youth-friendly opportunities for political participation such as video conferences and social media usages in order to reach out to the appropriate groups; (4) improving the efficiency and impact of political decision-making to reward political engagement amongst young people. Köbe finally suggests a steering instrument for political organisations to help them achieve these goals.In the book review section, we continue the theme of political participation and representation of the young. Simon Pistor reviews the book Youthquake 2017: The Rise of Young Cosmopolitans in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) by James Sloam and Matt Henn. The book investigates youth political participation in Britain around and after the Brexit referendum in 2016 and is built around the new notion a "youthquake" – a term initially introduced by British media to describe the surprising success of the movement behind the Labour Party but later on also becoming Oxford Dictionaries' 2017 word of the year.Pistor writes that Sloam and Henn expand the concept of a youthquake in their book to "youthquake elections" – "ones in which dramatic changes in how many young people vote, who they vote for and how active they are in the campaign have, quite literally, shaken up the status quo" (Sloam/Henn 2019: 8). Using this concept, the book's central claim is that it was a youth movement based on a broader appeal to the needs of young people(especially by the Labour Party) which spiked the higher voter turnout among young people.Pistor's review of the book is unequivocal: using methods from comparative politics, the authors provide a "very interesting argument" and "a clear empirical case for the youthquake during the 2017 General Election in the UK". Pistor also welcomes especially two implications of the book: (1) many young British people are not as politically disenfranchised as general wisdom holds (and there is much more to be said about that); (2) many of them are not only cosmopolitans but also British cosmopolitans interestedand engaged in national politics. Overall, Simon Pistor concludes that Sloam and Henn's book is "an empirically rich and informed study", which might suggest that the key to future democratic successes does indeed lie with the young.Ann-Kristin Kölln (Guest Editor, Aarhus University, Denmark)Antony Mason (IF)Jörg Tremmel (University of Tübingen)Markus Rutsche (University of St. Gallen)Maria Lenk (FRFG)