The lucky cohort

Unlike those born in the 1940s and '50s, the current generation can no longer take global peace and lifelong economic progress for granted

The cohort born in the decade 1940-50 may have been the luckiest till then. Consider some of the major positive global trends it benefitted from. In the 78 years since the end of the Second World War, there has been no global conflict, perhaps the longest period of world peace in recorded history. Of course, there have been long and brutal smaller “wars of intervention” (by America in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and now by Russia in Ukraine) and a sizeable number of nasty civil conflicts in West Asia and Africa. But the overwhelming majority of the world’s population has