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Notes -
Part of the problem is that economic policy in the West is based on the idea that 20+% of the population should be leisure-class gentry - namely middle-class retirees. The core premise of Boomercon thought is that an amount of wealth that could be accumulated relatively painlessly over 40 years of median-income work (30 for blue-collar union workers in legacy manufacturing or the public sector) should endow 20 years of comfortable, active retirement (including the massive healthcare expenditure needed to support it) through some combination of asset ownership, earned workplace benefits, and earned government benefits. The extreme and malignant form of Boomerconnery (and the dominant one in the UK) is that it should do this without touching the capital value of the family home you continue to occupy as empty nesters. In Continental Europe this is seen as an entitlement that should be guaranteed by the State, in the Anglosphere it is only seen as a default expectation that should be facilitated by the State. But in either case it is a huge constituency of people who are objectively rentiers and do, in fact, vote like rentiers.
The underlying confusion is conflating "class" as in inherited SES with "class" as in ones relationship to the means of production. In 1900 this didn't matter much - almost all rentiers and most entrepreneurs had higher inherited SES than almost all wage-workers. But in the modern day almost everyone is a wage-worker in their youth (it isn't socially acceptable for upper-middle class families to subsidise failsons to live a playboy lifestyle - notice that a huge part of Joe Biden's legal-but-sleazy scheming is trying to create opportunities for James and Hunter Biden to pretend they are earning the money) and everyone hopes to be a rentier in retirement, but in a way which means they can say that their ability to eat while others work is a right and not a privilege. So the generational divide in British (and, to a lesser extent, American) politics is exactly what orthodox Marxism would predict - wage-workers vote left, asset owners vote right.
That’s a cogent point, and we do have to worry about the dependency ratio mostly because of retirees.
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