Is there a case for ever-rising state pensions which redistribute from young to old? Madsen Pirie thinks not. The image of pensioner poverty, he says, "does not accord with present day reality for most pensioners":

Some 86% of pensioners live in households with assets in excess of £50,000. The average income of over 65s is £15,400. A young person working on current minimum wage for a normal working week earns just under £13,000. Yet the young person is taxed while the older person is guaranteed a triple locked pension.

However, you can easily argue that this is fair, and not just because, as Simon says, pensioners have assets because they have had years in which to save.

In fact, in one important respect pensioners are poorer than youngsters. Our wealth does not consist merely of financial assets. It also comprises human capital - our ability to earn wages. Youngsters have a lot of this: someone who can look forward to 30 years of a real income of £25,000 has an asset of almost £400,000, assuming a 5% discount rate. Pensioners have little or none.

This means they are exposed to greater risks than youngsters. For one thing, they face distribution risk: a shift in incomes from capital to labour would hurt them. Youngsters who hold a mix of human and financial wealth can diversify this risk, however*.

Also, oldsters have less chance to time-diversify. Youngsters can withstand short-term losses in the hope that better times will follow. Oldsters might be dead before they arrive.

And thirdly, younger retirees face a genuine uncertainty about whether equity returns will continue to mean-revert or not. Younger workers also face this risk, but their human capital means it is less important.

In these senses, older folk face more risk than younger ones. Higher state pensions can be justified on the grounds that they reduce the income risks that pensioners face.

And, remember, the triple lock does NOT merely redistribute to older people. Quite the opposite. Insofar as it stays in place, younger people will benefit more simply because they'll get many years of rises whereas an oldster will dies before getting them.And the power of compound growth is a great thing.

In saying this, I don't mean to deny that younger people have no grievances. They assuredly do. They face obscenely high house prices, the threat of being made redundant (pdf) by robots and the more immediate dangers of job degradation and polarization. There might be solutions to these harms - but they do not involve cutting pensions.

* Of course, many younger people can't afford to save and hold equities. This is either because they haven't yet seen the pay rises that come with experience, or because they'll suffer lifelong poverty. The first problem will solve itself with time, the second requires inter-personal rather than inter-generational redistribution.