A recent, and often very amusing, debate in London highlighted a global issue - have today's younger generation got a uniquely tough prospect ahead or should they stop moaning? Wealth managers should take note.

A staple of wealth management conferences and surveys is how to engage with the young. There were, therefore, good, journalistic reasons for your correspondent to head to London’s British Museum a few days ago to hear a debate that, while it sounded like an excuse for banter, had a serious purpose. The debate, hosted by the Spectator magazine and Duncan Lawrie, the private bank, had the title: “Stop Whining Young People, You’ve Never Had It So Good!”

The argument here is that teenagers and 20-somethings fretting about massive student debt – but with worthless degrees in the job market – or lack of affordable housing, or unpaid internships, are suffering in ways that, say, the Baby Boomers haven’t. Boomers had sex, drugs and rock n’ roll; they had final-salary pensions, secure jobs and improving medical care. But feckless Boomers are outspending what they have earned, and the cohorts behind them in the population must pick up the bill. Oh, and since the Boomers cavorted in their kaftans and listened to Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles, later generations have contended with AIDS, 9/11, recessions, nanny statism on health, and an increasingly puritanical “elf & safety” culture. No more jobs for life. No more adverts for Martinis and hot cars. As P J O’Rourke, the American humourist, once put it in Batchelor's Home Companion: "fin de siècle - fin de fun".

Arguing for the motion (you have never had it so good) were the journalist and controversialist James Delingpole (among other views, he is a global warming sceptic); Paul Flatters, a qualitative research expert and CEO at Trajectory Partnership, and Daily Telegraph columnist on economic and political matters, Jeremy Warner. Speaking against (ie, the ones saying that grumbling youngsters are right to moan about their lot) were Ed Howker, author of Jilted Generation: How Britain has Bankrupted its Youth; David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham, north London, and the author of the book, Out of the Ashes: Britain After The Riots, and Katie Morley, a personal finance writer at Investors Chronicle and a campaigner for young people in obtaining fair deals in financial matters. The event was chaired with customary brio by journalist and education activist Toby Young.

Delingpole was certainly amusing in going on about how younger people have life so much better in certain ways than their elders (a lot of his comments seemed to revolve around sex and mobile phones). Flatters was perhaps rather more measured in setting out a whole range of statistics and anecdotal evidence about the improving economic and social lot of the younger generation – while not denying the economic barriers. Warner took a more acerbic view of young persons’ complaints, even arguing that the housing shortage issue, while not insignificant, could to some extent play out through inter-generational inheritance. (This point is particularly important in the wealth management space.)

Morely was having none of it: student debts run, she said, to tens of thousands of pounds and yet many postgraduates find, to their horror, that their pieces of academic paper have no employment value. While she acknowledged there has been a huge rise in the proportion of school-leavers going into higher education, she said many young adults felt “conned” by their experience. Howker also focused on the debt and property shortage issues, while David Lammy pointed out that for some segments of the young population, such as those in inner cities where parents weren’t working, the outlook was bleak, although maybe not uniquely so.

The result of the vote, taken from the audience, was a win for those arguing against the motion, although the balance of those who agreed with it compared with the starting position slightly increased.

So what did I make of all this? I think there is a measure of justice in the “whiners’” complaint, but not as much as some of the more downbeat commentators suggest.

Every generation has its risks and opportunities. For example, my father (now 80) had to do military service (he was in the Royal Air Force as a navigator on jets), while the supposedly pampered Boomers campaigned to end capital punishment, criminal sanctions against gay people and end conscription. They had to deal with “stop-go” boom and bust, crummy public transport, unions and inflation, not to mention the threat of nuclear annihilation. True, the old “jobs for life” line sounds great, but came at a price of an increasingly sclerotic economy that hit the buffers in the 1970s both in the UK and abroad. Before 1979, you had to get state permission in the UK to take more than a pittance abroad on holiday. Now, young people can book a budget airline flight to Prague or Barcelona for a relatively modest sum.

Increasingly, with worries about rising education costs, the internet and other technologies may promise a route to break the logjam of rising expenses. Perhaps what does justify some of the angst today is that we are seeing the transition of Western countries’ population profiles as birth-rates decelerate and life-spans increase. But as we are told that population growth must slow to preserve the planet, it is difficult to see how this can be avoided to some extent. In some countries, such as Japan, the shift is very marked.

In sum, I think that the wealth management sector looking to engage with the young must certainly realise the challenges they face, but I would counsel against regarding these issues as uniquely awful. They aren’t, as we mark the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Western Europe, it is important to put all this in context. Today’s young are unlikely to receive a brown envelope demanding they drop their lives and head off into the line of fire.