OPINION: Born to parents blooded in a seemingly persistent cycle of war, the Baby Boomers didn't do too badly.

The world in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s was class-ridden, racist, sexist, sexually and socially conservative, and it's infrastructure needed a lot of investing in.

It's so much better today on so many fronts, yet Baby Boomer is a term most commonly used as an insult.

It's a generation blamed for its mistakes, not thanked for its successes, here and overseas.

It's been cast as a generation of sociopaths.

It isn't. It built roads, hospitals, social support systems, just like Baby Boomers' parents did, only it did more of it. People are living longer than ever before. There have been no more world wars. The proportion of people living in extreme poverty has fallen globally. Opportunities to be educated have increased. Being a woman, a person of colour, disabled, mentally unwell, or gay is far better now than it was.

It did better than previous generations on so many fronts, but it failed on many too, just like previous generations did, and future generations will.

It's been cast as a generation of sociopaths.

So why are we talking about Baby Boomers as if it is a homogenous generation, and the root of all social wrong today, and forgetting all its successes, and the fact that many Baby Boomers are actually poor as dirt?

It's because after the Global Financial Crisis, and majority acceptance that climate change was real, it became clear that in Western' liberal, open economies like New Zealand the young would never be richer than their parents.

Economic growth wouldn't give them the wages to pay off their student loans, buy overpriced houses, and build their retirement savings.

And the haves in places like the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand didn't look like they cared to do the things needed to give the young a fair crack of the economic whip.

Politicians moved quickly to prop-up banks, keep confidence in sharemarkets, push climate change out until "tomorrow", and maintain house prices.

It looked to the young like this was all about preserving the wealth of the already wealthy.

It looked like the young were never going to get their share.

It looked like economic crisis was being used as an excuse for kicking the climate can down the road again.

The young were angry as hell, and they weren't going to take it any more, and so the politics and language of intergenerational fairness went mainstream in the UK, in the US, in Australia and here.

It made for great headlines because, of course, when something is unfair, it's axiomatic that someone must be blamed.

The media piled in stoking up the sense of outrage.

And it's worked, to an extent.

The Labour-led government has prioritised some of the core elements of intergenerational unfairness: affordable housing, rental conditions, free tertiary education, and climate change.

But the language of intergenerational fairness obscures just as much as it illuminates. Political language always does this. That's the point of it.

The media piled in stoking up the sense of outrage.

It tars a whole group with the same brush, and so doing unifies those using the language: Millennials are the lazy generation, greens are socialists in disguise, all beneficiaries are potential cheats, farmers are animal abusers, men are to women what bicycles are to fish, all baby boomers only care about keeping their tax rates low and the prices of their houses up.

Baby Boomers weren't a sociopathic generation. They were our mums and dads, grandpas and grandmas.

They fixed some things the previous generation had stuffed up, and made mistakes that need fixing by their successors, but they also did many, many good things.

So thank you Baby Boomers. You were human. You tried. You succeeded. You failed.

Oh, and don't be too free spending our inheritances, because we will be expecting you to pass it on to us. Thanks in advance for that.

Give Baby Boomers their dues

It's been cast as a generation of sociopaths.

The media piled in stoking up the sense of outrage.