Every interest at the budget table has someone paid to defend it. The future does not
Somewhere in every capital of any country in the world there is a table. It has no address and no nameplate, but it meets more regularly than any parliament. At this table a nation decides, mostly without ceremony, how to divide what it produces among the ages of life: how much to the classroom, how much to the hospital ward, how much to the pension, how much to the debt that someone not yet born will one day service. Every state runs such a table. Every budget is the minutes of the meeting held at this table.
Look at who sits there.
Working adults arrive represented. They hold the wage bargain, and around the wage bargain a century of institutions has grown: unions, employers’ chambers, tripartite councils, strike funds, labour codes. Their claim on the national product is defended every day, professionally, by people paid to defend it.
The elderly arrive better defended still. Pension systems are among the largest commitments most states have ever made, run by institutions whose entire purpose is the reliability of the transfer. Behind the institutions stand organized constituencies, and behind the constituencies stands an electoral weight that every census enlarges. In an aging society, the arithmetic strengthens this seat year after year without anyone lifting a finger.
Even the past has its defenders, heritage boards and ministries of culture whose mandate is to preserve what was rather than to fund what is not yet born.
One chair is empty. Children hold no vote, no union and no ministry of their own. Those not yet born hold nothing at all. The parties with the largest stake in the long run are the only ones absent when the long run is traded away.
This is not a moral failure of anyone at the table. The issue is not that someone wishes children ill. It is that no one is institutionally required to wish them well at the precise moment the money is divided. Representation is arithmetic: it serves those who are organized and those who vote. Left to that arithmetic, every budget tilts, slowly and politely, toward the years of life in which capability is drawn down and away from the years in which it is created. No conspiracy is needed. An empty chair is enough.
Why should this trouble anyone beyond sentiment? Because of a fact so large it has become invisible: no generation pays for its own formation. Childhood is financed by the working adults of the day, through taxes and through the oldest transfer in human society, the one that runs from parents to children. Old age is financed by the cohorts that follow, today’s children and those not yet born. Every school budget, every pension law, every remittance sent home is a clause of one contract, the contract between generations, older than states, older than markets, the arrangement through which a society renews itself. The empty chair belongs to the junior party of that contract. Everything else at the table depends on the clause that nobody defends. That clause is the promise to form the next generation before a society collects from it. Fund the child, and in twenty years there is a worker to tax, a contributor to every pension, a citizen to service the debt.
And when the chair stays empty long enough, the terms deteriorate, and the young read terms better than anyone. They answer with the only instrument they hold, which is not the ballot. It is the ticket. Migration statistics are a continuous referendum on the contract between generations, one that no commission organizes, no campaign can spin and no government can suspend. In my part of the world, the Balkans, households have learned to answer twice. They pay once to raise and educate a child, and once more to finance that child’s departure: the tuition abroad, the ticket, the first year of rent in another country. The family’s largest investment project has become the export of its own children.
An economy does not survive this indefinitely. Machines depreciate; capability compounds, but only in the people who stay. A production function can absorb a bad year. It cannot absorb the steady disappearance of the people it was written for. A country can leave the chair empty; the consequences take the seat anyway.
What I write is nothing new. What is new is that the world has started to notice. In 2024 the United Nations adopted a Declaration on Future Generations, committing states to weigh the interests of those not yet born. In 2026 the European Commission gave the principle its first operating system, a strategy on fairness between generations with an index and a scheduled progress report. The direction is becoming clear: what begins as principle acquires measurement, and what gets measured eventually gets a ministry. Some countries have gone further and appointed the chair directly, a commissioner for future generations in Wales, an ombudsman in Hungary. The forms differ. The criterion does not.
Every country has this table, and this week it is meeting somewhere in yours: in a budget directorate, a pension working group, a room where a strategy is being drafted. Minutes will be taken. Decisions will compound for forty years. Someone whose duty is the child’s claim must be in the room at the moment the money is divided. Read the attendance list, find the chair no one occupies, and ask the only question that matters. Who, in your country, is supposed to sit there?
