The Economist.
Hello, this is Rosie Bloor, co-host of The Intelligence, our daily news and current affairs podcast.
Welcome to Editor's Picks.
We've chosen an article from the latest edition of The Economist read aloud.
We hope you enjoy it.
Once upon a time, inequality in Europe was largely horizontal.
The rich Western half drove BMWs and holidayed abroad,
while the poorer East rewired its own appliances and queued for bread.
But three decades of catch-up growth in erstwhile communist countries
has put paid to jokes about Romanian cars whose top speed was downhill.
These days, inequality in Europe has a vertical dimension, one that goes up and down family trees.
Youngsters unable to move out of their parents' spare room due to sky-high house prices
wonder if they'll ever enjoy the lifestyle as adults which they knew as kids.
Thirty-somethings in jobs pay hefty taxes to fund the pensions of oldies who retired in their prime.
Costs related to ageing are guzzling a quarter of the European Union's GDP,
a figure unlikely to fall as the old continent grows older still.
To be a young European is to feel oneself an unwitting participant in an intergenerational confidence trick.
If the European welfare state looks like a pyramid scheme, its pharaohs are the baby boomers.
The bumper generation born in the two decades after 1945, aged roughly between 60 and 80,
hello mum, hi dad, would like to go down in history as the first in centuries