He made the quite obvious remark that those in power now are those who ingrained the contradiction of  Mai 68 into french society, that these people know nothing about the Low Cost Generation that in turns knows nothing of continued growth. His conclusion, then, was that we could really see what was going on right now as the consequence of a generational conflict, in which the clear loosers are the young. They have less purchase power, less capacity to get property [a year of average salary could buy 9m2 in Paris in 1970. Today, it can buy 4; numbers' his].

However, he warns against a sort of new Mai 68 that would simply move the burden away from the young and not actually solve the true problem, being generational conflict.

I wouldn't call that a generational conflict. I would call that a conflict between the gospel of continued economic growth and the reality of reaching the limits of growth. The younger generation knows about this, but the older generation is in denial, a denial that goes back to 1972.

Half a lifetime away, as a teenager, I started confronting my parents about the fact that the worldview that they ('68 generation as well, but in Spain) and society generally was trying to pass on to my generation (including expectations about life, career, and so on) was completely in contradiction with what I could already see looming. It's not a generational conflict, it's a reality check. But, as some prominent scientist (or philosopher of science) said once, the way new (presumably better) theories about the world are accepted is that the old scientists die off, not that they change their mind.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman