‘Inheritocracy’ is an ugly word to describe an increasingly important social and economic development: the passing of approximately £5.5 trillion in housing wealth from baby boomers, Britain’s first truly propertied generation, to millennials. Eliza Filby, a leading observer of generational change, has a sharp eye for the topsy-turvy consequences of this huge act of inheritance, which is destined to take us back to the 19th-century world of Austen, Eliot and Dickens. ‘We live again in a world where wills, deaths, marriages and inheritances are the narrative thread on which great dramas were based,’ she writes.

The dramas of inheritance lie behind many of today’s headlines, from the introduction of death duties on family farms to the fear that assisted dying will become a means of avoiding rising care costs. Filby captures the emancipations, injustices and paradoxes of inheritance, combining analysis with interviews and reflections on her own good fortune.

There are two big differences between the 19th century and the present. One is the radically changed position of women. It has been estimated that about 60 per cent of the UK’s private wealth will be in female hands by 2025. Women make up almost half of the UK’s 2.6 million buy-to-let landlords and there has been a big surge in women of sixty-five and over opening business accounts.

The second difference is the weakening of the conventional family and the arrival of more complex blended families. ‘Blended families, however harmonious, bring a level of complication and sometimes economic disadvantage to the inheritance/gifting dynamic. This is especially true if there is a second marriage with much younger children, which can result in competing priorities between siblings and stepsiblings,’ Filby writes. Many blended families leave in their wake conflict and bitterness. The increase in separation and divorce means, according to Filby, that an extraordinary three out of four families are likely to experience a contested will or conflict of some kind over inheritance.

There has been much discussion in recent years of intergenerational unfairness. As David Willetts has highlighted in The Pinch, boomer gains in property, pensions and rising wages have not trickled down the generations. Notwithstanding this, there is a great deal of cultural overlap between boomers and their millennial children: the two generations are more likely to be friends than boomers were with the parents they often rebelled against.

Filby’s focus is on a subject that has received much less attention: intragenerational unfairness and the fact that the Bank of Mum and Dad (BOMAD) pays out so much more generously to some than to others. Exactly how much BOMAD exacerbates inequality is left a bit hazy. It is as if Filby had created her inheritocracy concept as a challenge to the idea that we live in a kind of meritocracy, but then pulled her punches when the numbers did not quite support the thesis. For a start, as many as 80 per cent of millennials are said to be set to inherit, albeit sharply varying amounts, and the issue is far less significant outside London and the southeast, where inherited properties will be less valuable. When discussing the housing ladder, Filby estimates that those with money from parents will be able to buy a property on average 2.6 years (rising to 4.6 years in London) earlier than those who don’t have it. This does not seem like a revolutionary new social divide.

Then there is the question of how much millennials will actually inherit, given the high costs of end-of-life care for those with property wealth. Among millennials, there are fewer captive daughters prepared to be ‘prisoners of love’, caring for elderly parents at home, than among their mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations. If the property wealth of boomers does not go into care homes, it might disappear into expensive holidays. ‘My inheritance is currently being drunk through a straw in a coconut in the Caribbean,’ complained one millennial in the Daily Mail. Forty per cent of millennials are said to resent their parents’ spending and 62 per cent of boomers think that their money is to be enjoyed now rather than left to their children, though how reliable we should regard these surveys – and the book is thick with them – is a moot point. Against this, it is worth noting that boomer and Gen X parents have been supporting their student-fee-blighted children at university at an average of £16,000 each, according to the market research company High Fliers.

But, as polling Filby commissioned for the book makes clear, younger people certainly believe inheritance inequality to be key: 71 per cent of under-45s think opportunity is now primarily defined by parental support, compared with 52 per cent of boomers. One thing, not mentioned by Filby, that will surely exacerbate the concentration of wealth is the fact that smaller families mean more money going to fewer children.

The book could have been better structured – the analysis and interviews sometimes rub up against each other awkwardly. But it is written with charm and verve, and sometimes with shafts of eloquence, especially on the subject of parenting your parents. Filby is endearingly honest about passing herself off as more disadvantaged than she actually is thanks to her bohemian parents’ wise property acquisitions in Tooting. There are lots of fascinating details too, such as the revelations that 10 per cent of UK students do not take out loans at all, as fees and costs are picked up by parents, and that for every ten men in a care home there are twenty-three women. And Filby is surely right that this is one of the biggest political subjects to remain shrouded in silence. Her book is a good start in breaking that silence.