Big History provides the cosmology for the present work in which the disproportionate impact of inequality on today's young generation is contextualised by examination of three types of societies, past empires, present capitalism and one pre-colonisation indigenous society, over time periods of more than centuries. Generations are seen as demographically referenced social locations like gender and race and at any one time several interdependent generations exist. Other referents include the work of JS Mill, his controversial ethology project, the history of ideas, the non-identity problem and social anthropology. The article concludes by anticipating a tentative reconstruction of Mill's ethology based on advances in social science in the century and a half since his time.