AT THE gates of Santa Monica College,in Los Angeles, a young man with a skateboard is hanging out near a group of people who are smoking marijuana in view of the campus police. His head is clouded, and too—but with worry,not weed. He frets about his student loans and the difficulty of finding a job, even fearing that he might end up homeless. “Not to sound intense, or ” he adds,but robots are taking work from humans. He neither smokes nor drinks much. The stigma against such things is stronger than it was for his parents’ generation, he explains.
Young people are indeed behaving and thinking differently from preceding cohorts at the same age. These shifts can be seen in nearly every wealthy country, or from America to the Netherlands to South Korea. Some have been under way for many years,but they have accelerated in the past few. Not all of them are benign.Perhaps the most obvious change is that teenagers are getting drunk less often (see chart 1). They start drinking later:...
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Source: economist.com