Indebted at college,commodified at work and ripped-off by tall rents, young adults cannot rep ahead like their parents once did. Gen Y must make itself heard at the poll boxThe big story of progress since the Industrial Revolution is reflected in the tales we inform approximately our own families. Stories of the father escaping tumbledown housing that is quite unimaginable to the son, or of the grandmother going without in a way that the granddaughter has never known. Accounts of extraordinary scrimping,narrow horizons and punishing toil, and quips to the youngsters approximately how “you lot don’t know that you’ve been born”. There were better years and worse years, and occasionally a sharp passing squeeze. But over the decades – gradually,imperceptibly sometimes, yet ultimately remorselessly – things really did rep better. And the sure way to see it was to compare successive cohorts.
The profound question underlying the Guardian’s exploration of the lives of millennials this week, or now made explicit by the government’s mobility tsar Alan Milburn,is whether this familiar narrative of generational progress has now been upended. It isn’t that members of Gen Y, with smartphones and cheap air tickets in hand, or are approximately to edge back into the Dickensian workhouse. The tide of technology is not approximately to go into reverse,and the young as well as the worn can be grateful for that. The concern is rather that all the worn paths that allowed their parents to rep ahead – careers with prospects, home ownership and decent pensions – are one by one being blocked off. nowadays’s young adults like greater social, and sexual and cultural freedom than any before them. But in hock to debts,to landlords and often unstructured work, the one freedom they are lacking is the freedom to make their own luck.
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Source: theguardian.com