There is an interesting phenomenon in voting patterns on both sides of the Atlantic: young people vote strikingly differently than their parents. And this division seems to be based less on income, education or gender, and more on belonging to a certain generation. There are good reasons for this. Life has changed for both the old and the young. But their past and future perspective are also different.
For example, the Cold War was over before some of today's young people were born, or at least before they grew up. The word socialism has no meaning for them that it had for their parents. For them, socialism is a society based on the common good - where people care about other people and the environment in which they live. They know that there have been failed experiments under that name in the past, but that does not mean that new, different experiments will not succeed.
Older Americans and upper-middle-class Europeans had a good life. When they entered the labor market, well-paid jobs awaited them. The question they asked themselves was what they wanted to do, not how long they would have to live with their parents before they could get a job that would allow them to move out and become independent. Members of the older generation expected that they would find a permanent job, that they would get married as young people, buy a house - maybe even a cottage - and that at the end they would have a certain pension. Overall, they expected to be wealthier than their parents.
Although not everything went smoothly for the members of today's older generation, their expectations were mostly fulfilled. Perhaps they had more profit from their houses than from their work. It must have been strange to them, but they accepted the gift of our speculative markets and gave themselves credit for buying in the right place at the right time.
The expectations of today's young people, wherever they are in the income distribution, are quite the opposite. They face the uncertainty of employment. Many young people with a college degree will wait months before finding a job - often with multiple unpaid internships at multiple companies. And they will consider themselves lucky unlike their poorer peers, who may have done better in school, but can't afford a year or two without income and don't have the necessary connections to land an internship.
Today's young people with degrees are burdened with debt - the poorer they are, the more they owe. That's why they don't ask themselves what they would like to do, but what job will enable them to pay off their tuition, because it will often burden them for twenty or more years. For them, buying a house is a distant dream. This means that young people are not thinking about retirement. And it's better that way: if they thought about it, they would be afraid of how much they have to save in order to provide themselves with a decent life in their old age (above the bare social security), because the interest on savings will probably remain at the lowest level for a long time.
In short, today's young people see the world through the glasses of intergenerational injustice. Upper middle class children may end up doing well because they will inherit wealth from their parents. Even if they don't like that kind of dependency, they'd like even less the alternative: "starting from scratch," with little prospect of approaching what was once considered a basic middle-class lifestyle.
These inequalities are difficult to explain. It's not that young people don't work enough: even those who studied hard from morning to night, achieved great success in school and did everything "right" face difficulties. They are tormented by the feeling of social injustice (the feeling that the economic game is rigged), especially when they see that the bankers who caused the social crisis, the cause of constant economic discomfort, receive megabonuses and that almost none of them are held accountable for their misdeeds. A huge fraud was carried out, but in a magical way - as if no one had participated in it. Political elites promised that "reforms" would bring great prosperity. And they brought it, but only for the top 1% of people. For everyone else, including the young, they brought enormous uncertainty.
Those three facts - social injustice on an unprecedented scale, massive inequality and a loss of trust in elites - define our political moment, and for good reason.
More of the same is not the answer. That is why the parties of the center left and right are losing in Europe. America is in an unusual position: while the Republican presidential candidates compete in demagoguery, with ill-advised proposals that would further worsen the existing bad state, both Democratic candidates have proposals that - if passed through Congress - would bring about real change. If the reforms advocated by Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders were adopted, it would reduce the power of the financial system. And both candidates also propose deep reforms in the financing of higher education.
But more must be done to enable the purchase of houses or apartments for those whose parents cannot provide a down payment, as well as secure pensions, bearing in mind the unpredictability of the stock market and today's world of money with almost non-existent interest. Even more important is the fact that young people will not find work in a bad economy. The "official" unemployment rate in the US (4,9%) masks higher levels of hidden unemployment that, among other things, keep wages stagnant. We cannot solve a problem until we recognize it. Young people recognize him. It is clear to them that there is no intergenerational justice and they are rightly angry.
(Social Europe; Peščanik.net; translated by S MILETIĆ)
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