Abstract
The Precarious Generation: A Political Economy of Young People is a welcome addition to the Youth Studies literature, a rare example of an analysis of political-economy in a field dominated, in my opinion, by work that primarily draws on cultural studies and identity politics, scholarship that generally favours the ‘micro over the macro’. The book is a self-proclaimed ‘political economy of generations’ examining how political relations shape the distribution of valued social resources between generations, including cohorts referred to as ‘baby boomers’, ‘generation X’ and ‘millennials’. The analysis is carried out in relation to the UK, USA, Spain, France and Australia, countries described as wealthy and increasingly unequal by the authors, a state of affairs with specific implications for youth. Bessant, Farthing and Watts meticulously document how intergenerational inequality is rising in these nations, with those who are currently under 35 being the first group to be less well off than the generation before them in terms of wages/income, employment rates and home ownership. While the economic situation has not become less prosperous for all citizens of these nations, it certainly has for the current group of youth, particularly when their circumstances are compared to those of their parents. The concept of a generation, defined as a group with a common zeitgeist or experience of historical events, is therefore used to show that those currently under 35 years of age are systematically disadvantaged in relation to the generation before them.
With this in mind, the authors propose that youth can be seen as a ‘class’—in relational rather than substantial terms—differentiating their notion of class from other interpretations of this concept, which they claim are problematically associated with attributing false consciousness and a lack of agency to marginalized groups. Their relational notion of class draws on Bourdieu’s focus on practices and processes, showing how generations engage in these to compete for a range of capitals in a particular field. Classes therefore emerge relationally through contestations over cultural, social and financial capital, rather than through sets of traits or characteristics exhibited by a group.
The current crop of youth were constituted as a class through three structural processes, namely the rise of neoliberalism, digital technology and globalization, leading to decreased independence, reduced pay-offs from education, increased inequality, new digitally informed sensibilities and political contradictions. In the book, political and economic changes since the 1970s are substantially blamed on a highly organized network of neoliberal ideologues that dismantled the welfare state and dismissed Keynesian economic principles. This facilitated the transition from the liberal welfare state (Esping-Andersen, 1990), in places such as the USA, Britain and Australia, to neoliberal policies and practices. While official neoliberal ideology claimed that the state needed to refrain from intervention, as it was believed that the market would naturally self-correct towards equilibrium and fair conditions, the state continued and continues to play a decisive role in economic relations during neoliberal times.
The authors describe how, in these turbulent political and economic conditions, youth were told that buttressing their human capital through ‘more education’, increasingly at their own expense, would secure a standard of living comparable to that enjoyed by their parents. This promise of ‘go to school and you will get a good job’ has increasingly been broken, as the belief that a greater supply of skilled labour would create its own demand for employment has not led to more jobs. To demonstrate this, the fact that 42 per cent of 25–34-year olds in OECD countries had some tertiary education in 2015 has not increased employment rates or the bargaining power of youth. The impending rise of machine-operated work, robotics, digital technology and other components of the so-called ‘fourth industrial revolution’, will only exacerbate the current situation, with the absence of jobs, rather than a lack of skills or knowledge, becoming further apparent. This situation has led to repressive forms of securitization often focused on youth, linked to pernicious defences of private property, attitudes that function to deepen current inequalities.
After laying out the broader contextual conditions for youth in the five countries that form the focus of the book, the authors share qualitative research with youth themselves. The research illuminates some paradoxes related to a group simultaneously exhibiting false-consciousness, through inflated beliefs of their own power to make choices, coexisting with awareness of structural limitations, age-specific benefits and rising inequality. While the formal realm of politics has increasingly excluded contemporary youth, Bessant, Farthing and Watts show that this group is far from apolitical, using a range of practices that incorporate new media, technological innovation and street protests to produce legitimate and creative forms of political action.
In the final two chapters, the authors use various philosophical perspectives, including those of Sen, Arendt and Nussbaum, to suggest how intergenerational justice might be achieved through the creation of a new public sphere that enables participation in political processes, nurtures a plurality of views and develops people’s capabilities.
The Precarious Generation is a bold piece of work that draws on an incredibly wide ambit of theoretical perspectives, from Marx to Bourdieu to Nussbaum, transcending academic disciplines to grapple with the problem of intergenerational inequality in a handful of wealthy countries. On their own terms, the authors admirably achieve what they set out to do. However, from my place on the global periphery, I cannot but hope that the sentiment which drives the book—looking relationally at groups—to grapple with what is fair in terms of material and social resources is done geographically as well as generationally, on a global level. We have arrived collectively at what these authors call a ‘tipping point’, with modernity reaching all parts of the globe, traditional forms of life thoroughly disrupted and youth everywhere wanting paradoxical combinations of iPhones, social media, ‘authentic’ cultural identities as well as jobs. Yet, inequalities that are both material and social remain rampant across various comparative axes, including but not limited to age. In addressing these intersecting inequalities, we can certainly learn from Bessant, Farthing and Watts. As the authors say, it is not to notions of ‘the good life’ to which we should look for answers, but to understandings of ‘the just life’. A comparative and relational approach to living a just life, one that incorporates material, social and political needs—and focuses on youth—urgently needs to be conducted beyond the five countries chosen by these authors. But that is a task for a different book.