Young people are beginning to realise something that previous generations rarely had to face: the economic system no longer works for them.
In this video, I begin with an unexpected political message from the United States. A Democratic Senate candidate from Maine, Troy Jackson, summed up today's politics in a single sentence:
“We are from the bottom, and we are rising.”
That phrase opens up a much bigger discussion.
To do so, I look at why millions of graduates in India cannot find work, why corruption has intensified young people's anger there, why young people in Britain increasingly question whether university is worthwhile, and why apprenticeships and decent jobs have become so difficult to obtain.
More importantly, I ask why this has happened.
Is this simply bad luck, or have governments and central banks deliberately created an economy that keeps unemployment high, house prices out of reach, and opportunities increasingly scarce?
This, though, is also a discussion about two very different ways of thinking.
Top-down thinking begins with ideology and forces reality to fit it.
Bottom-up thinking begins with people's lives and asks what actually needs to change.
If we continue denying younger generations hope, they will eventually demand change.
The real question is whether today's political and economic institutions are prepared for the moment when their top-down thinking fails, and the bottom-up thinkers amongst our young people overthrow them?
This is the audio version (it will not embed this morning, but the link will work)
The Debate Ammunition for this video is available here.
This is the transcript:
Sometimes I read a line in a news report, and it just triggers a series of ideas. I happen to have done that with regard to a report which I read in The New York Times. It's about a guy called Troy Jackson. He's just been chosen by the Democrats in Maine, in the USA, to stand as their candidate for the Senate in the USA as a whole.
He has previously been a local candidate for Senate in the Maine Senate, but now he's running in the country at large, and he said something really interesting. He said, “We are from the bottom, and we are rising.” I liked that idea.
Troy Jackson is a lumberjack, a pretty ordinary guy in his own words. He's not an academic. He's never been a professional politician. He's only done local politics, and that is not a full-time job in the USA. He is, however, running to be a senator because he's from the bottom and it's rising.
And that to me is a fundamentally important idea. It's an idea whose time has come. It's an idea that does have an expression in philosophy, by the way. There are two types of approach to thinking. One is bottom-up thinking, and one is top-down thinking. Top-down thinking decides a set of rules and tries to fit the world to them. We know how that works. Neoliberalism and our economic system do that.
It assumes that markets are good. It assumes that governments are bad. It assumes optimal outcomes come by giving people maximum control over their money. It decides as a consequence that tax is a bad thing. You know all the rest of this stuff. And that is top-down thinking. The assumptions are made, and the facts are forced to fit them.
The alternative is something called bottom-up thinking. In bottom-up thinking, you look at the world, you look at the facts, and you try to explain them. You explore the possibilities, and you are solution-focused. You're trying to find an answer to the question: what is going on here?
Top-down thinking says, we know what we want and we'll impose it.
Bottom-up thinking says, we are in a mess. How do we get out of it?
Troy Jackson said something which implies that he's a bottom-up thinker. We are from the bottom, and we are rising. He's thinking differently, and I like that. And that's essential in this world at the moment because, in the same report that I read in The New York Times where he was talking about this issue, they were also talking about the problem of young people in India.
Young people in India are very angry people at present. Earlier this year, a judge in India, the senior judge, as I understand it in India, described young unemployed graduates in that country as cockroaches. They didn't like being called that. Unbelievably, up to 40% of all graduates under the age of 25 in India are unemployed. They're creating vast numbers of graduates. There are no jobs for them.
If you think we have a problem with youth unemployment and graduate unemployment in the UK, you should look at India if you want to understand the scale of this issue, and this is in a country where about half the population is aged under 30. It's a young country. They have a massive youth unemployment problem, and those young people are angry.
And they're also angry because of corruption. Corruption in the exam system is what has got their goat. Earlier this year, there was to be an exam for entry into medical school. Around 2.2 million young Indians registered for those exams. There were 140,000 places available, and on the day of the exams they were cancelled because it became clear that the questions had been leaked to some of the candidates.
Obviously, it was right to withdraw the paper on that day because there would've been an unfair outcome. Those who were going to be marking didn't know who got the questions in advance. There had to be a level playing field. But that corruption has, in itself, triggered the anxiety about this whole exam process; the fact that young people in India are being forced to pass through so many hoops to get a job.
There were 35,000 jobs available on Indian railways this year. More than a million people applied. I think it might have been many more than a million. The point is, again, the desperation to get work in India is real. Young people are angry. The bottom is rising. They need answers.
They've now forced out Modi's Education Minister. That was one of their key demands. They didn't trust the man. They wanted something different. Modi has appointed a new education minister, a tech billionaire. Does he understand the position of those young people? No, he doesn't. He doesn't understand about the bottom because he's the top. He'll try and impose his solutions on a world where different answers are required.
And that's of course true in the UK as well. We have a problem of youth unemployment in the UK. We have a problem of graduates who can't find jobs in the UK. I was talking to a young person this week, an 18-year-old. She's waiting for her A-level results. I previously talked to her about the possibility of going to university and offered some advice, because I know a bit about this subject, unsurprisingly. I am, after all, a retired university professor amongst the many other things I've done.
And this week I asked her, what were her plans? And she said, “I've given up the idea of going. I can't see the benefit. I can't see it will improve my chances of getting a job.” I said, “What are you looking for?” “I'm looking for an apprenticeship,” she said. “How are you going?” “Every single application I've made has received no response as yet,” she said, “and I've applied to everybody I can think of, and every post I can see.”
Now, she's a bright young person. She appears to me to have the world at her feet, but not according to potential employers. This is the problem we've got. We have young people in the UK where young people are in short supply, and we need them to be in jobs to build the prosperity that people like me are going to require in only a few years' time when I can't work. And we have India facing the same problem with a surplus of young people; those who could be supplying the world in years to come.
In both countries, the young are being treated abysmally, and the answer is going to come from Troy Jackson. “We are from the bottom,” he said, “and we are rising.”
Those young people are going to rise. They're not going to accept this outcome for much longer. They're not going to be told they have to stay in place. They're not going to accept being told that they're cockroaches living off the system. They're not going to accept Andy Burnham telling them, “You can have your benefits, but only if you go litter picking.” This is not acceptable. These are bright, intelligent young people who want the chances that I had when I was their age.
In the 1970s, it never occurred to me or anyone else who was at university, or those who I was at school with who did not go to university, let me say, and I remained friends with many of them for many years after I left school; none of us thought we wouldn't get jobs. Every single person did.
And we got jobs that were good, jobs that we wanted because they were available, because we had an economy that could supply them. And it didn't occur to us that we might end up without a home of our own because we presumed we would, because homes were within reach. And now they aren't. And so the bottom will be rising. That is still the point.
We have built a world where the top is crushing the bottom, and that is unsustainable. Tops that try to crush the bottom ultimately shatter their foundations. They fall apart. That is going to happen. I have no doubt at all that's the risk that we are facing. We have to get on with securing the foundations of our society, or it will fall apart. And the foundations of our society are the young people who are being denied hope at present.
How do we give them hope? We give them hope by providing them with jobs. We do that by changing our thinking about the economy. Andy Burnham keeps on talking about opportunities for young people whilst the Bank of England is deliberately holding interest rates high with the intention of creating unemployment.
We do not have unemployment by chance in the UK; we have it deliberately.
There is no chance that unemployment in India is accidental. It is deliberate. They too follow monetary policies.
There is no chance that we have a situation where house prices are too high because that has been allowed by institutional oversight, if you like, because we have allowed lending against housing costs that has become extortionate and pushed the price of a property beyond the reach of a person on an average salary, which is the best that most young people can aspire to. They have no chance of buying unless they get parental support. This is unsustainable. The bottom will rise.
In that case, we have to provide jobs for people.
We have to provide a chance for people.
We have to stop denying who young people are.
Young people now realise they're diverse.
They now realise they have potential that is not recognised within systems.
They realise, with the education that they've got, that there are questions unanswered and top-down thinking will not let them explore the possibilities that exist in this world.
They realise that accumulated wealth is denying them the chance to become wealth-owners.
They realise they're being excluded.
They realise they're at the bottom. That bottom is going to rise.
We have a choice, therefore. We can either decide to maintain the current institutions of power and the current forms of thinking like those used by the Bank of England, which oppress young people by choice, or we can change our thinking. We can decide that we make young people our priority, because unless we give them a chance, the rest of us have no hope at all, because we're always dependent upon young people at the end of the day.
We have to make that choice. We have to change, and we have to design a world that young people can live in. So we have to embrace that reality. The bottom is rising. Let's get on and accept that fact.
That's my opinion. What's yours? Let us know. Share this video, and if you like what I've had to say, well buy us a coffee. Tom and I need coffee. That will be a great way to support this channel
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[…] The video that this Debate Ammunition supports is available here. […]
Might ruling caste selfish oppression of the young be yet another example of prioristising “Now-Money” instead of longer term national sustainable wealth?
Might any economic theory which ignores or distorts an equitable distribution of wealth be inherently deficient?
Might Mr Blair’s policies of high univiversity use and student loan debts have been based on ignorance, creating a greater debt burdened and so more submissive section of society or what?
It worked very well for Euan!
https://www.tatler.com/article/who-is-euan-blair-tony-blair-son-education
although maybe less well for his staff.
https://feweek.co.uk/ofsted-warns-multiverse-needs-attention-after-starts-stop-on-weakest-apprenticeships/
Richard, thank you for drawing Troy Jackson’s comment to a wider audience. This could be the start of something significant. If nothing else, it could become a battle cry for the young, the marginalised and the downtrodden. As you will know from some of my previous comments, I have long held the view that successive neoliberal governments have deliberately saddled the young with student debt, job insecurity and little to no chance of ever owning a home. There may be a number of reasons for this. For example, when you are in a precarious lifestyle would you be prepared to risk it all by strikes or protests? Ultimately it’s all about keeping the population under authoritarian control to ensure th of the continuance of the neoliberal order. The situation in India is troubling and I read somewhere recently that there is also a glut of graduates in Chine. In short, it seems we may be approaching the end of days for neoliberalism. However, those vested interests who have promoted it may be facing a backlash. The suppressed national security report on the dangers of climate change, the wildfires across the globe, the food shortages arising from prolonged droughts are all occurring at the same time as the neoliberal elites tell us we must pay more tax and suffer more public service cuts in order to buy more weapons from the arms industry to fund a war that they are raging amongst themselves. Are they really that stupid to think that the people cannot see what is going on? Do they really believe that we cannot recognise a corrupt political system when we see it? And do they think we will put up with the status quo indefinitely?
Thank you and a great deal to agree with.
The status quo will end, whether they like it or not, I suspect.
I’d like to draw attention to demographics.
We are told that there is a terrible problem because we have an aging population and there won’t be enough young people to do the work.
How is this compatible with massive youth unemployment?
Those at the top are invested in things staying as they are. Change only ever comes from the bottom up.
We need nothing less than a new global order, with its foundations deeply embedded in:
Stewardship. Organisations are rewarded for leaving assets – human, natural, social and financial – in better condition than they found them.
Long-term value. Success is measured over decades, not merely quarterly or annual performance.
Shared outcomes. Government, businesses, communities and landowners are rewarded for achieving common societal objectives rather than individual targets.
Resilience. Taxation, regulation and finance encourage investments that reduce future risks, even if they produce modest short-term returns.
From Bill Blain’s “Morning Porridge” today.
“Town centres are full of derelict shops and are no longer destinations. But most jobs remain in towns. A major problem for the economy is housing: young people lack access to affordable, secure accommodation, so they stay at home, don’t work and, critically, don’t start forming families. They have little confidence in the future. The results are an acceleration of the demographic crisis, increased welfare costs, and a lost generation.
If the government were to deliver on building literally millions of secure, safe, affordable social or for sale flats in the inner cities, the results could be stupendous – local economies (as we see in parts of London) of local shops, café culture, gastropubs then new life would emerge swiftly, leading to young families and a new economy. Humanity is just another form of life – chuck a rock in the ocean and within a year it will be festooned in plans and animals competing to live on it. Build flats in inner cities and in a year the streets will be vibrant with competition to offer the best breakfast.”
I agree with this, Richard, as we now have all three kids (30/28/23) back home stuck in a kind of limbo. Surely it isn’t beyond the wit of man to rapidly construct quality eco-prefabs or modular housing? When I was 5, my parents qualified for a brand-new council house in Devon – it was a good home.
And then cancel the student debt!
What I am picking up from this generation is a growing animosity towards people who have what they might not be able to ever get. That includes parents themselves.
I posted in more depth on your resources post on this issue. But what we are seeing in my opinion anyway is the real disconnect between Neo-liberalism and the real world. We always wondered what would happen when the power relationship between capital and labour was changed in favour of capital. We wondered how people would live if work was poorly paid to increase profits; if work went elsewhere or simply dried up. And then we wondered how capitalism itself would survive if no one could spend or provide the labour.
Well now we know. And it is our children who will be the big experiment. Were we consulted?
Capitalism will survive by creating debt – making money out of money (student debt etc).
People displaced by AI will be the source of that debt that can never be paid down (see Dr. Michael Hudson).
Spending sovereign money will be replaced by crypt o currency – self made AI money – capital will create its own money and not use that provided/legalised by the state. They will not need the money society uses. The balance of power here is critical and is ominous.
Thus we enter the era of what Satyajit Das called ‘extreme money’. And that is what we are dealing with – financial extremism – which is just as bad as anything the Left, Right, Islamic or Zionist has to offer. Capitalism will survive by consuming everything and providing for itself the means to continue. The state, its citizens are not required. Only our silence is needed.
I am not sure the young are willing to be quiet