Bleak prospects: youth transitions in twenty-first century Britain

Abstract

This paper presents data on pay, housing and pension prospects which shows that an inter-generation decline in life chances that had begun by the 1980s is continuing in the 2020s. A difference is that in the 1980s the decline was confined to young people on working class life courses. In the 2020s it spread through the lower middle class into some management and professional occupations. We then ask why there is more acquiescence than resistance from youth in the 2020s. Part of the answer is that depressing life chances by cohort replacement is less likely to lead to organised resistance than straight-forward population-wide income reductions. It is argued that the drivers of inter-generation decline will not go away, and the only effective resistance will involve boosting economic growth which is currently restrained by domestic and global financial governance.