The Revolt of the Forgotten Young
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From voting Labour to supporting Bernie, millennials are moved by economic issues.
‘The Millennials Are Moving Left.” That’s the headline of an important article in the New Republic by John Judis, who observes the trend in many Western democracies—the U.S., the U.K., France, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain, among others.
This was certainly the story in the British elections last week, which were catastrophic for Theresa May’s Conservatives. Not only did Labour candidates win 63% of voters age 18 to 34, but turnout among this cohort rose more than 20 percentage points from the previous general election, two years ago.
These young voters, Mr. Judis contends, are primarily motivated by underlying economic trends. There is no shortage of evidence in favor of this hypothesis, which points to the fundamental problems of slow growth and increasingly unequal distribution that so many Western democracies now face.
In a speech last December, Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, said that the U.K. was mired in its “first lost decade since the 1860s.” Workers’ earnings after adjusting for inflation, he said, “have grown at the slowest rate since the mid-19th century.” A Bank of England analysis shows that in the mid-1980s the 10-year moving average of real annual wage growth reached nearly 4%. As recently as 2007, it stood at about 3%. Now it has plunged below zero, meaning workers lost purchasing power for most of the past decade.
This would be bad enough if the pain were shared throughout the population, but of course it isn’t. Real incomes for U.K. residents 60 and over grew 11% between 2007 and 2014, while those 30 and under suffered a 7% loss. Projections suggest these trends are unlikely to improve soon. There are good reasons why young British voters flocked to the Labour Party, whose manifesto promised free college tuition and increased social benefits.
In much of Europe, young people face even greater economic challenges, including unemployment rates far higher than for older workers—25% in France, 38% in Italy, nearly 45% in Spain, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In the U.S., the share of young Americans earning more than their parents did by age 30 has plunged from 9 in 10 for those born in the 1940s to barely half for those born in the 1980s. The young have been hit especially hard, moreover, by the workforce shift from long-term full-time employees to contractors and part-timers. As they reach their late 20s and early 30s and begin thinking about marriage and homeownership, the charms of frequent job changes and unpredictable schedules begin to pale.
Previous governments have tried and failed to reform France’s rigid labor laws, whose protections for incumbent workers have made employers reluctant to hire new ones. If Mr. Macron can push through changes, and if a revitalized French economy can generate jobs and opportunity for younger workers and entrepreneurs, he could turn out to be the avant-garde for a new generation of centrists who seek a sustainable balance between state and market, and between social security and economic dynamism. If he fails? Le déluge, and not only in France.
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