Over the summer we have been hosting nine separate recent graduates who are each working on discreet projects for us (more on all of this soon) and my daughter just got her Higher results. It means I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people setting out on their lives recently, and the picture it paints is fairly horrifying.
Youth is now brutal. Once you’ve been softened up by the marketing industry which has converted you from being a child into a ‘key brand demographic’, the Tech Lords take your battered remains and pick away at them while the schools pitch you into a kind of winner-takes-all Hunger Games of an exam system for getting into university.
If you fail the exam game you better be male and get a trade or you’re off to the retail-and-care mines for a life of in-work benefits. And if you leave university you will have your debt to console you because there is a good chance you’ll be overqualified for the smattering of low-level jobs available.
Oh, and before you get a chance to get an interview for a job you don’t want in a line of work you’re uninterested in, you need to be rejected by a hundred AIs first, there to automate your humiliation.
That’s what I hear. The most common (despairing) comment I’ve heard is ‘none of my friends are in jobs relevant to their degree and they all hate their work’, and I’m still hearing that from people in their early 30s too.
While the generations before went through this to some extent, the structure of the overall economy and the nature of the housing market means we had a decent shot at escaping all of it into a decent life in later adulthood without the help of parents. Is that true for a lot of people now?
This generation is not convinced, and neither am I. Some of the people I’ve been talking to envisage perpetual strings of low-engagement, low-interest, insecure jobs as their future, like itinerant undocumented workers in the US trying to piece a life together one job at a time.
I am not sure youth is a ‘temporary problem’ any more and I think that both mainstream politics and the left should stop assuming that if we ‘get them through their youth’ it will all sort itself out, because the stats on age of first home ownership do not suggest that is exactly what is happening.
We have eroded the meaning of childhood and youth so much that thinking of them as a discreet group fells less and less helpful. More and more I think we need to see them either as what a mathematician calls an ‘extremum’ (the extreme outcome of any given situation) or as what a prophet would call an ‘omen’ (a warning about future events).
Have a look at how we talk about something like the introduction of AI. We see this as coming mostly from a structural point of view – how will AI restructure the labour market? We don’t see it from a longitudinal human perspective – what does that even mean, no entry level jobs? If there is no entry level, how is there a second stage? How does it work?
What does a life look like for a young person emerging into a world distorted by AI and eviscerated by offshored equity capitalism?
Stop seeing this as a series of time slices; what does it look like as a career, as a life? What does a life look like for a young person emerging into a world distorted by AI and eviscerated by offshored equity capitalism? Is anyone asking this? As far as I can tell we’re so busy in a destructive mad-cap race to gain tiny advantages now on issues like AI that we are completely ignoring even the near future.
The heartbreaking conversations I am having with young people have me rethinking policies I have developed, not always to change them but more just to see what they look like as the foundations of a life. It emphasises some things for me. Above all, the market as it stands wants to make the problem worse and it is not clear you can bridge from here to a market which works for people without some really radical changes in how we think about these things.
So this is my radical approach – think about a whole life process when developing policy for the young (or for anything else). Repeatedly ask the question ‘and then what?’ at each policy stage, mapping out a path through to a successful adult life.
How do we get people in the right post-school education? And then how do we get them onto a career path which reflects their hopes, meets their needs and provides the possibility of advancement? And then how do we get them into a positive housing situation? And then, how do we enable them to live a high-quality life?
It is incredibly unfashionable in politics to think about someone’s life. We’ve marketised our brains and we think in terms of choice, not life. Politics thinks someone’s life is only made up of two components – the options for consumption open to them and a wage that lets you access those choices. And as if that wasn’t reductive enough, we do not think either is the business of politicians.
So let me instead imagine a world which had a Department for Quality of Life which instead was dedicated to defining what a decent quality of life involves and what its component parts are, ensuring a real, affordable diversity of opportunity, and doing whatever it takes to help people into a position where they can take these opportunities. For real.
It would start at school and provide much better career advice, based on careers that exist. To do that we need to achieve something that I have heard politicians rattle on about continually all my adult life – achieving parity of esteem for vocation and academic education (which never ends up amounting to more than some leaflets).
Here is my radical suggestion – let’s boost the status of colleges for real. I would in any case like to see much more of the very lower level stuff colleges do (like basic competency skills) going into community education. And then I think I would take the business schools, marketing departments, HR degrees, accountancy and much of the narrowly work-focussed subjects you find in universities and move them to colleges.
Universities would be about engaging with bodies of knowledge that have been developed by humans over hundreds and hundreds of years, creating critical thinking and research skills. Colleges would be about skills and application-specific knowledge. And it would look like we mean it because all the prestigious business schools would be there.
Let colleges confer degrees in vocational subjects and behave much more like universities in their high-end courses, and let’s really try and break down the poor-people-learn-skills, rich-people-learn-to-think model we currently have.
Young people now are an omen of a world to come, a world dehumanised and created for the profit of equity capitalism, answerable to the AI systems of the rich, disinterested in the lives of people
But then what? How do people get into a career that they want, one with stairs that go upwards? Even more importantly, how do we create work with meaning and value? That is the single biggest reason people hate their employment – when they see it as without value.
Is it really that radical to ask young people what they’d actually like to do and see what we can to with public policy to increase supply of those kinds of jobs? There is one graduate I’ve spoken to recently who is happy at work and he works in a craft bakers. I suspect a lot of people would like to work in some kind of skills-focussed food economy.
Is it really too much to try and make much-needed reforms of our food system and do it in a way that creates a lot more of these jobs? I mean, the answer is definitely no. So if we can create a few thousand jobs like this across Scotland, would it not be worth it?
Alternatively, how do we get rid of really low value work so it doesn’t become a back stop? I am far from a luddite and am greatly in favour of automation of routine tasks. At the moment there is no point in investing in automation when you can hire desperate hungry people, but that is what we’re trying to get away from. How do we make automation about increasing job quality, not profits? Not without intervention.
And how do we take the big challenges ahead of us and convert them into careers? For example we need to get onwith house retrofit – how does that skill people up for a modern construction industry? Once we’ve completed retrofitting, how do those turn into prolonged careers? How do we structure it?
How do we make things again? People see building things or working on land-based industries or manufacturing to be interesting and of value. How do we create these jobs? Regulating AI is not the same as rebuilding a meaningful economy with real career structures.
Are we going to be stuck with dismal government like the current one on the housing situation forever? It is utterly hooked to making developers rich using public policy and public money and it clearly couldn’t care less about young people because they know that what they’re doing won’t work.
So how does a Department of Quality of Life prepare a life journey through the housing sector that is fit for this century? If you rent high-quality affordable homes when you’re younger, how do you prepare to own a house when you settle and have kids?
It’s not just material things. The nightlife that used to underpin youth is dying away and young people are becoming more isolated in their own homes. How do we reverse that? How do we create a society filled with things young people want to do? Can we not ask that question without being accused of communism?
And what about the long term? Kids now have no idea how they’re survive their retirement. They ought to be preparing now, but can they? Do we worry about that crisis ‘later’, or do we plan our way out of it now?
Young people now are an omen of a world to come, a world dehumanised and created for the profit of equity capitalism, answerable to the AI systems of the rich, disinterested in the lives of people. They are scavengers in a system that is cannibalising them for profit.. They are an extreme example of what is happening to all of us.
Let’s stop pretending this is going to ‘clear itself up’ and do something about it. This is not a temporary crisis. A decent life should be achievable – and it shouldn’t be a matter of chance, good luck or who your parents are. Bring on a Department for Quality of Life and let’s start making some value judgements about our society again.