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Routledge Advances in Sociology
The Precarious Generation: A Political Economy of Young People
This book draws on a wealth of evidence including young people’s own stories, to document how they are now faring in increasingly unequal societies like America, Britain, Australia, France and Spain. It points to systematic generational inequality as those born since 1980 become the first generation to have a lower standard of living than previous generations. While governments and experts typically explain this by referring to globalization, new technologies, or young people’s deficits, the authors of this book offer a new political economy of generations, which identifies the central role played by governments promoting neoliberal policies that exacerbate existing social inequalities based on age, ethnicity, gender and class. The book is a must read for social science students, human service workers and policy-makers and indeed for anyone interested in understanding the impact of government policy over the last 40 years on young people.
238 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 8, 2017
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March 8, 2019
This is an interesting book, but sort of odd at the same time. It is odd because it takes an awfully long time to get started. In part this is because it has a lot of back story it needs to provide before it can properly focus on what I guess is the main point of the book – that is, how young people form a ‘generation’ and why they have a right to feel done-over by a system that appears to be advantaging other generations and disadvantaging them.
Before the book can make this claim it needs to explain what neoliberalism is, and since it is looking at a range of countries, it also needs to compare this with what it calls a new form of conservative corporatism. To explain all of this it needs to present the move from Keynesianism – and the welfare state – towards the more radical, free market ideas that hold sway today – and therefore policies referred to as ‘workfare’.
But then, on top of all that they also use ideas from Bourdieu and Mannheim regarding cultural and social capital, habitus, fields and how these might be create a kind of political economy of generations.
And, because they are looking at a wide range of countries – they often need to then retell this story in the context of these countries’ recent histories – both political and economic. I found a lot of this very interesting, but I can also see that people might quickly think this was all becoming ‘too much information’.
To me, this book became particularly interesting once it began really explaining its understanding of neoliberalism and sought to undermine some of the common-sense assumptions we generally have about the transition between Keynesian and Neoliberal economic policies. One of those that I would also admit to having held was that spending on ‘social services’ would have decreased since neoliberalism has held sway. However, they show that the opposite is often the case. For instance, that in Australia the proportion of the workforce receiving income support grow from 4% in 1966 to 27% in 2014. They show that similar things have happened in the US and in the UK – three of the main countries with particularly free-market policies. As they say of the UK: ‘Thatcher presided over a net increase in the number of welfare recipients by around 60 per cent during her first term in office, while applicants for unemployment benefits rose approximately 200 per cent between 1980–1987’ (page 67).
What has changed is the punitive nature of governments and therefore the sheer nastiness of the requirements placed on people in receipt of welfare. That is, what was once an entitlement has now become both a mark of shame and something that requires so many hurdles to be jumped that it has created its own industry to manage the various punishments.
They also tackle another common-sense idea at the heart of neoliberal policies – that an increase in one’s ‘human capital’ (through more education, for instance), means better economic outcomes. This is increasingly being proven nonsense, a good book to read on this is The Global Auction, a book I can’t recommend too highly. In response to this they not only quote the problem that the jobs requiring a tertiary education simply have not increased at the same rate as those holding tertiary qualifications have increased – thus depressing the value of these jobs. But they also discuss the problem of student debt and the horrifying increase of this debt at a time when the ‘return’ that one can expect from a tertiary education is declining.
The chapter on crime was one of the best in the book. I particularly liked the idea that the crime rate is directly related to what you define as crimes and that one of the things many countries have done is to increase the number of crimes on the books – and so, more crimes means more criminals. The racial implications of this are also discussed at length here and in relation to multiple countries. The comparison between the cost of putting a young person in jail and in giving them a university education ought to shame us all.
They also question whether young people are as politically disengaged as they are often portrayed to be. This is very interesting, not least since they pit themselves against some of the big names of social theory – Bauman for one. The argument here is again based on Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital. That is, since young people do not have the cultural capital to fully engage in the political mechanisms that currently exist, they often avoid these and therefore look disengaged. However, other forms of protest and political engagement are more open to young people, and so they make much more use of these. But because these are not the traditional forms of power, they are devalued or even defined as not really existing. This was particularly interesting in the discussion of the 2011 London riots and how so many sociologists came out to say these were not political.
A problem I had with this book was the claim they made at one point that notions of ‘false consciousness’ have been mostly rejected by modern theory as being too simplistic – and to claim this on the basis of Bourdieu’s theories and ideas. The reason why I think this is an odd thing to claim is that Bourdieu himself said that you could see all of his sociology as a response to how to understand ‘symbolic violence’ – which basically means why people end up supporting a system that disadvantages them. And one of the main ways he says this happens is via ‘misrecognition’ – which I’ve always taken to be his French way of saying ‘false consciousness’.
Some quotes
we demonstrate how young people in Europe, UK, USA and Australia now bear a disproportionate and increasing burden of poverty and disadvantage. 4
Standing describes the ‘precariat’ as a new social class formed by people experiencing precarious employment that shapes lives without predictability or security and that affects people’s welfare and their sense of wellbeing. 4
In May 2015, Martin Parkinson, one of the most powerful bureaucrats in Australia, gave a graduation speech to young graduates in which he said ‘your generation is at risk of being the first in modern history whose living standards will be lower than those of their parents’ 11
These already high levels of inequality appear to be broadly on the rise in the OECD; the OECD average Gini was 0.29 in the mid 1980s, rising to 0.316 in the mid 2000s 15
The question that matters, Threadgold adds, is not whether class is dead but whether class consciousness (or class identity) is dead 39
a large body of research on the notion of ‘adult’ shows, the markers of adulthood (e.g. full-time work, independent living and long-term relationships) are being deferred well beyond the age of 25, which is the age when most the ‘legal’ markers of adulthood are met, and are increasingly difficult to achieve at all 39
Their critique is that the notion of ‘false consciousness’ represents ‘millions of people as unthinking, mindless dupes’ and it’s an idea with little analytical or empirical value 39
three global events have defined a zeitgeist for people born after the early 1980s. The first, which is the primary focus of this book, is the rise and spread of a neoliberal worldview that powerfully shaped the policy-making processes of many governments and the popular culture of many societies. The second is the advent of digital technology, which had and continues to have global ramifications. Finally, there is a political-economic process of globalization, promoting processes of complex socioeconomic and cultural change across the globe. 51
Generations include groups who differ from each other and who disagree but who, despite these differences, are oriented toward each other because of shared experiences. 51
‘Liberal welfare states’
‘Liberal welfare state’ regimes refer to those governments that historically have made the smallest move towards a rights-based regime of welfare provision. The liberal welfare state is exemplified by the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, as well as New Zealand and Canada.
Conservative welfare states
The second kind of regime Esping-Andersen identifies is the ‘conservative welfare state’ regime. Typical examples of this type include Germany, France, Spain and Austria. Conservative welfare state regimes have moved towards a universal welfare system, typically through some kind of universal social insurance model. 56
What few observers understood at the time was that the ‘crisis’ that the Keynesian policy paradigm was experiencing was also a consequence of a long-term political and intellectual campaign by those economists who had steadfastly opposed the Keynesian policy paradigm since the 1940s. 62
Neoliberals, like neoclassical economists, claim markets possess an inherent self-equilibrating or balancing capacity that is upset by ‘outside interference’ 62
(In Australia) The ‘neoliberal attack’ has not reduced the numbers of people receiving income support. The proportion of workforce-age people receiving social security payments grew from 4 per cent in 1966 to 27 per cent in 2014. 64
What neoliberal governments have done is introduce a new level of punitive, even stigmatising conditionality as a feature of its ‘workfare’ reforms. 64
The conventional justification offered for this is that the system is designed to help unemployed people find jobs. This is nonsense. On a simple measure in August 2016 the ABS reported that there were 721,000 unemployed people and a total of 175,300 job vacancies: that is, there were approximately four times more unemployed people than jobs available. 64
When the neoliberal turn came to America in the early 1980s, many thought the welfare state would shrink (Jencks 1992; Grogger and Karoly 2005). However, as in Australia, the system expanded. 65
The poorest single-parent families – 80 per cent of whom are headed by single mothers – received 35 per cent less in income support than they did three decades ago. By 2012, four million women and children were jobless and without cash aid 66
it was clear that Blair was dealing with the problem of unemployment by treating it as a problem of the unemployed. 67
Because people born since 1980 have known only this neoliberal paradigm, many may find it difficult to imagine how things might have been different, a theme that we consider in following chapters. 71
neoclassical economists and neoliberal policy-makers have successfully persuaded many people that public and private debt are the same things. 75
A ‘nation’ is not a ‘household’, whatever the metaphor implies. For one thing, a nation is many times larger than any household and, as we mentioned, it can print its own money 77
one of the consistently reliable things about economic predictions is that they have repeatedly failed to predict / major structural disasters like the Great Depression or the recent 2008 financial crisis. 78-79
For the second half of the twentieth century, many people and governments invested faith, hope and money in the idea that more education assured a prosperous future. 89
By 2000, 51 million 25–34 year olds in OECD countries had a university degree. Ten years later there were 66 million. In 2015, more than 42 per cent of 25–34 year olds in OECD countries had some form of tertiary education 89
The Chicago School is well known for developing and elaborating three key neoclassical economic claims. First, that the social world consists of individuals who are selfish, rational people (‘rational economic man’) calculating what will benefit them for the least effort (‘efficiency’). Second, every aspect of human life is ‘economic’. Finally, from the endless exercise of selfish individual happiness-maximising activity we create economic growth and affluence for all 91
They say that because all rational individuals (homo economicus) are purposeful, work-shy, self-interested and utility-maximizing, they will – when making decisions – aim to get as much as they can for as little effort as possible. 91
In Australia, total student debt is forecast to reach AU$70 billion by 2017 and $185.2 billion by 2025–2026 98
Nothing now raises more questions about the credibility of human capital theory than the growing joblessness rates among highly educated young people. 103
after two decades of sustained investment in their ‘human capital’, young people may be more educated, but remain equally unemployed and earn comparatively less than did earlier generations at a comparable point in history. 103
This will mean unskilled jobs will become de facto ‘qualified’ jobs, because those without qualifications are unlikely to get them. Finally, unskilled jobs will continue to pay less and this will decrease the return on the investment in education that individual young people have now paid. 104
the promise inherent in human capital theory is now broken. 107
The punitive turn refers to a style of policy-making that re-emerged in the 1980s 109
Congress, for example, created around 500 new crimes a decade between 1980–2007 110
Britain embraced an even more exuberant approach to criminalization. From 1988–1997, the Thatcher and Major governments legislated to create around 500 new crimes. And from 1997 on, Blair’s government created an astonishing 3,023 new criminal offences before 2006 110
13 per cent of the American population is African- American, they comprise over one-third of the total incarcerated population. 111
27 per cent – identified as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, despite making up around 3 per cent of the population at last estimate 114
The fact that incarceration rates for indigenous children are 24 times higher than for non-indigenous children across Australia, and 52 times higher in Western Australia, shockingly does not attract much attention domestically. 114
It is sobering, then, to find a criminologist like Fattah arguing that ‘there is no universal or agreed upon definition [of crime] ... It means different things to different people ... all attempts to define it are doomed’ 115
Michael and Adler suggested that ‘the most precise and least ambiguous definition of crime is that which is prohibited by the criminal code’ 116
All the neoliberal countries have higher rates of imprisonment than all the conservative countries, which in turn are higher than the Nordic social democracies. 120
The average yearly cost of incarceration per inmate hovers around US$31,200, more than three times the average annual cost of tuition at a good university 122
The Cameron government never made clear how military training or playing chess would assist low-income young people to escape poverty, rather relying on ‘common sense’ to imply that building character through these activities would naturally convert to poverty reduction. 137
Many conventional political scientists and other experts refuse to acknowledge actions like the campaigns by Anonymous against Scientology as political expressions. Nor, for example, do they acknowledge that the UK riots of 2011 were political. 146
Big-hitting sociologists like Bauman (2011) pronounced they were riots of ‘defective and disqualified consumers’, and Zizek (2011) declared it was a case of violent consumerism, with the rioters declaring: ‘you call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving us of the means to do it properly – so here we are doing it the only way we can’ 153
In the three months to the end of June 2011, there were 6,894 police stop and searches in the one local borough of Haringey, with only 87 of these resulting in an arrest 155
Before the book can make this claim it needs to explain what neoliberalism is, and since it is looking at a range of countries, it also needs to compare this with what it calls a new form of conservative corporatism. To explain all of this it needs to present the move from Keynesianism – and the welfare state – towards the more radical, free market ideas that hold sway today – and therefore policies referred to as ‘workfare’.
But then, on top of all that they also use ideas from Bourdieu and Mannheim regarding cultural and social capital, habitus, fields and how these might be create a kind of political economy of generations.
And, because they are looking at a wide range of countries – they often need to then retell this story in the context of these countries’ recent histories – both political and economic. I found a lot of this very interesting, but I can also see that people might quickly think this was all becoming ‘too much information’.
To me, this book became particularly interesting once it began really explaining its understanding of neoliberalism and sought to undermine some of the common-sense assumptions we generally have about the transition between Keynesian and Neoliberal economic policies. One of those that I would also admit to having held was that spending on ‘social services’ would have decreased since neoliberalism has held sway. However, they show that the opposite is often the case. For instance, that in Australia the proportion of the workforce receiving income support grow from 4% in 1966 to 27% in 2014. They show that similar things have happened in the US and in the UK – three of the main countries with particularly free-market policies. As they say of the UK: ‘Thatcher presided over a net increase in the number of welfare recipients by around 60 per cent during her first term in office, while applicants for unemployment benefits rose approximately 200 per cent between 1980–1987’ (page 67).
What has changed is the punitive nature of governments and therefore the sheer nastiness of the requirements placed on people in receipt of welfare. That is, what was once an entitlement has now become both a mark of shame and something that requires so many hurdles to be jumped that it has created its own industry to manage the various punishments.
They also tackle another common-sense idea at the heart of neoliberal policies – that an increase in one’s ‘human capital’ (through more education, for instance), means better economic outcomes. This is increasingly being proven nonsense, a good book to read on this is The Global Auction, a book I can’t recommend too highly. In response to this they not only quote the problem that the jobs requiring a tertiary education simply have not increased at the same rate as those holding tertiary qualifications have increased – thus depressing the value of these jobs. But they also discuss the problem of student debt and the horrifying increase of this debt at a time when the ‘return’ that one can expect from a tertiary education is declining.
The chapter on crime was one of the best in the book. I particularly liked the idea that the crime rate is directly related to what you define as crimes and that one of the things many countries have done is to increase the number of crimes on the books – and so, more crimes means more criminals. The racial implications of this are also discussed at length here and in relation to multiple countries. The comparison between the cost of putting a young person in jail and in giving them a university education ought to shame us all.
They also question whether young people are as politically disengaged as they are often portrayed to be. This is very interesting, not least since they pit themselves against some of the big names of social theory – Bauman for one. The argument here is again based on Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital. That is, since young people do not have the cultural capital to fully engage in the political mechanisms that currently exist, they often avoid these and therefore look disengaged. However, other forms of protest and political engagement are more open to young people, and so they make much more use of these. But because these are not the traditional forms of power, they are devalued or even defined as not really existing. This was particularly interesting in the discussion of the 2011 London riots and how so many sociologists came out to say these were not political.
A problem I had with this book was the claim they made at one point that notions of ‘false consciousness’ have been mostly rejected by modern theory as being too simplistic – and to claim this on the basis of Bourdieu’s theories and ideas. The reason why I think this is an odd thing to claim is that Bourdieu himself said that you could see all of his sociology as a response to how to understand ‘symbolic violence’ – which basically means why people end up supporting a system that disadvantages them. And one of the main ways he says this happens is via ‘misrecognition’ – which I’ve always taken to be his French way of saying ‘false consciousness’.
Some quotes
we demonstrate how young people in Europe, UK, USA and Australia now bear a disproportionate and increasing burden of poverty and disadvantage. 4
Standing describes the ‘precariat’ as a new social class formed by people experiencing precarious employment that shapes lives without predictability or security and that affects people’s welfare and their sense of wellbeing. 4
In May 2015, Martin Parkinson, one of the most powerful bureaucrats in Australia, gave a graduation speech to young graduates in which he said ‘your generation is at risk of being the first in modern history whose living standards will be lower than those of their parents’ 11
These already high levels of inequality appear to be broadly on the rise in the OECD; the OECD average Gini was 0.29 in the mid 1980s, rising to 0.316 in the mid 2000s 15
The question that matters, Threadgold adds, is not whether class is dead but whether class consciousness (or class identity) is dead 39
a large body of research on the notion of ‘adult’ shows, the markers of adulthood (e.g. full-time work, independent living and long-term relationships) are being deferred well beyond the age of 25, which is the age when most the ‘legal’ markers of adulthood are met, and are increasingly difficult to achieve at all 39
Their critique is that the notion of ‘false consciousness’ represents ‘millions of people as unthinking, mindless dupes’ and it’s an idea with little analytical or empirical value 39
three global events have defined a zeitgeist for people born after the early 1980s. The first, which is the primary focus of this book, is the rise and spread of a neoliberal worldview that powerfully shaped the policy-making processes of many governments and the popular culture of many societies. The second is the advent of digital technology, which had and continues to have global ramifications. Finally, there is a political-economic process of globalization, promoting processes of complex socioeconomic and cultural change across the globe. 51
Generations include groups who differ from each other and who disagree but who, despite these differences, are oriented toward each other because of shared experiences. 51
‘Liberal welfare states’
‘Liberal welfare state’ regimes refer to those governments that historically have made the smallest move towards a rights-based regime of welfare provision. The liberal welfare state is exemplified by the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, as well as New Zealand and Canada.
Conservative welfare states
The second kind of regime Esping-Andersen identifies is the ‘conservative welfare state’ regime. Typical examples of this type include Germany, France, Spain and Austria. Conservative welfare state regimes have moved towards a universal welfare system, typically through some kind of universal social insurance model. 56
What few observers understood at the time was that the ‘crisis’ that the Keynesian policy paradigm was experiencing was also a consequence of a long-term political and intellectual campaign by those economists who had steadfastly opposed the Keynesian policy paradigm since the 1940s. 62
Neoliberals, like neoclassical economists, claim markets possess an inherent self-equilibrating or balancing capacity that is upset by ‘outside interference’ 62
(In Australia) The ‘neoliberal attack’ has not reduced the numbers of people receiving income support. The proportion of workforce-age people receiving social security payments grew from 4 per cent in 1966 to 27 per cent in 2014. 64
What neoliberal governments have done is introduce a new level of punitive, even stigmatising conditionality as a feature of its ‘workfare’ reforms. 64
The conventional justification offered for this is that the system is designed to help unemployed people find jobs. This is nonsense. On a simple measure in August 2016 the ABS reported that there were 721,000 unemployed people and a total of 175,300 job vacancies: that is, there were approximately four times more unemployed people than jobs available. 64
When the neoliberal turn came to America in the early 1980s, many thought the welfare state would shrink (Jencks 1992; Grogger and Karoly 2005). However, as in Australia, the system expanded. 65
The poorest single-parent families – 80 per cent of whom are headed by single mothers – received 35 per cent less in income support than they did three decades ago. By 2012, four million women and children were jobless and without cash aid 66
it was clear that Blair was dealing with the problem of unemployment by treating it as a problem of the unemployed. 67
Because people born since 1980 have known only this neoliberal paradigm, many may find it difficult to imagine how things might have been different, a theme that we consider in following chapters. 71
neoclassical economists and neoliberal policy-makers have successfully persuaded many people that public and private debt are the same things. 75
A ‘nation’ is not a ‘household’, whatever the metaphor implies. For one thing, a nation is many times larger than any household and, as we mentioned, it can print its own money 77
one of the consistently reliable things about economic predictions is that they have repeatedly failed to predict / major structural disasters like the Great Depression or the recent 2008 financial crisis. 78-79
For the second half of the twentieth century, many people and governments invested faith, hope and money in the idea that more education assured a prosperous future. 89
By 2000, 51 million 25–34 year olds in OECD countries had a university degree. Ten years later there were 66 million. In 2015, more than 42 per cent of 25–34 year olds in OECD countries had some form of tertiary education 89
The Chicago School is well known for developing and elaborating three key neoclassical economic claims. First, that the social world consists of individuals who are selfish, rational people (‘rational economic man’) calculating what will benefit them for the least effort (‘efficiency’). Second, every aspect of human life is ‘economic’. Finally, from the endless exercise of selfish individual happiness-maximising activity we create economic growth and affluence for all 91
They say that because all rational individuals (homo economicus) are purposeful, work-shy, self-interested and utility-maximizing, they will – when making decisions – aim to get as much as they can for as little effort as possible. 91
In Australia, total student debt is forecast to reach AU$70 billion by 2017 and $185.2 billion by 2025–2026 98
Nothing now raises more questions about the credibility of human capital theory than the growing joblessness rates among highly educated young people. 103
after two decades of sustained investment in their ‘human capital’, young people may be more educated, but remain equally unemployed and earn comparatively less than did earlier generations at a comparable point in history. 103
This will mean unskilled jobs will become de facto ‘qualified’ jobs, because those without qualifications are unlikely to get them. Finally, unskilled jobs will continue to pay less and this will decrease the return on the investment in education that individual young people have now paid. 104
the promise inherent in human capital theory is now broken. 107
The punitive turn refers to a style of policy-making that re-emerged in the 1980s 109
Congress, for example, created around 500 new crimes a decade between 1980–2007 110
Britain embraced an even more exuberant approach to criminalization. From 1988–1997, the Thatcher and Major governments legislated to create around 500 new crimes. And from 1997 on, Blair’s government created an astonishing 3,023 new criminal offences before 2006 110
13 per cent of the American population is African- American, they comprise over one-third of the total incarcerated population. 111
27 per cent – identified as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, despite making up around 3 per cent of the population at last estimate 114
The fact that incarceration rates for indigenous children are 24 times higher than for non-indigenous children across Australia, and 52 times higher in Western Australia, shockingly does not attract much attention domestically. 114
It is sobering, then, to find a criminologist like Fattah arguing that ‘there is no universal or agreed upon definition [of crime] ... It means different things to different people ... all attempts to define it are doomed’ 115
Michael and Adler suggested that ‘the most precise and least ambiguous definition of crime is that which is prohibited by the criminal code’ 116
All the neoliberal countries have higher rates of imprisonment than all the conservative countries, which in turn are higher than the Nordic social democracies. 120
The average yearly cost of incarceration per inmate hovers around US$31,200, more than three times the average annual cost of tuition at a good university 122
The Cameron government never made clear how military training or playing chess would assist low-income young people to escape poverty, rather relying on ‘common sense’ to imply that building character through these activities would naturally convert to poverty reduction. 137
Many conventional political scientists and other experts refuse to acknowledge actions like the campaigns by Anonymous against Scientology as political expressions. Nor, for example, do they acknowledge that the UK riots of 2011 were political. 146
Big-hitting sociologists like Bauman (2011) pronounced they were riots of ‘defective and disqualified consumers’, and Zizek (2011) declared it was a case of violent consumerism, with the rioters declaring: ‘you call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving us of the means to do it properly – so here we are doing it the only way we can’ 153
In the three months to the end of June 2011, there were 6,894 police stop and searches in the one local borough of Haringey, with only 87 of these resulting in an arrest 155
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