The burden on the young

Hi to the one or two people who read the stuff I post here. I doubt you're still following given how long it's been since I've posted, but maybe a facebook update or something along those lines will get you back with me. Not sure if I'm going to be posting future updates - I've always just been doing this when and where I feel I have a topic to discuss. And right now is one of those times.

Recent proposals coming from the mouths of politicians and those who inform them include the idea of increasing the cap on tuition fees and possibly even making them unlimited. I think this is wrong, but moreover I think it's symptomatic of a worrying pattern whereby a younger generation (ours!) is being made to pay for the mistakes of our forebears. I want to make sure I emphasise here that it's not that our parents are going around splashing the inheritance or just generally being arseholes out of spite or wilful neglect or anything along those lines. It's more like there were a number of mistakes made and now the people paying the price are by and large the young.

Tuition fees is merely the thing that has prompted this post; it's not the focus of it. In fact, I can understand the arguments for increasing the cap on tuition fees: namely, that universities are having their funding cut and they need some other way to support themselves. You can debate the rationality of cutting the funding in the first place, but then we're kind of in a fiscal morass and there are cuts going on around the board. It's messy and it's complicated. Nevertheless, it is true that it is young people who will pay the larger share of such increases, notably those whose parents can't afford to support them through university (in fact the real risk with any such tax raise or whatever is not the pressure it puts on the poor as the poor are generally protected as much as possible for the political kudos that generates - it's the pressure on those who make enough so that they're not counted by needy, but who will struggle to pay any increase. I'd guess systems like the NHS and all that jazz generally favour the bracket of population in the middle as the rich can pay medical/tuition/whatever fees and the poor have them payed by the government.) But forcing students to take on large amounts of debt to get through university, like is currently the case in the states? Talking to people online, the sums they are having to pay are simply frightening. I don't know if that's a path we want to go down.

It's not the only way that the young are suffering, either. With the economic downturn, the young have again suffered. In terms of unemployment, in 2009 global youth unemployment reached a record high. Consider that. If global adult unemployment had reached a record high, we would certainly have heard about it. Some of this is due to the developing world (where it is of course, also a problem and I don't want to downplay it, but it's a problem for a different blog. This blog is the opinion of a well off caucasian male, and as such he's not concerned about the petty problems of the wider world,) but some of it is also due to the situation in the west. I'm sure you've seen the short sections on the news but here, for reference, is a list of articles in the ILO database about youth unemployment: http://www.ilo.org/Search3/search.do?searchWhat=youth+unemployment&locale=en_US

So young people are going to have to pay more for their education and be less certain of a job when they leave education. That's not great. But there are other long term issues that the young will have to deal with which have been exacerbated by the inaction of their elders. Most notably, climate change. We waited so long to take action, that the sweetspot passed, and it seems now that we're going to have to simply deal with the consequences rather than stop them happening in the first place. Scientists find modelling climate an intensely difficult task, so knowing exactly what is happening is difficult, but recently I've been seeing more and more articles where the opinion of scientists is now that a certain rise in temperatures is inevitable, and that that rise is such that it will cause some of the recursive effects that we had hoped we could avoid. That is, when the temperature rises, that in and of itself causes more carbon to be released into the atmosphere after certain tipping points. So the fact that those older than us, who had the power to act, did not, has left us with a huge steaming turd of a problem on our laps.

What's more, demographic pressure means we're going to have to confront these issues whilst supporting a larger and larger elderly population. The elderly not only have greater demands on society but also contribute less back - they've already made their contribution and earnt their rest, but it places a greater burden still on the young. Spiralling health care costs are already an issue in the states, and they will be an issue here too (though thankfully we have a saner system, and as such we won't have as great a cost. But we'll have to see.)

So the youth of today are faced with major short term challenges in rising tuition fees and falling employment) and major long term challenges. There are even more issues which I haven't touched on - for example, there's a coming global water crisis, and there's the fiscal issue, and so on. All problems which will affect the youth of today, and many of which could have been avoided with action from our parent's generation. So what can we do about it? I'm not sure - most likely it's simply going to be a case of toughing it out.

Of course, it's not all doom and gloom. To end this on a happier note, here are the things that our parents generation has done for us: Computers, the internet, mobile phones, uncounted pharmaceuticals and medical advances, printers, and so on. The digital revolution, baby!