John Rapley is a political economist at the University of Cambridge and the author of Twilight of the Money Gods: Economics as a Religion and How it all Went Wrong.
The story practically writes itself. Students at Queen’s and Western, complacent and entitled youths, partied upon their return to school. In British Columbia, the authorities were forced to introduce new measures to clamp down on house parties after young people drove a surge in COVID-19. Earlier this year, masses of spring-breakers crowded the beaches, bars and streets and spread the virus that is ravaging America. In Britain, the police fight running battles with illegal rave-organizers, prompting the Health Secretary to beg young people “don’t kill your gran.” If you wanted evidence that today’s youngsters lack the social conscience of their elders, look no further than this.
But is this, in fact, the real story? Could it be that we need to flip this script – that rather than being the villains of this drama, young people have actually been its quiet heroes?
Since the 2008 global financial crisis, a wave of protest has spread across the globe. From the Iranian Green Movement in 2009, through the 2011 Arab Spring and Occupy Movement, on up through Black Lives Matter and Greta Thunberg’s school strike for climate, and including, in the past year, Hong Kong’s democracy protests, anti-corruption demonstrations across the Middle East, a Nigerian youth uprising against police violence and a Thai one against the monarchy, a long list of revolts has grown longer by the month, with some of them even toppling governments. Many of them have been driven by young people. As a rule, they’ve organized their actions on social media, eschewing formal institutions in favour of horizontal, spontaneous forms that unite people around ideas rather than leaders. That may be why Donald Trump has always struggled so much with the concept of antifa, unable to understand how an idea can have such power without being somehow an organization (it may also be why nobody on his campaign team detected the sabotage of his Tulsa, Okla., rally, organized as it was on TikTok by a global coalition of teens).
The young people behind these uprisings have most often found common cause in a sense of economic frustration. Put simply, while the number of university graduates has increased around the world, the number of decent jobs and housing opportunities for them have diminished, all while the cost of living and inequality have risen. Nevertheless, while this bubbling frustration stokes the revolt, the protesters seldom confine themselves to material goals. On the contrary, they most often channel a deep idealism, calling for such things as democracy, racial equality, climate action, human rights or justice in policing.
By and large, the response of authorities to these protests has ranged from dismissal to outright repression. The core demands for significant change to the political-economic model seldom get more than lip-service from the powers-that-be. Amid every economic crisis, for instance, authorities have shown themselves far more concerned with getting house and stock prices back up than with protecting or creating jobs, or boosting pay. If the system seems to be geared toward protecting the lucky few, it’s because it is.
Then in the midst of this time of political ferment, the coronavirus pandemic appeared. In the early days, cases of illness skewed older, as groups more vulnerable to the virus suffered the brunt of it. Countries then went into lockdown. For the most part, especially when governments provided financial support packages to see people through the lockdown, everyone co-operated marvellously. There was, if anything, a strong sense of unity and togetherness that made it possible for people to weather the storm with a sense that “we’re all in this together.”
When the lockdowns lifted, many governments urged everyone to go back to work (as if nobody working from home was actually doing so) and to resume normal life. Not surprisingly, cases soon began rising – and now, come the fall, surging. In many Western countries, a second wave of the pandemic is under way. However, this time around, the cases have skewed younger. Given that we’ve heard reports of illegal parties among young people, it’s been a quick step to conclude that young people have been carelessly jeopardizing lives.
But it’s more complicated than that. Public health authorities will tell you that the data we have don’t really allow us to say where the outbreaks are coming from. But what is clear is that if governments are determined to “return to normal,” the bulk of new infections will likely occur among young people, for the simple reason that they inevitably engage in more social interaction than older people. They’re more likely to live in shared or crowded accommodation, to work in jobs that require a high degree of face-to-face contact – think of all those baristas, servers and shop attendants – to have to use public transit, and when they work in office buildings, to work in relatively cramped conditions. How often do you see a 20-year-old in the corner office?
So the problem is not the misbehaviour of young people, but the determination of governments to restore the status quo ante as quickly as possibly. Moreover, in this headlong dash back to normality, governments pay little heed to what economists call the “opportunity cost of compliance.” For example, many 65-year-olds, when asked to stay at home and watch Netflix, might not need to make a massive adjustment to their lifestyle. As people age, their social life tends increasingly to revolve around home anyhow – and, moreover, they’re more likely to have a home they enjoy. There are sacrifices involved, but the benefits most often justify them. After all, older self-isolators are protecting themselves from a disease that could prove very dangerous to them. In short, compliance costs little, while offering considerable benefits.
For a young person, though, the calculus is the complete reverse. It’s not only normal, but necessary, for young people to socialize. It’s the time in their lives when they’re looking for lifetime partners, building professional networks and forming the relationships that will enable them to advance in life. Asking them to stay home is asking them to hinder their lifetime prospects. Worse, the benefit of doing so is marginal at best, since COVID-19 only occasionally has lasting effects on young victims. In short, a young person who plays by the rules has to make a major sacrifice for little return.
On top of that, not only do young people gain little from compliance, they may actually lose much from it. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that most young people did party throughout the pandemic. What would happen? To begin with, the rules would become unenforceable. Regardless how many police officers you send around to house parties, as deposed governments in countries such as Iraq, Algeria and Lebanon will tell you, no amount of state repression can put down a youth rebellion if it becomes widespread (and you can be sure those governments tried). Meanwhile the pandemic would rip, infections would quickly spread beyond the youth and lots of older people would die.
Nevertheless, most young people would emerge unscathed. Let’s be brutally frank here. As a disproportionate number of elderly people died, young people might actually face improved economic prospects. With fewer people drawing on the pension system, they’d face better odds of a decent retirement than they do at the moment. As the houses of the deceased flooded onto to the market, prices would drop, and young people would finally be able to afford their own homes. And with less government expenditure oriented toward the economically inactive population, they might even benefit from lower taxes and/or improved government services.
In light of all this, therefore, the truly remarkable thing is not that a relative handful of youths have partied, but that the vast majority, by all accounts, have not. At considerable personal sacrifice, with little promise of gain, and with real potential of long-term economic loss, most young Canadians have been observing guidelines on physical distancing in order to protect their older and more vulnerable compatriots. One would have thought they deserved something other than blame for this.
Global youth have been revolting for over a decade because “normal” has not been working for them. The prevailing economic model has been geared heavily toward protecting the wealth and income streams of the top 10 per cent in society – which, in a country such as Canada, includes most anyone with a home and a defined-benefit pension. Young people have borne, and continue to bear, the brunt of maintaining this state of affairs. After both the 2008 and 2020 market crashes, central banks pumped money into markets to preserve share and property values. Much less attention was paid to protecting decent employment opportunities for young people, and when the bills had to be paid, it was most often young people who bore a disproportionate share of the expense. Even today, the determination to get people back into offices at all cost may be motivated less by the needs of the economy – in many sectors, home-working has been found to be perfectly efficient – and more by the needs of commercial property firms that provide the income streams of big institutional investors, pension funds among them.
The youth revolution that has upended politics in so many of the world’s countries has scarcely reached Canada. On the contrary, by their behaviour, young Canadians have made a vote of confidence in their country. Politicians ought to recognize this. As the other side of this pandemic comes into view, rather than return to normal, they should commit to building a society that promises a better future for young people, thereby keeping them on board and rewarding their sacrifice. If they don’t, the risk that real youth revolt might erupt one day can’t be ruled out.
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