1 Youth are right to be angry about financial
insecurity (Joseph Stiglitz in The Guardian) Older upper-middle-class Americans
and Europeans have had a good life. When they entered the labour force,
well-compensated jobs were waiting for them. That generation expected to have
job security, to marry young, to buy a house – perhaps a summer house too – and
finally retire with reasonable security. Overall, they expected to be better
off than their parents.
Today, the expectations of young people, wherever
they are in the income distribution, are the opposite. They face job insecurity
throughout their lives. Today’s young university graduates are burdened with
debt – the poorer they are, the more they owe. So they do not ask what job they
would like; they simply ask what job will enable them to pay their college
loans, which often will burden them for 20 years or more. Likewise, buying a
home is a distant dream.
These struggles mean that young people are not
thinking much about retirement. The inequities cannot easily be explained away.
It isn’t as if these young people didn’t work hard: these hardships affect
those who spent long hours studying, excelled in school and did everything
“right”. The sense of social injustice – that the economic game is rigged – is
enhanced as they see the bankers who brought on the financial crisis, the cause
of the economy’s continuing malaise, walk away with mega-bonuses, with almost
no one being held accountable for their wrongdoing.
Three realities – social injustice on an
unprecedented scale, massive inequities, and a loss of trust in elites – define
our political moment, and rightly so. More of the same is not an answer. That
is why the centre-left and centre-right parties in Europe are losing.
Were the reforms put forward by Hillary Clinton or
Bernie Sanders adopted, the financial system’s ability to prey on those already
leading a precarious life would be curbed. And both have proposals for deep
reforms that would change how America finances higher education.
Most importantly, the young will not find a smooth
path into the job market unless the economy is performing much better. The
“official” unemployment rate in the US, at 4.9%, masks much higher levels of
disguised unemployment, which, at the very least, is holding down wages. We
won’t be able to fix the problem if we don’t recognise it. Our young do. They
perceive the absence of intergenerational justice, and they are right to be
angry.
2 Life after Nokia (Edwin Lane on BBC) In Tampere,
former Nokia employees still ponder how the company went from world leader in
mobile phones as recently as 2007 to the struggling takeover target for
Microsoft in 2014. "I think one of the high points was when we'd shrunk
the mobile phones smaller than Motorola," says Mika Grundstrom, a former
senior manager at Nokia's R&D site in Tampere. "That was around
1997-1998. It was kind of an engineering dream."
For Mika the brief in the early days was simple -
make the phone with the best battery life in the smallest case possible. But
then all that changed with the rise of the smartphone, and in particular the
launch of Apple's iPhone in 2007.
Nokia played catch-up in the smartphone market until
2014, when its mobile phone business was sold to Microsoft and the Nokia name
was removed from its devices altogether. But despite its effective demise, many
Finns say there is a positive legacy to appreciate.
"Giving Nokia shares to workers made it
accepted that your next door neighbour could be a millionaire," says Kari
Kankaala. He says Nokia's biggest impact was to revolutionise Finland's
business culture. "That acceptance that someone can actually make money,
combined with the new approach to entrepreneurship - that was a major
change."
Two hours to the south in Helsinki there are already
signs of that new business culture taking hold in the post-Nokia world. Tuomas
Kytomaa is a software engineer who spent most of his career working for Nokia,
including stints in the US and Germany.
For him Nokia's legacy is a wealth of talent and
expertise waiting to be tapped. "The talent hasn't really gone
anywhere," he says. "The sheer magnitude of Nokia in Finland means
that there's a pool of tech talent that has deep specialised knowledge. Finland's
buzzing with high-tech skills and start-ups." Whatever the future of
Finland's tech industry, few believe that a company of Nokia's size and
influence will appear again.
3 The curious case of diminishing adulthood
(Sushmita Bose in Khaleej Times) The other day, I was talking, on the phone, to
a friend - who's well into his 40s - and he happened to remark: "I have
some of the office kids over at home." Then, he went on to name someone
(on that select list of guests) - who I'd met - and this "kid" was at
least 30.
My thought flow was muddied even more when my brother
happened to call his 8-year-old daughter (my niece) "a baby". There's
something weird happening. I know 40 is the new 30, and 50 the new 40 and all
of that, but that's stretching youthfulness, being less ageist - all of which
are good things.
But why on earth are seemingly grown-up (albeit
young) folks being called "kids"? Isn't it a sort of downgrade,
trying to smack the onus of responsibility and other such grown-up matters off
young (but surely not under-age?) shoulders?
All I hear, in sociological contexts, is how
everyone grows up much faster these days than they did 20 years ago. If someone
grows up faster, shouldn't they be, on their own, feeling less like
"kids" and more like adults?
I'm confused no end. Rahul Gandhi, who's in his
mid-40s, is a "youth leader"; many times, he's referred to as the
"Gandhi kid [who understands nothing]". But in a few years' time,
he'll be labelled a geriatric by third millennium "kids". So, as he
(along with countless others) hurtles from being a kid to an old man, he's
missing out on the most critical part of his life: being an adult.
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