Ryan Streeter
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Last year, I worked with Joel Kotkin on his excellent study, The Broken Ladder: The Threat to Upward Mobility in the Global City.
Kotkin focused on three mega-cities, one of which was London. In the report, he honed in like a laser on the problems surrounding the breakdown of the middle class and, as his title suggests, threats to the ability of lower-income people to work their way up the social and economic ladder. He predicted more rather than less class-based conflict in former hotbeds of middle class flourishing, such as London.
Some might object that the riots are not class-based. That's right, to an extent. There is no class ideology fueling the riots - that anyone can detect anyway. Rather, the problem lies with a certain "class" of people who are unhinged from ordinary moral obligations with little regard for the property, dignity, and freedom of others.
Matthew Sinclair of the TaxPayers’ Alliance has an excellent post at ConservativeHome UK in which he lays out the empirical basis of the kind of behavior on display in the burning streets of London. Drawing on the work of Ed Glaeser and Denise DiPasquale after the L.A. riots in 1992, Sinclair sums it up this way:
- Subsidizing unemployment with too generous a welfare state has made it too easy for young people to stay out of work for too long. Even before the recession, unemployment among young adults was a troubling trend.
- If you don’t think you’ll get caught, you’re more likely to do bad things. Rioters have been interviewed saying they’re after nothing other than “free stuff.”
The rioters are not driven by the motives that both right-wing and left-wing media elites ascribe to them as much as by their own utter lack of aspiration and desire to maximize whatever they can get for themselves.
Underneath all of this is a moral decomposition that Prime Minister David Cameron has likened not to brokenness but sickness, which my colleague Tim Montgomerie has examined here.
Here in America, we don’t have quite the pronounced problem of disaffected, disengaged, and disgruntled young adults that Britain has. For awhile, social scientists have used the acronym “NEET” – Not in Employment, Education or Training – to describe this group in Britain. We haven’t imported NEET to the same degree that it can be found in the UK.
However, the trends – at least in some parts of our country – are not moving in the right direction.
As I have pointed out here and here, younger adults in America:
Have been detached from the workforce at alarming levels since before the recession (a trend driven especially by young men not working)
Are living lives of relative economic stagnation unless they are in, or come from, roughly the top 20% of the income scale
Are taking longer to grow up, preferring to live at home and avoid responsibility their parents took for granted
Are forming households at an extremely low rate, mainly because they are not marrying and moving out into the world
Are losing their sense of the transcendent, especially if they come from middle to lower income homes, which suggests an important source of moral fiber is on the wane
None of this means we’re on the edge of London-like riots. But it does suggest that a cultural streak cutting through our younger generation is deeper and darker than the usual shtick about how the job prospects of 20-somethings are bad.
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