Does anyone know / remember if there were similar pieces written in the late 90s about people in their 20s and 30s then? Ie is this a trend that has always happened or something new?
The Thatcher/Reagan de-industrialisation through the 80s meant a huge number of children deprived of opportunity as whole regions and cities lost their major employers. In the UK it was effectively the start of our drug problem. Criminalisation had only arrived in the late 60s. Then we got the big recession of the early 90s.
Most of those de-industrialised areas had huge crime and drug problems, lost opportunities and parents who were broke, jobless and without hope. London and the South East was turbo-charging banking so we got Harry Enfield's comedy "Loadsa Money" character on tv, and plenty of market traders becoming stock traders. If you were early into IT you avoided it too.
So London and the South East was mostly OK, the rest, not so much. For those coming onto the job market it was a time of very high youth unemployment and limited chances. By the late 90s it had settled and most were busy spending it.
Some of those hardest hit areas are still not fully recovered. The cities have, mostly.
My father's generation were lost in the Great Depression, then got to go to WW2.
His father's in WW1.
We can learn from history that we don't treat the unlucky at all well, or try and prevent damage to the next generation. Oh, and that we mostly don't learn from history.
The Loadsamoney character was a plasterer. Even manual trades were doing well in the South East.
In the 90s recession youth unemployment was over 20% nationally. Can't find any decent regional or city figures now, and the tories changed the way unemployment was measured during that recession, so anything earlier is incomparable. In Scotland, the NW and NE, and probably the Midlands it was well over that.
Apprenticeships had recently disappeared (my generation was probably the last where some got a chance to leave school at 16 and go into a 3 or 4 year apprenticeship, as a few of my school friends did). Instead of going into work with prospects they ended up on long term unemployment benefit, maybe crime or drugs for some. Those who came out of college with engineering or manufacturing related skills find there's loads more chasing the industrial and engineering jobs that remained with poor chances.
Or simply take a dead end job unrelated to their qualifications, because money - the Deliveroo and Uber of their day, and many tried to move, failed, and got the dead end job somewhere expensive (SE). A CV with 5 or 10 years of all the wrong experience for a chosen career. Sure, some made it through unaffected too.
Kids coming onto the job market late 90s were fine, the economy was booming. Still far more so in the SE though. Those in the early and mid 80s mostly were too, unless they got unlucky with employer in the 90s recession, or bet on the about to die skills.
That generation had few chances of being paid as much as mum or dad, buying house or getting a mortgage until late or even the lifetime career prospects they might. Looking at them now, many got to OK. Though much later, on less money, in a smaller house, probably with more career and job switches and a far harder journey. Not a better deal at all.
Sheffield, Scotland and Liverpool probably still haven't forgiven the Tories for those years. Scotland certainly hasn;t looking at election results. Manchester and Leeds are pretty vibrant now, after many years repair and struggle. I don't know, but would imagine the story in the US rust belt would be frighteningly close.
In Sweden we had had high youth unemployment for 15 years (it's "low" now at 16%), but as people study or get a bit older they get work. Today though, it almost doesn't matter what you do. You either have to take a 100 year mortgage, or pay some significant rent, to live in e.g. Stockholm. And if you don't you are looking at declining job markets. It just seems like getting screwed has become ingrained in the system. Heads they win, tails you lose. Things are going well, you pay a lot. Things go bad, you are paid nothing. Maybe that was always the case and it is just easier to be informed now.
The biggest difference I see is housing. They keep getting more and more absurdly expensive with no signs of stopping. Even in countries far less attached to the idea of ownership than the UK. Which is more neoliberal policy again - public housing is right out of fashion everywhere it seems, even places that once did public housing really well.
As an example, I know someone with type 1 diabetes. The inflation-adjusted cost of insulin has gone up something like 700% over the last 20 years and the number of jobs offering health insurance has declined while the employee’s cost percentage has risen, so the percentage of people who can just absorb it is shrinking.
And to answer the OP's question, yes, in the nineties the "generational robbery" was a topic: Real estate was booming, making existing (old) homeowners rich and pricing out first-time buyers.
Most of these shows more or less ended with the characters getting married, having kids or otherwise ending that period in their lives. In Sex and the City, Miranda moving to Brooklyn because Manhattan is too expensive is a major event in the last season.
Guess they recovered nicely.
"""Andy, Dag and Claire have been handed a society priced beyone their means. twentysomethings, brought up with divorce, Watergate and Three Mile Island, and scarred by the 80s fall-out of yuppies, recession, crack and Ronald Reagan, they represent the new generation - Generation X. Fiercely suspicious of being lumped together as an advertiser's target market, they have quit dreary careers and cut themselves adrift in the California desert. Unsure of their futures, they immerse themselves in a regime of heavy drinking and working at no-future McJobs in the service industry."""