Rising wages and low house prices helped the baby boom generation
to prosper. Today’s young face high unemployment, expensive education, and a lifetime of renting. Have they never had it so bad?
Let’s take a typical 24-year-old everyperson. This person lives in Nottingham.
There’s a one-bedroom flat they want but it costs £120,000. You need a salary of more than £25,000 to get a mortgage for that.
But this everyperson has no salary. They’re one of the 18.5% of people aged 18-24 in the UK who are out of work. Our 24-year-old has a degree and a £25,000 debt to pay off from university.
The everyperson has moved back in with their parents, part of the “boomerang adultescents”.
A job is the most pressing requirement but many of those are now going to older workers. The over-50s accounted for 93% of the job increases over the last decade, according to analysis by investment bank Citi.
And there’s the growing number who put off retiring. Working people of pension age have nearly doubled over the last two decades, reaching 1.4 million in 2011, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor from
via BBC News – Have young people never had it so bad?
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Posted by literarylydi | February 5, 2013, 12:29 pm