Young People’s Prospects Have Nosedived Since Financial Crisis

A new measure of young people's prospects, launched today, reveals that they are losing out badly, relative to older generations, and the situation has accelerated since the financial crisis of 2008.

The UK’s first annual Intergenerational Fairness Index (IF Index) – a new open-­‐source measurement of how governmental policies affect young people – reveals a worsening by 6-­‐7 points over the past two years compared to an annual average deterioration of 2 points up to 2008.

Angus Hanton, Co-­‐founder of IF and joint creator of the Index, commented: "The IF Index shows that poorer young people are financing rich old people as our society grapples with demographic change and increasing longevity. It puts into stark relief the real plight of younger generations."

Professor Laurence Kotlikoff, Professor of Economics at Boston MIT, and the creator of

intergenerational accounting for the World Bank in the 1990s, said: "Intergenerational inequity is the moral issue of our day and, like an adult report card, the Intergenerational Foundation’s vitally important Intergenerational Index makes it vividly clear that the UK is failing its young.

The UK, like other developed economies, has engaged in fiscal,educational, health and environmental child abuse."

The Intergenerational Foundation (if.org.uk) took nine indicators that most affect young people’s lives and outlook unemployment, housing, pensions, government debt, participation in democracy, health, income, the environmentand education, – and put them together to create an aggregate of how things have changed over the past 20 years. Setting the Index at 100 in the year 2000, it has risen in its measure of unfairness from 84 in 1990 to a level of 128 by 2010,based on the latest available data.

(GK)