STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Thursday, 31 May 2012

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24. Downward mobility is now a reality {europe}

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/31/downward-mobility-europe-young-people


A young graduate looks for work at a jobcentre in London. Photograph: UK Stock Images Ltd/Alamy

Every generation has its measure of outcasts. However, it doesn't happen often that the plight of being outcast may stretch to embrace a whole generation. Yet precisely that may be happening in Europe now.

After several decades of rising expectations, the present-day newcomers to adult life confront expectations falling – and much too steeply and abruptly for any hope of a gentle and safe descent. If there was bright light at the end of the tunnels their predecessors passed through, there is now a long, dark tunnel stretching behind every one of the few flickering, fast fading lights trying in vain to pierce through the gloom. With prospects of long-term unemployment and long stretches of "rubbish jobs" well below their skills and expectations, this is the first postwar generation facing the prospect of downward mobility.

The youngsters of the generation now entering the so-called "labour market" have been groomed and honed to believe that their life task is to outshoot and leave behind the parental success stories, and that such a task is fully within their capacity. However far their parents have reached, they will reach further. Nothing has prepared them for the arrival of the hard, uninviting and inhospitable new world of downgrading of results, devaluation of earned value, volatility of jobs and stubbornness of joblessness, transience of prospects and durability of defeats, stillborn projects and frustrated hopes and chances ever more conspicuous by their absence. The higher they looked, the more deceived and downtrodden they would feel.

The past few decades were times of unbound expansion of all and any forms of higher education and of an unstoppable rise in the size of student cohorts. A university degree promised plum jobs, prosperity and glory: a volume of rewards steadily rising to match the steadily expanding ranks of degree holders. That temptation was all but impossible to resist. Now, however, the throngs of the seduced are turning wholesale into the crowds of the frustrated.