The Blocked Generation — Summary

Unemployment and underemployment are not the same condition. The unemployed person represents a gap that policy, at least in principle, can close. The underemployed person is working, or could be, but in roles that do not correspond to their preparation or the social contract that organized their investment in themselves. The engineering graduate driving a motorcycle taxi. The computer science degree holder doing data entry. The credential was acquired. The economy that was supposed to honor it did not.

The political difference between these conditions is the difference between frustration and grievance. Frustration is personal. Grievance is structural. Frustration asks what did I do wrong. Grievance asks what did the system do wrong. Accurate structural explanations for educated underemployment are complex and diffuse, genuinely difficult to assign blame for. They are also politically inert, because they produce no clear target. The explanations that gain traction are simpler: they identify a group that benefited, name a betrayal, connect frustrated aspiration to an existing social cleavage. This is not speculation about possible futures. Egypt before 2011, Tunisia in the same period. The combination of educational expansion outpacing labor market absorption has historically been among the more reliable precursors to political instability.

Democratic systems have a mechanism for processing frustrated aspiration: legitimate political participation. The mechanism works when the frustration has a policy-addressable cause. It struggles when the cause is structural and the institutional toolkit is inadequate. What democratic politics does in this situation is provide outlets. But outlets are not solutions, and populations that use them without achieving solutions eventually question whether the outlets are worth using.

The connectivity amplifier changes the political experience. Every previous generation of educated underemployed people encountered their frustration in relative informational isolation. The current generation has constant access to the comparison set of the entire connected world. Relative deprivation has always been more volatile than absolute deprivation.

The governments of these countries are in a structural position that makes honesty almost impossible. To tell the truth would be to admit the social contract has broken. No government says this, because governments cannot survive taking ownership of problems they cannot solve. The absence of an honest narrative is not neutral. It leaves the field open for the narratives that will fill it.