We went to the Lost Generation? Recession and the young talk at the RSA last week, where economist David Blanchflower warned of the “lull before the storm” in youth unemployment. Currently, 1 in 5 young people are out of work and this is set to rise. Blanchflower predicts this could leave permanent social and economic damage on an entire generation. Youth guru Ruby Pseudo aka Jenny Owen, challenged this view, arguing that the world of work needs to adapt to a generation with a different skillset. It’s not just a question of job creation (as Miles Templeman of the Institute of Directors, put it in the post-talk discussion), the old jobs are going, and they’re not coming back. The challenge now is to find new, flexible, engaging employment and education designed for the next generation.

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We are witnessing the rise of the middle-class proletariat. This formerly temperate caste is now rebelling to safeguard its place in society. Long-range forecasts by the Ministry of Defence warn that the middle classes could become the new Marxist revolutionaries. “The growing gap between themselves and super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban underclasses are likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability.” This week, the Daily Mail reported that this group accounts for the sharpest rise in crime. The increase in ‘middle class crimes’ ranges from VAT evasion to over-filling a wheelie bin and is estimated to be £14bn annually, nearly five times that of burglary. Economic shifts leave the middle class in the same relative position that the proletariat used to occupy. They have the same motives and an even keener sense of entitlement.


Many revolutionaries were middle class: Che Guevara was a doctor, and Castro and Lenin each had a degree in law. As in any other domain, education, money and brains make success more likely.

We are already witnessing signs of the global middle class proletariat in action. When the Pakistani president General Musharraf suspended the constitution in November 2007, many protestors took to the streets. The majority of those arrested were not guerrilla fighters, but the country’s lawyers. Venezuela is also seeing a middle class rebellion; driven by economic and political instability, large numbers are seeking to emigrate.

“The real point of proletarianism is a middle class start, going into a depression,” says social commentator Peter York. “It’s the Guardian classes, historically. The first middle class generation concentrate on ‘my son the doctor’, the house, the PhD. It’s the kids who are more complex and militant.”

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Imagine if the city of London was built not around commerce, culture and tourism but instead built around health care and stopping the flow of disease. In the latest copy if the UK issue of Wired magazine, architectural and landscape futurist Geoff Manaugh, blogger and author of The BLDGBLOG book, has done just that as part of the magazine’s cover feature on ‘Unlocking the digital city’. His short story depicts a London in 2047 following an outbreak of flu in Holland. The outbreak has completely shifted society – ‘doctors, surgeons and chemists are the elected MPs’. Designing the city is about stopping the flow of germs and infections – walls are made from ‘microbe-resistant plastic and have built-in air filters and blood-testing checkpoints’. Congestion charges to pedestrians, watchtowers, body scanners and written permission from GP’s to cross into London boroughs are all ways to stop the widespread flow of flu. Parts of the city are now built to cure, ‘Space itself is on subscription’; and the cities parks used to grow ‘genetically engineered flowers for pharmaceuticals’. It’s a case of ‘If you have a condition, there was a district for you’. Is this simply Sci-fi or is it fully plausible? It certainly makes you re-evaluate the places we live in time when flu is very much a part of everyone’s agenda.

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Britons are starting to look on the bright side of life. A recent Ipsos MORI Consumer Confidence study shows that Britons are feeling more positive than they’ve felt since 1997. In fact it’s pretty much the steepest rise since 1981. We asked our friends at HHB Dialogue to fire off a question to their mobile Vox Pops panel: “What’s making you feel positive about the world right now?” Watch the clip to see what they say. Mostly, people talk about “the little things in life”, like spending time with friends and family, doing sport, walks in the park. It’s a heartening message, as long as we’ve got each other, how bad can it get?

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Credit crunched consumers are choosing to save their gift vouchers because they think they will get more pleasure out of them by waiting to treat themselves. Behaviour economists Suzanne B. Shu and Ayelet Gneezy, say this ends up with fewer people actually using the vouchers. As the recession bites, we are seeing the rise of a medical condition known as ‘hyperopia’, which according to Harvard Magazine, is the habit of overestimating the benefits one will receive in the future from making responsible decisions now. The word, taken from ophthalmology, means ‘farsightedness’, and works to our detriment by driving people “to underconsume precisely those products and experiences that they enjoy the most.” Time-sensitive offers such as birthday passes and vouchers with an urgent expiry date could be the solution. Online luxury store Gilt Groupe sells limited edition stock on sale for only 36 hours every day and has over 1m members. Economist Edward Leamer thinks that time-sensitive offers might even boost the economy more effectively than temporary tax cuts. Read more »

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