“It's the Political Economy, ------!”

Many of the financial problems young people experience were amplified by the “great recession,” but are certainly not new. Before the onset of the recession in 2008, myriad problems related to education and labour force participation were traceable to the collapse of the youth labour market in the recession of the early 1980s  (e.g., credentialism and underemployment). What is different for the current generation of young people it that those from more prosperous families and cultures are now being disenfranchised, so public attention is being alerted as if a new problem has emerged. In fact, the disenfranchisement of youth follows a more linear trend when indicators of earnings and labour force participation are examined over the past half-century. I argue that to understand this trend it is most useful to look at the “materialistic” position of youth in the political economy of a society, and to not get sidetracked by “symbolic” issues.