El Erian - Project Syndicate -

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/youth-political-participation-by-mohamed-a--el-erian-2016-07?utm_source=Project+Syndicate+Newsletter&utm_campaign=0804e930b7-Khrushcheva_The_Strongmans_Power_Trap_24_7_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_73bad5b7d8-0804e930b7-93854061

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I am in my late fifties, and I worry that our generation in the advanced world will be remembered – to our shame and chagrin – as the one that lost the economic plot.

In the run-up to the 2008 global financial crisis, we feasted on leverage, feeling increasingly entitled to use credit to live beyond our means and to assume too much speculative financial risk. We stopped investing in genuine engines of growth, letting our infrastructure decay, our education system lag, and our worker training and retooling programs erode.

We allowed the budget to be taken hostage by special interests, which has resulted in a fragmentation of the tax system that, no surprise, has imparted yet another unfair anti-growth bias to the economic system. And we witnessed a dramatic worsening in inequality, not just of income and wealth, but also of opportunity.

The 2008 crisis should have been our economic wake-up call. It wasn’t. Rather than using the crisis to catalyze change, we essentially rolled over and went back to doing more of the same.

Specifically, we simply exchanged private factories of credit and leverage for public ones. We swapped an over-leveraged banking system for experimental liquidity injections by hyperactive monetary authorities. In the process, we overburdened central banks, risking their credibility and political autonomy, as well as future financial stability....

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 We let inequality worsen, and stood by as too many young people in Europe languished in joblessness, risking a scary transition from unemployment to unemployability....

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Growing restrictions on companies such as Airbnb and Uber hit the young particularly hard, both as producers and as consumers....

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Sadly, young people have been overly complacent when it comes to political participation, notably on matters that directly affect their wellbeing and that of their children. Yes, almost three-quarters of young voters backed the UK’s “Remain” campaign. But only a third of them turned out. In contrast, the participation rate for those over 65 was more than 80%.