Young, Poor and Totally Screwed

His new book is a deadly serious, but darkly funny, examination of how life for many who followed the Baby Boomer generation has become defined by falling incomes and the financial insecurity of the gig economy. Even as rising trade has reduced global extreme poverty, generations in the West are living the reality of being poorer than their parents.

Stuart uses beer to explain why extreme monetary easing has priced the unmortgageable young and poor out of life. Later on, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg feature, playing the “ultimatum game” to help demonstrate why such unfairness is not just bad for its own sake, but leads to poor and unsustainable outcomes. We live in a world defined not by economic rationality, but by reactionary policies, financial crises and market failure.

These largely avoidable calamities amplify the skew towards enriching the already wealthy while destabilising the economy for everyone else. Worse still, they sabotage engagement with the greatest market failure of all: the climate emergency.

The tragedy is greater because we know what works. Even China’s deeply flawed application of the basic economic principles of trade and investment led to huge advances in the war against poverty.

Policies that promote disadvantage have set our society on a ruinous path. Left unchecked, there is an avoidable line from intergenerational unfairness, through populist growth-destroying policies, to our ultimate defeat in the war against climate change.

Economics is the science of uncertainty, but the one thing we can be sure of is that if you leave some people behind, you are asking for trouble. If you leave everyone behind, trouble will find you.

Stuart Trow
Adviser to development finance institutions | Former EBRD Senior Market Strategist