London’s become a city where many young people feel they’re finished before they start. Global economic imbalances (think, crudely, a country with a perpetual trade deficit) ultimately mean that there aren’t enough jobs to go around — and entrepreneurship is about as British as fish and chips are American. Being lucky enough to land a job that propels you into the ranks of the upwardly mobile — or at least, that keeps you from the ranks of downwardly mobile — depends, in my experience, not just on having gone to a handful of top schools (Oxford, Cambridge, LSE), but on having the right accent, postcode, and background. And while Americans might say that’s unique to Britain, I wonder if in most advanced economies, similar dynamics aren’t at work. Top employers, for example, don’t exactly recruit heavily from The University of Nowhere. Internships are heavily tilted towards the already-privileged. In fact, the problems of youth unemployment, underemployment, marginalization, and inequality are so pervasive globally, more and more economists are beginning to point to a lost generation.
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