To open the front door into one's own home for the first time is a rite of passage in modern consumerism. Here too standards have gone backwards. The IFS report says, "Just over a quarter of people aged 22-30 live with parents . . . This proportion rose by 7 per cent [from just above 23 per cent] between 2005/6 to 2007/8 and 2010/11 to 2012/13." For those living away from their parents, home ownership is less accessible. The latest English Housing Survey, from the Department for Communities and Local Government, showed that the proportion of under-35s paying a mortgage fell from 21 per cent in 2008 to 18 per cent in 2013.
Changing expenditure patterns may be part of the story. Young people today are huge consumers of social media and the internet, neither of which existed in any meaningful sense 25 years ago. As official statisticians do indeed have great difficulty fitting entirely new products into the measurement of changes in consumption, a shift in spending from cars and houses to mobile phone bills and app subscriptions may imply that people in their twenties are doing less badly than it appears. Even so, the dotcom bubble 15 years ago was premised on the ability of the new technologies to generate faster productivity growth, which does not seem to be happening at all.
So successive postwar decades delivered increasing living standards for all age groups. After the Great Recession the old emerged more or less unscathed and the middle-aged fell back only modestly. By contrast, the young have experienced a major deterioration in living standards. The obvious question is "why?". The IFS is staffed by researchers who move in and out of universities, and it is hardly surprising that their report claims that "rises in participation in education are clearly" beneficial "in their own right". But an important policy issue is raised by the poor outcomes of current new entrants to the UK labour market. Is the decline in outcomes due to these people's characteristics or to other factors?
A separate IFS report, in 2011, began, "Public spending on education in the UK grew rapidly during the 2000s. Over the decade between 1999/2000 and 2009/10, it grew by 5.1 per cent a year in real terms, the fastest growth over any decade since the mid-1970s." Surely the young people of today should be better-educated, and hence better able to cope with the demands of a modern economy, than any previous cohort of young people. But they are struggling. On the face of it something has gone badly wrong.
Changing expenditure patterns may be part of the story. Young people today are huge consumers of social media and the internet, neither of which existed in any meaningful sense 25 years ago. As official statisticians do indeed have great difficulty fitting entirely new products into the measurement of changes in consumption, a shift in spending from cars and houses to mobile phone bills and app subscriptions may imply that people in their twenties are doing less badly than it appears. Even so, the dotcom bubble 15 years ago was premised on the ability of the new technologies to generate faster productivity growth, which does not seem to be happening at all.
So successive postwar decades delivered increasing living standards for all age groups. After the Great Recession the old emerged more or less unscathed and the middle-aged fell back only modestly. By contrast, the young have experienced a major deterioration in living standards. The obvious question is "why?". The IFS is staffed by researchers who move in and out of universities, and it is hardly surprising that their report claims that "rises in participation in education are clearly" beneficial "in their own right". But an important policy issue is raised by the poor outcomes of current new entrants to the UK labour market. Is the decline in outcomes due to these people's characteristics or to other factors?
A separate IFS report, in 2011, began, "Public spending on education in the UK grew rapidly during the 2000s. Over the decade between 1999/2000 and 2009/10, it grew by 5.1 per cent a year in real terms, the fastest growth over any decade since the mid-1970s." Surely the young people of today should be better-educated, and hence better able to cope with the demands of a modern economy, than any previous cohort of young people. But they are struggling. On the face of it something has gone badly wrong.
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