Young people seem more optimistic about the future in poorer nations
Will the next generation do better than the one that came before? To young people in wealthier nations, that dream of upward mobility seems more like a story about the past than modern-day reality, according to a large new survey taken in 21 countries.
In poorer countries, though, there is still hope that young people’s lives will be better than those of their parents, and that the world is becoming a better place.
“In a lot of the developing world, there is a bit more optimism that yes, with each generation our living standards are improving,” said Laurence Chandy, director of the office of global insight and policy at UNICEF, which conducted the survey with Gallup. “But there’s a recognition in the West that’s stopped happening.”
In the United States, 56% of young people and 64% of older people said that children today would be worse off, economically, than their parents — a view that comports with the economic realities for many in recent years.
The survey was of 21,000 people in two age groups — 15 to 24, and 40 and up — and included nationally representative samples from all regions of the world. The younger group said that children today were better off in basic ways, like education, health care and physical safety. In the median country, 57% of them said the world was becoming a better place with each generation, compared with 39% of older people.
And the best part of being a young person today? Technology, according to respondents in follow-up interviews.
“Young people these days have access to information and new technologies that other generations haven’t even come close to having,” said Victor Paganotto Carvalho Freitas, 24, from Sao Paulo, Brazil. “With the advent of the internet, it is possible to learn different skills from within your bedroom.”
But young people also have significant concerns. In the surveys, about 9 in 10 said they sometimes or often have anxiety. Six in 10 said children today have more pressure from adults to succeed than their parents did. Seven in 10 say the actions of their parents’ generation have contributed to climate change.
The survey, conducted from February to June, did not directly ask about the pandemic (the researchers weren’t confident that answers could be compared because COVID-19 has hit countries at different times). But young people said countries would be
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safer if they cooperated more to fight threats like COVID-19. A majority said they struggled with mental health. And the institutions in which they had the highest levels of trust were medicine and science (social media and religious institutions were lowest).
“I just think about COVID when I think about the future,” said Landen Otaka, 16, from Hawaii. “We’re trying to adapt to what has become.”
In the six richest countries in the survey, about one-third of young people said they thought today’s children would be economically better off than their parents. They were particularly pessimistic in Japan, France, Britain and Spain.
In low-income countries, though, about two-thirds of young people said they thought today’s children would do better financially than their parents, especially in Africa and South Asia. They were also more likely than those in high- or middle-income countries to say the world was becoming a better place with each generation.
Wealth accumulation and improvements in living standards may be slowing for many in the global North, said Sharlene Swartz, a sociologist at the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria, South Africa, whose research focuses on young people.
“But in almost all of the global South, that is not true,” she said. “Living standards have been improved across the board. People have been lifted out of poverty. Malaria treatment, HIV medication — all those things are leading to people living longer lives.”
Still, the optimism was not universal in the developing world.
“The worst part are destroyed economics, negative effects of capitalism and climate change, which our generation will have to deal with,” said Valeriia Drabych, 19, from Kyiv, Ukraine. “Lust of money, which our ancestors did not know how to overcome, brought us to the state we are in today. We have to sort it all out, and we have to do it ASAP!”
In the West, particularly the United States, many young people surveyed said that not everyone is born at the same starting line, and that success is not entirely within their control. The American dream has often been defined as a belief that those who work hard will live a “better, richer and happier life,” regardless of the circumstances in which they’re born. But this generation appears to have doubts — which matches a recent economic finding that since 1980, Americans are no longer likelier than not to earn more than their parents.
Young Americans still said hard work was most important to success, but the second-largest share said it was family wealth and connections. Older people in the United States were 40% more likely than young people to say hard work was most important, and half as likely to say it was family wealth or connections.
“We’re starting to tell different stories here, not always about Rocky and Rudy and the bootstrap thing,” said Bob Mckinnon, founder of Moving Up Media Lab, a nonprofit focused on helping people recognize what influenced their lives. “On one hand, you want and need people to believe that they can make a difference in their own lives, but on the other hand, you need people to understand it’s about more than just their own hard work.”
Makeila Ward, 16, from Nevada, is taking classes at community college during high school, and plans to become a flight nurse in the Air Force. “People who start off with a better life than others have higher chances of getting more successful more easily,” she said. “But even with a hard background, if you put the work in and save up the money, most of the time you get what you deserve.”