50 Time February 3, 2020
n intergenerational
crisis is— increasingly—
under way. We have
created a system that
disproportionately rewards
the happy few, underfunds
social security and
infrastructure, and puts
at risk the health of the
planet as a whole. Young
people are right to be deeply
concerned and angry about
this, seeing it as a betrayal of their future. But we can’t
let that realization stifle us. 2020 should be the year
in which we start thinking and acting long-term again
and make intergenerational parity the norm. But how?
Many young people will look back at the 2010s
with mixed feelings at best. At the beginning of
the decade, the youth-driven Arab Spring ended
in disappointment. In the West, at the same time,
demands for a fairer system from the Occupy
and Indignados movements similarly remained
largely unanswered. And around the world, young
protesters throughout the decade became frustrated
at the inaction on social and environmental issues.
Going into 2020, youth around the world are still
upset. Greta Thunberg became the voice of an entire
generation when she expressed her disillusionment
over climate inaction at a U.N. meeting in September.
“How dare you continue to look away,” she said to
A
a crisis betwIf we don’t act to repair intergenerational inequity,
een generations m
ay becom
e inevitable
Young people are right to be
angry. They should have seats
at every table BY KLAUS SCHWAB
THE WORLD
WE LEAVE
THEM
those in charge, “and come here saying
that you’re doing enough when the pol-
itics and solutions needed are still no-
where in sight? How dare you look at a
younger generation for hope?”
Her generation is right in being so in-
dignant. The window for action on cli-
mate change is closing at a rapid rate,
and that’s just one of many problems in
the system. In many societies, there is
also a lack of social mobility; a problem
of generational wealth accumulation; an
underfunding of social security, health
and infrastructure; and a backwardness
in educational and training systems. The
worst hit are almost invariably the young.
In the U.S., one of the most striking
ways this intergenerational inequity
can be seen is in the share of wealth
held by each generation. As Christo-
pher Ingraham of the Washington Post
calculated, by the time the median
baby boomer was 35 in 1990, that gen-
eration held over a fifth of American
wealth. Generation X, which hit a me-
dian age of 35 by 2008, had accumulated
less than a tenth of U.S. wealth by that
same age. Millennials, though not yet 35
on average, accounted for only 3% of U.S.
wealth by 2018.
Another obvious sign of this imbal-
ance is the debt that’s been loaded onto
the rising generation. Until the early
1980s, U.S. national debt rarely exceeded
40% of GDP, and at times stood as low
as 30%. Then it exploded. By the end of
2019, U.S. federal debt stood at over 105%
of GDP. It is burdening youth even as they
struggle to repay their own student and
other debt, and even as the infrastructure
they inherit is increasingly crumbling and
needs urgent replacing.
And then, of course, there is the im-
balance in caring for the planet. The eco-
nomic boom of the past 75 years came at
a high price: almost all of the CO₂ “bud-
get” the world had to avoid catastrophic
warming is now used up. If we want to
avoid even 2° of warming, the next gen-
erations both in the U.S. and around the
world will either have to stop leading the
energy- consuming lifestyle of their par-
ents or Western peers altogether—or
come up with clean alternatives in less
than a decade.
The good news is that such inequi-
