The New Revolutionary Class

No power on earth is more fearsome than a highly educated class that faces a constrained, even dismal, future. Such people have played a role in revolutionary upheavals in Europe, Russia, and Latin America—and could potentially do so here in the United States.

The key to radical agitation lies in what one Marxist scholar described as “the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs.” Modern activism rarely stems from blue-collar workers. Instead, it mostly comes from the alienated-educated class, which emerged in its contemporary form with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The key lies in the disjunction between those who consider themselves enlightened and fit to lead, as defined by tests and degrees, and the less-educated classes that work hard, innovate, and take risks. The educated class has expanded globally as college enrollment has exploded—which grew almost 80% between 1970 and 2010—even as job opportunities for many of that class have declined.

The New Angry Class

What has been referred to as “the educated underclass” can be seen not only in America but in Canada, in almost all European countries, and, most particularly, in China. Once seen as a land of future possibilities, the Middle Kingdom now suffers from a looming property, demographic, and overall economic crisis, with young educated people, as opposed to skilled blue-collar workers in particular, left with distressingly few opportunities.

Given this trajectory in virtually every high-income country, Pew has found that the vast majority of parents—80% in Japan and over 70% in the U.S.—are pessimistic about the financial future of their offspring. It’s no surprise then that less than 10% of Americans under 30 think the country is headed in a good direction.

This generation has a reason to be upset. Collectively, the older generation has left them an almost unfathomable $91 trillion debt load. In many countries, including the U.S., Australia, Canada, and the U.K., homeownership rates among the young are far lower than in the past. In contrast, in the U.S. a fifth of Boomers own half of the $32 trillion in home equity. In Britain, one in four Boomers is a millionaire, mainly due to inflated housing prices. British retirees have more income than working-age people, notes a recent Resolution Foundation survey.

To make matters worse, Millennials face a world where many good jobs are disappearing while they have to cope with high rents and exorbitant tuitions. In the U.S., some 40% of recent graduates are underemployed, working in jobs where their college credentials are essentially worthless. In the U.K., roughly a third doubt they will reach their career goals. Close to half of American adults under 30 still live with their parents. Across Europe and the U.K., large proportions of young workers are neither in work nor school.

Read the rest of this piece at American Mind.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Adam Shrugged, via Deviant Art under CC 3.0 License.