Suppose a friend of yours was out of work and wasn't in study or training. Suppose they confide in you that they have no close friends other than you, their mental health is bad, they haven't had sex for more than 12 months and are less engaged in their community than ever.
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Would you be worried? If your answer is yes, then you should be worried about Australia's young people.
We all know that Aussie households have had a rough decade. Among plenty of other challenges, the last decade saw the slowest growth in real household income in more than half a century.
What is less known is that, while incomes grew slowly for everyone else, they went backwards for people aged 15 to 24.
We all similarly know that the 'aggregate labour share' - the share of national income that goes to workers rather than businesses - has declined in recent decades.
What you might not know is that this decline is almost entirely accounted for by the more pronounced slowdown in real wage growth for younger workers.
And it gets worse. The rate of young men who are not in employment, education or training rose by more than a third during the global financial crisis and never came back down.
COVID-19 saw that rate double again. Even with a super strong labour market we have struggled to get it back down to pre-GFC levels.
We see young people struggling in other areas, too.
About 18 per cent of young people were classified as being lonely back when the HILDA survey was undertaken in 2001. It has spiked to 26 per cent since then.
The number of young people experiencing distress similarly increased from 18 per cent to a staggering 42 per cent since 2001.
It's partly because young people have fewer friends than before. Around one in five of 18 to 34-year-olds say they have only one or no close friends, triple what was reported in 2011.
Young people are having less sex, too. The portion of those aged 18 to 29 who claim to have had no sex for 12 months has more than doubled in a decade - to 23 per cent last year. And this is despite sex being easier than ever given there's much less religion and many more dating apps.
Not only is there less sex, international surveys suggest there's also more hostility between the sexes, too.
Polls from 27 European countries found that men under 30 were more likely to believe that "advancing women's and girl's rights has gone too far" compared to men over 65.
Things are not looking good.
So, what gives? Why are young people in such a rut?
One reason is that a lot of the bad things that have inflicted (and are inflicting) the economy and society are hurting young people more than everyone else.
Our economy is less dynamic than it used to be, meaning we are seeing fewer new businesses being created and fewer people changing jobs. Both these things hurt young people more than older people.
When young people change jobs, they get a 30 percentage point increase in their wage, on average. And when new businesses are created, they disproportionately hire younger workers.
Young workers also bear the brunt of economic shocks, and we've had more than our fair share of those lately.
Workers that are most at risk of losing their jobs during an economic shock, and hence more exposed to the cost of job loss, are typically young and working in casual or part-time jobs in industries such as hospitality and retail trade.
But this only explains some of the story.
A major reason young people are struggling so much is because our policies are constantly working against them and written in favour of old people.
When it comes to housing, our policies are geared towards helping those who already own a house rather than helping those who would like to buy one.
When it comes to climate change, we are much more worried about the impact on the current generation than future generations.
When we are hit by crises like COVID-19, we implement lockdowns that hurt young people in order to protect old people, and undertake massive spending programs that young people will have to pay off in the future.
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Older generations have enjoyed tax advantages and the ability to accumulate capital that young people can only dream of.
Even when we talk about challenges like loneliness, the conversation is always about older people despite the statistics clearly showing that it is younger Australians who have it worse.
Between 2001 and 2009, the greatest proportion of lonely people in Australia were aged 65 and older, according to the HILDA survey. By 2023, it reversed: the oldest Australians now have the lowest rates of loneliness in the country. It is young people who are facing the biggest challenges.
All this highlights that Australia's young people are facing serious challenges. Solving these serious challenges will require serious reform across our tax, welfare, education and employment policies.
But above all else, it will require us to rethink and rebalance our approach to policy to inject some much needed intergenerational fairness.
We've prioritised older Australians for far too long. It's time to give young people a chance.
- Adam Triggs is a partner at the economics advisory firm, Mandala, a visiting fellow at the ANU Crawford School and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution
Adam Triggs
Adam Triggs is a partner at the economics advisory firm, Mandala, a visiting fellow at the ANU Crawford School and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Adam Triggs is a partner at the economics advisory firm, Mandala, a visiting fellow at the ANU Crawford School and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution.
