But Kodi, who was just 16, stayed inside and called his older brother, Bailey, instead. Raised by a neglectful mother after the death of their father, the Westcott boys had shared an intensely deprived childhood on south Bristol’s Hartcliffe estate. Built in the Fifties to house those displaced from the inner-city by slum clearances and the Luftwaffe, its neat rows of houses stretch out for miles.

In drill tracks recorded together under the names G-Boy and Young G-Boy, Bailey and Kodi would flash blue bandanas, brag about ditching school to sell drugs, and rep the “13s” — a gang, or loose affiliation of friends, depending on your perspective, named for their postcode.

“On the 4’s block we lurk and attack; anything red gets shot or stabbed,” a balaclaved brother raps on one song, in reference to the group’s rivals: residents of the adjacent estate of Knowle West. Built several decades before Hartcliffe, it has been renowned for social dysfunction almost since its creation. Writing in the Forties, sociologists described residents who had moved out because it was hard to bring up children decently while those of their neighbors had “often unmentionable standards of behavior and language.”

These two areas, BS4 and BS13, have for decades maintained a simmering rivalry despite the many residents who count friends and family members on both sides. “Westers” who spend all week threatening to attack those in Hartcliffe will often find themselves scrapping alongside them at a Bristol City game come the weekend, one youth worker told me. Only in recent years has the division descended into more serious violence.

On the January evening last year when Kodi’s house was attacked, therefore, it was clear to the Westcotts where they had to seek revenge. Bailey, 22, summoned his friend Anthony Snook, a local 45-year-old man, who appeared with a car.

With Snook driving, Kodi, his friend Riley Tolliver and two other boys, who remain unnamed due to their age, headed to Knowle West. In an attack that lasted 33 seconds, they leapt from the vehicle and used large knives and a baseball bat to inflict catastrophic injuries to Max Dixon and Mason Rist, two entirely innocent teenage boys who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Across Britain, extreme youth violence is rising. In recent months, children have been stabbed in schools, on buses and in the streets around their homes. The victims and perpetrators seem to grow younger; their weapons more extreme. Over the past 10 years, the number of teenagers killed with a knife or sharp object has increased by 240%. Across the same period, adult knife homicides have seen just a 30% rise.

The government has responded to the horror with a technocratic focus on regulating the implements used to kill. Machetes, zombie knives and ninja swords are being banned, while Amazon is blamed for selling them in the first place. But what drives children to kill remains murkier.

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Surrey cokeheads are lining up chaos

By Dominic Adler

Outside London, Avon and Somerset saw the greatest rise in knife crime over the last year relative to population, according to police data published in January. From 2023 to 2024, Bristol alone saw 400 extra offenses involving blades. Following the killing of Max and Mason and then, the following month, the stabbing of 16-year-old Darrian Williams by two younger children, the city has been undergoing a period of reflection.

Serena Wiebe was already grieving her brother’s suicide when her friend was fatally stabbed. “We kind of all grew up together,” she says. “So it was kind of like, ‘wow, I’ve lost two people that I saw as like family.’” The 21-year-old was raised in east Bristol, around Easton and St Pauls, ethnically diverse areas long blighted by drug violence which in recent years have been dubbed some of the world’s coolest neighborhoods by Time Out, with rising property prices to match.

Here, and further east, gangs from the BS16 and the BS2 postcodes are locked in an internecine conflict. When Williams’ killers approached him, they shouted, “Is that Darrian? Are you 16?” At their trial, his mother held up a green bandana and yelled, “you killed my son for this… is it worth it?” until police officers asked her to sit down.

“They’ll just stab anything at this point,” says Serena. “I’ve noticed now that if you’re in problems with someone, the culture is you have to do something about it. Or there’s people in your ear saying, ‘you need to do something about it’.”

At a low-rise gym close to the roundabout where Easton meets St Pauls, I speak to Serena and other young people working with Empire Fighting Chance, which provides a mix of boxing training and psychological intervention to steer young people away from violence.

Those at the charity are witnesses to knife crime spreading beyond its traditional boundaries. Mariella, 19, had a close friend stabbed to death by her best friend’s boyfriend when she was 14. “I’ve seen kids that have come from relatively good homes,” she says. “Obviously they’ve experienced a few traumatic things, but they’re in situations where they’re safe, they don’t have to carry a knife. And the only reason they’re doing it is because they’re seeing it on social media.”

Both women agree that the competition for social status online is crucial. When Serena recently took her 11-year-old relative’s phone and started browsing Snapchat, the first three stories that appeared were of people holding knives. “If you’re seeing it from that young age automatically you’re desensitized to what’s going on,” she says. “I’ve had to have conversations with him being like, ‘this isn’t normal’.”

When she was that age, Mariella says, there were gangs and some had knives but they were carried covertly. “Now it’s almost like having a designer bag, having a big knife in your hand in a picture.”

Both also agree that those from Bristol’s deprived inner-city and outer-rim estates feel locked out of the city’s growing prosperity. “There isn’t hope for young people,” says Serena. “I remember when I was in school all we’d be talking about is how none of us will probably ever be able to own a house because of how expensive it is. A lot of young people are like, ‘what’s the point? I’m not going to be able to have what my parents had.’ If you’re in that situation, you’re going to live with your parents forever. Where is the hope?”

Amid such despondence, postcode gangs provide an alternative form of attachment. “It’s sort of spread everywhere,” says Mariella. “There’s 10s, which is my area, Southmead. Every postcode is now grouping together and becoming like a gang within itself. It is a sense of belonging, I think.”

Since 2013, Desmond Brown has worked to break children from across Bristol out of such a cycle. I meet him in St Pauls, where his charity, Growing Futures, helps young people dealing with school exclusions, violence, and child criminal and sexual exploitation. He believes a “death cult” has developed among some children: those from stable homes are carrying and using knives because of the culture, not necessity.

Brown fields phone calls from parents who have found stashes of knives in the local park or their child’s bedroom, but do not know what to do and, often, are too scared to confront them. If they suspect their children are carrying, Brown tells them, they must search them every time they enter and leave the house. But they are the responsible ones. In other homes, he says, it is parents who supply their children with weapons.

And while family units disintegrate, the traditional structure of organized crime also erodes. Children can find accounts on Snapchat that teach them how to cook crack, take over and “cuckoo” the house of a vulnerable person, establishing their own county line. Youths need only to find a dealer and they can set themselves up as an ultra-violent entrepreneur. They fan out from Bristol into Wales and the southwest of England.

Amid violent crime and a culture of knife carrying, children are consumed by fear. Many wear balaclavas, Brown claims, because they wish to disappear, rather than intimidate. They brandish longer and longer knives so they can keep a gap from those who seek to harm them. Sitting in his office, he mimes an outlandish swordfight to me, waving his arm erratically at great distance from his body.

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The private police patrolling London

By Fred Sculthorp

Officials, who are predominantly white and middle class, meanwhile have little understanding of what drives violence, he claims. Children who feel unsafe are going to arm themselves. “No matter what we say about ‘put down knives’, if you’re going to school and you live in Fishponds and you come into City Academy, you’re driving through ops [rival] territory where people will get on the bus and tell you to run your pockets, ask you who you’re repping, where you’re from, and if you say the wrong thing, you could get stabbed.”

When Kodi was sentenced last December, the judge was clear the teenager was likely to have lived in a state of “hyper-vigilance, keyed up all the time”. He had been targeted by rival gangs because of Bailey’s affiliations, because he is from Hartcliffe and because he is mixed race, said Justice May. Amid postcode hostility, carrying knives had been normalized by the adults around him. He likely regarded it as necessary for his safety.

When I speak to Mike Vass, Avon and Somerset Police’s strategic knife crime lead, he is keen to show me a densely patterned diagram detailing the influences which lead children to violence. Is their mother struggling with multiple children and a chaotic lifestyle? Who’s their male role model? Are they being sexually abused?

To combat such factors, primary schools in his patch have begun teaching their pupils not to carry knives when they grow up. “My children, their children and beyond is what we are influencing now,” Vass says with an air of fatalism. “What we’re influencing now is not for the most part going to change in a short period of time.”

Reversing the effects of decades of cuts to frontline services will take 30 years, Vass claims. His parents used to worry that he might smoke and drink; he worries that his two sons will be stabbed.

Revelations from the report prepared on Kodi Westcott by the Youth Justice Service make bleak reading on the influences that shaped him. He missed most of his schooling. His educational level was between seven and 10 years old. His childhood, said May, was one of “scarcely believable neglect and deprivation”.

After his arrest, by contrast, Kodi behaved well. Youth justice workers who examined him said that had he received more nurture his crime might have been prevented. He expressed sorrow for his actions, and May told the court she believed him.

When I visit Hartcliffe, I walk south past children zipping around on souped-up dirt bikes, and head into a large Morrisons on the outskirts of town. At the newspaper display, I see Kodi’s face staring up from the cover of the Bristol Post.

Now sentenced to at least 23 years for murder and detained in a secure children’s home, he has somehow obtained a phone, created an Instagram account, and begun posting mocking references to the 33 seconds it took him to kill and his victims “up in his coffin”.

“Love to everyone showing love to my ting,” he has written to his followers. “This is only the start trust me.”

For some, the future is now. More than 4 million people have had a shot of a vaccine, each jab sparking a little flash of hope. Social media and family WhatsApp groups ping with people keen to share the news that a parent, a grandparent, a great-aunt, anyone they know has had the vaccine. Each story is offered as proof that the light at the end of the national tunnel is drawing closer. Britain is cautiously optimistic, and that’s good for a government that hasn’t won much praise for managing the crisis so far. YouGov finds 61% think the government is handling the vaccine rollout quite well or very well.

Are we about to emerge from the darkest days and start putting the strains and pains of the pandemic behind us? Don’t bank on it. Britain and Boris are happy right now, but both should enjoy that tentative feeling of vaccine-driven optimism while they can, because a whole new set of problems is on the way. Indeed, if luck is against us — and it generally has been — then it’s ominously possible that vaccinating Britain against Covid-19 will bring about a greater test of faith in the state — in our coherence as a society and in our national character — than the virus itself was.

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Will vaccine wars destabilise Britain?

By Aria Babu

The first act of the vaccine-tension drama is regional, with different bits of the country complaining that other bits are getting more jabs more quickly. Any metro-mayor or local political baron worth his or her salt has already jumped on this bandwagon of grievance already: Sadiq Khan says London is hard done-by; a cross-party group of pols in Birmingham say the same for their city. This will make for good local headlines but will fade away as long as the overall rollout continues well. And thankfully none of our sharp-eyed local leaders has yet decided to copy the health boss in Italy’s rich North who wants vaccine stocks allocated according to regional GDP.

Far more serious is how people behave — and see each other — once some of them have had the vaccine. Will the Covid rules survive the partial vaccination of Britain?

Despite the fretting of politicians and headline-writers, posterity will remark that the most notable aspect of Britain’s early pandemic experience was near-universal acceptance of restrictions meant to protect some of our society from harm. The UCL Covid Social Study found more than 97% compliance with Lockdown 1, with no reduction from March to May last year. Britain really did stick to the rules and, although most people with symptoms still don’t get tested, overall compliance in early 2021 is near the levels of May 2020.

Why? Far from being an atomised amalgamation of hyper-individual libertarians, Britain is, when the chips are down, still a coherent society where people feel themselves part of something bigger than themselves. We stay inside to “protect the NHS” not just because we want it to be there to look after us, but for other people too. We stay inside to “save lives” not just because we fear for our own and those of our family, but to avoid increasing the risk of the virus killing a complete stranger several links down the infection chain.

The uniformity of compliance is all the more noteworthy given that economic experiences of lockdown are anything but uniform: staying at home is an annoying way to save money for people with decent and secure incomes, but a financial disaster for many people in poverty. Even the young and healthy who have less to fear from the virus than others have, mostly, complied with restrictions that have disrupted their lives and damaged their life-chances. Far from being feckless and reckless, their compliance rates are not much different to those of older people, and they’re actually more likely than others to get themselves tested.

Young people haven’t turned their lives upside down just to prevent Covid killing their gran. They’ve done it to protect other people’s grans too. And this is where the vaccine, the lovely vaccine that will protect from the dreadful virus, could end up injecting real discord into British life.

Suggested reading

The truth about vaccines

By Stuart Richie

The fact is, people who are vaccinated might still be able to spread the virus — and therefore still pose a threat to people who aren’t, some of whom will end up in hospital and possibly dead. And then there’s the nightmare scenario where a virus circulating in an only partially-vaccinated population mutates into something resistant to that vaccine. In short, there are still good reasons to keep a lid on things even after a big chunk of the population is vaccinated. But will there be persuasive arguments for that? The idea that you might kill someone’s gran unless you stay at home loses its force when grannies are out to lunch because they’re all vaxxed up and raring to go.

Will vaccinated older Brits comply with the rules if the lockdown persists well into the spring? There are reasons to think that many will not. Among them, the evidence that older people aren’t very compliant with some of the key elements of Covid strategy. The Covid Social Study shows 75% of adults aged 60+ say they have never requested a test despite experiencing symptoms on one or more occasions since the pandemic started. Will those people step up their compliance once they’ve been given a shot? No wonder ministers are ramping up their messaging to the vaccinated to tell them that they need to keep playing by the rules.

On current progress, by early spring the vaccine should be cascading down to people in their 60s. Will it really be politically viable for any government — but especially a Conservative one dependent on older voters — to instruct millions of fit, healthy 60-somethings to accept ongoing restrictions to contain a disease to which they are now immune? Especially given that those 60-somethings might be keen to get out and spend money in bits of the economy that dearly need their custom.

More from this author

Why 2021 will be a false dawn

By James Kirkup

There’s another reason the political climate will make it harder still to keep the vaccinated at home and masked up. They don’t boast about it, but newspapers in the UK are largely read by people who will get vaccinated by the time the tulips are up. Most also rely on advertisers and sales that have been hammered by Covid restrictions. Don’t expect Fleet Street to argue that 60-somethings with an armful of vaccine and a wallet full of cash should stay at home until the whole population is jabbed in the autumn.

The prospect of lots of people once again circulating freely while the virus is still active is troubling scientists and health officials, and for good reason. The risks that arise from older people cutting loose once vaccinated include a domino effect on the behaviour of others. We’re social animals and group norms affect all of us: a powerful force behind Covid compliance is the sense that everyone else is doing it so we should too. If we think other people aren’t playing by the rules, why should we?

More specifically, why should 20-somethings who face no significant risk from Covid, and who have put their lives in the bin for a year to protect their grandparents’ generation, continue to do so when that generation has been very visibly (and expensively) vaccinated — and is out and about making up for lost time?

In the dry verdict of the Government’s SPI-B behavioural analysis experts: “Adherence might decline if people feel less of a need for protection, or the rules and guidance seem less salient to them as attention focuses more on the vaccine.” Crucially, SPI-B notes: “These factors might vary across different sectors of society.” In other words, a vaccination plan that only covers some of the country may well mean that when it comes to Covid compliance, we no longer stand together. Whatever national unity we maintained during the earlier phases of the pandemic will be tested as never before.

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Why are minorities so hard hit by Covid-19?

By Saloni Dattani

Will ministers try to hold the ring and urge ongoing restraint, more social distancing and curbs on gatherings? Already, this week’s attempts to curb Britain’s enthusiasm are looking rather underpowered. As the vaccine rollout continues, emotive arguments for ongoing restrictions and compliance will only get harder. By the time the vaccine reaches the 60+ group, the best reason to go on restricting movement and curbing viral spread will be that among those still unprotected are the group who are among the most likely to end up in intensive care with Covid, with all the attendant burdens on the NHS: overweight middle-aged men.

“Don’t kill gran” had moral force and emotive power. “Stay at home because Fat Uncle Barry could end up in ICU” seems unlikely to sway the British population in quite the same way. Maybe the vaccination journey will see some realignment in Britain’s intergenerational relations, the young and the old uniting to demand the restoration of their freedom, at a public health cost to the generation in between.

Then there’s race. One study reckons 72% of black Britons are reluctant to be vaccinated, and 42% of those of Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage; conspiracy theories about the vaccine are said to spread widely in some British Asian communities.

This isn’t just awful because of the ongoing risk to those who decline the vaccine. There’s also a nasty risk to social coherence. Significant numbers of Covid-vulnerable BAME Brits going without the vaccine bolsters the need to maintain Covid restrictions for longer. Public health policy and basic humanity both dictate that they must be protected even if they’ve chosen not to take up the vaccine.

But I fear that point could be taken badly in some corners of the emotive, social media-driven debate about the virus. A country where a small number of people are willing to accuse NHS staff of lying about hospital occupancy is capable of unpleasant conversations about whether a majority group should have to make compromises to ensure the welfare of a minority group.

Sometimes, wartime unity is replaced by peacetime tensions. When the pandemic raged with no sign of an ending, Britain was all in it together. But we won’t get out of it together, and that could be our toughest test yet.

But there’s something odd about the perfectly choreographed, meticulously turned-out K-pop idols adorning bedroom wall posters across the planet – none of them are wearing glasses. Well not odd, because in showbiz image is everything – but, rather, at odds with the astonishingly high levels of shortsightedness among young Koreans.

Further reading

What's making Millennials so lonely?

By Peter Franklin

Back in 2015, Nature published an article on the phenomenon by Elie Dolgin – and, if you’ll forgive me, it’s a proper eye-opener. It seems that the world is in the grip of a myopia epidemic – with an especially high rate of incidence in East Asia:

“East Asia has been gripped by an unprecedented rise in myopia, also known as short-sightedness. Sixty years ago, 10–20% of the Chinese population was short-sighted. Today, up to 90% of teenagers and young adults are. In Seoul, a whopping 96.5% of 19-year-old men are short-sighted.”

It’s been getting worse elsewhere too:

“Other parts of the world have also seen a dramatic increase in the condition, which now affects around half of young adults in the United States and Europe — double the prevalence of half a century ago.”

What on Earth is going on? Variations between different populations might suggest a genetic component, but Dolgin, noting the astonishing rise in cases from one generation to the next, says that “genetic changes happen too slowly to explain this rapid change”.

We might be tempted to shrug our shoulders – after all, it’s a pretty minor condition, isn’t it? Well, not for everyone:

“In severe cases, the deformation [of the eyeball] stretches and thins the inner parts of the eye, which increases the risk of retinal detachment, cataracts, glaucoma and even blindness… about one-fifth of university-aged people in East Asia now have this extreme form of myopia, and half of them are expected to develop irreversible vision loss.”

A recent article in Optometry Times, by Raman P Sah, confirms the threat:

“Myopia is now one of the leading causes of vision impairment and blindness in the world… The increasing prevalence of myopia has emerged as a global health concern because of sight-threating pathologies like myopic macular degeneration, choroidal neovascularization, cataract, and glaucoma associated with high myopia.”

When a potentially serious medical condition that used to be rare (at least among young people) becomes increasingly common, we need to know what’s causing it.

Further reading

The hermit generation: The young aren’t rebelling against society, but hiding from it

By Peter Franklin

Can we blame reading for the epidemic – whether it’s printed material or, more latterly, electronic media? Is all that squinting over page and screen harming our eyesight? Dolgin argues that it isn’t – at least not directly.

Researchers believe that the real problem is not with the act of reading (or checking social media apps or playing computer games), but with where such activity normally takes place: indoors. Dolgin guides us through the compelling evidence that exposure to the brightness of daylight helps young eyes stay healthy.

Of course, humans have been spending time indoors ever since our ancestors built the first hut. But in recent times we’ve conspired to keep ourselves – and especially our children – cooped-up as never before.

Though we fret about the impact of modern life (and especially new technology) on our wellbeing, we’re rather selective in our concerns. We pay a lot of attention to some potential threats (e.g. smartphone addiction) and surprisingly little to others (see above).

Yes, it’s true that social media exposes young people to pressures and influences that previous generations did not experience, but what about all the other ways in which we’ve altered the physical and social environment in which children grow up? I’d say that any factor that prevents children getting enough sunshine is worth worrying about.

Back in the 1990s, I got chatting to a very nice bunch of Seventh Day Adventists. They were missionaries, of a kind – dedicated to a Biblically-based programme of health and well-being. They summed up their approach in the acronym NEW START, which stands for Nutrition, Exercise, Water, Sunshine, Temperance, fresh Air, Rest, and Trust in God.

Decades on, it strikes me that contemporary culture is now very keen on the NEW part of that formula (even if the ‘water’ bit is now called ‘hydration’). However, we’re not so good when in comes to the START. Obviously, Trust in God is a challenge to our sadly untrusting secular society, but we could make more of an effort on the STAR. Making sure children get the sleep they need, and stay away from the alcohol and other substances they definitely don’t need, is a matter of control (and teaching self-control), but to give them more sunshine and fresh air, we need to set them loose.

Further reading

Why cities are no place for kids

By Peter Franklin

It’s time to return to a free-range childhood with plenty of unstructured, unsupervised outdoor play. Of course, that requires reasonably clean and safe places for them to play in, but adults (including parents, teachers and the various regulators of the public realm) also need to get over their paranoid, risk-averse mind-set.

In over-protecting children and over-organising their lives, we may be doing them real physical harm.

If we really care about our kids, we should kick ’em out.

In a previous article, I mentioned a series of graphs – based on the American Time Use Survey – which shows the number of hours the average American spends each day with different categories of people, for instance, their friends, partners, co-workers and so on. The final graph is for time they spend alone.

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Boomer populism is a warning from the future

By Peter Franklin

This last measure is at its lowest level in childhood. It hits a minor peak in early adulthood, then dips a bit as people start jobs, form stable relationships and have children of their own. In middle age, however, the line turns upward and keeps climbing as the impact of divorce, retirement, bereavement and infirmity sever the links that keep people together. Only death interrupts the inexorable upward trend (after which, one way or another, you’ll never be alone again).

Of course, solitude and loneliness are not the same thing. Indeed, as Brian Resnick reports for Vox, those most likely to say they feel lonely are not who one might expect:

“Today, members of the millennial generation are ages 23 to 38. These ought to be prime years of careers taking off and starting families, before joints really begin to ache. Yet as a recent poll and some corresponding research indicate, there’s something missing for many in this generation: companionship.

“A recent poll from YouGov, a polling firm and market research company, found that 30 percent of millennials say they feel lonely. This is the highest percentage of all the generations surveyed.”

As Resnick reminds us, the Millennial generation is now composed of twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings. It’s a phase in life in which time spent with friends falls away rapidly. The responsibilities of adulthood displace the easy companionship of one’s youth – and suddenly life seems like you alone against the world.

Was ever thus? Resnick mentions a study from 1990 which found that loneliness was highest among the young adults of that era. And yet, returning to the recent YouGov poll, there are hints that the Millennials have it especially bad:

“22 percent of millennials in the poll said they had zero friends. Twenty-seven percent said they had ‘no close friends,’ 30 percent said they have ‘no best friends’…

“In comparison, just 16 percent of Gen Xers and 9 percent of baby boomers say they have no friends.”

As the internet meme has it, ‘the miracle that no one talks about is that Jesus had 12 close friends in his thirties’.

Suggested reading

The bitter truth about Millennial burnout

By Peter Franklin

One might have thought that the social media age would have made it easier to make and keep friends. Perhaps it has for some people, but as tends to be the way with digital, the rewards are unequally distributed. Social media amplifies the advantages that the most socially adept and superficially attractive individuals already possess. The competition for peer group popularity is further sharpened by the fact that ‘friend’ and ‘follower’ counts have become monetisable commodities.

In a 2015 essay on friendship for The Atlantic, Julie Beck points out another double-edged effect of social media:

“Social media makes it possible to maintain more friendships, but more shallowly. And it can also keep relationships on life support that would (and maybe should) otherwise have died out.”

This is an under-appreciated point. In the pre-modern world most people stayed in the same place for most of the time, making friends (and enemies) that would stay in their lives until the grim reaper intervened. With the coming of modernity, life became more complex, more mobile – people moving on from one social context to another, making new friends, but then losing touch. In the absence of proximity, it took a real effort to maintain a friendship over time and distance.

Not anymore. Our lives are as complicated as ever, but for digital natives, staying ‘in touch’ has become much easier – in fact, practically automatic. These may be the flimsiest of relationships, but a life lived in part through social media is cluttered with these online revenants. “Auld acquaintance” that would have once been “forgot and never brought to mind”, now lingers on, scrabbling for attention.

No human capacity is unlimited – and that includes our capacity for friendship. I wonder if social media isn’t imposing a parasitic load on our social lives and getting in the way of maintaining real friendship, which gets harder as one gets older.

Suggested reading

Who are you calling a snowflake?

By Tom Chivers

Of course, it can’t all be blamed on technology. Friendship requires proximity and continuity in the real world – and modern life has many ways of disrupting that. For instance, there’s the regular upheaval of moving from job to job, city to city, country to country in search of economic opportunity. Then there’s the increasing numbers of people who stay single and/or childless – either later into life than previous generations or permanently. This has been identified as the cause of the so-called ‘sex recession’ among Millennials; but as well inhibiting romantic and family relationships, there is the loss of the platonic friendships that depend on the wider connections forged when you settle down and have children.

It would be nice to think that this is all a matter of choice – and that such freedom provides opportunities for different kinds of friendship and social connection. As the old saying goes, you can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your relatives.

Then again, the reality may be that friendship and freedom are in tension – and that, in some way, one needs to be stuck in a situation with others to connect to them. Biology does the trick when it comes to family, but to nurture friendship in today’s world of unlimited choice, we need to commit ourselves to enduring communities and institutions.

These are increasingly thin on the ground – especially for a generation that’s been taught to mock and distrust them.

Suggested reading

Why cities are no place for kids

By Peter Franklin

Different cultures, colours, creeds, classes, languages and identities of every kind: all are included. Except for one group of people who find themselves increasingly excluded from the urban milieu: children.

Further reading

Can you afford parenthood?

By Peter Franklin

It’s a phenomenon explored by Derek Thompson in a must-read piece for The Atlantic:

“In high-density cities… no group is growing faster than rich college-educated whites without children, according to Census analysis by the economist Jed Kolko. By contrast, families with children older than 6 are in outright decline in these places. In the biggest picture, it turns out that America’s urban rebirth is missing a key element: births.”

Consider the statistics for New York:

“Since 2011, the number of babies born in New York has declined 9 percent in the five boroughs and 15 percent in Manhattan.”

Or Washington DC:

“…the overall population has grown more than 20 percent this century, but the number of children under the age of 18 has declined.”

Or the tech capital of the world:

“San Francisco has the lowest share of children of any of the largest 100 cities in the U.S.”

The great global cities are portrayed as places of youth and vibrancy. They certainly attract ambitious, highly educated twenty-somethings – which is why big companies base themselves there: so that they can take their pick of the brightest young minds. This is especially true of the tech sector.

In 2007, it was reported that Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, told a conference that “young people are just smarter.” Zuckerberg himself was only 24 at the time and well on the way to global domination – and thus could be excused for thinking such a thing (which, in any case, is correct in some respects).

He’s also reported as saying that “Young people just have simpler lives. We may not have a car. We may not have a family.” In a long-hours working culture, that’s something that adds to their employability – and another reason why top employers love big cities.

The heaving metropolis doesn’t just concentrate bright young things in one place, it also ensures that they can be worked without distraction. The sky-high property prices that put city-centre family homes beyond the reach of most young workers are a feature not a bug. They stop reproduction from getting in the way of productivity.

Further reading

The world's most successful* people get enough sleep

By Peter Franklin

Family life isn’t solely about having children of our own, of course. It’s also about continued participation in the families we were born into – and, beyond that, a wider circle of friends and neighbours. To take one’s place in a community, to learn from others so that responsibilities can be handed from one generation to the next, is (or was) part of becoming an adult – as much as getting a job or getting married.

The concentration of young talent in big cities severs these connections too; distance weakens established old family ties just as property prices discourage new ones.

But does this matter? There’s plenty of time in one’s thirties and forties to quit the city and do the whole family and community thing somewhere less frenetic. So why shouldn’t twenty-somethings – excuse me while I vomit – ‘work hard and play hard’?

It’s a neat idea, but collapsing birthrates around the world suggest that many people never make up for lost time. I wonder where the big employers hope to find the next generation of eager recruits if they’re not even being born? Immigration is only a stop-gap because western demographic trends are spreading to developing countries.

There are political consequences too. Derek Thompson describes America’s great divide:

“With its rich blue cities and red rural plains, the U.S. has an economy biased toward high-density areas but an electoral system biased toward low-density areas. The discrepancy has the trappings of a constitutional crisis.  The richest cities have become magnets for redundant masses of young rich liberals, making them electorally impotent.”

Any group of voters (e.g. college educated urban liberals) who concentrate themselves in a few locations are not only likely to lose elections – but also to be shocked when they do. After all, almost everyone they know thinks and votes the way they do – so, how does the ‘other side’ keep winning? It must be some kind of trick!

The sense of bewilderment is accentuated by one of resentment. If the cities are generating most of the money and thus ‘subsidising’ other parts of the country, then suburban and provincial voting preferences are perceived as ingratitude if not outright stupidity.

Of course, if you’re relying on other parts of the country to supply most of the people – it shouldn’t be so surprising if they perceive you as dependent on them.

Thompson sums it all up as a “division of labour”:

“America’s rich cities specialize in the young, rich, and childless; America’s suburbs specialize in parents.”

But while a division of labour may work in a factory – different workers specialising in only one part of the job – it can’t work in a country. Each component community, whether urban, suburban or rural, has to do the whole job of being a community, finding a place for people at every stage of life.

A truly flourishing community is an extended family, joining together the generations. The childless city, however, is something quite different: an extended workplace. For all its diversity, it is fundamentally incomplete.

Further reading

How WEIRD are you?

By Peter Franklin

We know this, because every few days there’s a story about how they are too overprotected to be police officers (they have been “wrapped in cotton wool”, are routinely shocked that police are expected to work nights and weekends and “do not like confrontation”, apparently). They’re “entitled, spoilt and molly-coddled snowflakes”, they’re “flaky”, “self-centred”, “narcissistic” and “oversensitive”.

But as far as I can tell, it’s all nonsense. For a start: millennials aren’t that young any more. The usual cut-off point, where Generation X becomes millennial, is 1981. (I miss out by less than six weeks; I’m gutted.) The oldest millennials are now 37 years old; some of them are grandparents; many of them will be taking their own children to university this September. Even the youngest (born 1996) are now approaching their mid-20s and have probably been in the workforce for a while now. Professors and medical consultants are millennials; quite a lot of those millennials who are too mollycoddled to be police officers will be detective chief superintendents by now, which must have come as a shock.

For another: all this dividing people up into generations (boomers, Gen X, millennials, iGen/Gen Z) is at best arbitrary and at worst meaningless. I’m apparently Gen X, but I obviously have more in common with a millennial born two months after me than I do with someone born in 1965.

Suggested reading

Could Generation X save the world?

By Peter Franklin

The sociologist Philip Cohen argues that the categories are essentially valueless and do not line up with any useful distinctions; they’re just “irregular categories without justification”, “marketing names that promote stereotyping and confirmation bias”. Most people, when asked to give their own “generation”, get it wrong.

That’s not to say that people haven’t changed: obviously they have. Younger people are more liberal on most issues, for instance, and they are less likely to smoke, drink and take drugs. But they don’t line up neatly with the generations: actual changes in social attitudes, such as attitudes towards divorce, are unconnected to these arbitrary categories.

Here are some of the differences. Younger people are more liberal on LGBT issues – about 80% of under-34s have “no objection” to same-sex marriage, compared to 62% of 55- to 75-year-olds – and race; young people are much more likely to think that it’s racist to dislike hearing UK residents speak other languages than English or to make jokes involving racial stereotypes. They’re less likely to be religious, although slightly more likely to be of a non-Christian faith, a change presumably driven by immigration. They’re more likely to identify as LGBT themselves.

And they’re more likely to be worried about climate change – although it’s not as dramatic a difference, at least in the UK, as I’d have expected, given the constant moaning by baby-boomer columnists about Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg. According to the British Social Attitudes survey, 94% of 18- to 34-year-olds think climate change is definitely/probably happening, 46% think it’s definitely/probably caused by human activity, and 32% are extremely/very worried about it. For over-65s, those numbers are 90, 35 and 20 respectively. It’s not huge. In fact, since Britain saw its hottest ever recorded temperature last week, I would have been entirely happy if it were greater. If the younger generation is willing to make those sacrifices that we older ones are not, then perhaps the consequences might not be quite so severe.

Suggested reading

Is this the end of personal responsibility?

By Tom Chivers

What I find strange is the older generation complaining about this. Young people have always been more liberal than their parents; it’s as though the boomers have forgotten the Sixties. And being more open on sex and gender issues is hardly new either; about half of British teenagers in the Sixties and Nineties decided they were gay because David Bowie and him out of Suede were for a while. (I have this theory that most of the young men doing it are doing it to be more interesting to girls, just as lots of my contemporaries did back then, and that a large percentage of the male-bodied people who describe themselves as genderfluid now will be married to a woman and living in St Albans with two kids and a miniature schnauzer by the time they’re 40. But I have nothing to back that hypothesis up.)

And, of course, “young people are lazy and entitled” is a tale as old as — well, perhaps not the hills, but certainly as old as the United States of America. The younger generation was marvellously described as “a race of effeminate, self-admiring, emaciated fribbles”, lacking the “manly vigor and athletic appearance of our forefathers” in a letter to Town and Country magazine back in 1771. Their morals are “corrupted” by plays and romances (1790); their elocution is “wretched” (1780).

Incidentally, I put “millennials workplace meta-analysis” into Google Scholar, to see if there was any actual support for the idea that millennials are any more lazy and/or entitled than previous generations were when they were in their 20s. The short answer is: no.

Suggested reading

Why are Millennials so boring?

By Douglas Murray

The first relevant result I found, which is a meta-analysis from 2012 and claims to be the first systematic review of generational differences in the workplace, looked at job satisfaction, how committed to their employers they were, and how likely they were to stick around. It found that “the relationships between generational membership and work-related outcomes are moderate to small, essentially zero in many cases”.

Another review article, from 2018, found that there is “little solid empirical evidence supporting the existence of generationally based differences, almost no theory supporting any reason behind such differences, and plenty of viable alternate explanations for any differences that are observed”.

As far as I can tell, all this “millennial snowflakes” stuff is just the same “kids today are being damaged by social media and Fortnite, and this is different from how my parents thought I was being damaged by heavy metal and teen magazines for reasons I cannot fully articulate” wine in different bottles.

Suggested reading

The truth about Gen Z

By Eliza Filby

But, of course, there are some real differences between the younger generation and the older one. One is that very few of them can afford to buy their own homes; just 35% of 25- to 34-year-olds did in 2013/14, compared to more than 60% in 1981. Millennials and Gen-Zers look like they will be the first generation to have less disposable income than their parents (partly because of the increase in house prices, but partly because of stagnating incomes).

Those middle-era and younger millennials who graduated after the financial crisis will probably earn less for much of their careers than those of us who graduate before. None of this is their fault; this is the fault of governments voted in by Boomers and Gen-Xers who refused to build housing stock, who stripped back government spending and stalled the economy, and who failed to keep a grip on financial markets.

I’m pretty sceptical of stories about how the younger generations are crippled by mental health problems or how we have a suicidal generation. Generally the evidence doesn’t stack up and it’s just an excuse for someone to whine about social media or smartphones. But, actually, younger generations really do face problems that the older ones didn’t; on some really crucial issues, it is harder to be 25 now than it was 25 years ago. And yet as far as I can tell, they aren’t any lazier, any more entitled or whiny, or significantly more depressed than their parents were at the same age. To be honest, since we’re the ones who’ve screwed it all up for them, we should be more grateful that they’re not rising up to overthrow us.

About a year ago, a friend of mine posted on her four-year-old Instagram account for the last time. Then, a week later, she made a new one. The bio for this account reads: “All my bits”.

Curious, I asked her why she’d felt the need to start from scratch. “I guess the old account made me feel like I had to conform to this outdated/limited version of myself, like not just online but in actual life,” she replied, almost instantly.

Her words came back to me earlier this month, while reading comments Zadie Smith made at Hay Cartagena (the famous Welsh literary festival’s Colombian cousin):

“We are being asked to be consistent as humans over great swathes of time. People are searching through social media. But everyone is changing all the time.”

Social media has turned our identities into brands; and brands must be meticulously consistent in order to make people like and trust them. One of the best ways to discredit a politician, celebrity or academic is to use their Twitter history against them: remember the striking anti-Brexit billboard campaign? It used screenshots of tweets from key figures, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, to expose their hypocrisy. People really “are searching through social media” every day to try and hoist influential people by their own petard.

Suggested Reading

Ideologues miss Orwell's greatest lesson

By James Bloodworth

It is, of course, important to hold high-profile people to account, but this climate in which our own words are so often used against us is enough to make anyone nervous – even when we don’t make a living from our ‘brands’.

And absolute consistency online is reinforced by the praise we receive for delivering content that’s in keeping with the impression other people have of us – an impression they’ve got from our previous posts. ‘On-brand’ has become a real-life compliment: if I ask a friend what she thinks of my new lipstick and she replies, ‘very on-brand’, this roughly translates as ‘I like it, it suits you, you should wear it again’.

But – as Smith recognised – perpetually conforming with past iterations of yourself can hold you back.

In literature and in life, Smith is obsessed with how necessarily plural, irreducible and paradoxical individuals can be. The introduction of her first essay collection – aptly titled Changing my Mind – announced that, “Ideological inconsistency is, for me, practically an article of faith.

Suggested reading

Peterson, Corbyn and the rise of the kidult

By Jenny McCartney

She’s not the only one. Psychologists widely recognise that the path to fulfilment requires constant re-evaluation and re-adjustment of one’s priorities, beliefs and image. And these processes are particularly important for the most voracious users of social media: the young.

Coming-of-age is meant to involve experimentation. Teenagers are meant to reject their former selves – which is hard when you’re constantly reminded of who you were by ‘on this day four years ago’ notifications. When you’re trying to work out what kind of person you want to be, you need time to passionately commit to a new image here, a radical movement there.

But, as Alexis Petridis lamented in the Guardian a few years ago, youth subcultures have vanished. “Mods, punks, soulboys, metallers, goths, hippies” are all endangered breeds. “There’s something oddly self-conscious and non-committal about” the way young people engage with cultural movements nowadays, he reflects.

My peers and I – born in the mid-90s – were the first people to come of age in the social media era. During our schooldays, we were taught that an online photo of us dressed inappropriately in 2010 could cost us a job in 2018. We were conscious that if we got drunk and silly selfies were taken, we might end up tagged in the photos on Facebook days later. We knew, when we entered the job market, that our potential employers would scroll through our Twitter accounts to check they’re consistent with what we’ve expressed in our cover letters. We’re haunted by the idea of being proved inconsistent in plain sight.

Suggested Reading

The bitter truth about Millennial burnout

By Peter Franklin

It’s no surprise, really. Human beings are inherently prone to what psychologists call ‘consistency bias’ – which Guardian journalist Oliver Burkeman describes as, “the well-studied way we’ll retroactively adjust our attitudes to avoid admitting to being changeable”. We want to believe that we’re stable, in an unstable world. Social media appeals to – and exploits – this tendency: it enables us to go back and erase the bits of our identity that we think don’t fit, because they’re too ugly, embarrassing or incompatible to exist within the confines of our self-image.

Now, kids are so acutely averse to posting anything permanent that they prefer fleeting snapchats to lasting Facebook posts. Even as they document new hair-cuts, old friendships and vague observations, they know they don’t want that evidence to last; they’re aware that it’ll become cringe-y soon enough.

Don’t mistake this fear of commitment for the healthy, necessary rejection of a former self – the archetypal coming-of-age narrative. Forming an identity requires you to invest in your experiments. Teenagers need space to try an image on for size without the fear of being judged by others – or indeed their future selves. Constantly surveyed by social media, many young people don’t dare subscribe to anything, even – or perhaps especially – temporarily.

And this is having a profound effect.

Suggested Reading

The truth about Gen Z

By Eliza Filby

The American Psychological Association (APA) recently found that there has been a sharp rise in perfectionism among young adults since the dawn of the internet age. Their study involved over 40,000 university students – on both sides of the Atlantic – who completed the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale. This survey asks individuals to indicate the extent to which they agree with statements like, ‘When I am working on something, I cannot relax until it is perfect’.

The study found that between 1989 and 2016, there was a 10% increase in ‘self-oriented perfectionism’–when people have unrealistically high expectations of themselves. In the same time period, there was a massive 32% increase in ‘socially prescribed perfectionism’ – when people believe they have to be perfect in order to live up to the expectations of others.

These increases are disturbing. As young people strive to be consistent with their own and others’ ideas of who they should be, their inevitable failure has a terrible effect on their mental health. Perfectionism is associated with, for example, clinical depression, anorexia nervosa and suicide ideation; in recent years, multiple reports have shown that these conditions are on the rise among teenagers and young adults.

According to the APA’s study, socially prescribed perfectionism – the kind that’s seen the biggest increase – “is the most debilitating”, “because the perceived expectations of others are experienced as excessive, uncontrollable, and unfair.” In other words, these expectations make people feel powerless, limited and held back.

Which is exactly how my friend described feeling while using her four-year-old Instagram account.

Suggested reading

What's bugging the Millennials?

By Peter Franklin

The APA report mentions social media as a force that encourages people to present an idealised image of themselves; what it doesn’t mention is that social media demands not only a perfect image but a perfectly consistent personal brand – an altogether more overwhelming pressure.

We need to be cognisant of how social media promotes socially prescribed perfectionism. Young people have never felt more out-of-control: everything from the state of the job market to the housing crisis makes us feel as though we can’t move forward materially. Meanwhile, the online profiles we so carefully curate make us feel as though we can’t move forward mentally.

Our formative years are supposed to be a time for growth and development – a time to build a solid sense of self. If young people increasingly feel as though we can’t deviate, take risks or make mistakes – if we’re obsessed with editing and conforming with our past selves – we can’t progress.

Millennials are roundly mocked for being seemingly unable to grow up. But how can we, when we feel like the world’s demanding that we stay the same?

There’ve been other transformations. For instance, commuters now talk to one another… only joking! This is southern England, some things never change.

What has changed, however, is what people do on trains while politely ignoring their fellow passengers. Twenty years ago a lot of people read, by which I mean proper reading of actual books.

Of course, some commuters still read books, but in far smaller numbers than used to be the case. I realise that these are subjective impressions and that ‘data’ isn’t the plural of ‘anecdote’, but if you’re on a train just look around you and try calculating the book-to-smartphone ratio (bearing in mind that a modest few might be reading e-books or listening to audiobooks on their smartphones).

More from this author

Screen addiction has killed the bookworm

By Peter Franklin

Jean Twenge is someone who does have hard data on smartphone use – especially on the part of the ‘post-millennial’ generation (i.e. the young people now in their teens and early twenties, with no memory of a world without smartphones).

In an article for The Conversation, she hits us with a sequence of jaw-dropping statistics:

“By 2016, the average 12th grader said they spent a staggering six hours a day texting, on social media, and online during their free time. And that’s just three activities; if other digital media activities were included, that estimate would surely rise.

“Teens didn’t always spend that much time with digital media. Online time has doubled since 2006…”

Twenge is a high-profile scholar of the smartphone revolution. She’s best known for her work on the impact of smartphone use on young people’s behaviour and mental health (which I’ve written about here and here).

As often happens to those who warn about the effects of liquid modernity on young minds, she has her critics. For instance, one could dismiss the doubling of time spent online as a mere by-product of the increased availability of broadband, Wifi etc. (Just because we’re now usually connected while using our electronic devices, it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re spending more time on with them.)

One might also argue that online activities, such as gaming, have a social element that offline equivalents lack and are therefore less isolating in their effects. The trouble with that theory, however, is the evidence that young people are spending substantially more time playing computer games:

“…time spent playing video games rose from under an hour a day to an hour and a half on average. One out of 10 8th graders in 2016 spent 40 hours a week or more gaming – the time commitment of a full-time job.”

Furthermore, time spent online is displacing time spent on activities in the real world with real people. Indeed, online technologies appear to exert a much more powerful displacement effect than older electronic media:

“While 70 percent of 8th and 10th graders once went to the movies once a month or more, now only about half do. Going to the movies was equally popular from the late 1970s to the mid-2000s, suggesting that Blockbuster video and VCRs didn’t kill going to the movies.”

Returning to my opening theme, it’s bad news for books too:

“…the trends in moviegoing pale in comparison to the largest change we found: An enormous decline in reading. In 1980, 60 percent of 12th graders said they read a book, newspaper or magazine every day that wasn’t assigned for school… By 2016, only 16 percent did.”

Suggested reading

The lesson of l’affaire Huang

By Tom Chivers

Should we care that young people aren’t reading books anymore? After all, the internet gives them instant access to more information than any new generation in human history. This trouble is when it does so in the form of bite-sized fragments designed to exploit rather than develop youthful attention spans. As Twenge points out, “It doesn’t bode well for their transition to college… Imagine going from reading two-sentence captions to trying to read even five pages of an 800-page college textbook.”

Twenge is not a reactionary, she’s not advocating a ‘Butlerian Jihad‘ against the smartphone. But she does implore parents to carve out some screen-free time in their children’s lives – space in which they can engage with the real world more closely and human knowledge more deeply.

And that brings me to what I really resent about the tech-liberals who signal their sophistication by making snarky remarks about tech-related ‘moral panic’. However relaxed their public opinions, you can bet that in private they’ll be making some effort to curb their kids’ screentime. Not all children will be so lucky.

But here’s some other things that they’re less likely to do: English literature, history, philosophy or almost any other humanities degree.

Suggested reading

British universities should disrupt the US model of gated access to higher education

By Peter Franklin

According to Ben Schmidt, American students literally don’t want to know – or, at least, not as much as they used to:

“No matter what baseline you use, virtually every humanities major from big, old ones like English to small, newer ones like gender studies went into significant decline around the time of the 2008 financial crisis.”

Can this be interpreted as a reaction to the financial crisis – with students (and/or their parents) looking less favourably on degree subjects that don’t lead directly to a decent job? Quite possibly, but unlike America’s GDP, the decline in the humanities has continued:

“Rather than recover with the economy, that decline accelerated around 2011-2012. That period constitutes an inflection point for a variety of majors in and out of the humanities. Though it may have slowed a bit in the last few years, there’s little sign that the new post-2011 universe holds signs of a turnaround.”

The expansion of higher education means that there is a larger number of not-so-academic institutions offering a greater variety of courses in technical and vocational subjects. This would suggest a relatively benign explanation: less a decline and more a ‘dilution’ of the humanities. Except that Schmidt presents a wealth of hard data showing that the decline isn’t just relative (i.e. the proportion of student doing humanities degrees), but also absolute (i.e. the numbers of people doing humanities degrees).

In any case, the figures show that the humanities are in decline at the ‘elite’ universities too:

“The elite liberal arts colleges were, until 2011 or so, the only schools where humanities, social sciences, and sciences actually split up the pie evenly: now humanities are down from 35% to 22% of degrees. The drop at elite research universities is similarly steep. (At both, humanities are down to about 70% of their 2008 values.”

Schmidt is disinclined to blame the influence of ‘post-modern’ (i.e. left-wing and politically correct) ideology on course content and teaching. Yet, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to link the decline in viewpoint diversity in academia to a decline in the number of students willing to engage with the subjects most likely to be affected.

What are America’s young people choosing to study instead?

“The big winners in recent years have been health professions, including nursing; computer science and engineering; biological science and to a lesser degree, physical sciences; and what I oddly call “leisure,” which includes things like sports management and exercise studies.”

What all of those have in common is that, right now, they look like good bets for future employment (though some people disagree).

Suggested reading

The jobs that survive computerisation will require a human touch. Are we still teaching that?

By Nigel Cameron

Perhaps the best place to conclude is where I began – with the risk-averse tendencies of the post-millennial generation. Committing four years of your life – plus decades more of indebtedness – to the study of an ‘impractical’ subject is, when you think about it, a crazy thing to do. However, like a lot of crazy things, our civilisation would be all the poorer if no one did do it.

Except that’s not quite true. Houses are indeed expensive – and always will be. Leaving aside the cost of land, the cost of materials and labour is such that houses are typically worth many times an average annual salary. Most aspiring home owners don’t have that sort of money on hand, which is why they need someone else to give them the necessary capital – or, more likely, lend it to them.

All other things being equal (such as job security) any collapse in home ownership among potential first time buyers should, in the first instance, be explained in terms of access to finance.

This is the approach taken by the economist Ian Mulheirn – who is emerging as a constructively contrarian voice in the debate over the housing crisis. Blogging on the issue he begins with a summary of the UK situation:

“Last week the IFS produced a report that… documents how the home ownership rate among UK-born 25-to-34 year old dropped dramatically from a peak of about 58% in 2002 to around 39% in 2016. The authors pin the blame squarely on rising house prices relative to incomes, citing a 152% increase in real house prices in the 20 years after 1995–96 compared to a meager 22% real terms rise in household incomes for young people.”

However, he then goes on to point out that “three quarters of the fall in home ownership occured after house prices had begun to fall. He also says that the (declining) trends in home ownership in each region of the UK were similar despite dissimilar house price trends. The implication is that the proximate cause for the collapse in home ownership has to be something that (a) happened after the financial crash and (b) was pretty uniform across the country.

Mulheirn has a prime suspect – credit conditions, in particular access to mortgage finance:

“A look at first-time buyer mortgage data tells a much more compelling story for why home ownership rates collapsed… in the five years up to 2007 the issuance of [first time buyer] mortgages was pretty constant at around 370,000 per year. In 2008 that number suddenly almost halved, to 192,000, and didn’t really recover for the next six years.”

Mulheirn’s conclusion is that you can’t have high home ownership rates without easier access to finance – the risks of which leave policymakers with two options. Here’s the first:

“Privatise the risk again… end the limits on high loan-to-income loans, and relax mortgage affordability tests…”

That might do the trick… but it might also cause the next financial crisis. Thus we turn to second option:

“Publicly subsidise the risk (more). If you’re not too impressed with the private sector’s risk-management track record of late, an alternative way to raise home ownership would be to use taxpayers’ money to subsidise it.”

This is exactly what the UK government is doing with its Help to Buy policy – effectively a subsidy for first time buyers – which, in Mulheirn’s opinion, has “almost certainly helped to break the fall in home ownership.” However, in doing so, it has helped sustain a renewed burst of house price inflation to the primary benefit of speculators.

Having identified the flaws in the options one and two, Mulheirn has a third – which is to give up:

” If neither of the above seem acceptable, then we may have to acknowledge that the 71% home ownership rate of the early 2000s is a thing of the past and accept that something nearer the current 63% is here to stay.”

71% to 63% doesn’t seem too big a drop – but there’s no guarantee it won’t resume its decline once the cooling effect of Brexit on property speculation wears off. Also, as made clear by the IFS figures, the drop we’ve seen so far is heavily concentrated on 25-34 yrs olds – an age group for which time is running out. After the age of forty it becomes progressively harder for assetless first time buyers to get a mortgage; because you need enough years of working life left to pay it off.

We therefore need further options. What those might be we’ll explore in a forthcoming UnHerd series on the housing crisis.

Admittedly, the online behaviour of adults – up to and including the President of the United States – is hardly providing a good example; but there are many reasons why we should be especially concerned about the cyber bullying of children by other children.

The social media aren’t just social in that they facilitate communication, they also mediate – indeed, orchestrate – those other basic features of society, status and hierarchy. Some of these mechanisms are pitilessly quantitative – friending/unfriending, following/unfollowing, upvotes/downvotes and all the rest of it. However, the ability to post comments and images, provides a qualitative stream of feedback too, one exploited by anonymous cyber bullies to give in-depth expression to their sadism.

Except that in some cases the online abuse isn’t sadistic, it’s masochistic. In many cases of online bullying, the abusive messages are posted anonymously by the victim.

Just how common is this ‘digital self harm‘? Writing for First Things, Aaron Kheriaty reviews the evidence that we have so far:

“In the first systematic investigation of this behavior among adolescents, recently published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, Justin Patchin and Sameer Hinduja report their findings from a large, randomly sampled population-based study of 12-to-17-year-olds in the U.S. Of the 5,593 adolescents surveyed, one in twenty admitted to engaging in ‘digital self harm’. Specifically, 6 percent reported that they had ‘anonymously posted something online about myself that was mean.’ Among these, 36 percent said they had done it a few times, and 13 percent said they had done it many times. Likewise, 5 percent responded affirmatively to the statement, ‘I have anonymously cyberbullied myself.’ Among these, 37 percent had done it a few times, and 18 percent had done it many times.”

Why would anyone do such a thing to themselves?

Might there be a link between cyber self-harm and the practice of physical self-harm? Not for the most part, it would seem:

“…in this study, only 7 percent of those who admitted to digital self-harm reported a history of physical self-harm.”

Young people were more likely to cyber self-harm if they were victims of bullying by others:

“…those who were bullied at school were four to five times more likely, and those bullied online (by others) were seven to twelve times more likely…”

Is this analogous to Stockholm Syndrome, in which victims identify with their kidnappers? Is it a way for bullying victims to assert some warped form of control over the bullying process?

There are no happy explanations for this phenomenon, but perhaps the most disturbing is that some self-bullies are doing it to manipulate others:

“This suggests that some teens are consciously seeking out the cyber-bullied-victim role because it confers social benefits and can be a marker of status. In a culture shaped by a politics of identity, where white knights identify novel victims to be rescued, victim status may confer power or perks: ‘I can’t go to class today; I’m emotionally distressed because I’m being bullied online’; or perhaps simply, ‘I’m important enough to be targeted by haters.’”

In an earlier UnPacked, I wrote about a theory that western societies have progressed from an ‘honour culture’ (where status is earned by displays of dominance), to a ‘dignity culture’ (where status doesn’t need to be earned because it is conferred by shared humanity) and now to ‘victimhood culture’ (in which status must once again be earned, but this time by displays of how one has been put upon by others).

Recommended reading

The new political correctness: not a fad, but a deep cultural shift

By Peter Franklin

I wonder if the phenomenon of cyber self-harm is evidence of an intersection between victimhood culture and another disturbing societal shift – the narcissism epidemic, i.e. the growing prevalence over recent decades of radically self-centred and self-aggrandising personality traits.

It must be stressed that in many cases cyber bullying is real and can have devastating consequences. Tech companies – and indeed the law enforcement authorities – need to be doing a lot more to protect people, and especially young people, online.

However, if the victimhood culture and narcissism epidemic theories are both true, then behaviours in which individuals seek to present themselves as victims is exactly what you’d expect to happen. And where better to show off your new status than on social media?

Three important questions are begged here which require much more detailed investigation given the long term impacts on political discourse.

1. First, is this a cohort or age effect?  The equality versus freedom numbers suggest the former: younger people since the War (at least) have placed huge value on freedom.  How much has that changed and why?
2. Second, what do different ages understand by ‘communism’ and ‘capitalism’?  Communism seems to many Millennials a mere throwback to a former age while capitalists feature currently in discourse over how Western economies are run.
3. Finally, and most intractable of all, to what extent is the political angst of younger age groups caused by frustration at government inability to tackle the consequences of social breakdown and a fragmented society?  For example, Western governments ignore the avalanche of statistics showing the personal and societal costs of family breakdown, while legislating to make divorce easier and legalise civil partnerships for all.  By failing to tackle the underlying causes of societal breakdown all governments can do is play political ‘splat the rat’ by trying to fix the consequences of failed social policies.  Is Millennial flirting with far left policies a cry of ‘do something’ in the face of failing government interventions, despite ever more cash being thrown at the problems?

Without understanding fundamental drivers of generational behaviour, we fail to prepare for the political fallout from what currently looks to be the most significant shift in values in living memory.

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> Introduction to this Under-reported series | All Under-reported articles.

Without stories, without the imposition of meaning onto pattern, all we’d have left would be a sequence of events, some predictable and others random. Patterns themselves carry no meaning: the irony is that fiction, literally a lie, is where we go for truth.

Not coincidentally, given what we’ll discuss below, one measure of the success for artificial intelligence would be for machines to pass beyond the pattern recognition that is their current limit. “You need to buy more cat food,” says Alexa, without explicitly revealing its logic: “because I’ve noticed that you previously ordered more cat food when the stocks of cat food were low, and they are low again, ergo you will want to order more.” This is a pattern recognition algorithm, the simulation of intelligence, not the real thing.

Only when Alexa — having emailed the order to the supermarket — follows up with: “That sentimentality you exhibit for animals… it’s the other side of not trusting people, isn’t it?” — then, and only then, I’ll start worrying that the robots are after my job.

So stories matter, and stories are good. But they remain fiction, and therein lies their danger. Computers are able to identity and record the patterns of near-uncountable many phenomena, which is how machine-learning works: they can build and discard explanatory models more quickly than we can, before honing in the “best” one (Alexa records everything you do but notices that the stock of cat food is predictive of your tendency to order more, while the number of baths you take per week is not.)

Humans, on the other hand, tend to become stuck in “comfort narratives”, stories that we’re used to, regardless of the explanatory power of those fictions. In the media, this tendency manifests itself as “chunkability”, treating complex, interwoven stories as simple and discrete.

There are three stories that have dominated the British media over recent weeks:

1. the antipathy of young people towards capitalism;
2. Britain’s departure from the European Union; and
3. the government’s new Industrial Strategy.

I’ve read countless stories about each of these; I don’t think I’ve read one which linked them together. But together they fit. Let’s have a go at making the narrative complete.

“Everyone knows” that the current generation of young people, caught in the pincers of both the great university mis-selling scandal and a lack of affordable housing, have turned against capitalism. So atrophied has the image of capitalism become that more than twice as many people under 45 in the UK believe Jeremy Corbyn is on their side as believe the same of Theresa May’s party.

Unless you’re happy to wait around until this cohort elects Corbyn, whose government would destroy your pension and ruin the country, then the centre-Right needs to win back the trust of young people. So far, most of the suggestions veer between the useful but reactive — build more houses; well, yes — and the fatuous (free railcards).

Now imagine yourself a twenty-something graduate, wondering what Britain will be like in two decades’ time. You switch on the news: Brexit-Brexit-Brexit and nearly all of it pictures of old white guys arguing about trade fees. On the table lies your unopened mail: student loan due, and a final demand from your rich-as-Croesus landlord. I think even Alexa would be able to predict your vote.

But, last week, in amongst this noise, these stories of Brexit and youthful anti-capitalism, there came a policy agenda which might just deal with both issues at once – by aiming for something more important than either.

Greg Clark, the Secretary of State for Business in Theresa May’s government, launched his industrial strategy. Greg isn’t a showy-offy type of man but is that rare beast, a genuinely clever politician with a PhD in quantitative methods. (Disclosure: I worked for him in 2015-16 — on sabbatical from industry — as a speech-writer).

The man is not independent of the policy…

Tony Blair’s industrial strategy was rock stars in sweaty rooms, to fan his Cool Britannia neuroticism…

The EU’s industrial strategy is to bugger Greece and protect Germany…

Jeremy Corbyn’s industrial strategy is the misery of Venezuela, with less agreeable weather.

Greg Clark’s industrial strategy is a narrative, thank God, rooted in reality, yet visionary in its ambition.

The white paper announces a sequence of “Sector Deals”, to cover construction, life sciences, the automotive industry… and Artificial Intelligence, where we came in. Britain’s at the front of the field in these areas, says the paper: so let’s maximise our competitive advantage and be the best in the world. Each sector is intellectually exciting, redolent of well-paid careers spent developing medicines and machines to improve life for people in need. (Britain is more than parasitical banks, is the not-very-silent subtext).

Those specific sectors may or may not float your boat, and the white paper itself (perhaps he’s lost a good speech-writer :-)) employs too much cliché about “innovation” (as though anyone ever stood up in a business meeting and said “Let’s not innovate”.) But it’s refreshing to read of government ideas about how the country might flourish after the EU’s clammy hands have been prised away.

More than refreshing, it’s vital. Maybe Greg’s strategy will change over time; perhaps AI will never move beyond the order-cat-food level. But the UK needs a vision for its future to match the revolutionary zeal of its young people, something more exciting than the old lecture on how socialism tends not to turn out awfully well.

I said humans need stories to overcome the paralysis of signal overload: neither young British voters, nor middle-aged Tory politicians, are exceptions to this rule. For the last two years, the British centre-Right has been paralysed by the dominance of the “Young people love Jezza” story on the one hand, and the “Goodness, isn’t negotiating with a bunch of horrible EU bureaucrats difficult?” on the other. Into the gap has moved the Left, spinning its yarns of utopian paradise; artificial unintelligence, you might say.

How do we save capitalism from electoral extinction? And what do we do after Brexit? Greg Clark’s industrial strategy is Chapter One of an exciting new book: The Future Is Bright. The Future Can Still Be Tory. I found it a compelling read, and think it deserves a wider audience. I hope there’s a second chapter, and soon.

Her argument is that today’s teenagers aren’t just a bit different from previous generations, but profoundly different. That’s not a mere matter of opinion, or of older people forgetting that they were young once; as noted yesterday it can be measured as a series of dramatic shifts in behaviour. For instance:

“The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently. It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out. That’s something most teens used to do: nerds and jocks, poor kids and rich kids, C students and A students.”

Economics is not the driver here. Loafing about with your mates needn’t cost anything. Rather it’s the availability of a digital alternative. With a smartphone you can maintain a running conversion with as many or as few people as you like – and do so no matter where each of you happen to be. As with most things in life, ease drives out effort, and so digital supplants physical interaction. Indeed, once stripped of its absolute necessity, the latter becomes a choice – which, if not mutually desired and agreed upon, might also be viewed as an imposition. You only have to consider office culture, where email has supplanted face-to-face conversations and phone calls (which are increasingly regarded as intrusions or escalations).

However, electronic communication imposes its own costs – and not just by reducing the scope (and potential benefits) of actually meeting your friends:

“For all their power to link kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out. Today’s teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts relentlessly—on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it. Accordingly, the number of teens who feel left out has reached all-time highs across age groups. Like the increase in loneliness, the upswing in feeling left out has been swift and significant.”

Adults are not immune. There’s nothing like social media for making you feel small. For instance, there was a time when you didn’t have to be that jealous of the fantastic holiday that somebody else went on – not unless they invited you round to view their snaps. But now Facebook etc provide an effortless connection between the boastful and the envious.

To fully engage with social media is to make your life a product (albeit one for which you receive no payment) – a product that others not only consume, but also review in the form of ‘likes’, ‘follows’, ‘retweets’ and comments. Twenge describes the consequent affirmation-anxiety as a “psychic tax”.

As I say, this doesn’t just impact upon today’s teenagers, but theirs is the first generation to have their social lives fully immersed in an interactive digital environment. And this is physically as well as psychologically taxing:

“Fifty-seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991. In just the four years from 2012 to 2015, 22 percent more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep.

“The increase is suspiciously timed, once again starting around when most teens got a smartphone. Two national surveys show that teens who spend three or more hours a day on electronic devices are 28 percent more likely to get less than seven hours of sleep than those who spend fewer than three hours, and teens who visit social-media sites every day are 19 percent more likely to be sleep deprived.”

So, evidence of yet another rapid generational shift – another deformation of human experience that we’re just accepting as if there’s nothing we can do about it. However, there are decisions to made here, whether at the level of the individual, the family or the nation.

Technology is not destiny.

That is certainly true of Jean M Twenge’s extended essay for the Atlantic, which will be relevant for years – and decades – to come. It concerns that oldest of subjects: young people. We’ve become accustomed to thinking about the young as the Millennial generation. However, the Millennials – i.e. those who came of age in the years around the Millennium – aren’t so young anymore. The oldest of them are now in their thirties and it won’t be long before we’re talking about middle-aged Millennials.

So, enough about them, let’s talk about the next lot – those who are teenagers now or soon will be. For reasons that will become clear, Twenge calls this generation ‘iGen’ – and argues that they represent a profound discontinuity in the evolution of society:

“I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out…

“Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it… The changes weren’t just in degree, but in kind.”

What’s going on, then? Teens becoming a bigger nuisance than ever before? A ravening hoard of drunken, drugged-up super-yobs? Er, no:

“More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.”

For instance, in both Britain and America, rates of teenage pregnancy have been in long-term decline, but have dropped like a stone in this decade.

No need to worry about iGen, then? Actually, there is – but for different reasons:

“Psychologically… they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades.”

Even among the majority who remain remain in reasonable mental health, one has to recognise that passivity has its downside:

“In earlier eras, kids worked in great numbers, eager to finance their freedom or prodded by their parents to learn the value of a dollar. But iGen teens aren’t working (or managing their own money) as much. In the late 1970s, 77 percent of high-school seniors worked for pay during the school year; by the mid-2010s, only 55 percent did. The number of eighth-graders who work for pay has been cut in half. These declines accelerated during the Great Recession, but teen employment has not bounced back, even though job availability has.”

Twenge argues that while previous generations stretched out their adolescence well into their twenties (remember the ‘lad culture’ of the 1990s?), this generation is, for good and ill, stretching out its childhood – not drinking, not driving, not going out, not working, not doing much of anything apparently.

Perhaps, prompted by the economic uncertainties of the 21st century, they’re too busy studying? But, no, that’s not it either:

“If today’s teens were a generation of grinds, we’d see that in the data. But eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s.”

So, what are they doing with their time? The answer, as I’m sure you’ll have observed, is that iGen are on their smartphones – and the consequences of that we’ll look at tomorrow.