Lucky or Left Behind? The Gen Z Money Story

0:00Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com. Hello there and welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell. Now, we get loads and loads and loads of emails and of messages and of comments about what we do in the podcast. at or close to the top, it relates to young people. And in particular, I would argue so-called Gen Z, 14 to 29. What's going on with them? What kind of world are they living in? What kind of world are they going to inherit?

0:38What, if they do have kids, are their kids going to inherit? How much we should be worried? Have we seen all this before? And it's just a kind of a phase that the world is going through. So we should take it seriously. And we are. We've put together a four-part series on this, not a moan fest, not a oh bloody kids moan fest or rant, something that we hope is balanced because the picture is nuanced and it's complicated. So which is it? Is Gen Z lucky or is Gen Z left behind? That's what this series is going to investigate. So we brought in a journalist, Vicky Spratt, who first came to my attention when she wrote a very good book about housing, but who has spent the better part of a decade speaking to hundreds, hundreds of young people about these questions.

1:28So she's going to be guiding us through four episodes and she's going to be joined by specialists along the way. Here's episode one. Lucky or left behind? The Gen Z money story. So let us set about this task. At every level, radical improvement and reform for our children. Freedom is a precious gift that one generation can pass to the next, and a promise that I intend to keep. We know the importance of those early years and setting children up for a good life. Your dreams are our dreams. Gen Z. Gen Z. Gen Z. New report says Gen Z struggling with anxiety and uncertainty about the future. Mental health issues, depression, anxiety.

2:12Why is my heart pounding like I'm in war? They're calling them Generation Jobless. The work ethic, it's missing in the younger kids. I'm never going to own a house. Absolutely, when you're spending$40 a day on smashed avocado and coffee. Your generation is greedy and selfish. Generation Z are utterly useless. You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? Change is coming, whether you like it or not.

2:42Welcome to The Rest is Politics, Dr. Eliza Philby. Great to be here. Eliza Genzy, in some ways, the most connected, informed generation in history. In others, being absolutely hammered by fiscal drag, by wage stagnation, student loans, high house prices. I could go on. How bad is it really? I think we are living through quite a momentous time. I mean, we all feel it, don't we? We all feel the sense that the script we were sold and were told has been upended. And that script was very much, and it was a late 20th century script, right? Let's get as many of you to university. Through becoming a graduate, you will get on some sort of professional track.

3:29And that professional track will ensure that you get on the housing track and that track to financial stability. And we are living through a time now, and I think we've been living through it since 2008, actually, where that script has, I think, been found wanting and I think is being upended. And so when I say, actually, Gen Z have got it better than millennials, I'm going to be really specific here. What I mean is, I think the delusion is over. The sort of years of realism, I think really started post-Covid. So I think we spent a lot of 2010s going, why am I still having to stay at my parents?

4:12Why am I not gaining financial stability? Why is my degree not bringing the rewards I thought? And I think there was a lot of sort of confusion and anger throughout the 2010s. I think Gen Z, I think there's a greater degree of realism and anger. So let's be clear about what is it we are seeing. Firstly, what we were told hasn't materialized. What we were told to do hasn't brought the rewards that it brought our parents. I think also, though, it's very clear areas where that's becoming true. So housing, your area of expertise. You know, when we think about the accessibility of housing for boomers and Gen Xers, It wasn't there for millennials and it's even less there for Gen Z.

4:58There's nuances within that, certainly regional differences, but it's not that accessible route to home ownership, isn't there? I would say home ownership now is a leap and not a ladder. We can go into the details of that. Number two, education. The pathway to tertiary education is off the back of creating a system as we did, really under New Labour, but subsequently under the coalition and the Tories. is the expectation of going to university and creating a system where basically you sunk or you swam and if you swam, you got to university. And obviously that came with increasing price. And what we've seen is this horrible situation where the price of university has gone up, but the value of that degree has gone down.

5:45Not in all courses, not for all universities. So we've got housing, education. And number three, I think, is jobs. And I think actually this is where there is real crisis for Gen Z because you've got this kind of collision of forces happening where you've got tax on wages, you've got the graduate tax if you're paying back your student loan, you've got an increasingly challenging workplace because of the force of AI. And work isn't bringing the rewards that it did 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And so you combine that, education, housing and jobs. It's no surprise there's a level of disillusionment and a level of crisis amongst a generation who are, if they can, ever more reliant on the bank of mum and dad.

6:35Yeah, we were labouring under the illusion that it was still possible to work hard and buy a house and that we lived in a meritocracy. And what you're all saying is Gen Z, we're never under that illusion. They know full well. It's really about how much your parents have. So we've polled the Rest Is Politics audience and had 12 ,000 responses. Yeah, huge number of people really interested in this. At the point that we're sitting here, 12 ,000, maybe it will be more. 6 ,000 of those from Gen Z. I'm really interested in something you just said about 2008, whether perhaps that's ground zero for Gen Z, for this generation that are coming up now.

7:11One listener said, our futures as educated homeowners were bargained away after 2008. And if our futures as mid-income renters are also being bargained away on the world's battlefields, it's better to know that and prepare ourselves. Yeah. I think 2008 is a really important moment, partly because it is that point when asset prices start to actually, you know, the house prices start to go up before them. But, you know, it does quantitative easing, you know, is the policy that's pursued and it, you know, asset prices are increased. I think it's also because it is a nice turning point in terms of the cost of education as well, although that obviously came out later.

7:53There is that key moment. I think it's also, and I don't think we talk about this enough is one's financial attitudes are actually shaped earlier than you would presume. They're actually shaped around between the ages of seven and 12, right? Really early. And so when people talk about the global financial crisis, they tend to think that it impacted millennials. I think psychologically it impacted Gen Z who saw their parents being laid off, who maybe saw their parents, you know, having their house repossessed, who saw their parents struggle and I think therefore grew up in a sort of culture of economic realism rather than a culture of unending economic opportunity that perhaps millennials did.

8:32And of course, if they went to university, have been loaded up with a huge amount of debt. Do you think that has shaped their worldview? One of the things, I mean, I taught in higher education for a number of years And I definitely saw a transition that my older colleagues really didn't understand, the emergence of the student as a customer, right? And when you are paying for something, you respect a return on that investment. So when you have a generation who are, you know, working harder than ever, maybe had some private tutoring, maybe, you know, maybe did, you know, huge number of GCSEs, number of A-levels, worked much harder than I did, right?

9:16And the focus is education, education, education. And then you enter tertiary education and you go, actually, hang on a minute. You know, I've got six hours of lectures or maybe more if you're doing sciences. My lecturers don't know my name. And I'm not sure this degree is going to get me in an area of work that I want to work in. I think it's a different mindset entering tertiary education amongst Gen Z. And I saw it happen in universities where the number of times we'd sit in meetings going, how can we like you know basically sort of bribe them so that they can fill out that student satisfaction survey to the highest percentage should give them free beer and free pizza yeah then they'll say oh this university is great and i think there is this sort of real culture shift that i think older generations don't really understand that's happened in higher education which is now it's consumers who want a really good service and by the way if you went to university during the COVID pandemic, you had online lectures, you really had really, frankly, piss poor service.

10:16And there's a sense that, what am I getting for my money? And you combine that with a generation who's had a smartphone in their pocket since they were 13, done probably most interesting learning on YouTube, maybe now ChatDVD, and are really questioning the point and price of going. And I think that's as important as obviously the price that we now see people paying. Let's talk about the price, right? Because it is a big price tag. Until 2006 in England and Wales, fees were£1 ,000 a year. Then they went up to£3 ,000 a year. That's what I paid. Then 2011,£9 ,000 a year, they trebled. So the average graduate now has got more than£50 ,000 worth of debt.

11:03If they do well, if they go on to earn around£60 ,000, the marginal tax rate they are paying is above 50%. And yet we're not calling it a graduate tax, but it is essentially a graduate tax, right? Yeah. And not everybody is going to be hammered with that because if you've got wealthy parents who can help and who can pay your fees upfront or not particularly wealthy parents, I've spoken to people who say that their parents took money out of their houses to pay for their university education, they're not going to have that debt when they graduate. So it's not a level playing field. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, and by the way, you know, the UK has some of the worst student debt in the world.

11:46Much worse than America, which is surprising. And why is that? Because a number of parents start saving for the graduate degree in America in a way they don't tend to here, but also because they have better bursaries. So I think we need to realise how bad it is actually in the UK, even compared to America. That's interesting because there is this sort of illusion that our system is fairer. Can you explain that a bit more? I don't think it is. I don't think it is. And I think it's also related to wages, right? And I think that the thing you alluded to is that it's not just the interest on that loan.

12:27It's also, if you are in a high, you know, what is a high earning salary? But if you are earning a lot, the more you pay and the more, you know, the more you're seeing go out of your wage packet, suddenly the student graduate premium doesn't look like, you know, what you were led to believe. it should look like. And I think, again, it's this growing up an economy where work doesn't pay. And if work doesn't pay, the return on the investment of your education isn't there either. And I think you combine student loans crisis, and it is a loans crisis. A lot of people are now talking about the government like it's the worst kind of loan shark.

13:05Yeah. Loan shark. And I think there's a huge justification. The way that they've tweaked the loan means that people are legitimate when saying, that's not the agreement that I signed up for. Also, that it's all slightly done in stealth and secret and incrementally so that it's a bit like the fiscal drag. No one really knows or notices what's happening, but actually you look at your payslip and it's a considerable amount that's coming out each month. That's where the sense of grievance comes from. You combine that in a low wage economy where we don't have the same growth in wages that you have in the US and you combine that with the level of taxation on wages as opposed to taxation on wealth, there's a legitimate grievance there for sure.

13:49I think what's interesting is how is the government going to respond? And I think, and this goes back to my earlier point, is that throughout the 2010s, there were student protests around student fees. There was lots of about the intergenerational gap. Lots of talk about boomers have had it all and their kids have had nothing. But there was no political ramifications of that, because the Tories were totally in sub to the boomers and not enough young people voted. I think now that's starting to change. One of the reasons why I think that is politically, this is difficult for Labour because of the impact potentially it might have on people switching to the Greens.

14:32But I think it's also a sense of young people have been screwed for a long time and there's a there's a there's a sense that their parents are starting to realize it i don't know many people over 50 who go i wish i was young now so much fun these days for young people there's a great time to be a boomer right that wasn't said 10 years ago do you know what i mean like i think a lot of boomers and gen Xers, particularly Gen Xers housing their 20-something kids, having to pay to get their kids through university, having to delay their retirement plans, are really now realising how screwed their kids are financially.

15:12I think a lot of boomers are as well. Therefore, it's more politically volatile for young people, I think, and potentially there's a huge opportunity for young people to start sort of protesting and gaining some political capital because I think a lot of families are carrying this financial burden. It's not just young people were screwed, it's the older generations are having to carry their kids in a way that didn't happen 20, 30 years ago. And so these aren't young people's problems, they are problems that are being carried by families. And let's just talk about the graduate premium, because the defense for hiking fees, I remember because I was working in parliament the night of the vote in 2010.

15:59I remember we were stuck in parliament. We weren't allowed out. I was protesting. Yeah, I remember. People were protesting. Everybody got kettled. But the justification at the time was graduates earn more than non-graduates. It's right that they pay something towards that education. But what happened after 2008 in Britain is that wages did stagnate, particularly for younger workers. Whereas, as you've said, in the US, actually, graduates did see their earnings go up. So we used to have a graduate premium of around 50 % more. We still have a graduate premium, but now it's more 36 % is at that kind of level.

16:36Do you think it's still worth going to university? If you want to hear my whole conversation with Dr. Eliza Philby and the rest of the Gen Z series, where I'll be joined by Freya India, Bobby Duffy, Alistair Campbell, and former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, sign up at therestispolitics.com. And if you're a student, make sure you sign up with your student email address for an exclusive discount.