Global Capitalism and the ‘Lost Generation’
Moral Maze
BBC
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 22 October 2020
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
By November, 1 million young people in the UK will be unemployed, according to a report out this week from the newly-launched Alliance for Full Employment. It has the backing of the former Prime Minister and Chancellor Gordon Brown, who warned of a “lost Covid generation” of young people with no prospects and nothing to do. The cost, he says, is more than just a financial one: “It destroys self-worth; it hurts family life; it shatters communities”. So what should our moral obligation be to this generation? A parallel has been drawn with the post-war period which saw the birth of the Welfare State. While there is widespread support for short-term financial help, there are those who caution against what they see as writing off an entire generation as ‘lost’, or institutionalising state dependency; they believe that the pandemic has merely accelerated inevitable economic change from which a brighter future can emerge. There are many young people who don’t share that optimism, and point to how the Covid crisis has exposed pre-existing health and wealth inequalities, which, for them, raises bigger questions about the morality of global capitalism. This is the moment, they argue, to change capitalism so that it focuses on what humans really want and need, and to actively promote the things we value beyond financial success and economic usefulness. Capitalism’s supporters, however, see our quality of life as being intrinsically bound up with markets and economic growth. For them the moral response to Covid is to kick start the consumer boom and allow people the freedom to make money unconstrained. Is it time for a radical challenge to unbridled capitalism for sake of the young, or is the ‘invisible hand’ still the best way to get a leg up? With Grace Blakeley, Ian Goldin, Daniel Pryor and Jamie Whyte.
Producer: Dan Tierney.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Good evening. It's not been the best of years to be young. A report this week on the effects of the COVID crisis predicts a million young people will be out of work by the end of this month, with little prospect of getting a job. |
| 0:11.6 | The former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been talking darkly of a lost generation and said there was a moral imperative to protect them from the consequences of the coming recession. |
| 0:21.6 | First question, |
| 0:27.5 | is it really worse for millennials than previous generations? What is our moral obligation to them? |
| 0:33.0 | More widely, the crisis has prompted loud calls for us to reboot our economic priorities, |
| 0:39.6 | to replace or at least reinvent global capitalism with a system that would be fairer, more caring, less destructive. |
| 0:45.5 | It's an increasingly polarised argument, with the other side saying that it's globalised capitalism that has lifted billions out of the poverty that many had been kept mired in |
| 0:49.2 | by systems that have promised but not delivered a better, more equal society. |
| 0:54.2 | So second question, if when we get out of this mess, what's best? |
| 0:58.5 | The swiftest possible return to life as it was, or maybe for the sake of the young, |
| 1:03.1 | somehow bridal capitalism into producing what we should want and need. |
| 1:08.0 | That's our moral maze tonight. |
| 1:09.1 | The panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator at the |
| 1:10.9 | Times, Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Inter-Religious Studies at Edinburgh University, |
| 1:15.9 | the historian Tim Stanley and the priest and polemicist, Charles Fraser. Jarls, I'm just guessing mine, |
| 1:21.6 | but I think you'd go for that, wouldn't you? Listen, capitalism creates a society that's great |
| 1:26.2 | for moving capital around the world and a disaster for actual human beings. |
| 1:30.5 | People now, younger people are more uprooted, they're unhappier, they're more loss, they're more depressed, they're more lonely. |
| 1:36.7 | And the myths peddled by capitalism are largely responsible for this. |
| 1:40.4 | Melanie Phillips? |
| 1:41.7 | I think COVID-created unemployment will create victims who definitely need |
| 1:46.0 | our support. But I think the good society is about much more than economics. And if we really want |
... |
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