The Battle Over Britain’s Lost Youth

 In psychology there is a concept known as agentic living: the idea that we have some sort of agency over our own lives. At heart it is a throwback to the age-old philosophical question: are we determinists who believe we live at the mercy of a fate already written, or do we, as Augustine hammered out, have freewill? On reading Alan Milburn’s excoriating interim report into ‘the moral crisis’ of one million 16–24 year-olds who are not in work or education (NEETs), it becomes obvious there is a sharp dividing line between determinists and those who attempt to exert agentic freewill.

For the most part, the children and young people who are now effectively bed-bound – scrolling on their phones until 5am, applying for a few jobs and then giving up, who long ago ducked out of school because the experience was overwhelming – have become determinists. They have come to an early conclusion that their own efforts to succeed at life are marginal, so they may as well be pushed around by the education, mental health and welfare systems, big tech, their iPhones, the stagnant economy and the threat of AI. On the other hand, there are actors in this whole blood-chilling saga who have exerted powerfully destructive agency over society. By their individual actions and decisions, we have arrived at the inevitable situation which, as Alan Milburn writes, has created “a generational fault line” that costs the taxpayer £125 billion a year, with entrenched youth disengagement “fast becoming a strategic economic risk for Britain”....<<<Read More>>>>...