Some­thing dif­fer­ent for this most his­toric of days:

The true mea­sure of a nation’s stand­ing is how well it attends to its chil­dren — their health and safety, their mate­r­ial secu­rity, their edu­ca­tion and social­iza­tion, and their sense of being loved, val­ued, and included in the fam­i­lies and soci­eties into which they are born.

UNICEF — Child Poverty in Per­spec­tive: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries.

Last year the United Nation’s Children’s Fund released their report on child well-being in indus­tri­alised nations (pdf). For the UK and US it was quite a sober­ing read: the coun­tries were ranked last and sec­ond to last respec­tively, and both found them­selves in the bot­tom third of the rank­ings for five of the six dimen­sions reviewed. Neal Law­son of Com­pass—New Labour’s think-tank—said:

The rea­son our children’s lives are the worst among eco­nom­i­cally advanced coun­tries is because we are a poor ver­sion of the USA, so the USA comes sec­ond from bot­tom and we fol­low behind. The age of neo-liberalism […] can­not stem the tide of the social reces­sion cap­i­tal­ism creates.

The best com­men­tary on this report I’ve read was by Maria Hamp­ton in the unashamedly anti-consumerist Adbusters. Look­ing past the sen­sa­tion­al­ism and the bla­tant oppo­si­tion to eco­nomic mate­ri­al­ism, Gen­er­a­tion F*cked: How Britain is Eat­ing its Young is actu­ally a very solid arti­cle on the state of our coun­tries and the future of the gen­er­a­tion now enter­ing the work­force with earnest.

The first stir­rings of major inter­gen­er­a­tional con­flict are already being noted. The basic rights of the recent past — a safe job, free edu­ca­tion and health­care, secure homes to raise a fam­ily, a mod­est but com­fort­able old age — have slipped qui­etly away, all to be replaced by a myr­iad of vapid lifestyle choices and glit­tery con­sumer trin­kets. Excluded from a national social hous­ing scheme sold off by their par­ents, unwill­ing to give birth in the UK’s dra­con­ian new sys­tem of rental accom­mo­da­tion, [and] unable to afford homes of their own in 85 per­cent of the coun­try, today’s iPod gen­er­a­tion is stunted: trapped halfway between child­hood and adult­hood. It now takes them until 34, on aver­age, before they can afford a house, let alone have a fam­ily of their own. Lit­tle sur­prise that they are such woe­ful mod­els of grown-up respon­si­bil­ity for their younger sib­lings to emu­late. Mom and Dad aren’t much bet­ter. By blow­ing their children’s inher­i­tance on 80 per­cent of the UK’s lux­ury good pur­chases […] Britain’s baby-boomers seem hell bent on ensur­ing that, even with­out the com­ing resource short­ages, […] their off­spring will be the first gen­er­a­tion in liv­ing mem­ory to have a low­ered stan­dard of living.

As Richard Esguerra fears, this arti­cle lays out a blue­print that our coun­tries seem to be draw­ing for Gen­er­a­tion Y: a nar­row­ing of our cul­tural expe­ri­ences cou­pled with the by-products of ‘neo­cap­i­tal­ism’, such as “over­pow­er­ing con­sumerism, [the] decline of pub­lic value (like pub­lic spaces or the pub­lic domain)”, and the sta­tus of worker-consumers over­tak­ing that of ‘full-time’ parents.

Maybe, nay, hope­fully this “new dawn of Amer­i­can lead­er­ship” is the cat­a­lyst the devel­oped world will need to reverse these changes: finan­cial and social. We can but hope.

Note: Déjà vu? The major­ity of this is a reworked ver­sion of a post that orig­i­nally appeared on LloydMorgan.co.uk last year.