(Little, Brown, £14.99)
The youth of today? Don’t know they’re born. Can’t work, won’t work, or if they do work, they’re probably doing it to fund a drug habit.
Such attitudes still persist among some older people, including some of those who write newspaper columns or sit in parliament. But it could hardly be more wrong. There is a rising generation which is sober, self-motivated and thoughtful. The problem, says Georgia Gould in Wasted, is that we aren’t using their potential, and are content instead to leave them alienated from conventional politics and wider society
Gould—at 28 a bonafide “young person”—doesn’t share the disenchantment of her contemporaries. The daughter of Philip Gould, a senior strategist for Tony Blair, she started going to her father’s focus groups as a teenager and writes with unabashed earnestness about the power of party politics. (She is a Labour councillor.) But having checked her political privilege early in the book, she embarks on a journey to discover—largely through her own focus groups—what drives or demotivates the rest of her generation. The early parts of the book, in which Gould measures the size of Britain’s intergenerational gulf, are thoughtful but dense, never citing one statistic when three will do. The closing chapters, which present some thoughts on how to bridge the gap, are perkier, with solid and occasionally surprising ideas on everything from housing to computer hacking.
Wasted is no romp. Gould’s writing is filled with think tank-isms, her prose peppered with “active partners” and “empowerment.” But as a starting point for solving a neglected problem, this book merits attention from the old fogeys at the top of the tree. They might find they learn something, once they start listening.
The youth of today? Don’t know they’re born. Can’t work, won’t work, or if they do work, they’re probably doing it to fund a drug habit.
Such attitudes still persist among some older people, including some of those who write newspaper columns or sit in parliament. But it could hardly be more wrong. There is a rising generation which is sober, self-motivated and thoughtful. The problem, says Georgia Gould in Wasted, is that we aren’t using their potential, and are content instead to leave them alienated from conventional politics and wider society
Gould—at 28 a bonafide “young person”—doesn’t share the disenchantment of her contemporaries. The daughter of Philip Gould, a senior strategist for Tony Blair, she started going to her father’s focus groups as a teenager and writes with unabashed earnestness about the power of party politics. (She is a Labour councillor.) But having checked her political privilege early in the book, she embarks on a journey to discover—largely through her own focus groups—what drives or demotivates the rest of her generation. The early parts of the book, in which Gould measures the size of Britain’s intergenerational gulf, are thoughtful but dense, never citing one statistic when three will do. The closing chapters, which present some thoughts on how to bridge the gap, are perkier, with solid and occasionally surprising ideas on everything from housing to computer hacking.
Wasted is no romp. Gould’s writing is filled with think tank-isms, her prose peppered with “active partners” and “empowerment.” But as a starting point for solving a neglected problem, this book merits attention from the old fogeys at the top of the tree. They might find they learn something, once they start listening.
