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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2024
A piece of advice: if you’re going to live through a deep recession, do your very best not to be a young adult. If you must be young, don't be Black (or Pakistani or Bangladeshi). If you insist on being both young and Black, try your very hardest to have welloff parents.
I remember being told years ago that children and young adults are much less likely to be seriously hurt by a fall than older ones. They’re more flexible and more resilient than older adults whose bones are more brittle and muscles less elastic. The younger you are the more quickly and easily you bounce back. Sadly, the opposite seems to be true of young adults and recessions.
In 2011, a young man called Marc took part in the Poverty and Social Exclusion research project in the UK (Poverty and Social Exclusion 2013). He was 19, lived in Redcar in North Yorkshire and had been looking for work for two years. He’d applied for hundreds of jobs and been on umpteen employability schemes but had no luck. In his area there were 5,490 people on jobseeker’s allowance and looking for work but only 460 vacancies. He lived with his sister in charity-supported housing but only had four months left on his tenancy there. Marc talked about his hopes for the future and his struggles both materially and with his mental health: I’ll probably want in my life just to be stable enough to feed myself and my kids, cos my Mum couldn't when … she couldn't afford to feed herself when she was feeding us …
Some days she couldn't afford to feed us and herself so she would feed us and she would starve herself for two days. Just things like that. That would really affect someone. I wouldn't want to bring up someone like that. I would struggle. I don't know how she went through it at all …
I’ve been searching for work for two and a half years, near enough three, and it's coming up clueless at the moment. Must have been hundreds, hundreds of jobs I’ve applied for in the past two/three years. Bar tending jobs, cleaning jobs. Everything you can probably think of, even fixing lampposts …
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