OVER my working life, I have watched the next generation enter organisations with different expectations. Business leaders today frequently complain that younger employees view careers, loyalty and work differently from earlier generations. That may be so, but we should also ask whether the economic proposition attached to work has changed. For many young people today, the connection between work, progress and economic security is much less certain. Perhaps that is one reason something interesting is happening across very different parts of the world.
In France, Spain, Belgium, and Albania, young people have been prominent in protests around issues pertaining to education, housing, public services, living costs, and austerity. In India, a youth-led protest movement that began around examinations and electoral processes appears to reflect a deeper frustration about jobs, opportunity and institutions. The circumstances are clearly different, and it would be simplistic to describe this as a single global movement. But perhaps young people in these very different societies are asking versions of the same question. Does the economic system they have inherited still offer them a credible path towards a better life?
For much of the post-World War II period, the bargain was reasonably clear. Get educated, find employment, work hard, buy a home, accumulate some assets, and eventually retire with reasonable security. Each generation could expect to live better than the previous one. But this bargain is beginning to look less certain. When we think about inequality, we normally think about rich and poor, or capital and labour. An important divide nowadays may, instead, be between those who already own assets and those still trying to acquire them.
Property, financial assets, pensions, family businesses, and inherited wealth all create advantages that compound over time. The child of a family that already owns capital begins adult life in a fundamentally different position from someone who depends entirely on wages. This does not mean that wealth accumulated legitimately is wrong. Saving, investment, entrepreneurship, and risk-taking remain essential to economic progress. The more difficult question is what happens when advantage becomes self-perpetuating.
Across very different societies, young people are asking whether the economic system still offers them a credible stake in the future.
Europe faces another dimension of this problem. Young workers are entering economies with expensive housing, strained public services, and ageing populations. At the same time, they are being asked to finance pension and welfare systems created under very different demographic conditions. The current protests across Europe differ in their immediate causes, but education, housing, public services, and living costs repeatedly appear among the grievances.
India presents almost the opposite demographic picture, yet the underlying anxiety can be surprisingly similar. Its economy has continued to grow rapidly, but growth alone does not guarantee the quantity and quality of employment expected by an increasingly educated young population. Recent protests have had specific institutional triggers, but concern about opportunity and the credibility of the pathway from education to employment sits in the background.
How are young people everywhere reacting to the underlying issues? Some respond by demanding greater redistribution and stronger public services. Others move towards nationalist or populist politics. Others simply lose confidence in established institutions.
Governments often point to achievements in economic growth, employment or falling inflation and struggle to understand why dissatisfaction remains so intense. But young people may be asking a different question. They are not simply asking whether the economy is growing. They are asking whether they can build a secure life within it. This may also explain why younger employees sometimes seem less attached to careers and organisations than earlier generations were. A young person may have a respectable income but still be unable to buy a home, accumulate meaningful assets, or feel confident about retirement. Economically, such a person may be classified as middle class. In lived experience, they may feel permanently insecure.
An emerging divide, therefore, may not simply be between the rich and poor. It is between those who already possess economic security and those still trying to acquire it. That is a more difficult problem for governments, because it cannot be solved simply by increasing GDP.
This is where Pakistan should pay attention. We always describe our young population as a demographic dividend. But demographics do not create dividends by themselves. Young people become an economic asset only when an economy can educate them, employ them productively, and give them a reasonable expectation that effort will improve their lives.
What exactly is the bargain we offer a young Pakistani today? Get educated, compete for too few productive jobs, struggle with housing and asset prices that have moved well beyond ordinary incomes, enter an economy in which family capital and connections matter enormously, and help support a state carrying large pension and debt obligations accumulated over previous decades.
Economic systems ultimately require legitimacy. People are more willing to accept unequal outcomes when they believe opportunity remains open, effort is rewarded, and their children have a reasonable prospect of advancement. Once that confidence disappears, inequality becomes more than a statistic. It becomes political. For much of the past century, the debate around capitalism has centred on whether markets can generate growth and prosperity. The harder question now is whether the prosperity they generate continues to offer succeeding generations a meaningful stake in it.
Unless young people can see a credible route from education to work and from work to economic security, the problem will not simply be that they have less than previous generations. It will be that they no longer believe the system gives them a fair chance. And that is what the protests everywhere are beginning to tell us and what business leaders and policymakers at home need to pay attention to.
The writer advises boards and CEOs on strategy, leadership and organisational transformation.
Published in Dawn, October 21st, 2026
