Lessons from the class of ’92

I graduated from a British university in 1992, in the depths of what then seemed a bad recession. A year later I was rattling across the country on a road trip with three contemporaries, when a song we had never heard before came on the radio: “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?”

Suddenly all banter died down. Within about a minute we were singing along. Facile as it now seems, the “Loser” song, by another unknown impoverished contemporary of ours called Beck, captured what it felt like to be trying to break into adult life during a recession.

Compared with today’s recession, 1992 now looks like a golden age. Today’s youth are the most educated generation in history, yet about one in five people aged 15 to 24 in developed countries is unemployed, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The figures are even worse in Tunisia, where the revolution began last December when an impoverished 26-year-old burned himself to death, and in Egypt, where the young took to the streets before political groups did.

Things will get better – but not for all these people. Some will suffer for decades for having been young in a recession. That’s what academic research says, and it’s what happened to many in my generation.

As a student, I had vaguely imagined that after graduation I would stride out into the world on a red carpet while crowds threw flowers. It didn’t happen like that. Youth unemployment is the way companies adjust to recessions. In 1992 few businesses were hiring. The height of ambition for many of my peers was becoming a civil servant, because everyone knew that civil servants were unsackable.

Nobody I knew became an entrepreneur. No wonder, because British base interest rates in 1992 were more than 10 per cent. Few of us then knew exactly what interest rates were, but we sensed that nobody was chucking cash at us. (“Easy credit” wasn’t a problem in 1992.) Our parents could barely pay their mortgage interest, so there was no money forthcoming there.

I had friends who got good degrees and began flipping burgers, or waiting tables. Others tried to get to the El Dorado of the day: Japan. In every generation there is a city where penniless young wannabe artists and writers flock, and in 1992 that city was Prague. Luckily, even London then still had many cheap semi-slums.

People would grab any job going. One lunchtime a little before graduation, a gaggle of us met an adult we knew in a sandwich shop. The adult offered a friend of mine a humble assistantship. My friend reluctantly took it. He still works in that industry today.

That’s what happens to many young people in recessions. You take a job, any job. You stick it out for a few years. By then you are in your late twenties, with a mediocre CV. Younger people with pristine CVs who graduated during the recovery overtake you. Soon you have a pram at the door. So you never jump to the career you wanted. More than most people’s, your life becomes a compromise. This is particularly true in immobile societies such as France, where your first proper job often determines your career.

The key cultural sources for our generation – most of them produced in the lone superpower of the day – reflected this frustration. There was Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X, about young people hanging around pointlessly. There was Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction, about lowly gangsters killing people or hanging around pointlessly. And there was Doug Liman’s film Swingers, about young unemployed actors hanging around pointlessly.

Yet Swingers came out in 1996, mid-recovery. The problem was that many in my generation had never quite recovered. Academic economists have persistently shown that entering the job market during a recession can cause “scarring” that lingers for years, sometimes decades. For instance, Lisa Kahn of Yale School of Management studied white males who graduated from American colleges around the early 1980s’ recession, and found that even 15 years later they had lower salaries and less prestigious jobs than similar people who graduated in good times. David Bell and David Blanchflower, economists at Scotland’s University of Stirling, studied people who had been unemployed when young during that same recession, and found that 25 years later they were still unhappier, less healthy, less satisfied in their jobs and on lower wages than comparable people. Ominously, Bell and Blanchflower say that Britons who have become unemployed during the UK’s current recession are disproportionately the young.

When you’re young you inevitably overestimate the potential of your friends. You assume that someone with such a lovely figure, or so good at cricket, or with such word-perfect recall of Seventies’ British comedy, must be destined for greatness. Perhaps it was never going to happen for me and my peers, but the fact that it didn’t probably also has something to do with our graduation date.

simon.kuper@ft.com