If you asked any parent what hopes they had for their children, they would include the chance to see them grow up in an environment where they had every opportunity of obtaining a higher standard of living.

It made me sit up, therefore, when Tom Kochan, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, confessed a concern last week that without a remodelling of the labour market and the institutions that serve it "we will be the first generation in a long time that will leave our kids in a worse position than our parents left us".