A stable job, a mortgage and a handful of expectations separate Arnau Adán’s life from that of his father and mother. He is 25 years old and lives at his parents’ house while he finishes his last year at the university. At his age, his parents had finished their studies, owned a flat and had a stable job. “We are the first generation that is going to live worse than the previous one, at least according to their standards”, he assumes resignedly. The youth context is so precarious that even the average pension of the new retirees is higher than the salary of the youngest.
Like Arnau, half of the young people in Spain believe that they will live worse than the generation of their parents. And despite the fact that they will do so in a context of unprecedented freedoms and social rights in Spain, the economic and material difficulties they face mean that the social elevator only works down.
The effort of today’s youth to elbow their way into a hostile world of work places the average age of emancipation at the bottom of the European Union. While in Europe it is close to 26, in Spain young people do not leave the family home until after 30. “The increasingly later age is paradigmatic when considering whether today’s young people have it more difficult,” explains José Ignacio Conde-Ruiz, professor of Fundamentals of Economic Analysis at the Complutense University of Madrid.
The job insecurity and the price of housing faced by young people contrasts with the favorable context that their parents had. The older generation, people born between the mid-1940s and the late 1960s, burst into the world of work in the early 1980s: they built their lives in an economic and social environment that uplifted them.
“We have had demographics and the economy in our favor, but we have also had politics in our favor. Being the largest group, we are becoming more and more and weigh more within the electorate”, acknowledges the economist Conde-Ruiz. “When I was young, per capita income doubled every ten years; now it is practically stopped ”, he adds.
This generation —to which Conde-Ruiz also belongs— has come to be described as a “buffer generation” since even now it concentrates a good part of the decision-making positions of a system that has allowed them to live better than their parents and grandparents did and than their children and grandchildren can do. This term was developed by Josep Sala i Cullell (Girona, 1978), a high school teacher in Norway for 15 years and author of the book Generació Tap (Ara llibres, 2020).
In the political sphere, this translates into more than 30 years of political decisions taken from the perspective of this generation: from 1986 to 2018 all the governments of Spain have had a majority of ministers born between 43 and 63. The evolution of the average age of the different Executive teams has risen 14 years from 1986 to the present. Conde-Ruiz laments that “political demography is increasingly going against intergenerational justice: young people are increasingly going to be more irrelevant.”
The generational conflict often leads to criticism of young people from the “glass generation” or “ninis”: With 12.7%, Spain is among the European countries with the most young people who neither study nor work. But at the same time its educational level, with 55% university students, is one of the highest in Europe.
The sermon towards young people is recurrent: ‘At your age I had a stable job, I had bought a flat, a car, I had a daughter and another on the way’. Whether or not they choose the couple-house-car-children model, the independence to choose their path is impossible to achieve without the first premise: having a stable job. An authentic feat considering that 40.4% of those under 25 are unemployed and 25% of young people between 25 and 30 are also unemployed, according to the latest 2022 EPA data.
The context for young people is so complex that the average pension of new retirees is already 38% higher than the salary of young people, one of those striking data that usually agitates debates on the generation gap in social networks. The amount of those who retired this January is 19,668 euros per month while people up to 25 years of age earn an average of 14,218 euros. It is also higher than the average salary for society as a whole, which is between 16,400 and 18,500 euros, according to the latest data published by the INE. In the next decade the number of retirees is expected to exceed 14 million.
A few months ago, the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, highlighted this differential with a phrase about pensions that earned her much criticism: “It is the best distributed salary that families can have”—and she continued— “with help for the son who cannot pay for electricity, to go to the supermarket to buy the five things that the daughter cannot buy, it is the help that our grandfathers and grandmothers give our young people so they can go out on weekends or buy sports shoes”. Around 63% of those over the age of 55 help their family or environment financially, 20% more than in 2021, according to a December Mapfre Barometer. It is no coincidence: 20% of workers under 30 are on the verge of poverty, according to data from the La Caixa Social Observatory.
Generational tensions have also become evident in the public debate in recent months through electoral promises by age groups. Like the cinema at 2 euros for people over 65 or the interrail voucher for young people that Pedro Sánchez announced in the municipal campaign. Or also the universal “inheritance” of 20,000 euros for training and entrepreneurship of young people that Sumar proposes, financed with a tax on millionaires.
The generational conflict has a dangerous drift. “Deep down, the welfare state is a pact between generations” and this implies “not only opportunities for young people, but opportunities for the country as a whole,” says Pablo Simón, a political scientist and tenured professor at the Carlos III University of Madrid.
In a context that does not facilitate the progress of young people, family help to move forward can become a differential factor. And also in a dilator of inequality, not only between generations but also at an intragenerational level. Access to housing is the clearest example: “It is not the same to inherit a flat in a small town as a flat on the Gran Vía”. Or what not to inherit. In almost 75% of households, the main savings asset they have is their home, says Simón.
Arnau does not aspire to be able to buy a home but wants a salary sufficient to access a rental in Barcelona, ??one of the Spanish cities where it is almost impossible to rent a home with an average salary. “Getting rid of these expectations is perhaps the best way to be able to continue with our lives, even if it is in another way.”
With information from Eva Niñerola, Arnald Prat and María Sierra
