The lucky cohort

Unlike those born in the 1940s and '50s, the current generation can no longer take global peace and lifelong economic progress for granted

The cohort born in the decade 1940-50 may have been the luckiest till then. Consider some of the major positive global trends it benefitted from. In the 78 years since the end of the Second World War, there has been no global conflict, perhaps the longest period of world peace in recorded history. Of course, there have been long and brutal smaller “wars of intervention” (by America in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and now by Russia in Ukraine) and a sizeable number of nasty civil conflicts in West Asia and Africa. But the overwhelming majority of the world’s population has enjoyed peace for nearly eight decades.

In the 20 years between 1946 and 1966, decolonisation swept across Asia and Africa, bringing self-governance and its manifold benefits to nearly all the world. Thanks to an astonishing and prolonged resurgence of relatively unrestricted international commerce in goods and services since 1950, coupled with a cornucopia of scientific and technological progress, the world has witnessed hitherto unmatched growth in material prosperity. The fairly rapid spread of public health measures and the growing availability of modern medicine and education have greatly reinforced prosperity and well-being.

To just give a couple of indicators, according to United Nations population data, world life expectancy (at birth) soared from 45 in 1950 to 73 in 2022. In the two most populous nations, it doubled in India from 35 to 70 during this period, while in China it increased from 43 to 77. Turning to the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform, the headcount ratio of “extreme poverty” (to population) in the world fell from 38 per cent in 1990 to below 10 per cent in 2019. In East Asia, the drop was from 65 per cent to 1 per cent, reflecting the explosive growth of output and employment in the region. In South Asia, the decline was from 50 per cent to under 10 per cent. In sub-Saharan Africa, the decrease was from 55 per cent to 35 per cent, and in Latin America from 17 per cent to 4 per cent.

Of course, there have been famines, disease outbreaks (most recently, the deadly Covid pandemic), the subjugation of one group of people by another, terrorism, huge inequalities across people and their life chances, and other bad things. But they all have to be seen against the backdrop of unprecedented human material progress, at least, until recently. Unsurprisingly, the 1940-50 cohort in India, and across much of the world, has tended to take such unidirectional progress for granted. Indeed, they have come to expect nothing less in what has been called the “revolution of rising expectations”.

However, this seemingly unchecked material progress has taken a heavy toll of the planet’s natural resources and seriously disturbed delicate environmental and ecological balances. The costs have become increasingly apparent in this century. Over 200 years of unrestricted burning of fossil fuels (mostly in industrialised nations) and depletion of other planetary natural resources have spawned the massive problem of global warming and possibly irreversible climate change, with its manifold (and underestimated) consequences. Large areas of the earth are becoming too hot to live in, warming oceans are destroying marine life and flooding low-lying coastal areas, rising air pollution is damaging health, disease vectors are multiplying, and the chances of new pandemics are rising. In recent years, the frequency of extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts, hurricanes, and forest fires, has risen dramatically. Lives and livelihoods have been increasingly lost or damaged.

What needs to be done to significantly mitigate these problems is mostly known, but the necessary political commitment (at global and national levels) has been too often missing.

World economic growth has also slowed since the global financial crisis of 2008-10, and powerful countries seem to be diluting their commitment to free international commerce, driven partly by geopolitical trends and partly because of increasing domestic political resistance from those who have either been hurt or not benefitted much from globalisation. The trends towards greater protectionism and increasing fragmentation of the world economy received a boost from the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in 2016, and the Brexit referendum in the UK in the same year. They were further strengthened by the geopolitical realignments following the Ukraine war and the rising bellicosity of China under president Xi. In India, protectionism has risen markedly since 2016 after a quarter-century of trade liberalisation.

From the viewpoint of human well-being and dignity, economic growth is important but decent job opportunities are even more so. Growth and employment do not always correlate well. For example, between 2011-12 and 2017-18, India’s GDP growth averaged a quite decent 7 per cent. However, according to official employment data, over the period, unemployment rose sharply to 6 per cent, youth (15-29) unemployment nearly tripled to 18 per cent, female labour force participation rate collapsed from 43 per cent to 23 per cent, and the worker population ratio (sometimes called the “employment rate”) for all adults (15 and above) dropped from 55 per cent to 47 per cent. While these ratios have improved somewhat since, they still remain poor compared to the larger East Asian countries. More recently, China’s youth unemployment rate rose above 20 per cent, causing the government to cease the publication of this data!

Across the world, in recent decades, technical progress seems to have demonstrated a pronounced labour-saving bias. The spread of robotics, 3-D printing and a host of other digitally-spawned technologies has heightened the insecurity of low-skill labour. The recent rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have exposed higher-skilled categories to similar insecurities.

To sum up, compared to earlier decades, say 1960-2000, the challenges of climate change, a more fractured world economic order, and the rising scarcity of decent jobs cast long shadows over a not-so-brave new world. The growing polarisation and political dysfunction in the world’s richest and strongest nation, America, has made matters worse. Perhaps, the cohort of 1940-50 was not just the luckiest up to then, but, along with the cohorts of the next couple of decades, may turn out to be the luckiest ever!

The writer is chancellor of the Central University of Andhra Pradesh, honorary professor at Icrier, and author of An Economist at Home and Abroad (Harper Collins, 2021). The views are personal