There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

by Fiona Hill

Just as a college education is no longer a dependable way of improving one’s prospects, moving to a locus of opportunity like London or New York—and in some cases even living there—is no longer a guarantee of social mobility. Today students from the richest families have become the sole beneficiaries of this set of circumstances in the UK as well as the U.S. Their parents cover their education. Their networks help them find jobs. They have a different infrastructure of opportunity, one that has proved impervious to the impact of deindustrialization in the 1980s and recession more recently. The rest of their cohort of Millennials and Generation Z have not been so lucky. And just as female workers, former industrial workers, and other disadvantaged groups were chafing at the beginning of the twenty-first century under a system that was clearly skewed against them, so too would this new wave of younger aspiring workers come to feel an acute and justifiable grievance—one that would soon have a seismic effect on democratic politics on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially in the United States.