Future Shock

In The Shadow Of Generation X And The Seniors Tsunami, How Can Today's Youth Plot Their Own Course To Happiness?

Early on a cool spring morning at the Torrefazione coffee bar on Victoria's Government Street, Mark Kruse serves the caffeine crowd milling around the high marble counter. It's Friday and for Kruse that means a workday that begins here at 5:30 a.m. and finishes 16 hours later at Club Monaco, the unisex clothing store up the street. With black, spiky hair, dark-rimmed glasses, black shirt, and subtly dotted black-and-white tie, Kruse looks every bit the savvy 23-year-old he is.

Young and carefree, however, he isn't. After three years studying English at the University of Victoria, Kruse is $14,000 in debt. He works 50 to 60 hours a week to pay living costs and the interest on his loan and to save something for a move to Vancouver this fall to study marketing at BCIT. At that point, he'll take on more debt.

"Education costs have gone up so much," Kruse says, "it's difficult for people in my generation to get financing, and the debt you take on shadows you for so long afterwards. The majority of people I know have student loans; not everyone's parents are rich. A lot of people take on more than I have."

I'm here talking to Kruse, and nursing a double Americano, because I want to know what's changed from my generation to his. Right now my focus is education, but I'm also curious about other things that shape our quality of life, that overused phrase. What do members of Kruse's generation face, for instance, in the areas of health care, social equity, environmental integrity, and global security? What have baby boomers passed on to them, and how has that affected what they will pass on to their children? Are things better than they were 40 or 50 years ago? Are they worse?

Answering these questions requires looking beyond the simplistic and often misleading progress reports that our political and business leaders trot out. Quantitative measurements such as gross domestic product (usually called GDP and meaning the total value of goods and services produced in a country within a specified period of time), the consumer price index, and inflation rates tell us nothing about gross domestic happiness. GDP ignores positive elements such as free time, volunteerism, and unpaid work. It says nothing about how wealth is shared. Worse yet, things that make the GDP go up often make good things go down. Canada's record of natural-resource depletion (think Atlantic cod) exposes the folly of viewing the economy as a closed system when, in truth, it is part of a larger ecosystem.

Seventy years ago, Simon Kuznets, the Russia-born U.S. economics professor who was an architect of the GDP, warned against equating national welfare with economic growth. Since then, people have urged governments to use other yardsticks to measure progress. Ronald Colman is one of them. A political scientist and executive director of Genuine Progress Index Atlantic, a Halifax-based nonprofit group, Colman is developing an index of well-being and sustainable development for Nova Scotia that he hopes will become a model for the nation.

"It's one of the biggest illusions in our society that you can use the growth statistics to tell whether we're better or worse off," Colman says in a phone interview. For instance, the Quebec ice storm, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the Oklahoma bomber were all good for the economy but bad for people and other creatures. And he mentions the head of a multinational pharmaceutical company who reportedly said: " 'These days you have to be in diabetes--it's a growth industry.' "

Graph of 2001 census data showing the change in average Canadian family income between 1990 and 2000 (in 2000 dollars), by incomedeciles. Graph compiled by the Canadian Council on Social Development.

COLMAN IS FAR from alone. Since the early 1970s, people have searched for better markers of progress. Human Resources Development Canada (now Social Development Canada) developed in the 1990s an Index of Social Health for Canada modelled after a similar American index. HRDC researchers used indicators such as drug abuse, child poverty, access to affordable housing, and the gap between rich and poor. In a 1997 report, Measuring Social Well-Being: An Index of Social Health for Canada, they concluded that Canada "experienced its best years for the Index in the latter half of the seventies."

"When plotted against the GDP, the results explain the discomfort felt by people despite the growth in the economy," the report states.

Other measurements, such as the Index of Economic Well-Being or the Genuine Progress Indicator, include elements such as environmental degradation, unpaid work, or unemployment. But no matter what the measurement, the results are essentially the same. In A Survey of Indicators of Economic and Social Well-Being, a 2000 paper prepared for the Canadian Policy Research Network, author Andrew Sharpe concludes: "Many variables that affect well-being are just not advancing as quickly as they used to, or may even be declining."

That scenario puts youth, their children, and their children's children on the wrong side of an increasing generational divide in North America. No doubt, many of the past decades' changes have been terrific on a material basis. We have bigger homes, faster cars, and more toys than ever. But wealth is not social health. Other critical changes show a troubling downward trend. Canada's position on the United Nations' annual human-development index, for example, fell from third to eighth last year (behind the U.S.) after spending most of the 1990s in the top spot. (The index measures, among other things, adult literacy, educational enrollment, infant mortality, life expectancy, and GDP.) Young people are up against obstacles--environmental, health, and economic--that their parents never imagined. Although the same can be said of every generation, in an increasingly complex, competitive, and consumptive world, these changes demand notice.

Here's a snapshot of how life in Canada has changed in five key areas.

EDUCATION

Access to education has changed dramatically over the past 50 years--for the better. In the early 1950s, more than half of all Canadians over age 15 had less than a Grade 9 education. Today, almost half of Canada's high-school graduates go on to more education, the highest postsecondary participation rate of any of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's 30 member countries.

"Who went to university in the 1950s? The sons and daughters of the elites," says Charles Ungerleider, a UBC education professor and a former B.C. deputy education minister. "We had a tremendous increase in egalitarianism since the '50s and a democratization of postsecondary education."

More people with skills and knowledge under their belts, he adds, benefit everyone. The higher-educated earn higher incomes, pay higher taxes, and are less likely to be a drain on society for reasons of crime, sickness, or unemployment.

Yet those higher credentials come with a higher-than-ever price tag. Since 1990, per-student debt after the completion of a four-year degree has tripled from almost $8,000 to about $25,000.

Those numbers don't surprise New Westminster student Chantal Shovar. Shovar, 22, her husband, Brian, and their 21-month-old daughter, Brielle, live exclusively on student loans. Chantal and Brian, both first-year Douglas College students, have embarked on an expensive academic odyssey. Chantal wants to teach and Brian hopes to be a doctor. Each borrowed the maximum loan allowed: $7,395 per semester. Chantal says she can't bear to think of their debt load upon graduation. Until recently, she worked part-time stocking shelves at London Drugs from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m., then attended classes, picked her daughter up from daycare, and went home--to clean house, prepare meals, put her child to bed, and study before collapsing for the night. She quit her job.

"I was just exhausted. I couldn't do it anymore," Shovar says. "Being a student these days--working at a job, doing volunteer work, and then maintaining your grades--is a very hard thing."

Kruse and Shovar's situations are not unique. According to the Canadian Association of University Teachers, postsecondary education is less affordable today, even though it's more accessible, than at any time in the past 100 years. Average undergraduate tuition fees, adjusted for inflation, more than doubled since 1990, with even steeper increases in other areas: a tripling in law, a quadrupling in medicine, and a five-fold increase for dentistry. All this at a time when academic expectations have been raised for everyone.

"When he was 20 years old, my dad was hired on at a mill with a great pension plan and got paid top dollar," Shovar says. "Forty years ago, you could walk into any trades job as a young man or young woman and make good money."

Today, people who want to get away from the service counters worked by Kruse and many others like him feel that they don't have much choice but to pursue higher education. Their perception is largely reality. As Ian Boyko, national chair of the Canadian Federation of Students, says, fully three-quarters of new jobs this year require some postsecondary education.

"I don't think this gets through to the older generation enough, people who went to university or college in the '60s and '70s," Boyko says in an interview from Ottawa. "It's just not comparable to today. Postsecondary education has to be looked at as more of a necessity than a privilege or luxury."

It is a necessity, however, that's not available for everyone. Despite high enrollment numbers, Boyko says, if you're from the top quarter of the socioeconomic high-rise, you're twice as likely to receive a postsecondary education than if you're from the bottom quarter.

HEALTH

Nobody's dying like they used to. In fact, every generation of Canadians is healthier and lives longer than the generation before. That's mostly because of dramatic declines in infectious diseases such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. The greatest determinant of health, however, remains wealth. The poor are more sick more often, and die younger than the rich. Still, most of us smoke less, get more exercise, and are more health-conscious than our parents. Cardiovascular disease remains the number one killer and rates are expected to rise, but as with cancer that's not because of any greater risk but of greater numbers of elderly.

That's the good news. The bad is that, as a society, we're sadder, fatter, and tremendously more stressed. Depression rates are particularly high among the young. According to Health Canada, the incidence of depression declines with age, a reversal from what happened a generation ago. Obesity rates have tripled since 1985 and are on the rise in all age-sex groups except that of women aged 24 to 30. Stress seems to permeate everyone from federal politicians to pressure-cooked teens. According to a 2002 Health Canada study, more than half the workforce is "highly stressed". Working mothers are the most stressed of all, clocking in an average of 70 hours a week in paid and unpaid work.

Health is one thing and health care another. Who knows whether or not the upcoming generation will receive the quality of care their parents and grandparents did. Our public system is under siege: from dysfunctional federal-provincial wrangling; from the forces of privatization, which know a moneymaker when they see it; and from out-of-control prescription-drug costs. And the so-called seniors tsunami that usually gets blamed for overburdening health care is largely a myth, says UBC health-care economist Robert Evans.

"It's the difference between a glacier and an avalanche. Glaciers transform the landscape slowly. Aging maybe makes a difference of one percent per capita a year. But the past five years have seen drug costs move up 10 percent a year. That's the avalanche."

Young people who feel that governments are feeding an insatiable health-care monster while starving other priorities such as education and environment are right, Evans explains. But that's not because health care gobbles up more of the money pie than ever--it doesn't. We spend about the same portion of national income on health care as we did 20 years ago. What's changed is that governments cut income taxes, a move that benefited the rich far more than the working poor, and thereby cut their own public-sector revenues. For political reasons, they've chosen to maintain health budgets while slashing other ministry budgets.

Still, Evans says, "We don't need to shovel a whole lot more money into health. It's about better management, not more money. And if we keep shovelling more money and looking the other way when it comes to what good it's doing, that's one of the more dangerous things we can do."

SOCIAL EQUITY

Sharing the nation's wealth in a fair and compassionate way used to be a point of pride for Canada. That's what our progressive tax system and public-policy agenda were all about. No more. Social equity has been seriously eroded in Canada, especially when compared with other developed countries such as France, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands. In one of the most prosperous decades on record, 1990 to 2000, the rich got richer and the poor either stayed poor or got poorer. The 2001 census figures reveal that over the past decade, the top decile, or tenth, of Canadian families saw their incomes soar by about 15 percent while the bottom decile saw theirs increase less than one percent. The income of many working families actually fell.

Our society is becoming increasingly polarized, according to John Anderson of the Canadian Council on Social Development. This trend does not bode well for the young. Despite higher-than-ever education levels, young workers earn less money today than their counterparts did 20 years ago. Why? More employers pay two-tier wages, one for regular employees and a lower wage for "new" employees. Jobs have become more precarious, many morphing from full-time to part-time or temporary positions, or into contracts. And the purchasing power of the minimum wage has failed to keep pace with inflation.

We've ceased to think of inequality as an issue, Anderson says, while raging on about such poverty-rooted problems as crime, racism, and drug abuse.

"If we're not going to deal with inequality, then we're going to be in for a much rougher ride socially."

WORLD SECURITY

Are Canadians politically safer today than at the end of the Second World War? Not according to the Doomsday Clock. At seven minutes to midnight, the symbolic ticker's hands are set as close to Armageddon today as they were in 1947, when an international group of concerned atomic scientists set it up.

But the clock's wrong, says Andrew Mack, director of UBC's Human Security Centre at the Liu Institute for Global Issues. The 1950s and '60s were the most likely era for a nuclear war, due to high levels of American and Russian paranoia, Mack says. Since then, the Cold War ended and there's been an explosion of development and peacekeeping work. The result is a less violent, less dangerous world. Globally, the number of wars is down 40 percent since 1990.

"The reality is that the major powers--Britain, France, Germany, Russia, United States, China--have gone through a period of unprecedented peace. It's more than 50 years since any of them fought each other, and that is quite extraordinary. And there is no longer any expectation that they will go to war with each other."

What is possible, however, are increased terrorism attacks by a pool of highly disaffected Muslims. Bush's war on Iraq, Mack says, has encouraged an orgy of anti-West sentiment. Although only a tiny percentage of angry, alienated, and humiliated Muslims are willing to use violence, he notes, that is still a tiny portion of hundreds of millions of people.

"The invasion was likely good for Iraqis in the long term but bad for global security."

Still, Canadians have no reason to freak out about terrorism. They are at much greater risk of dying of illness or accident. Also, despite the overwhelming media focus on the terrorism since 9/11, the number of international terrorism incidents has actually fallen since 1986. The source? The U.S. State Department.

ENVIRONMENT

Previous generations had world wars. This generation has climate change. From chewed-up countrysides to empty seas and rivers to naked hills to poisoned orcas and starving polar bears, the record of what Canadians have done to their native land in the past 50 years is heartbreaking. Although in far better shape than most countries, when compared to what previous generations had, Canada is seriously degraded. As we grow richer--at least materially--the world around us becomes more impoverished.

But don't dare despair, says B.C. environmental lawyer David Boyd, because that's sentencing future generations to a very frightening world. Face the challenges--the biodiversity crisis, the fallout of industrial agriculture and aquaculture, and climate change--and take action. Take comfort also from the dramatic increase in environmental awareness in the past 30 years.

"There's plenty of reason for optimism," Boyd says. "There's a tremendous well of human ingenuity we haven't tapped into in terms of addressing these problems."

Twenty-five years ago, scientists discovered another global challenge that was thought to signal the end of the world: chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) eating holes in the Earth's protective atmospheric ozone layer.

"At the time, people thought that in 50 years' time we'd all be forced to live indoors and only venture out briefly because of all the...radiation," Boyd says. "We'd all go blind and we'd all have cancer."

But that's not what happened. Instead, nations got together and agreed to phase out the use of CFCs, mainly used as aerosol propellants, refrigerants, and cleaning solvents. Canada reduced its use by 95 percent and the world by 90 percent.

"That's a tremendous success story," Boyd says. "Think of how different the world was one or two generations ago--and if it can get worse in a hurry, it can get better in a hurry."

ON MARCH 27, 2000, Liberal MP Joe Jordan (Leeds-Grenville) stood up in the House of Commons and said: "Making decisions primarily on the information provided by the gross domestic product is like driving a bus and just staring at the speedometer....The dashboard of any modern society should be equipped with a broad range of instruments to indicate changes in natural resource stocks, pollution levels, biodiversity, the durability of goods, employment satisfaction, the quality of education and health care, leisure time, unpaid work, crime and other factors of consequence. The political reality is that while for years politicians have driven the bus looking only at the speedometer, the people are looking out the windows. They are getting more and more concerned."

Three years later, on June 3, 2003, the House passed Motion 385, a recommendation that government develop and publicize a set of indicators to measure the well-being of people, communities, and ecosystems in Canada. Such indicators already exist and the task would not be onerous, according to Mike Nickerson, an Ottawa-area environmentalist who was instrumental in getting the motion passed. Nickerson has worked for decades on well-being and sustainability issues and coauthored the Canada Well-Being Measurement Act, the document behind the motion.

"Citizens' groups, government departments--everywhere you turn, someone's measuring something," Nickerson says in an interview from Lanark, Ontario.

So far, however, Motion 385 has gone nowhere. Asked why, Nickerson apologizes for his cynicism and says: "Because it's not in the best interests of the powers that be to make that information visible."

That may be. Yet knowing what's improving and what isn't is in Kruse's and Shovar's best interests, as it is in all of ours. Although soothsayers, prophets, and teacup readers predictably forecast doom, the future remains largely unknown. Still, history is the story of the rise and fall of civilizations, a testament to the reap-what-you-sow principle. When harvest time comes--and it's not far off--let's hope our children and our children's children gather more than remnants from what once was a healthy environment and strong social fabric.