The Promise That Worked, Until It Started Splitting
The post-war promise was not sentiment or nostalgia. It was real and it was measurable.
Between 1950 and today, global life expectancy rose from 46 years to over 73. Extreme poverty fell from more than 60 percent of humanity to under 10 percent, even as world population tripled. Literacy climbed from 36 percent to over 86 percent. Child mortality dropped from one in five to under one in twenty-five. World Bank research on intergenerational mobility confirms what many families lived. Children born in the mid-twentieth century surpassed their parents with living standards at historically high rates across many countries. Progress was not only visible in development charts. It was visible in the lives around us.
That is what made the promise feel axiomatic. It was held in living memory across generations. Faith and effort seemed to convert, reliably, into dignity, security, and something better for the next generation.
So has generational progress hit a wall?
The evidence suggests the wall is not in survival, literacy, or access. It is appearing in the pathways that once converted effort into adulthood: work, housing, wages, wealth, and confidence in the future.
The work entry crisis is perhaps the most structurally damaging signal. Federal Reserve Bank of New York data shows graduate underemployment running at approximately 42.5 percent for recent cohorts. A degree no longer reliably opens the door it once did. Layoffs driven by AI adoption and hiring hesitation have compressed the entry pathway further. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas captured the mood precisely when he noted that the single most frequent question he was hearing from clients was: “What will our kids do?” That question, arriving from some of the most economically secure people
in the world, tells us something important. It is not a question about survival. It is a question about purpose, formation, and forward motion.
MIT Sloan Management Review has made the deeper point: entry-level work is not merely economic. It is where human judgment develops. When that on-ramp narrows, the loss is not the first salary. It is a formation pipeline for the next generation of leaders, professionals, and citizens.
The wage and housing story runs in the same direction. US net productivity rose 64.6 percent between 1979 and 2022. Typical worker pay rose 14.8 percent. Effort and reward have quietly decoupled. Meanwhile the home price to income ratio, which held at roughly three to three and a half through the 1980s and 1990s, rose above five and a half by 2023. For many young people, a home — the most tangible proof that effort had translated into stability and the platform from which families are built — has
moved beyond reach despite full-time work. Inflation has added to the daily experience of strain: when the cost of essentials rises faster than wages, the arithmetic of getting ahead stops working even for those who are trying.
Wealth concentration is accelerating the divide rather than bridging it. Federal Reserve data shows Baby Boomers hold approximately 52.6 percent of US household net wealth, Gen X approximately 27.8 percent, and Millennials approximately 9.4 percent. An $84 trillion wealth transfer is projected through 2045. But Cerulli Associates’ research suggests that as wealth is already concentrated, much of it is likely to move within already-wealthy families rather than rebuild broad mobility.
The confidence numbers reflect all of this. Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer found that only 36 percent of people globally believe their families will be better off in five years. In many advanced economies, the number is lower.
This is the wall. Not a collapse of progress, but a fracturing of its transmission. The promise that effort converts into security, education into opportunity, work into dignity, and prosperity into confidence for the next generation, that conversion is weakening. The promise does not disappear in one dramatic moment. It stalls quietly at the handoff between generations.
The Fracture Is Travelling
The same weakening is now appearing across societies: effort and education not reliably becoming security, dignity, and confidence that the future is worth building.
Global youth unemployment sits at 12.6 percent, roughly three times the adult rate. In China, urban youth unemployment reached 21.3 percent in mid-2023 before the government suspended publication and revised its methodology. In India, the ILO's 2024 Employment Report found that youth account for nearly 83 percent of the country's unemployed, and that educated youth face higher unemployment
pressure than those with less schooling. A degree is becoming the new minimum, not the advantage it once was.
There are cultural signals as well. In China, tang ping, lying flat, and bai lan, let it rot, describe a generation exhausted by effort that does not convert. In South Korea, the N-po generation captures something more sequential: young people giving up on dating, then marriage, then children, then homeownership, one milestone at a time, under the same conditions of unaffordable housing, work insecurity, and weakened future confidence.
Sustained low fertility and ageing, now well established at scale, carry their own social and economic consequences. When fewer young people enter the workforce, the burden of supporting ageing populations falls on a smaller, less wealthy generation than the one before. The UN projects the global ratio of working-age adults to older people will fall significantly by 2050. Each generation is being asked to support more, with less, while receiving a weaker inheritance of wealth, institutional trust, and opportunity than the generation ahead of them. That is not a temporary imbalance. It is a structural one,
and it compounds.
In parts of Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, the progress story is still alive, but early warning signals are visible in job quality, climate exposure, urban housing, migration pressure, and whether expanding education can become meaningful work.
Constant political strife erodes trust and confidence and increases long-term fatigue.
History offers something important here. Periods of comparable structural strain have occurred before. Some societies were overwhelmed. Others found a way through, not through singular leaders, but through the durable work of institutional renewal: new systems of knowledge, legitimacy, welfare, and shared purpose, built to outlast any one generation.
That capacity for renewal is what matters most now. And it has happened before, in ways worth understanding now.
When Societies Have Found a Way Through
Structural strain, institutional exhaustion, legitimacy crisis are not new conditions. What is instructive is not that they occurred, but what some societies chose to do when they did.
Two examples, separated by geography and century, carry the same essential lesson.
Song China: 960-1279 CE
The collapse of the Tang Dynasty in 907 CE led to the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, decades of warlordism, regime turnover and fragmentation.
When the Song dynasty emerged from that disorder, its answer was not simply military consolidation. It made a different choice about what society would reward. It expanded the civil service examination system, shifting power and prestige from military aristocrats toward scholar-officials. Printing spread texts and helped widen the pool of those who could compete. Commerce, urban life, paper money, maritime trade, and technological diffusion followed. Agricultural improvement and urban growth followed, extending the benefits of renewed stability into ordinary life, not only administration. Knowledge and administration became more central than inherited force as the basis of the social order. That shift outlasted any single emperor.
Abbasid Baghdad: 750-1258 CE
The Abbasid rise followed conflict and legitimacy stress in the Umayyad order. Baghdad was founded in 762 and became a cosmopolitan commercial and intellectual centre.
The challenge was how to hold together a vast, diverse civilisation across languages, faiths, regions and inherited bodies of knowledge. The translation movement brought Greek, Persian, Syriac and Indian knowledge into Arabic. The House of Wisdom was important, though historians debate whether it was a single institution as popularly imagined or a symbol of a broader Baghdad scholarly ecosystem. Scholars translated, preserved, criticised and extended knowledge in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, optics and administration. Institutions, libraries and public infrastructure were created to sustain and support state patronage.
Crisis does not automatically produce renewal. Many societies were simply overwhelmed. These societies found a way through disorder. Renewal came not from force alone, nor from a single transformative leader. It came from institutional redesign from societies choosing to make knowledge, merit, legitimacy and public welfare the foundations of what came next. The systems they built outlived the crises that produced them.
These examples had ecological and material buffers that the present does not. They expanded into land, labour and resource frontiers. Any renewal today must happen while reducing damage to the world that future generations will inherit, not by consuming it.
History shows that renewal is possible. But possible through what, and for whom, and by what right? That is where wisdom traditions across centuries have something to say.
What Wisdom Asks of Us
History shows that societies have sometimes found a way through disorder. But history alone cannot tell us what renewal is for, or who it must serve.
For that, we need to turn to another inheritance: centuries of thought about order, legitimacy, duty, fairness, restraint, and stewardship. Not as a museum of old philosophy, and not as ready-made answers for the twenty-first century. The world of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls was not our world. Nor were the worlds of the Arthashastra, Confucius, Daoist thought, Indigenous seventh-generation traditions, Khalifah, Dharma, Pitri Rin, or Laudato Si.
If the wall is real, then the task is not simply to restart growth. It is to use the understanding of history and the wisdom of the past to ask recurring questions: how do we live together? What makes power legitimate? What protects the vulnerable? What do we owe one another? How far into the future does responsibility travel? And can one generation pass on more than it took?
That wisdom matters now. The intergenerational promise cannot be repaired only with better economics or better technology. Economics can show us imbalance. Technology can expand capability. History can show renewal patterns. But wisdom asks the questions that determine whether renewal is humane.
This is, in its own way, a comfort. Civilisations as distant from each other as Song China, Abbasid Baghdad, ancient India, and the Enlightenment have faced these questions and left us something to work with. We are not starting from nothing.
How Can Our Children Be Better Off?
We began by asking whether generational progress has hit a wall, and whether our children will be better off than us. The evidence suggests the wall is real—though not the same everywhere, and not yet final. History shows that walls like this have been overcome before, through institutions built to outlast any single generation. Wisdom reminds us that overcoming it is not only a technical task, but a moral one—asking what we owe each other across time.
We have some thinking and work to do. To be clear, this does not take away from the importance of children taking responsibility, much as we did. Every generation must cultivate discipline, attention, skill, patience, and responsibility. They need to understand that a degree is not destiny, that comfort must not weaken resilience, and that agency and judgment matter even more in the age of technology.
But we will miss generational responsibility if we ignore the structure around the young. Values and agency matter, but agency lives within societal conditions. When entry into work narrows, housing moves out of reach, trust weakens, and the future feels less reliable, “try harder” is not enough as a social philosophy. A better contract must ask more of individuals—and more of the systems into which they are born.
In the 75th edition, we will go deeper into that inheritance and ask what it means to build a social and generational contract for our own times: what each generation now owes the other, and what each of us can carry forward, beginning with ourselves.
Do you believe our children will be better off than us?
Has the balance changed between personal responsibility and the social conditions needed for effort to become progress?
What can we learn from history and wisdom traditions to build a better handoff between generations?
I would love to hear your comments, thoughts, and your company as we explore what a better handoff between generations can look like.
Best wishes,
Sidebar: References
External Sources
World Bank: Fair Progress? Economic Mobility Across Generations
Shows why the post-war promise felt real: many mid-twentieth-century cohorts experienced historically high upward mobility.
Our World in Data
Tracks long-term global progress across life expectancy, poverty reduction, literacy, and child mortality.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Labor Market for Recent College Graduates
Provides evidence on graduate underemployment and the weakening education-to-work pathway.
MIT Sloan Management Review
Supports the judgment-pipeline argument: entry-level roles build judgment, not just output.
Edelman Trust Barometer
Tracks institutional trust, public sentiment, and declining confidence in future economic mobility.
ILO India Employment Report 2024
Highlights youth employment challenges in India, especially among educated populations.
Dieter Kuhn: The Age of Confucian Rule
Explores Song China’s institutional renewal through governance, examinations, commerce, and learning.
Dimitri Gutas: Greek Thought, Arabic Culture
Covers the Abbasid translation movement and its role in knowledge synthesis.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Social Contract Theory
Clear overview of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and the foundations of social contract thinking.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Intergenerational Justice
Frames the ethical question of what present generations owe future ones.
Great article