Britain is no country for young men Would you like to be 16 years old? Let's assume you are 40 years old, the average age of our population, and have a chance to start again, as a random young person entering the labour force in 2012. It must be tempting: there is a minimum wage, higher education has expanded, workplace discrimination is less common and emerging economies offer a global market for your skills. You could spend your pay on an iPad, a high-definition television, or a cheap flight abroad. However, you could also be one of the 20.8 per cent - and rising - of British 16- to 24-year-olds not in full-time education and without a job. This is the highest rate over the period for which there is comparable data. And if you are lucky enough to buy a house, you will have to wait until your mid-30s before you step on to the property ladder, unless you have rich and generous parents. More disturbingly, the average 20-something is no better off today than at the turn of the century. This is unprecedented. My colleague Chris Giles has shown how those born in 1985 - two years after me -are the first cohort for 100 years not to be experiencing better living standards than those born 10 years previously. For the first time, Brits in their 60s are earning more on average than those in their 20s. "You're a lot better off than I ever was," my 85-year-old grandfather points out. He's right. Living standards might have flatlined since 2000 but they are, of course, better than they were 100, 50 and 25 years ago. But, being human, we care deeply about immediate relative changes, such as whether we will be - or feel - better off than our parents. When asked, young people today do not believe this is going to be the case. It is easy to blame baby boomers. Apparently they marched for Mao before settling down to mortgages and middle-classdom. This is misleading; the 1970s were tough for the nine out of 10 postwar children that did not go to university. Frankly, bad-mouthing an entire generation should be left to Gertrude Stein. Nevertheless, the idea that parents leave the world in better shape for their offspring is an assumption underlying modern politics. The failure of politicians to notice that this assumption may in fact be false suggests a shortage of imagination. Perhaps this is unsurprising: the three leaders of the main UK political parties were born between 1966 and 1969, and came of age in the largely benign labour markets of the late 1980s and 1990s. They are like Philip Larkin, in "High Windows," ignorantly watching "everyone young going down the long slide to happiness, endlessly." The coalition has belatedly recognised there is a problem. It ditched the previous government's Young Person's Guarantee, which provided training, education or a job for young people unemployed for six months. In November it was dusted off the shelf and relabelled the Youth Contract, disingenuously described as a "radical new approach." This forms part of the wider Work Programme, which pays private providers to find jobs for the unemployed. It is definitely worth trying. But it is also worth remembering that these markets are only as efficient as the civil servants that make them. The programme's fine print shows that providers are paid less to get someone aged 16-24 in work than any other group; hardly backing rhetoric with action. Fortunately, we don't have the dual labour markets of southern Europe. Indeed, some commentators argue that we should cut the hourly minimum wage for young people to make them more attractive to employers. But it wouldn't work, according to recent evidence from the Low Pay Commission. Of course, even the best-designed work programme can only do so much in the absence of growth. Youth unemployment is especially sensitive to demand and almost always higher than the overall rate. However, it was - unlike broader unemployment - rising from 2005. The bridge from education to work was rickety even before the crisis. It is easy to say we should be more like Germany, where strong links from classroom to factory are still in place. However, we must start with the economy we have, not the one we wish we had. Geography, globalisation, culture, policy decisions and comparative advantage have given the UK a service-dominated economy. This means traditional pathways for young people to a trade are less common. Last month UK employers issued their ritual complaint about the shortage of skills across Britain's youth. It is a moral scandal that we allow young people to leave school without being able to read or write, as the head of Ofsted reminded us on Thursday. Young people need to take responsibility too: they will need to work harder, for longer, and take out more debt to fund any further education. Education needs improving (this has occurred to politicians), starting at the earliest possible point, but it is wrong to pin all this blame on the school system, the supply side of the equation. The demand side matters, too. One element we can take from Germany is the idea that there is a deal to be struck. Companies could get more protection over losing workers and continued subsidies for basic skills training in exchange for doing more to train workers in advanced skills and push them up the wage ladder. Apprenticeships could provide the basis for this. More broadly, we need to think about how we distribute our increasingly tight resources across the generations. Like the US and other western states, the UK government is a health and welfare insurance scheme backed by a military. This means public spending is greying, like the population. This is the legacy of postwar promises and the reality of voting patterns. No one after the grey vote would agree with W.B. Yeats that an aged man is but a paltry thing. We need to ask whether it is right to spend so much money on well-meaning measures such as pension tax relief and winter fuel payments, and relatively little on curbing youth unemployment or on early-years education. A gesture to begin this debate would be to invite 16-year olds to vote. But ultimately, the frozen generation can only help themselves so much - it is up to those 40-somethings, again. The writer is the FT's executive comment editor