

Manu Joseph: The young are everyone’s hope—but has youth become the world’s most overvalued asset?
At a dinner hosted by a family that owns a newspaper business, the conversation naturally drifted towards artificial intelligence, then doom. I said something I believe in, even though I knew it was not very persuasive. That the time has come for a triumphant return of a general interest print magazine, as long as it was brilliant, entertaining and not overrun with activists.
Someone said, “But young people, they don’t read, definitely not print.” Not for the first time, the thought occurred to me: spare me the young, why should they matter for everything? They have no money, no clout. Even if it was true that they won’t read a magazine, which I don’t believe is true, why should that decide the survival of a product?I notice this fixation with the young in several businesses. It is as though there aren’t other kinds of people on this planet.
That is odd when those businesses survive on other kinds of people. In cinema, television, dining, apparel, hospitality, social media and just about any business except hospitals and old-age homes, people at the helm worry a bit too much about the young—how to get them, or how to keep them. Entire nations are obsessed with the young.
That insufferable buzzword, ‘demographic dividend,’ is all about this phenomenon. The value of the young is not only their fertility rate anymore, as the average age at which people become parents has been increasing. Their value is said to lie in their contribution to society, which I believe is overblown.
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