What Our Boomers Failed, and Our Gen Zs Have to Pay For

By LuzD’Paz

Our forefathers built the factories, highways, towers, ports, and institutions that made modern prosperity possible. Yet industrialisation and majestic infrastructure were never the whole measure of progress. The unfinished inheritance of earlier generations, climate damage, inequality, insecure work, weakened education, and short-term politics now falls heavily on Generation Z. The question is not whether the older generation built; it is whether they built a future that the young can safely inherit.

The Promise of Global Agendas

When the United Nations advanced global agendas, from the Millennium Development Goals to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the intention was explicitly intergenerational: to secure peace, dignity, equality, and a healthy planet for present and coming generations.

The UN Secretary-General’s Our Common Agenda states plainly that young people and future generations “will have to live with the consequences of our action and inaction,” and calls for their collective interests to carry greater weight in policy and budget decisions.

That promise has only partly been kept. The UN’s 2023/24 Human Development Report describes a world trapped in “dangerous gridlock,” marked by uneven development, intensifying inequality, and political polarisation. The global system has produced remarkable wealth and technology, but it has not distributed security, opportunity, or environmental safety fairly across generations.

Climate Debt: The Largest Unpaid Bill

The clearest failure is climate. Industrial growth powered by fossil fuels created modern economies, but it also released greenhouse gases whose worst consequences are deferred to those who did not cause them. The IPCC finds that climate impacts are already affecting water availability, food production, and livelihoods, and that today’s children and future generations face greater exposure to flooding, heat stress, water scarcity, poverty, and hunger.

The scale is stark: children aged ten or younger in 2020 are projected to experience nearly four times more extreme events under 1.5°C of warming by 2100, and five times more under 3°C. Gen Z therefore inherits not merely an environmental problem, but a structural transfer of risk: older generations enjoyed the benefits of carbon-intensive development, while younger people must finance adaptation, endure disasters, and rebuild livelihoods.

Work Without Security

Gen Z is also paying for an economy that prizes flexibility for employers more than stability for workers. The International Labour Organization reports that 64.9 million young people aged 15–24 were unemployed globally in 2023, with a global youth unemployment rate of 13 per cent. Although this is the lowest rate in fifteen years, the headline number conceals a deeper

problem: many young people are underemployed, informally employed, or trapped in precarious contracts that delay independence, home ownership, and family formation.

This is the employment paradox of our time. Previous generations could often expect that education, hard work, and entry-level employment would lead to a stable life. Today’s youth face higher qualification requirements, slower wage growth, expensive housing, and competition from automation and global labour markets. The failure is not laziness among Gen Z; it is the weakening of the social contract between effort and security.

Education Promised, Learning Denied

Education was meant to be the great equaliser, yet access alone has not delivered opportunity. UNESCO reports that 251 million children and youth remain out of school worldwide, and that the global out-of-school population fell by only 1 per cent in nearly a decade despite the adoption of SDG 4 in 2015. More children are enrolled than ever, but enrolment without quality learning, digital access, and relevant skills leaves many young people formally educated yet economically unprepared.

For Gen Z, this becomes a double burden. They are told to upgrade their skills continuously, while the systems meant to prepare them remain unequal and under-resourced. The UN’s Our Common Agenda recognises this by calling for transformed education, skills training, and lifelong learning as central parts of a renewed social contract.

The Price of a Broken Promise

Gen Z is inheriting an economy in which the traditional route to security, education, secure employment, saving money, buying a home, building a family has become longer, more fragile, and more dependent on family wealth. The burden is not simply that life is expensive; it is that the costs of housing, debt, and insecure work have risen faster than the incomes and protections available to young people.

Insecure work delays financial independence. A young worker who cannot predict next month’s income cannot confidently take a loan, move out, pursue further training, or start a family. The ILO identifies the lack of stable and paid jobs for young people as a central concern for the future of labour markets, particularly where informality and insufficient job creation persist. In effect, Gen Z is asked to be financially responsible in an economy that often denies it financial stability.

Housing has become the most visible generational divide. Across OECD countries, 60 per cent of people aged 18–29 said in 2022 that they were somewhat or very concerned about finding and maintaining adequate housing, compared with 49 per cent of those aged 30–54 and only 38 per cent of those aged 55–64. The OECD’s 2024 Risks that Matter survey similarly found that seven in ten respondents aged 18–29 were concerned about securing adequate housing over the next decade.

This anxiety reflects a real structural shift. House prices and rents have risen faster than young incomes in many economies, while homeowners who benefited from decades of price appreciation are better placed to help their own children enter the market. The IMF notes that this dynamic can amplify intergenerational inequality, because family support increasingly

determines who can buy in desirable areas. A young person without wealthy parents therefore faces not only high prices, but a narrower route to ownership.

For those who cannot buy, renting often means paying a large share of income for housing without gaining an asset. OECD data show that one in ten respondents reported difficulty paying rent or a mortgage in recent months, and around 9 per cent said they were likely to leave their accommodation because of affordability pressures. The result is a “rent trap”: high rents reduce savings, weak savings delay a deposit, and the delay exposes young people to further price increases. Meanwhile, landlords and asset owners gain from appreciation, while tenants absorb rising costs.

The infrastructure achievements praised by earlier generations, skyscrapers, business districts, highways, and expanding cities, have not always produced affordable places to live. UN-Habitat’s World Cities Report 2024 stresses that sustainable housing must also be affordable to ensure social accessibility and equity, and that affordable and subsidised housing should be located near accessible public transport. In many cities, development has prioritised high-value commercial and residential property over homes for essential workers, students, and young families. The consequence is spatial inequality: young people may find jobs in expensive urban centres but be pushed to distant, poorly connected areas, losing time, money, and opportunity.

The housing and employment crises also combine into a deeper demographic consequence: delayed or abandoned family formation. OECD analysis finds that 88 per cent of respondents identified young people’s financial situation, and 87 per cent identified housing conditions, as barriers to having or expanding a family. When secure work and affordable housing are unavailable, Gen Z does not merely postpone milestones; it may permanently lose options that earlier generations took for granted.

What the Older Generation Must Now Repair

The failure of the “boomers” was not a lack of ambition; it was an excess of short-termism. They built visible monuments but underinvested in invisible foundations: clean air, resilient food systems, affordable housing, mental health, decent work, and democratic trust. The UN has proposed mechanisms such as a Declaration on Future Generations, a Futures Lab, and a Special Envoy for Future Generations precisely because present political and budget cycles rarely protect people who cannot yet vote.

Repairing this burden requires more than telling young people to save harder. Governments should treat affordable housing as essential infrastructure, expand supply near jobs and transit, strengthen tenant protections, and use public land for genuinely affordable homes. Labour policy must move beyond unemployment statistics toward decent work: formal contracts, portable social protection, fair wages, skills pathways, and protection for platform and gig workers.

Generational equity also requires institutions that make the future visible in present decisions. The UN’s Pact for the Future and its first-ever Declaration on Future Generations call for a whole-of-government approach to assess, develop, implement, and evaluate policies that safeguard the needs and interests of future generations. The UN has also proposed youth consultative bodies in every country, a global standard for meaningful youth engagement, and

a Special Envoy for Future Generations to assess the intergenerational effects of major decisions.

The OECD Youth Policy offers practical measures: invest in more and better-quality jobs, guarantee labour rights and adequate pay, use employment services to support young people facing barriers, and align tax and benefit systems so that work pays for young people, including young parents and secondary earners. Governments should also increase housing supply where jobs and training exist, reform land-use rules, invest in affordable student accommodation, and provide portable rental assistance that allows young people to move for work or education.

Most importantly, intergenerational fairness must be built into fiscal and housing policy. Tax incentives that inflate asset prices, under-regulated short-term rentals, and restrictive planning rules may benefit current owners while pricing out the next generation. Gen Z does not need sympathy; it needs a system in which effort, education, and work can once again translate into security, dignity, and a home.

Conclusion

Our forefathers’ towers may touch the sky, but a civilisation is judged by what it leaves beneath them. The industrial age gave us capability; this era’s moral test is whether we use it to repair the damage and hand Gen Z a liveable, fair, and hopeful world. The UN’s global agendas were meant to pull us through. They still can, but only if the older generation stops treating the future as someone else’s problem and starts treating it as a debt already due.