“Only when we become aware of the part we play, even the most unobtrusive part, will we be happy.”
Antoine de Ste Exupéry
I was reminded last week of the old saying ‘we come into this world with nothing, we leave with nothing - so anything we have in this life is a bonus’. That may be true but, as our commentary ‘Abundance and Scarcity’ reported two weeks ago, it still leaves a huge amount of room for unlevel playing fields.
It is a fact, however, that the potential to achieve great things is distributed fairly across all new-borns, no matter what their background or gender. Nature of course leaves its mark, but the main source of relative advantage or handicap comes from nurture. This was graphically described by Antoine de Ste-Exupéry in the epilogue of his book ‘Wind, Sand and Stars’ (the English title), which we recorded at Share Radio a few years ago.
Helping young people to achieve their potential as an individual is a key objective for those who believe in a more egalitarian form of capitalism. So, this week we focus on some initiatives which will help us move in that direction in the years ahead.
There are currently two dimensions in our quest for egalitarian capitalism: for all adults, one of the opportunities for which we addressed in our commentary of 21st February, and for young people. If the former is addressed through our ‘Shares/Stock for Data’ plan, its relation to international businesses means that convergence in key areas such as regulation and administration will be necessary in order to provide equal treatment.
But for young people, the key ingredients are some resources and life skills as they grow towards adulthood, and these can be addressed on country-by-country basis.
In the United Kingdom it is only the Child Trust Fund scheme which sought to provide some resources on a broad scale for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds: they received initial payments from the Government totalling up to £1,000 each. Over the past ten years, young people in care have also benefited from the Junior ISAs opened for them with an initial Government grant of £200, opened and administered by The Share Foundation via its contract with the Department for Education.
General Government contributions into Child Trust Funds ended in 2011, and Junior ISA accounts have to be funded on a discretionary basis by families since then. There are now 6.5 million young people who are eligible to have one of these accounts but, in 2019-20, subscriptions were only received into one million accounts, or 15%. This naturally represents wealthy families making provision for their own children, but in no way does it provide for inter-generational rebalancing.
The logical solution is to divert part of the proceeds of inheritance levies in order to give young people from disadvantaged backgrounds a better start in adult life - but HM Treasury has been implacably opposed to such hypothecation for decades. One solution might be to incentivise those preparing their wills to allow for an allocation for the young disadvantaged: there is already an inheritance tax discount for charitable giving.
Hopefully the UK Government will be more receptive to these proposals going forward.
Further analysis needs to be undertaken of such schemes for inter-generational rebalancing elsewhere across the world, and hopefully this will be part of the SHARE research project work in Cambridge.
However, resources are only part of the answer: it's also important for young people to have the life skills to empower them to achieve their potential. There are more encouraging opportunities here, on an international basis. A couple of weeks ago I was introduced to a major international online learning platform called ‘LearnDesk’, which appears to have achieved a considerable international reach. Organised from the United States and India, it claims to provide a route for achieving access on a global scale. It will be vital to offer this kind of access in order to address some of the wealth disparities highlighted in our commentary on 4th April.
However, there are many locations where access to online platforms such as these is limited, and that’s where the second initiative, to which I have been introduced by abrdn, is also encouraging: Project Hello World. At present, it is providing solar-powered internet access hubs in several countries where online reach is very poor. Its Dome solution, providing unlimited access for over 1,000 people in each hub, is currently in operation in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Uganda and Nepal. Over 90% of all Hello hub users say that the hubs have improved their quality of life.
So, there are some encouraging signs in terms of both resources and life skills, to bring more opportunity for disadvantaged young people to achieve their potential. And, where it is possible to move them forward on a country-by-country basis, it is once again the tech revolution which is providing the real opportunity for international levelling-up.
Gavin Oldham OBE
Share Radio