Robert Verkaik

In 2020, for the first time in its history, UNICEF began feeding hungry children in the UK whose capital city boasts more billionaires than any place on earth. Soaring rents, unfair taxation and a growing gig economy have brought about unprecedented economic shame: Amazon warehouse workers living in tents, nurses turning to foodbanks, London firemen commuting hundreds of miles to work. Even those higher up the ladder are losing their grip on the life they were promised. Barristers take home less than the minimum wage and doctors are starting out with £100,000 student debts on salaries lower than the national average. We’re all facing a new economic phenomenon - in-work poverty. At the same time a generation of young professionals is coming to terms with never being able to own even the cheapest home in their area. Why You Won't Get Rich tells the stories of people at the bottom as well as the top of our economy, revealing how capitalism in its current form is too blunt an instrument to tackle Britain's epidemic of inequality. The only way to reverse the damage is if people feel they have a financial stake in society.

How Capitalism Broke its Contract with Hard Work

Why You Won't Get Rich

Aske Dørge

All this means that many millennials can't even afford to buy a garden shed. These trends - together with student debt and meagre pensions - seem to be having a psychological impact on mil- lennials and the generation trailing after them. Perhaps because life seems more uncertain, they have become more risk-averse in the labour market. … These younger generations have sub- consciously opted out of trying to get rich because they can see before them the huge attainment gap between what they can have and what they desire.

Courtesy of the pandemic we now know how many 'bullshit jobs' there are, how many pointless business journeys we take every year, how so little of the working week needs to take place in an office and how much valueless and unnecessary product we produce.

One way to interpret this is that more people today have a fatalistic attachment to the system of government. They feel it doesn't matter whether they cast their vote or not because they dont benefit either way. There is a correlation between hard times and low turnout. But there is an even greater link between poverty and political disengagement. People in the

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