I start with an observation that I attempt later to account for: Youth are coming to be increasingly marginalized in modern society. In attempting to account for this, I will ask just why this should be; what is it about modern society that leads to the marginalization of youth? We take this fact as if it were natural, but there is nothing natural about it. Why increasingly marginalized? Why not increasingly central?

Figure 2.1 is an indicator of the marginalization. Shown in the figure are ratios of male youth (young men ages 15 to 19) unemployment to the male adult (25 and over) unemployment rate, in 1965 and in 1979, 14 years later. In all countries but one, the ratio is greater than 1.0, and in nearly every country for which data are shown these ratios have increased during that period. In Canada and the United States, the ratios were already high; in some other countries, they became high during this period.

What makes this result especially striking is that during this same period, a great increase occurred in the proportion of youth not in the labor market, but in full-time education. Taking the two results together, the picture is one of a radical change for youth, from being part of the productive economy to being outside it in “holding tanks,” so to speak, with difficulty in moving from the holding tanks to the productive economy.