Hence it is imperative that policy aims to prevent and reduce social disadvantage, in addition to containing
the purely economic problems that can arise during tough economic times.
The students Brooks examined in 2001, who had entered adolescence after the fall of the Berlin Wall, spent their formative years in a world predicted by Francis Fukuyama in 1992: «The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a
purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by
economic calculation, the endless solving of technical
problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.»
If we looked at the
problem as
purely a question of what response is merited by the state of the science and the
economic predictions, we would probably all be on the same page.