ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how governments, economic actors and experts described and tried to explain the far-reaching changes in the economy and the shape of the labour markets that began in the 1970s and 1980s and how certain representations of young people came out of those accounts. It analyses the key gaps between those accounts and what was actually happening. They were gaps partly created from the political drive by governments and financial capital to redesign capitalist economies in the advanced developed world so as to restore what was deemed to be the right and natural dominance of capital over labour. Both the ‘young precariat’ and the ‘young entrepreneur’ are representations shaped by political worldviews and specific political-economic interests. The young precariat representation highlights how many young people are the victims or ‘casualties’ of dramatic new socio-economic processes. The ‘young entrepreneur’ is a more optimistic representation of the hero-saviour.
