ABSTRACT
The hatred with which the mature of Western society regard the young is a testimony to the latter's importance, to their power potential and actual. The adolescent has not enjoyed such economic and social power as is his and hers in mid-twentieth-century Britain, Europe and America, since the early days of the classical Industrial Revolution, when rapidly declining rates of mortality among the young made them worth taking seriously, and technological change and the reorganmtion of industry gave them a strategic position in the nation's economic life.
