Gen Z Will Drive the Biggest Political Moves of Our Time

What I think

Right now, most of the world’s political systems are run by Baby Boomers. The people running the United States, China, India, Russia, Germany, Japan, the UK, Indonesia, Turkey, Mexico, Nigeria and South Africa were all born between 1946 and 1964. In the US Congress, Boomers are the largest generation and hold about six in ten Senate seats, while Gen Z holds one seat out of 533. Worldwide, fewer than 3% of members of parliament are under 30.

I expect that to change. Between 2030 and 2050, Gen Z will gain significant influence over these systems. I think they will drive the biggest political moves any of us has lived through, and the biggest changes to the way societies organize themselves.

I don’t mean that as a compliment. This might turn out to be the least successful generation in modern times at what I call life-success: steady work, a home, relationships that last, a long plan, and the peace of mind to enjoy any of it. They are also over-confident, less educated than their degrees suggest, and apolitical, with little loyalty to any party or institution.

Those weaknesses are exactly why they will move politics so much. From 2030 to 2050 they will be very vulnerable to the economy and to how government and the social system work. I expect populist demands, then economic, social and government collapses in some countries, and revolutions. I also think more of them will turn pro-socialist. Gen Z will come out of that holding real power in politics, business and most other things.

There’s no official definition of Gen Z anywhere in the world, so I’ll use the most common one: people born from 1997 to 2012, up to the start of Generation Alpha. In 2030 they’ll be 18 to 33. By 2050 they’ll be 38 to 53.

What I see at work

I started thinking about this because of the people around me. All of my employees, and most of the people I’ve worked with, have been Gen Z, so this is the generation I know best.

You can rely on them less than you should be able to. They forget things often, and you have to repeat the same thing many times to make sure they remember it. Their phones have too much influence over them. I see behavior problems that look like addiction, and I see clip thinking, where the world comes in as separate fragments with nothing connecting them. A short clip gives you a feeling and the next one replaces it. Work needs the opposite. You have to hold one thing in your head long enough to finish it.

Millennials are different. In my experience they’re much smarter and they remember a lot, so you don’t have to keep repeating yourself. What they lack is confidence, and many of them have succeeded less in life than their ability deserves.

I know every employer complains about young people. This feels different to me. A review of 71 studies and about 98,000 people links heavy short-video use to weaker attention and self-control, most of all when the use is compulsive. That matches what I see every week.

How freedom did this

I think it started at home. Gen Z was raised mostly by Gen X and Millennials. Many of those parents were less confident and less successful than they had hoped to be, and I think that’s why they gave their kids freedom where earlier parents gave rules.

That freedom arrived at the same time as the smartphone. Across OECD countries, 98% of 15-year-olds now have one, and in most of those countries at least half spend 30 hours or more a week on digital devices. In the US, 53% of kids had their own smartphone by age 11 as early as 2019. Across 44 countries in Europe, Central Asia and Canada, problematic social media use among adolescents rose from 7% in 2018 to 11% in 2022. Nobody was watching what happened inside the phone. These kids became addicted to gadgets before they were old enough to understand what was happening to them.

Freedom with nothing asked in return made many of them lazy and focused on themselves. In the US, only 18% of 15-to-17-year-olds had a job in 2018, against 27% in 2002 and 41% in 1986. A first job teaches you to show up, take correction and do what you don’t feel like doing. I think missing that will hurt them, because at some point life stops adjusting to you.

Growing up in dopamine culture

The phone was part of something bigger. The writer Ted Gioia calls it dopamine culture: short, repeated bursts of stimulation built to keep you coming back. Gen Z is the first generation to grow up inside it from childhood.

Older people watched this happen, and they remember the left column. Gen Z started on the right, so for them it’s just normal life.

Once you look for it, you see it everywhere. Around the world, 44% of 18-to-24-year-olds now say social media and video are their main source of news, and in the US more people now get news there than from TV. The Lancet’s commission on gambling estimated that 17.9% of adolescents worldwide gambled in the past year. Oxford’s word of the year for 2025 was rage bait, and the year before it was brain rot.

In the US, people now marry for the first time at about 30 for men and almost 29 for women, compared with about 23 and 21 in 1974. They spent 58.5% of their food money away from home in 2023, the highest share since records began in the 1930s.

Each step asks for less effort and less patience, and each one pays faster. You can scroll for half an hour and barely remember any of it, while a good book stays with you for years.

The reward has a price. After the spike comes a low that most people don’t recognize. They say they’re tired, or burnt out, or a bit depressed, and then that low sends them back for the next hit.

Everything that matters in life sits far away. Between starting something and getting paid back for it, there’s a long middle where you get small results but nothing big enough to keep you excited. That’s where most people quit, and a childhood of instant reward is terrible training for it. There’s a saying that if you won’t sacrifice for what you want, what you want ends up being what you sacrifice.

More confident, less prepared

This generation expects a lot. Ask young people what success looks like and you’ll hear numbers no normal job pays. In the US, the typical full-time worker aged 25 to 34 earns about $59,000 a year. In most of the world it’s far less. If you spend your childhood watching the luckiest people on earth live their best days, any normal salary starts to feel like failure. That gap between what they expect and what they get is what makes them so easy to move.

A degree also doesn’t mean what it used to. Between 2018 and 2022, OECD average scores for 15-year-olds fell 15 points in math and 10 in reading, a drop the OECD called unprecedented and only partly blamed on COVID. Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Iceland and Poland each lost 25 points or more in math. US 13-year-olds reading for fun almost every day went from 27% in 2012 to 14% in 2023.

Then AI arrived. Critical thinking is something you can lose. It takes effort and it doesn’t happen on autopilot. Writing is how you work out an argument, so anyone who lets AI write the essay skips the learning. In a high-school trial in Turkey, students with plain ChatGPT did 48% better during practice and 17% worse once it was taken away.

AI gives you the output without the ability, and the output feels like ability. Over-confidence and weak education end up feeding each other. My own rule is to do my thinking first and bring in AI afterwards.

The economy is hurting them

None of this lets the system off the hook. The current economy, and the way capitalism works today, are hurting Gen Z badly. I say that as someone who runs a business.

Dopamine culture is what capitalism builds when attention is the product. A feed earns more the longer you stay, and a betting app earns more the more you lose. Nobody had to plan this to hurt young people. It just pays.

The middle class is shrinking. In the US, 61% of people lived in middle-income households in 1971 and 51% in 2023, while the middle’s share of all household income fell from 62% to 43%. Across rich countries, each generation is less likely to reach the middle class, and I expect Gen Z to continue that line.

Meanwhile the rich are becoming super rich. Globally, the top 10% own 75% of all wealth and the bottom half own 2%. In the US, Baby Boomers hold about half of household wealth, while Millennials and Gen Z together hold around a tenth. The same generation that runs the politics holds the biggest share of the assets.

More and more people can’t afford ordinary things. Half of US renters, a record 22.6 million households, spend at least 30% of their income on housing. Across rich countries, house prices grew three times as fast as median income over two decades. When a home, a child and a stable life all cost more than a normal job pays, people stop believing in the deal they were offered.

Work is shifting under them too. Worldwide, one in five young people are not in work, education or training. In the US, employment of 22-to-25-year-olds in the jobs most exposed to AI has fallen by around 13–16% relative to less exposed jobs. The entry-level job is the first rung of a career, and it’s the rung AI reaches first.

You can already see what this does to life-success. Young people are now the least happy age group in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and youth happiness has fallen in Western Europe too. Americans under 30 rank 62nd in the world on happiness, while over-60s rank 10th. Despair among Americans under 25 rose from 2.9% in 1993 to 8% in 2023, and the old pattern of unhappiness peaking in middle age has disappeared in the US, the UK and across 44 countries. Americans aged 15 to 24 lost 62 minutes a day with friends between 2003 and 2019.

Faith in the system is going with it. A Cambridge study of nearly five million people in more than 160 countries found that 55% of Millennials were dissatisfied with democracy by their mid-thirties, more than Gen X or Boomers at that age. I expect Gen Z to go further. Even in the US, positive views of capitalism fell to 54% in 2025, the lowest Gallup has ever measured.

I think more of them will probably become pro-socialist, because nobody is fixing the real problems. Young people can see housing, debt and work getting harder year after year while every government promises to fix them. In Pew’s 2022 survey, only 40% of Americans aged 18 to 29 viewed capitalism positively. In a 2021 survey for the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs, 67% of young Britons said they would like to live in a socialist economic system.

To me the logic is simple. Capitalism works when people have a stake in it. Now take someone with too much student debt who can’t afford a home. Americans owe more than $1.6 trillion in student loans, and graduates in England finish with about £53,000 of debt on average. That person has negative capital. They own nothing in the capitalist system, and that’s where things are heading for a lot of people. People like that will turn against it. When enough of them do, power shifts, and the way these systems work shifts completely.

Apolitical until they aren’t

When I call Gen Z apolitical, I mean they have no loyalty to parties and very little faith in institutions. In the US, 43% of Gen Z adults don’t identify with either major party, and only 19% of people aged 18 to 29 trust the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time. Among young Europeans, only 57% prefer democracy over any other form of government, and 21% would accept authoritarian rule under certain circumstances. People like that don’t stay quiet forever. They just have nothing holding them in place once they move.

You can already see them moving. Trump’s share of voters aged 18 to 29 rose from 36% in 2020 to 46% in 2024, and among young men from 41% to 56%. In Germany’s 2025 election, voters aged 18 to 24 gave about a quarter of their votes to the far left and about a fifth to the far right. In Japan’s 2025 election, the “Japanese First” party Sanseito went from one seat to 14 with help from younger voters. You see the same pull toward the edges in Argentina and Poland.

Right now that anger goes both left and right. What these votes share is a rejection of the middle and a move toward more radical approaches.

This is part of something bigger. Radicalism is on the rise: a record 32% of European voters backed populist and anti-establishment parties in 2022. Polarization is rising too, in about a quarter of all countries according to V-Dem. Cultural differences are growing on immigration, religion, gender and family, and this generation grew up with feeds that show each side the worst of the other. Once you stop seeing the other side as wrong and start seeing it as dangerous, compromise feels like betrayal.

The split also runs between men and women. In many countries young men are moving right while young women move left. A generation divided like that will find it harder to form families, on top of everything that already makes families expensive.

Groupthink makes all of this worse. It’s what happens when wanting to fit in matters more than thinking clearly. That’s how a room of smart people talks itself into something any outsider can see is wrong, and a feed full of the same few clips makes it easier than ever.

What happens from 2030 to 2050

Boomers can’t hold on forever. By 2050 the youngest of them will be 86, and Gen Z will be 38 to 53. The oldest Gen Z turn 35 in 2032, old enough to run for US president, and by 2050 they’ll be 53, the age when people run countries. In the US, Millennials and Gen Z together are projected to make up more than 60% of potential voters by 2036, and aging countries around the world are heading the same way.

Gen X and Millennials will take many of the top jobs first. But I expect Gen Z to gain significant influence inside those twenty years. It will start with their votes, which decide what every politician has to promise. Then come the candidates, the advisers, and the people who own the channels everyone gets their news from.

That handover happens just as the bills arrive. More than half of the world’s countries now have fertility below replacement level, which leaves fewer workers for each retiree. Across OECD countries there are about 31 people aged 65 or over for every 100 of working age, and that’s projected to reach about 54 within 30 years. Japan is already at 55. In the US, the Social Security retirement fund runs out in 2033 on current law, which would mean a cut of about 23% in benefits. Gen Z will be paying into systems while being told those systems may not be there for them.

I think these are the years when they will be most vulnerable to the economy and to how government and the social system work. In 2040 the oldest Gen Z will be 43. That’s about when someone who expected to be rich realizes it isn’t coming, while still renting, while AI takes more of the first rungs from the people behind them. If the middle class keeps shrinking and the rich keep pulling away, a large part of this generation will feel it has little left to lose.

I expect the demands to be populist. Cancel the debts. Tax older people’s wealth. Rewrite the pensions. Cap the rents. Close the borders. Ban or tax AI. Get rid of the old parties. Each of these sounds reasonable in a 30-second clip, and clip thinking doesn’t ask what comes after.

This is the last row of the dopamine chart. Populism is dopamine culture at the scale of a country. You get a spike when the giveaway arrives and a low when the bill comes, and then the low becomes the reason to vote for the next promise.

We know roughly how this goes. Across 51 populist presidents and prime ministers from 1900 to 2020, GDP per capita ended up 10% lower after 15 years than it would otherwise have been, and institutions eroded along the way. The same Cambridge researchers found that young people feel better about democracy when populists win, and warned of a major legitimacy crisis once those leaders stay past two terms.

I see this playing out in three ways. Different countries will land in different ones, and some will go through more than one.

Economic collapse. A populist government promises more than it can pay, and debt, pensions and inflation do the rest. People’s savings and wages lose their value. Each crisis then feeds the next round of politics. Across 20 advanced economies and more than 800 elections, far-right parties gained about 30% in vote share after financial crises.

Social collapse. The middle class gets too thin to hold things together. Public services stop working, pensions pay less than promised, fewer people can afford a family, and people stop believing the rules apply to them. From the outside everything can look open while the system underneath has stopped working.

Government collapse and revolution. Where institutions are weak, the middle class is shrinking or small and many educated young people have no work, I expect governments to fall and some countries to go through real revolutions. Radicalism, polarization and economic differences are what will create them. In a divided country, a failed economic system or a banking crisis stops being a problem to solve together and becomes proof that the other side has to go. In stronger states it will look more like constitutional crises and old parties disappearing. Large youth populations have long been linked to political violence, and Africa, the only region with fertility still well above replacement, will have more and more young people looking for work. The historian Walter Scheidel argues that large inequality has rarely fallen peacefully. It took mass war, revolution, state failure or plague. I don’t see much reason to expect a gentler correction this time.

Rich countries are more likely to see the first two, and weaker states the third.

Out of all this, Gen Z gains power. The people who made the demands will end up running parties, ministries, companies and the media, and they’ll have to deal with what’s left. John Dewey wanted education to produce citizens who could think critically. We’re heading for the reverse: the most power to change the system, in the hands of people with the least practice at long thinking. I’m predicting big change. I’m not promising it will be good.

What I would do

If you’re Gen Z, you can beat this forecast personally. Do your own thinking before you ask AI. Put your hardest work in the first two hours of the day. Make bad habits harder and good ones easier, so keep your phone in another room and delete the apps you use most. As Stephen Covey said, it doesn’t matter how fast you climb if your ladder is against the wrong wall. Before you chase a big goal or vote for a big promise, ask why three times.

If you’re a parent, set rules early and keep the smartphone away as long as you can. Freedom is something children should earn.

If you employ young people, don’t lower the standard. Write instructions down, correct people directly, and teach what a first job used to teach: showing up, finishing, and remembering what you were told.

If you run a government, fix pensions and housing before a crisis forces you to. That work pays out in a decade, which is exactly why nobody wants to do it.

How I’ll know if I’m wrong

This is a forecast, so it needs a test. I’m wrong if, by 2050, Gen Z is ahead on income, homes and family, despair has fallen back, the middle class has stopped shrinking, pensions have been reformed without a crisis, and no major country has collapsed or gone through a revolution.

I don’t expect that. There’s an old Buddhist story about a man shot with a poisoned arrow. You pull the arrow out before you ask anything else. That’s the instinct behind every populist vote: stop the pain now and ask questions later. It’s the right instinct for an arrow. A country is harder, because someone has to stay with the wound for years, through the long middle, when reform costs something today and pays out in a decade.

There’s a saying I keep coming back to: easy choices, hard life; hard choices, easy life. I think it’s true of countries too. Gen Z has been trained for the easy choice, and it’s about to inherit the hard ones.