After decades of being peripheral to social policy it seems that once again inequality and poverty have become central to social policy. We have seen of late the publication of major studies such as Wilkinson and Pickett (Reference Wilkinson and Pickett2009), Standing (Reference Standing2011), Picketty (Reference Piketty2014) and Atkinson (Reference Atkinson2015) as well as several major OECD reports (e.g. 2011). Added to these have been repeated expressions of official concern by entities like the OECD, the World Bank and the European Commission about evidence of growing levels of inequality not seen since the late nineteenth century. This recent renewal of scholarly interest and official concern is not too surprising.

The Great Recession of 2007–8 indelibly marks the lives of many, an experience compounded by harsh austerity measures imposed by European governments in their bids to fix the deficits governments incurred as they ‘socialised’ the damage from their attempts to repair the broken financial system after the 2008 ‘crash’. Few can forget the popular responses, the spontaneous anger manifest in the outrage to the enormous damage caused by the international financial elite and the widespread resistance to austerity policies evident in parts of Europe since 2010.

Against this backdrop Lorenza Antonucci, Myra Hamilton, and Steven Roberts have produced a timely edited collection of chapters focussing on the status of young people in Europe and the current shape of social policy. There are eleven chapters by 23 scholars drawn from the UK, Italy, Finland, Sweden, France, Germany, Norway, Spain and Australia. The editors also contribute a useful introduction and a conclusion that provides a coherent conceptual framework for the book as a whole.

The editors acknowledge this is a time of crisis. As they note young people now face unprecedented challenges marked by labour market insecurity and ‘social exclusion’ or what Stiglitz (Reference Stiglitz2012) refers to as inequality and poverty. The editors say this highlights the need to bring together disciplinary fields like youth studies, sociology and social policy studies to promote a ‘holistic understanding of the challenges faced by young people’. The book also makes the case for paying more attention to ‘the efficacy of social policies for young people and the assumptions that underpin them’. The editors call for new social policies in a time of crisis that help mitigate the adverse effects of economic distress and what they describe as ‘new risks’. They rightly argue this requires an integrated policy that cuts across portfolios like housing, education, health, welfare, defence, labour market, the environment and so forth.

Collectively the authors do a number of things. The book foregrounds the shifts in language occasioned by recent events: the authors use the concept e.g. ‘precarity’ drawing on recent work by Guy Standing. Concepts like ‘changing transition’, ‘risk’, ‘welfare state’ work to provide also common threads throughout the book, along with the state roll-out of austerity policies provides a unifying theme across the book.

Some contributors offer finely-grained descriptions of the ways educational systems and labour markets work in the UK, Spain, Italy or Greece and the impact of this interplay on young people. Several chapters offer valuable reviews of European research into disadvantage, income distribution and educational participation. Attention is given to the diversity of experiences for young people given the differences in identity markers and ‘structures’ like class, gender, culture and geography. Empirical research combined with insider accounts provides a wide-ranging picture of how multiple young people experience life, and highlights their aspirations to achieve very basic things like getting a job with secure and reasonable income, having children, accessing decent and affordable housing and looking towards a future with some sense of optimism. Finally while acknowledging the diversity of the lives of young Europeans, the contributors agree that overall the global economic crisis of 2008 had a seriously damaging impact on many young Europeans.

Contributors focus on the development of social and youth policy in Europe and the beneficial effects – or otherwise – of these policies. The book clearly foregrounds concern that assumptions which have long informed social policy before 2008 have not changed, like the assumption that young people would continue to transit in linear fashion from school to university to stable, long term employment and achieve the independence associated with adulthood. As the editors note, this long outdated paradigm continues to inform recent policy initiatives like the European Youth Guarantee 2013, with damaging effect.

While there is much to like about this book, it does tend to overlook the question of politics and their part in generating the crisis and associated policy responses – which can be found e.g. in recent books by Standing (Reference Standing2014) or Atkinson (Reference Atkinson2015).

My reservation is that much of some of the thinking and critique in the book relied too heavily on the language of ‘risk’ and ‘life-cycle transitions’, vocabulary that has dominated the youth studies and areas of sociology field since the 1990s. This encourages the thinking that things just seemed to happen without anyone or anything being responsible. It encourages an aversion to naming those responsible and discourages an analysis of the politics and the ethical frames (e.g. utilitarianism) and a discussion about how they informed the policies.

Why not say that a policy is disastrous or that it was designed in ways that could never work in the way we might expect it to, because it was informed by ethical frames and politics that would secure the outcome that we now see?

This is needed in a sharp discussion about the politics of neo-liberal policy making in Europe before, during, and after the Great Recession. Moreover, the OECD's ‘active society’ policy model created the conditions for an enduring and unbridgeable gap between a professed commitment to support young people and families, to prevent ‘exclusion’ and to promote access to employment and the actual policy regimes that could never have realized such a declared objective. To argue therefore that ‘social protection systems are failing to shield young people from increasing labour market precarity’ misses the salient point: that is, the social protection systems cannot do this because they were never intended or designed to do that.

All this raises important questions about the prospect of new policies involving eg new tax arrangements, basic income schemes and educational figurations different from what we now have. This is what policy communities need to consider.

The questions also remain about how we are recognizing and planning for the dramatic and far-reaching processes of socio-economic, cultural and political transformation now taking place, developments marked by the shift to a ‘digital economy’. This is having a dramatic and immediate effect on the lives of young people, their education, access to a livelihood and the means to building a good life. It's a transformation that is displacing high- and low-skill labour with new forms of labour information capital and digital-robotic technologies. Networked technologies hold out the promise of freeing increasing numbers of humans from the need to labour, but what are the implications for social policy and in particular youth policy? Amongst other things, this means that labour is rapidly being decoupled from the production process and from the reproduction of capital. It is a development that will have a dramatic impact on the ways we produce and distribute economic goods and services.

Given the significance of this change, it matters very much that we don't simply repeat the time honored responses policy-makers made when they faced earlier crises, responses that had a disproportionately devastating impact on the lives of young people. One thing those earlier responses to economic crises do make clear is that we have no guarantee that an accurate account of a given social or economic problem or the appropriate policy remedies will prevail.