How to fight back against Gen-Z socialism India’s surprise baby bust is a warning to the world Ukraine is not a charity case Britain is wrong to ban speakers like Hasan Piker America’s decaying Treasury market needs a fix How to make football more exciting
How to fight back against Gen-Z socialism The me-first doctrine is a threat to prosperity June 4th 2026 Something new is stirring on the left. A fresh crop of socialists want to remake the economy with price controls, hefty wealth taxes and a spree of nationalisations. Supercharged by fury over Gaza, they are winning voters at a formidable pace. Many rose to prominence only recently, like Zack Polanski, who leads the Green Party in Britain, or Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York. Others are long-standing political fixtures: the septuagenarian Jean-Luc Mélenchon is on his fourth swing at the French presidency, but thumping support from the 20-somethings of “Generation Z” has put the Elysée back in his sights again. Call it Gen-Z socialism. Not because all its adherents are young—or because it is new for young people to lean leftward—but because it is the brand of leftism, made for the TikTok era, that today’s young revolutionaries support.
Forget weighty collectivist ideals or seizing the means of production. Gen-Z socialism is a me-first doctrine. Climate change and race, preoccupations of the 2010s and early 2020s, are now much more peripheral concerns. So are social issues, barring Gaza. Angst about inflation, housing and artificial intelligence have replaced all that with something cruder. “This country is awash in wealth,” says Avi Lewis, freshly elected leader of the New Democratic Party in Canada, a country where productivity has been all but flat for a decade. “We can have nice things.” Saying that prices should be capped to keep your bills down while someone else pays for your public services is a seductive, shareable message. Plenty of the grievances that animate Gen-Z socialists do stem from real issues. Inflation has been too high, rent in big cities is now often unaffordable and AI could upend the labour market. Dismissing these worries would be foolish. Yet Gen-Z socialism is wrong about how to fix the problems of capitalism. It must be resisted, because it is a profound threat to prosperity. No country’s Gen-Z socialists are quite alike. The realities of power have forced some, like Mr Mamdani, to become more moderate. But they broadly agree on three core principles. First, that growth does little to help ordinary people. Theirs is a zero-sum mindset, where a better outcome comes not from creating but from taking—as they fear ai barons will soon do on a vast scale. Second, that spending can be paid for by the richest. Once the left wanted higher taxes for everyone; Gen-Z socialists demand handouts funded by billionaires. The third tenet is a remarkable hostility to private enterprise. Gen-Z socialists are uninterested in letting the market rip and redistributing the proceeds. They would have chunks of everyday life, from housing to groceries, governed by state diktat. Politics has always had zany fringes. The far right is no less barmy—and more dangerous. But what is so worrying about the Gen-Z socialists is how deeply their ideas are bleeding into the centre-left. Desperate to compete, even mainstream Democrats in America now propose mad schemes like exempting over half of tax filers from federal income tax. In Britain the Labour Party, having won power on a centrist platform, has been spooked by the Greens and is rekindling its zeal for higher taxes and state control.
Increasingly, the ideas of the Gen-Z socialists can win even when their candidates lose. That is bad news. Rent controls would worsen housing shortages by crushing the incentive to build. The profit margins of big supermarket chains, demonised by Gen-Z socialists, are already wafer-thin after years of ruthless competition—a miracle of modern capitalism. Wealth taxes would become confiscatory and deter innovation. Do not assume that the failure of these policies, if implemented, would bring about an automatic course correction. Europe has struggled for decades to escape the low-growth funk left by its own over-regulation; the rise of statist “Peronists” in Argentina helps explain its century of relative decline. Resisting Gen-Z socialism is therefore an urgent task. The first step is for free-market liberals to stop apologising. A series of popular criticisms of capitalism, each containing a grain of truth, has in aggregate obscured the fundamental wisdom that private enterprise is at the root of human prosperity. Yes, people aren’t always rational, as behavioural economics shows. True, inequality matters and growth is better when broad-based. Free trade and globalisation create losers as well as winners. But this is the best time in human history to be born, given record real incomes, high life expectancy and low rates of extreme poverty. A punchier defence of capitalism would work better in the social-media age than hand-wringing by uncharismatic centrists like Sir Keir Starmer. Centrist governments must also solve the problems driving popular discontent. “Abundance” liberals are right to want to build cheap and plentiful housing and infrastructure. Politicians must stop saddling the young with the burden of funding excessive pensions. The tax system must ensure that meritocracy prevails over inheritocracy: broader-based inheritance taxes and levies on property would help. The hardest challenge will be the disruption caused by advances in AI. The Gen-Z leftists have set out their stall with calls for a moratorium on data centres and a government jobs guarantee. Liberals must be more positive and imaginative in their own prescriptions, using a mixture of taxes, distributed capital ownership and support for workers to make sure that the upsides of labour-market disruption are widely shared.
Populists have the wind in their sails; it can sometimes seem as though market liberalism is doomed to political failure. The Economist disagrees. A robust defence of the ideas that have brought unprecedented riches has barely been tried. Many of the problems that animate Gen-Z socialists, like high rents, are the result of markets that are insufficiently free, not excessively so. There is time yet for liberalism to once again produce results —and to win the argument. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//leaders/2026/06/04/how-to-fight-back-against-gen-z- socialism
India’s surprise baby bust is a warning to the world It is not just rich places that are becoming less fertile June 4th 2026 YOU ARE having too many babies. For decades that crude message was drilled into the minds of Indians by their rulers, abetted by inept foreign donors. In the 1960s slogans on school buildings chided parents, telling them: “Two or three children, enough”. By the 1970s officials had taken a crueller turn, overseeing the sterilisation of millions of young adults, usually the poor, many forcibly. But when Indian school textbooks are reprinted this summer, they will carry a very different message. They will warn not of the dangers of having too many babies, but of the risks of having too few. That’s because the world’s most populous country is experiencing a baby bust. India has a total fertility rate (TFR), a measure of children per woman, of 1.9 and falling. This is below the replacement rate, of 2.1 or so, needed
for a stable long-term population. In several Indian states the TFR now matches the sputtering rates you find in rich European countries. Tamil Nadu, an industrialised state in the south, and West Bengal, a populous one in the east, each have the same fertility rate (1.3) as Finland. Maharashtra, a big western state encompassing Mumbai, is on a par with Norway (1.4). If you think of Indian demography, Scandinavia is not the natural reference point. Increasingly, it will be. India’s population will still continue to grow from its current tally of 1.45bn: it takes time for fewer births to translate into fewer people overall. But the number of births is already down by a fifth from its peak in 2001. In Tamil Nadu 1,200 schools were closed last year for a lack of pupils to fill their classrooms. Those who do attend increasingly show up without any siblings. The government frets that India will get old before it gets rich—that the country is on a similar path to China, where the population has already peaked and is starting to fall. Some politicians are offering cash to encourage Indians to procreate. India’s demographic transition is the most striking example of a global trend. For it is no longer just wealthy places where families have few, or no, kids. Over two-thirds of all countries are now below the replacement rate. Middle- income ones like Brazil, Iran, Thailand and Turkey have been well below it for years. Poorer countries are steadily joining their ranks. Sri Lanka has a TFR of just 1.3; Tunisia’s is 1.6. Morocco has fallen below replacement rate. Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, may be close to that point. In many places birth rates are plunging despite marriage remaining near-universal and even though few women have formal jobs. India also exemplifies why this global slump is happening. Falling rates of child mortality provide one explanation: parents need not have as many children if they can be confident they will all make it to adulthood. But demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education. Schooling means that girls gain more autonomy and a greater say in life’s decisions. It is no coincidence that, in the 1990s, both India and much of Africa saw a huge surge in girls attending schools. It is only in the few places where most girls still don’t go into formal education—like Niger, northern Nigeria or Chad—that fertility has hardly budged.