Dismissed Intergenerational Support? New Social Risks and the Economic Welfare of Young Adults

This paper concerns the declining role of the welfare state in supporting young adults. The literature on new social risks concentrates on the incapacity of institutions to respond to a new social situation, and has so far largely neglected the capacity of alternative systems or institutions to fill the vacuum created. The focus in the paper is on the situation of young adults in a Nordic welfare state, in which social security benefits have developed unfavourable. Perusal of Finnish data on welfare-state programmes and financial transfers across generations, and of the literature on new social risks, reveal that young adults living on the basic level of social security, such as basic unemployment benefit, a student grant or child home-care allowance, are in a particularly vulnerable economic position. On a more detailed level, the article shows that the proportion of people receiving financial support from their parents has been increasing at the same time as the welfare state's ability to provide support has been diminishing. The overall conclusion is that there is an invisible compensatory mechanism offsetting the economic vulnerability of many young adults. (Contains 5 notes, 2 tables, and 1 figure.)