Wellbeing deficit Covid hurt young people - and the economy is paying

From the outset it was obvious that the coronavirus pandemic would be brutal on the UK's young people. Just how brutal has only become apparent over time.

- Larry Elliott

Children, teenagers and adults in their early 20s were the least likely to have adverse physical consequences, but they were the ones who suffered most from the restrictions put in place to prevent the virus spreading. Children were deprived of education. Teenagers were stuck in their homes and unable to meet their friends. And the concentration of young adults working in hospitality meant they were most vulnerable to being furloughed or losing their jobs.

It was a recipe for an increase in unhappiness and mental illnessand so it has proved. People in their early 20s are more likely to be out of work because of ill health than those in their early 40s.

All this would be bad enough had young people gone into the pandemic in good shape. But as a new academic paper shows, the mental health of young people has been deteriorating for a decade and a half.

It used to be assumed that there was a U-shaped trend to wellbeing, with happiness declining as young people entered middle age and then rising again as they got older. David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, and his two co-authors on the paper, UCL's Alex Bryson and Xiaowei Xu of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, show that this is no longer the case.