Why are French youth rioting?

What do you do when the future you're told to work towards feels out of reach? For young people in France, the answer is to take to the streets. But it's only one of many countries across Europe that's had protests start peacefully only to turn like this. Many young people in France see a bleak future ahead and a cost of living they can't afford. They're demanding more investment in schools and housing, which are underfunded because the French government is proposing spending cuts and tax measures to bring down the deficit. But the students want more than that, complete reform. Anyway, our demand is not only at the high school level, it is institutional. That is to say, if we can reform the government, there is no problem. We, Macron, don't want it anymore, Le Cornet doesn't want it anymore. How did we get here? In the French Senate, there are 348 members. The average age is 60 years old. French high schoolers between the ages of 15 to 18 started the protests. It then spread to university students who were on average around 21 years old. Keep that in mind as we go back in time. 40 years ago, today's politicians were young adults and the cost of living was very different. The year is 1986 and by modern standards, housing is remarkably affordable relative to the disposable income people had. Back then, the average price for a house in Paris was around 1,400 euros per square meter. Today, it's 11,000 euros. That's almost eight times more. You'd assume monthly average salaries went up by around that much too. But since 1986, they've only increased by a factor of 2.2. And after paying taxes and bills, people typically still had 71% of their salary left. Today, it's only 53%. But even back then, France was experiencing major political shifts with mass student protests. They were marching against a proposed reform where universities would be able to charge higher admission fees and be more selective about who gets in. The protesters were successful and the bill was withdrawn after weeks of unrest. So why is it that the politicians of today are so resistant to calls for change when they belong to a generation that demanded better and were able to achieve it? While budget cuts and underfunded schools aren't new, especially in Europe, historically France's modern trajectory with cost-cutting can be traced back to the 80s. Economists have a name for this kind of policy, austerity. Austerity refers to strict economic measures a government implements to reduce its budget deficit and stabilize debt, typically by severely cutting government spending, raising taxes, or a mix of both. There's been a lot of research on whether austerity works on improving a country's economy. Some economists say that it doesn't. After reviewing data from the 1980s covering EU countries, the IMF found that cuts to public investment are detrimental. Unemployment rose by around 0.6 percentage points at first and around 0.9 points two years after, all while productivity and GDP fell. And probably more strikingly, income inequality increased and the gap between the rich and the poor grew. So why do governments continue to cut public spending, especially when there are so many examples of that not working? Some economists say austerity isn't really about bettering the economy, it's about maintaining the class system political economist Clara Mattei argues that capitalism depends on an arrangement where most people work for a wage and a smaller group owns the businesses and takes the profit she says that arrangement is protected by austerity because when jobs are hard to get workers have less power to push for more and so it is a way to protect those who hold the power so like the rest of Europe France frames spending cuts as a necessary sacrifice in the name of a better future but either way the students in the streets today are asking what this current generation of politicians once asked and if the cuts are for the sake of a better future how will a struggling education system equip young people to thrive