The St. Gallen Symposium’s Leaders of Tomorrow (LoT) community is part of the next generation of global leaders. Do they blame the older generation for having granted itself too much freedom at the expense of their own? This year’s Voices of the LoT Report indicates: Most of them do.

Climate change threatens the freedom of future generations. In face of this crisis, young people around the globe have joined forces in an environmental movement of unprecedented dimensions. When talking about freedom and its limits, questions of intergenerational fairness thus come to the front.

Given how long the threat of rising CO₂ levels for the planet’s temperature has been known, their concerns about their future need to be put into context with earlier destructive behavior of prior generations. Similar discussions, on a smaller scale, have also been held on financial decision making and overspending at the expense of younger people.

The community of young entrepreneurs, politicians, and activists, which were surveyed for this year’s Voices of the Leaders of Tomorrow Report – a collaboration of the Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions and the St. Gallen Symposium – are leading representatives of the younger generation. We wanted to know: Do they blame the older generation? The answer is clear: Most of them do.

More than 8 out of 10 say that the accusation “The elder generation has granted themselves too much freedom at the expense of the younger generation” is justified – at least in a few aspects. Just 12% consider it unjustified.

In open statements that participants could add to explain their answers, sometimes the accusations are accompanied by reflections about the situation of the older generation and the understanding that it is easy to judge in retrospect – admitting that the younger generation can also be oblivious to the future costs of present behavior. And sometimes they even grant the older generation some credit for certain achievements for today’s standard of living. However, many participants – even those who considered the accusation true in just a few aspects – blame them heavily in the open explanations about their accusations.

The main reasons for these accusations are environmental exploitation, degradation and pollution, prioritization of economic growth and their own wealth, general short-term thinking or a lack of consideration for the future generations and the consequences of their actions. It seems to be time for the older and younger generations to agree on a new social contract on sustainability, fairness, and the limits of freedom.

Read the full Voices of the Leaders of Tomorrow Report here for all findings and detailed analysis.