There is a quiet mismatch at the heart of economic policymaking. The people who design long-term policy on debt, trade, pensions and climate tend to be at the later stages of their careers, while the people who will live with the consequences for the longest are only at the beginning of theirs. The horizon of the decision and the horizon of the decider do not line up.
This is not an argument that experience does not matter. It plainly does. It is an argument that a table with only one generation seated at it is missing information it cannot get any other way, and that the missing perspective belongs to those with the largest stake in the distant future.
A Stake in the Long Term
Many of the hardest questions in political economy are really questions about time. How much debt should one generation pass to the next? How fast should an economy decarbonise, and who bears the cost of the transition? How should the returns from growth be shared between those who hold assets today and those who will earn wages tomorrow?
On every one of these questions, younger citizens hold a distinct position because their exposure runs decades further out. When they are absent from the discussion, the long-term interest tends to be spoken for by people who will not personally face most of it. Even with the best intentions, that is a structurally weak way to weigh the future.
“A young delegate invited to observe but never to decide learns cynicism, not stewardship. Genuine inclusion means real influence over outcomes, not a seat arranged for the photograph.”
Not a Courtesy but a Correction
Inclusion improves the analysis rather than merely softening the optics. People who will spend forty more years in the labour market, the housing market and the climate that policy produces bring a set of concerns that shorter horizons naturally discount. Their presence changes which risks get taken seriously.
Tokenism is worse than absence because it creates the appearance of a voice without the substance of one. A young delegate invited to observe but never to decide learns cynicism, not stewardship. Genuine inclusion means real influence over outcomes, not a seat arranged for the photograph.
From Sidelines to Substance
Bringing younger participants into economic policy is not achieved by good intentions alone. It requires deliberate structures. It means forums where emerging leaders engage directly with practitioners rather than listening from the back of the room, briefings that treat them as future decision makers, and pathways that carry the most capable of them into institutions that shape policy.
This is the conviction behind the work of CIPES and the forums it convenes. A generation that is trained to think rigorously about political economy, and then given real access to the people and institutions that set the rules, does not simply inherit the system. It is equipped to improve it. That is the whole point of putting youth at the table while the decisions are still being made.
