The "media hype about a 'lost generation'" is unhelpful, says Caleb – most students will go on to lead productive lives, and worry unnecessarily.
We must not allow there to be a lost generation".
We may not yet be a lost generation, but we have certainly experienced a lost decade.
(I was pretending, you see, to be a Lost Generation exile with my parents sitting three feet away).
"That would be a lost generation more than a lost decade," said Ms. Reichlin, who is also a member of the committee at the Center for European Policy Research that attempts to determine when recessions begin and end.
Tackling that issue is what he sees as his key role: "It is vital – I have to stand up to defend what could be a lost generation of young people.
"We fear this will be a lost generation, not only because they are not in school but because a lot of the new gangs will turn them into criminals or extremists," Fawaz Mahmoud, the Syrian Interim Government's deputy minister of education, told me.
Perhaps the bigger danger, conference participants said, is that a psychology of permanent unemployment could set in, especially among the young, setting the stage for what Mr. Strauss-Kahn said would be "a lost generation of people disconnected from the labor market".
On 14 March 1945, Kerouac wrote a letter to his sister Caroline: "For the kind of book it is – a portrait of the 'lost' segment of our generation, hard-boiled, honest and sensationally real – it is good, but we don't know if those kinds of books are much in demand now, although after the war there will no doubt be a veritable rash of 'lost generation' books and ours in that field can't be beat".
