There is a number being passed around this week that ought to make us pause before we cheer. Of the new accounts opened at the Pakistan Stock Exchange this fiscal year, more than four in ten belong to Pakistanis between eighteen and thirty. The bourse has climbed for three years; the new listings have, on average, rewarded those who bought them. The official voice calls this confidence, a young nation discovering capital. I want to ask a quieter question. What does it mean that the young have decided to trust a screen of moving prices more than the solid things their elders were taught to trust?
Consider what they are turning away from. The savings account, once the modest virtue of the salaried man, now loses to inflation while you sleep. The plot of land, that great Pakistani altar of accumulation, demands a lump sum no clerk’s child can assemble. The government bond pays in a currency whose own value is a rumour. And the job — the steady job that was supposed to make all this patience worthwhile — has, for the largest youth cohort in our history, simply failed to appear. The Economic Survey says it plainly: the cohort arrives, the work does not. So I will not call the rush to equities reckless before I have asked the harder thing. Reckless compared to what? Against which safe alternative is the brokerage app the gamble?
This is where the easy moral cracks. We are tempted to read the young investor as a creature of greed, seduced by quick returns, a speculator in the making. But greed is the explanation of the comfortable. Look again and you may see something closer to its opposite: a search for ground. The Greeks had a word the philosophers loved, hypokeimenon, the thing that lies beneath, the substrate that stays while appearances change. Every generation looks for its hypokeimenon, the bedrock on which a life can be built. Our parents found it in land and gold, things you could touch and bury and pass down. What I am suggesting is that the young have looked for the same bedrock and concluded, not unreasonably, that it has migrated. It now lives, they believe, inside the index.
And yet — here the question turns on itself — is the ticker ground, or is it only a faster kind of weather? The land at least sat still while its price moved. The screen offers no such mercy; the asset and its price are the same thing, and both can vanish before lunch. There is an Urdu saying, aasman se gira, khajoor mein atka — fallen from the sky, snagged on the date-palm. One escapes the failing rupee only to be caught on the swaying branch of a market that has, let us be honest, never yet shown this generation its other face. A three-year climb is not a law of nature. It is a sentence that has not yet reached its full stop. The young who entered in the ascent know the market only as a thing that rises. They have not been introduced to the verb in its other tense.
I do not say this to scold them back into their losing savings accounts. That would be a cruelty dressed as prudence. The deeper trouble is not in the choices of the young but in the menu set before them. A healthy political economy offers a citizen several honest forms of ground: work that pays, savings that hold, institutions that endure. When all of these have been hollowed out — education funding falling to a sliver of GDP, the factory floor in retreat even as the bourse soars — then the stock market is not one option among many. It becomes the only door that is not locked. And a society that leaves only one door open should not congratulate itself when the crowd pours through it.
So the real question this week is not about the young at all. It is about us, the arrangers of the menu. We have built an economy in which the safest-seeming act, saving, quietly impoverishes you, and the riskiest act, speculating, has lately rewarded you. We have inverted the moral physics that every elder tried to teach. Is it any wonder the children have learned the new lesson better than we have?
Perhaps the boom is real and the young will prosper. Perhaps the branch holds. But a generation that finds its only foothold on a moving thing has not been given confidence. It has been given a dare, and told to call it hope. The work ahead is not to talk them down from the ledge. It is to build, somewhere in this republic, a piece of ground that does not move — so that the next time a young Pakistani goes looking for what lies beneath, the answer is not merely the next quoted price.
A society that leaves only one door open should not congratulate itself when the crowd pours through it.
A generation that finds its only foothold on a moving thing has not been given confidence. It has been given a dare, and told to call it hope.
