

The Youth Unemployment Bomb - alexwestholm
http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/07_52/b4064058743638.htm

======
patio11
I'm most worried not for the numbers as for the corrosive effect long periods
of unemployment have on employability. You lose the simple habits which are
required for lots of gainful employment, such as "getting up before 9 AM
consistently" and "working mostly non-stop for 8 hours a day".

I see this in a lot of these articles where folks will, e.g., claim they
applied for 15 jobs in 3 weeks. At some point the new normal for him has
become that he works 15 minutes a day or less on his job search. (Relatedly:
some days I wonder if the single most effective form of unemployment relief
would be teaching people that sending out resumes _is for suckers_.)

~~~
_delirium
_(Relatedly: some days I wonder if the single most effective form of
unemployment relief would be teaching people that sending out resumes is for
suckers.)_

The welfare-reform efforts of the past 15-20 years in most western countries
have tended to do exactly the opposite, oddly enough. Out of a worry that
people were just receiving benefits without really looking for work, you must
now demonstrate that you're actively sending out resumes and filling out
applications. Some jurisdictions even require you to show up every so often to
a center where they help you search job listings and send out resumes.

~~~
bioh42_2
John Maynard Keynes did suggest welfare should be employing people to do
things, even pointless things like building giant structures and them
demolishing them again.

It seems silly, but if we truly recognize that long term unemployment has a
horrible way of killing one's ability hold a job, then Keynes idea is rather
practical.

The government not as welfare but simply as employers of last resort. Much
like the Fed is the lender of last resort.

Obviously this has the danger of government employees lobbying for ever better
pay until it is economically irrational for people to seek work in the private
sector.

~~~
rst
How about putting back together giant structures that are falling apart? Our
infrastructure is rotting away --- that Minneapolis bridge collapse in 2007
was a bit of a wake-up call. There's no shortage of stuff in the United States
that needs to get fixed.

~~~
pmb
You mean some sort of administration that would give people money to work on
projects? Like a Work Projects Administration?

Sorry, Roosevelt did that, but nowadays I am pretty sure it would be called
socialism.

~~~
Unseelie
So...when the government pays people to do things, that's socialism?

I seriously doubt that's how a governmental program training and employing the
youth to repair the infrastructure would be viewed, and especially not as
proposed to the more socialistic policy of welfare.

~~~
mmt
_So...when the government pays people to do things, that's socialism?_

Of course, but the statement itself is a bit meaningless and appeared to me to
be flippant, at that.

When the government pays people _not_ to do things, that's a more extreme form
of socialism.

To me, the question is one of subsidy. UI[1] is a 100% subsidy. A WPA type of
deal could potentially be no subsidy at all, at least to the individuals. It
would merely be directing tax money at a particular kind of boondoggle.

[1] Notwithstanding that the I stands for "insurance," since it's structured
as a tax, at least here in the US.

------
pragmatic
The simple answer is: These kids are training for the wrong jobs. College (in
many areas) is a waste. Trade schools (vo-tech) offer a (almost 100%)
guarantee of employment.

A trade is a gateway to self employment (once you have your hours in for
licensing).

My brother has his master electrician's license in two states. He has more
work than he knows what to do with.

I have two friends who recently went back to school (one finishing undergrad
business/marketing the other MBA). Their job outlook is _poor_. The market is
flooded with people that have _soft_ skills.

Our company is still hiring network technicians. Again a two year degree with
_hard_ skill requirements. (Cisco certs, etc).

Tech school is way cheaper than college and your job prospects are good.

~~~
thedaveoflife
I agree that there are certainly plenty of opportunities presented by
developing a technical skill. However the unemployment rate is only 4.5% for
the college educated vs 10.7% for high school only and 8.4% for an associate
degree/some college. So maybe college is not as much of a waste as you might
think.

<http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm>

~~~
pragmatic
Yes but show me the figures that break out Electrician/Plumber/LPN from 2 year
business degrees.

My sister in law got a 2 year biz degree. You're qualified to be a secretary
(without experience). She went back and got LPN with an additional year at
school.

Her job outlook is amazing. Her income is 2 to 3 times what she could have
made with only her business degree.

Associated degree/some college includes a lot of things like child
care/business, etc.

------
scotty79
Our wealth has grown exponentially in recent decades but poor people still
work 9 to 5 or more.

Wealth is manufactured by machines not people.

Some generation has to close the gap between how wealthy society is and how
much average member of society has to work for same basic needs.

You can't make basic necessities cost always nearly same amount of work
because that work thanks to technology is producing more and more wealth.

You can't keep prices of meals to be higher than recent technological wonder.
Someone at some point will call bullshit on that. "My sandwich is not worth
same amount of wealth as 4GB flash thumb drive. They just want me to pay this
much for sandwich to keep me working because I need sandwich. I'll just pass
on working, buy cheapest food and see how this works out. They don't seem to
want me in their companies anyway."

This unemployed generation can be the first one to take advantage of wealth
humans get from technology en masse without need to cunningly trick everyone
else out of their share. They'll get their share just by being more or less
human dead weight that rich won't be able to shake off because they can't kill
them or even let them die because there's for the first time too many of them.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Our wealth has grown exponentially in recent decades but poor people still
work 9 to 5 or more._

This is a myth. The poor work very little - their full time labor force
participation rate is only 10% or so (this includes both the employed and
unemployed). 80% of the poor don't work at all.

<http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf>

(Before you criticize this statistic as being too simple, go see this thread
where I answer many objections: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2129845>

In particular, this is not a result of the poor being disproportionately old
or young.)

~~~
lotusleaf1987
Please go read Howard Zinn. You are 100% wrong. Poor people work more hours,
harder jobs, more dangerous jobs, are more likely to die at a younger age etc
etc. Everything is worse for poor people and your argument of just blaming the
poor is counter-productive and myth.

Zinn: There are two issues here: First, why should we accept our culture's
definition of those two factors? Why should we accept that the "talent" of
someone who writes jingles for an Advertising agency advertising dog food and
gets $100,000 a year is superior to the talent of an auto mechanic who makes
$40,000 a year? Who is to say that Bill Gates works harder than the dishwasher
in the restaurant he frequents, or that the CEO of a hospital who makes
$400,000 a year works harder than the nurse, or the orderly in that hospital
who makes $30,000 a year? The president of Boston University makes $300,000 a
year. Does he work harder than the man who cleans the offices of the
university?

Talent And hard work are qualitative factors which cannot be measured
quantitatively. Since there is no way of measuring them quantitatively we
accept the measure given to us by the very people who benefit from that
measuring! I remember Fiorello Laguardia (US Senator) standing up in Congress
in the twenties, arguing against a tax bill that would benefit the Secretary
of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, and asking if Mellon worked harder than the
housewife in East Harlem bringing up three kids on a meager income. And how do
you measure the talent of an artist, a musician, a poet, an actor, a novelist,
most of whom in this society cannot make enough money to survive - against the
talent of the head of any corporation. I challenge anyone to measure
quantitatively the qualities of talent and hard work. There is one possible
answer to my challenge: Hours of work vs. Hours of leisure. Yes, That's a nice
quantitative measure. Well, with that measure,the housewife should get more
than most or all corporate executives. And the working person who does two
jobs -- and there are millions of them -- and has virtually no leisure time,
should be rewarded far more than the corporate executive who can take two hour
lunches, weekends at his summer retreat, and vacations in Italy. ... But
better still, why not use as a criterion for income what people need to live a
decent life, and since most people's basic needs are similar there would not
be an extreme difference in income but everyone would have enough or food,
housing, medical care, education, entertainment, vacations.... Of course there
is the traditional objection that if we don't reward people with huge incomes
society will fall apart, that progress depends on those people. A dubious
argument. Where is the proof that people need huge incomes to give them the
incentive to do important things? In fact, we have much evidence that the
profit incentive leads to enormously destructive things -- Whatever makes
profit will be produced, and so nuclear weapons, being more profitable than
day care centers, will be produced.

And people do wonderful things (teachers, doctors, nurses, artists,
scientists,inventors) without huge profit incentives. Because there are
rewards other than monetary rewards which move people to produce good things
-- the reward of knowing you are contributing to society, the reward of
gaining the respect of people around you. If there are incentives necessary to
doing certain kinds of work, those incentives should go to people doing the
most undesirable, most unpleasant work, to make sure that work gets done. I
worked hard as a college professor, but it was pleasurable work compared to
the man who came around to clean my office. By what criterion (except that
created artificially by our culture) do i need more incentive than he does?

End quote.

~~~
Shorel
Please travel more instead of just reading. What you argue totally depends on
the country.

Some of the 'poor' people here in Colombia work 3 hours a day, earn just the
same money as someone who recently got a bachelor degree, and stay the rest of
the day drinking beer and saving no money for tomorrow.

They also tend to have very big plasmas or LCD TVs and huge sound systems,
while their houses are just bricks without any paint on them.

So, I live in a very rich country (you just can't imagine the delicious and
cheap fruits here) but full of poor people.

------
bambax
> _But the failure to launch has serious consequences for society—as Egypt's
> Mubarak and Tunisia's overthrown President, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali,
> discovered._

Mmm, what? Don't make it sound like overturning dictators is a bad thing,
dude.

Maybe it's much better for "society" to have unemployed young people with not
only the courage to fight for freedom but also nothing better to do with their
time, than to have people with jobs who tolerate authoritarianism.

~~~
kjhgfdfgh
The trouble is that they might get confused between overthrowing our stalwart
allies in the war against terrorism like Mubarek and start thinking that there
is no real difference between a dictator for life and a government that
relects the same group of millionaire business leaders every year or one where
the same bunch of toffs from the same few fancy schools get to be in charge.

~~~
kjhgfdfgh
Suppose you have a 'democratic' country where the same party has been in power
since independance.

The party leaders have got rich by telling everyone else the country is
booming - when it was all a property scam. Now they have 30% youth
unemployment and are cutting school and college funding to pay for it.

They were quiet happy to support terrorists in another country for their own
political gains - they might want to start worrying about where the next car
bomb will be placed.

And this is isn't in the middle east ......

~~~
JohnnyBrown
Ireland?

------
wisty
I've spoken to a few Chinese about this, where manual workers get more than
uni grads (though not as much as successful business owners). Chinese really
value education (in the high culture sense), and education (in the sense of
meaningless test scores), money, and status. Until a few years ago, degrees
were a ticket to riches. Now, they just mean you are overqualified for higher-
paying jobs. Their feelings about it tend to be _extremely_ complicated.

~~~
ylem
I think that you see this in places like Spain as well--you have a large
educated, unemployed fraction of the population...

------
iamdave
I grew up with an ex-drill sergeant for a father. My dad was a skilled
carpenter, a certified electrician and welder (TIG, MIG and Stick), and has
fixed every single car I've owned and totalled.

Passed down to myself and my brothers, we're both skilled in welding, my
brother now has his own electrician shop. I work in IT. If suddenly my IT job
goes away, I have a trade to fall on.

Skilled trades and physical labor it seems to be lost arts on my generation
(I'm 25) and that depresses me.

~~~
tannerburson
Move out of the city. In the more rural areas that isn't as true. It's
definitely trending in that direction, but there are still a lot of kids who
grow up with parents in skilled trades who pick up a lot of those skills
growing up. Combine that with high schools that have legitimate trades
programs, and there's at least a much better opportunity.

------
andresmh
In Mexico they are called nini's (_ni_ estudian, _ni_ trabajan). They often
find "better" opportunities joining organized crime/drug cartels. This, in my
opinion, is one the main challenges that need to be resolve in order to end
violence in Mexico.

------
netmau5
They mention the product lifecycle being short as a primary reason for not
wanting to bring on new employees. If it takes someone 12 months to get up to
speed in an 18 month product lifecycle, it is too costly.

I've got to wonder what kind of industry takes 12 months to get up to speed
unless you've got workers coming in with absolutely no training and education.
For most programmers I know, the worst case ramp up time is around 3 months.
That is often with a project that will never be profitable, much less make it
for 18 months.

There are other fiscally attractive reasons to hire young so I'd think if
training was the only problem, we could solve that problem. The problem I see
with regards to education in most companies is that there is simply no one on
staff who can do the training effectively or is given the time to do so.
Perhaps this will open the door for the return of a mini trade school in the
form of an app.

~~~
redrobot5050
Hardware engineering can easily be 12 months out of 18. There are a sundry of
reasons:

a) Moore's law. The technology your school is using for hardware design is
easily 5-6 or 10 years out of date. This makes it easier to teach and cheaper
to work on, but the "real world issues" like heat, leakage current, etc just
aren't addressed at the same level.

b) Intel has its own RTL that is not taught in schools. Some technology
companies also have proprietary in-house technologies (like Cachet, or
Wasabi).

c) Ripple effects. Analog components might change/fluctuate and this impacts
the entire design. Or a new antenna placement might merit new design, etc.

d) Scale. An undergrad in hardware engineering typically builds a 5 stage
pipeline processor that supports 2-4 hardware interrupts and a memory
controller. This is enough to run linux on an FPGA. You've engineered a
computer! But a Core 2 Duo has 23 pipeline stages. Vector units. Out of Order
execution. 96% accurate branch predictor. Each one of those things I've
mentioned could be the focus of a masters or PhD thesis. Getting hired, you'd
be expected to pick up the logic of all of them in about six months.

e) Minimization. More systems are being done by less chips. This is what is
called System-On-A-Chip design by some. Previously, you'd need to know how to
design a CPU. Now you need to know how to integrate a CCD into the CPU.

This is off the top of my head but i'm sure you get the point.

------
ylem
I think one thing that we have in the US is that unemployment centers were set
up in a different age and are designed to serve unskilled labor--but there are
not so many unskilled jobs. Some of the training programs that are paid for
are short "certificate" programs of dubious worth.

But, here's a question: currently sites like ODesk provide contract labor.
Some of the jobs are for people to do research (for example, I wanted a
listing of high schools/contact information for a side project I'm working
on). I've only done a couple of postings, but I got very few American
applicants. Is it just not well publicized? The rates are low, so it's not a
good long term solution, but in some cases for "simple" research jobs, the
rates could be $10/hr, which compared to some service jobs is competitive
(since many service jobs here also don't provide health care)--especially in
some lower cost of living states.

------
rst
One key bit: "more education is not always better. What matters is matching
the skills of the workforce to the skills that employers demand. In Iran,
where the percentage of people aged 15 and over with postsecondary degrees has
soared from 2.5 percent to 10.5 percent over the past 20 years, the education
system has become 'a giant diploma mill,' says Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an
economist at Virginia Tech."

The same is true here, as many of our chronically "overqualified" unemployed
could attest. What's worse, some of what counts as "training" here is a set of
dubious commercial vocational schools --- cosmetology schools, and the like
--- which soak up student loans, and leave the trainees with large debts that
are hard to dismiss, even in bankruptcy.

(And these are pretty big business. One of them, Kaplan, is a wholly owned
subsidiary of the Washington Post corporation that has over $2 billion in
revenue, accounts for just about all of the parent corporation's profits. Not
without controversy by the way; reports of abusive practices from Kaplan have
led to allegations of fraud:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10kaplan.html> The Washington
Post, of course, has editorialized in favor of its baby.)

~~~
ylem
This would seem to be especially true of "for profit" colleges. There was a
pretty depressing tv special (frontline?) on it...They sell hopes and dreams.

------
kiba
It's time for youth to blaze new path to employment.

19 years old like me are trying to build a living on the internet by writing,
programming, and selling ads. It's a lot of hard work to find clients and more
scary when you're trying to deliver the work.

~~~
bsaunder
Buy an Arduino and start building robots. IMHO, there's a long, rewarding
career there.

~~~
kiba
I don't have such capital but I have around 600ish dollars worth of saving(In
an another currency!) that's earned through hard work.

Hopefully, the network of clients I am building will grows to such portion
that I am able to find constant work as well charge more.

------
DrJokepu
The fact is than even the educated kids are unemployable. We constantly try to
hire graduate developers here in London but the fact is that most of those
kids are simply unemployable. They have impressive degrees from the best
universities, but I simply can't hire someone who can't code a simple
Fibonacci algorithm at the whiteboard in the interview room. In the language
of their choice. I'd even accept an only marginally working solution with a
few bugs. Still, most of them just can't do it. They don't even know how to
start.

Universities simply don't prepare kids for the needs of the industry. After
3-5 years of higher education, many of the graduates can't solve even the most
basic programming problems. I suspect that this must be the case in other
professions as well. Something has to be done about the completely defective
higher education systems.

~~~
mkr-hn
I was fortunate in community college because the instructor for my major
(Linux admin) liked to spend large parts of class time telling stories from
working in the IT industry.

Many interesting stories from dealing with MS audits in a mixed source
environment.

The most interesting classes were those where he had us solve a real world
problem (like researching and preparing an executive summary for a purchase).

Or the time he mangled all the computers while we were on break and had us
troubleshoot them.

------
Tycho
_Luckily the soil is fertile: All over the world, the hittistes and shabab
atileen, NEETs and freeters and boomerang kids are hungry for a chance to
thrive._

Hmm, but how hungry? Compared to say people who came of age in the 40s or 50s?
I'm not sure hungry is the right word. Restless maybe. Peckish.

~~~
_delirium
The Americans at least that I know who came of age in the 50s as anything
close to middle-class weren't very hungry at all. They lived in a world of
corporate jobs for life, defined-benefit pensions, comprehensive employer-
provided health-care with no deductibles/copays/exclusions, low unemployment,
etc. Even blue-collar workers had quite strong unions, high pay, and great
pensions/healthcare in the 50s.

Granted, if you meant coming of age in 1947 in Poland, that'd be another
matter.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Unfortunately, the jobs paid for a much lower standard of living than today,
the health insurance would pay a doctor to tell you "you have terminal
cancer", and all of this was only available to white males.

(Meanwhile, a terrorist group with millions of members was setting off about
20 bombs a year plus assorted lynchings and other acts of violence. The
response by law enforcement was mainly gun control targeted at the _victims_
of the terrorist group.)

The world of Mad Men is awesome if you get to be Don Draper. For everyone
else, it sucked.

------
jderick
The government should create jobs to solve this problem. Unemployment is cruel
and inefficient. Prioritizing reducing the national debt over employment is
short sighted.

------
ngvrnd
Things which cannot continue, won't.

------
rorrr
Anther problem is the education that people choose. The world is full of "VCR
repairmen", while everyone is using disposable bluray players.

I see it again and again, students pick silly, simple or just useless degrees,
such as

    
    
        * philosophy
        * international relations (every single one of those wants to work for the UN, maybe 0.001% ends up there).
        * arts, all kinds
        * history (how many historians do we really need)
    

Don't get me wrong, they are interesting and entertaining, but just not very
helpful when it comes to being employable.

~~~
mikecarlucci
Not to troll, but Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Leonardo DaVinci etc. were
all technical people with understanding of philosophy, art, history,
mathematics. Obviously these are cherry-picked examples, but having only
technical knowledge isn't a great solution either.

~~~
rorrr
I never said anything about technical only knowledge. I myself took a few art
classes, and enjoyed them.

What I said is that people pick these majors, and then we see these crazy
unemployment stats. Most of these unemployed people are not qualified to do
anything that society is willing to pay money for.

~~~
mikecarlucci
OK. Just making sure. Sometimes "the arts" get too much of a bad wrap here.

------
ahoyhere
I'm sure many people who are unemployed are unemployed through no fault of
their own. But...

... the other day I checked out a site for finding tech/design-oriented
interns. There were 50 listed in my city (Philadelphia)... and most of the
eye-catching descriptions the interns had written for themselves were things
like:

* "Coming soon"

* "19 years old"

* "I'm a recent graduate of the University of Miami"

* "My name is Brittany"

* "My name is [redacted] and I am a 19-year-old Korean-American student."

This was the only part of the profile that was really custom to them, other
than checking off a list of skills & available times/dates.

Don't even get me started on the usernames they chose to present to potential
employers. (Musicbabi_87?!)

Their chances are pretty much zero. Obviously nobody taught these kids (and,
in a few cases, adults) anything at all about professionalism or the fact that
when they take a job, their job is to serve the employer. And they obviously
haven't been reading books on their own that would teach them that.

Only a precious few mentioned anything that would tell me what I'd get out of
the deal, how they could help me/be useful to me. Almost none even expressed
any interests or goals of their own.

So, obviously, I'm not hiring any of them -- when I would have liked to. They
got in their own way. This is, sadly, their fault.

