Loving how many responding here don't seem to actually realise the socio-economic situation in South Africa is vastly different to that in the US/Europe, and so immediately start making false equivalencies.
As a white male from South Africa, I can assure you this wouldn't have been my reality were I still living there. Black people make up approx 80% of the population, and this would disproportionally be theirs. Reasons date back to the Apartheid regime, which deliberately kept non-whites uneducated, as well as some horrendous mismanagement under the current ANC governnment under then-president Jacob Zuma (who himself serious under-valued education in general).
Just as one example: there was a famous incident where, due to some corrupt dealings, textbooks weren't able to be delivered in Limpopo (one of the provinces) for several years in a row. For many years there have been schools with 0% high school graduation rates. The infrastructure and processes that are taken for granted in developed countries are only really available to a minority in SA. This makes a huge difference.
I’ve never lived in South Africa, but I have two South African parents and have visited the country several times, and can confirm that the parent comment is exactly correct. SA can come as a shock if you’re not expecting it: even just driving from Cape Town airport to the central city, the view abruptly switches from tin shacks as far as the eye can see, to houses (which in comparison are mansions) surrounded by barbed wire and electric fences. And it’s the same no matter where you travel. And this is in one of the more affluent and safe cities in SA — ‘safe’ as in, you’re not actually risking your life if you walk on the street in one of the more touristy areas. Definitely an amazing country to visit, but the inequality is utterly extreme.
EDIT: Here’s an example of what I mean. [0] is a Google Street View of a bridge near Cape Town International Airport. On the one side: tin shacks. On the other side: a golf course, behind middle-class (I think) housing.
Every day millions of South Africans walk in the street and don’t die.
The touristy areas are safer than elsewhere. There isn’t just random non stop killing in the streets.
By your logic if 0.000000001% of the population was killed while going for walks each day you could say going for a walk was literally risking your life.
Obviously these things operate on a scale and I’m not saying that there is zero risk. I was addressing your hyperbolic binary view of things. Saying that going for a walk in South Africa is risking your life is complete nonsense.
Source: I’ve lived in Johannesburg (most “dangerous” city in SA) for 30 years and have been an avid walker for most of these. In fact I “risked my life” for an hour just this afternoon, it was lovely.
To other readers: Not necessary to travel to SA to confirm truth of this description. A few minutes “driving” the roads with Google Street View will suffice.
Thank you for your candor! The socio-economic inequality in South Africa is staggering and its a powder-keg that's just waiting to be set off. Additionally, there is a wide chasm between black and white youth unemployment - I believe only 6% of white youths are unemployed.
I think blaming Zuma alone for mismanagement is not entirely accurate: none of the successive governments prioritised eliminating inequality - not the Apartheid government (obviously), but also not Mandela, Mbeki, Zuma or Ramaphosa. The economy is reliant on the exploitation of cheap labour, but this will have to change if the political will is there. BEE (affirmative action) had the right idea, but the execution was not great as it was riddled with corruption. It did help with the creation of a growing black middle class, but the floor wasn't raised.
There is a lot of corruption, but much could have been done to improve the education in under-resourced areas - a lot of rural and township schools do not provide high school science subjects because they do not have labs or lab equipment, not to mention teachers.
The spectre of Bantu Education will haunt non-metropolitan schools for a long time to come. "Bantu Education" was a lower-quality education black people had to endure under Apartheid - just enough to prepare one for non-skilled factory or mine work. A large number of present-day black teachers studied under Bantu Education, or if they are young, were taught by teachers who qualified under bantu education. It's a mess.
> BEE (affirmative action) had the right idea, but the execution was not great as it was riddled with corruption.
Not surprising. Affirmative action and other “right ideas” like this can only result in corruption and racial tensions. Straightforward help to the poor is more useful, but unfortunately it is less politically popular and harder to exploit for corruption.
> Affirmative action and other “right ideas” like this can only result in corruption and racial tensions.
This is a no-win scenario: Apartheid was affirmative action for a minority, it resulted in corruption and racial tensions, to put it lightly. There was a government-mandated floor on how poor white people could be - for instance, the starting position for white people in factories and mines were supervisor-/manager-level, regardless of their skill or education. It was verboten for a black person to have a white report.
Apartheid lasted for most of the 20th century, at at the end of the day, you have 2 options, both 'unfair': maintain the status quo or try to make things more equitable. Which would you have chosen?
> The infrastructure and processes that are taken for granted in developed countries are only really available to a minority in SA.
A very small minority. The middle classes don't have access to reliable power, water, government bureaucracy (mail, taxes, passports), law enforcement, etc. South Africa is failing all its people.
In the West, our experience is the West. So we often make the mistake of assuming similar systems, even similar beliefs, when we speak about other areas of the world. Forums like this are useful precisely because there is an ability to have knowledgeable people chime in to help us set a more realistic context for discussion.
Agree completely, but I can tell you for many of them pirating a text book is beyond their means. To do so you need not only internet access, but the sophistication to find pirated text books, and THEN the means to print possibly hundreds of pages. There is a big difference between poverty in the West and in a place like South Africa. Just printing the text book would be prohibitively expensive.
You find similarly grim numbers in Western Europe too. I mean youth unemployment was over 50% in Spain during the post-Great Recession crisis and is at 38% now.[1]
It's pretty sad - young people are living with their parents into their thirties and not having children until their 40's if at all, fuelling a massive decline in the birth rate to one of the lowest in the world at around 1.3 births per woman, far below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman[2]
While true, it kinda hides another issue as well. Salary hasn't really improved in almost 15 yrs now, so youths that are currently employed make barely more than the existential minimum.
Germany has issues as well, even though that specific statistic looks good
Yeah, low birth rates aren't all about money even though that's important. A lot of it is about culture, which affects women's age at first child which affects how many children a woman will ultimately have.
Even with all the incentives (subsidize childcare etc.) you'd still have to modify the harder to modify cultural reasons like people valuing independence, "casual dating"/FWB relationships for years that go nowhere is more common instead of dating with intent to marry, hustle culture/emphasis on career progress, less social pressure/shaming from parents ("why don't you have a husband/wife/kids yet?!"), freedom to "find yourself/travel" or "get sexually experienced/have a ho phase before settling" for years after college, etc.
Most people don't want to go from college to marriage and kids right away these days, and a few years of this type of casual dating/exploration after college eats up a lot of prime reproductive years. But these cultural factors are very hard to change especially with the absence of religion/strong communities these days.
A lot of our economic machinery more or less bakes in some big assumptions about the size of the workforce not declining, and we have lots of examples from other countries of what happens when birth rates fall too low (Japan's Lost Decade becoming plural as the birth rate fell and the population aged).
Social Security in the US is one example. It literally depends on having a larger input base than the output.
The expectation of GDP growth is another, but without population growth, it's unlikely to be realized perpetually. I'm fine with that, but our over-leveraged financial system isn't.
Your idea that Japan's lost decade was caused or extended by a low birth rate doesn't sound right to me... and the first two results in a search engine don't support your claims. It would also not appear to be provable or disprovable. The lost decade certainly wasn't caused by demographics, and there's no alternative universe Japan that encountered those same economic conditions but many more babies were made.
1. There are a lot of goods where supply is naturally limited. Nice holiday destinations, for example. Good housing in desirable locations is another. Space on public roads. This implies that there is some population size where some notion of real wealth per capita is maximized. That population size may be much lower than 7 billion.
2. Economic growth can be driven by increases in productivity. Automation can massively boost productivity. But at a certain amount of supply of labour, it is cheaper to employ a human than automate the task, even though the automation technology for that task is within reach. So a reduction in supply of manual labour can actually make the economy more automated and efficient.
> A lot of our economic machinery more or less bakes in some big assumptions about the size of the workforce not declining
Do it like software: if the implementation doesn't match reality, fixing the implementation is easier than trying to fix reality to match the broken assumptions
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
But if you believe it is reasonable or desirable to engineer social changes to increase the birth rate to be able to create and support economic growth, I think your priorities ordering is not right
Exponential growth isn't going to be sustainable forever. The economic models need to be updated to match reality, instead of the tail wagging the dog.
This is not a valid comparison. "Youth Unemployment" is calculated differently than "Youth not in employment, education or training". The equivalent statistic for Spain per the OECD is ~17% now, not 38%.
It sucks but it seems to be where we are anyway headed in a few decades, you simply do not need so many workers, at least not in how the job market is shaped now.
Yuval Noah Harari argues the same [1]. Whereas the 20th century was a century of workers fighting exploitation, now the 21st century might be workers — or more generally people — fighting irrelevance. When so much work can be performed by machines, human labor will not be necessary like it was before.
Many experts are predicting declining job rates. I do think we can create jobs though as a society. For example instead of one teacher handling 12 toddlers we can pay for 4 teachers to do it. Or improve the care old people get by increasing staff. These are jobs automation cant replace easily...but there needs to be a will to make the investment.
The problem is when “we” wants lower taxes or regulations to enable more consumption of tropical island vacations or recreational vehicles, or any other individual consumption item.
The political will is unfortunately not there. On this very forum, someone was claiming that a 1 adult to 4 infant ratio was too restrictive!
This conversation is about care for infants and toddlers, which is only privately funded in the US (aka daycare). The conversation I was referring to was about the government restriction of 1 adult per 4 infants was causing daycare prices to be too high.
> The problem is when “we” wants lower taxes or regulations to enable more consumption of tropical island vacations or recreational vehicles, or any other individual consumption item.
"You" are always welcome to donate any amount of your money to the government. In the USA, its the Treasury's Bureau of the Public Debt.
Taxes are practically irrelevant in the US. The gov just goes to the Fed and and increases it's balance.
The real issue is that those in power don't actually want to lift up those that are struggling. I'm not saying there aren't some good politicians--I'm saying politicians don't have the power.
When the government isn't acting on behalf of the people, more taxes would only serve to harm.
Taxes are then paid back out by government spending (which exceeds taxes, btw, so inflation is doubly-inevitable). So, you did not actually negate the point of the comment you are replying to.
Sure, but in the spirit of the original argument, the taxes still aren't about regaining funds to help the little guy. It's not like paying more taxes is going to go to something beneficial to society.
And in my opinion (not verified or anything) we're seeing such strong Cantillon effects that inflation is being regulated via soaring asset prices.
So it's harder to buy a house and or a share of SPY, but everyday goods are inflating way below the increase in dollar supply atm.
I see a lot of unrest coming up as AI replaces workers. The elites can keep the poors down for a while but eventually as we see all through history, they revolt. I suppose given better AI and drones the elites can eventually make AI robots to keep the rabble in line maybe(?) as tech gets better though, kind of like T1000s under the control of the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels of their time.
The New American Movement (a precursor to the Democratic Socialists of America) published a poster in the 70s that read:
"If you’re unemployed it’s not because there isn’t any work
"Just look around: A housing shortage, crime, pollution; we need better schools and parks. Whatever our needs, they all require work. And as long as we have unsatisfied needs, there’s work to be done.
"So ask yourself, what kind of world has work but no jobs. It’s a world where work is not related to satisfying our needs, a world where work is only related to satisfying the profit needs of business.
"This country was not built by the huge corporations or government bureaucracies. It was built by people who work. And, it is working people who should control the work to be done. Yet, as long as employment is tied to somebody else’s profits, the work won’t get done."
Adding to this, institutions make the work between free individuals all but impossible.
If I just want someone to help me plumb a bathroom, they have to have license and insurance, they need to file to be a corporation themselves, they need to file a permit to start the work, they need to have a final inspection, and they have to pay taxes on what I pay them.
On top of this supplies are becoming ever more expensive unless you're a big enough buyer, so the little company or one independent plumber can't even compete with larger companies on cost of materials and tools.
I basically do all my household remodeling myself as the cost is extremely prohibitive.
It is both work and a job, in this example. But it's an occupied job, where the poster is discussing communal job creation through joint bargaining power rather than a corporate monolith. Your second statement is right on the money.
Those are also usually low-paid jobs. Plans to increase employment like this feel more like a way to implement UBI while pretending to have a work requirement. “You pretend to work and we pretend to pay you” and all that.
This is a false dichotomy generated by corporate propaganda. The system is designed to make you feel this way. Trust me, I was saying these say things online in 2012, and jobs have only increased in number since then.
> When so much work can be performed by machines
Then more people can buy a machine and have their own small automated business.
Why not? Why would you think that this is not a valid idea? Because in your premises you are assuming that all the machines are wildly expensive and well out of the reach of a small business owner.
But then that makes your premises an argument for the "inevitability" of consolidation of the economy into the hands of a few companies and not actually an argument against the number of possible jobs.
Do you see how subtle that is? Do you see how sneaky that false equivalence is?
Politicians and Wall street have been consolidating the economy into a few companies (via mergers, acquisitions, regulations, index funds, etc.) that can work at reduced losses and increased margins and f**ing over the younger generations primarily, but the middle class in general.
Yes, because in this "machine automated society" your supply chain is also coming from "automated" production and thus you have equivalent access to the same-priced goods as any competitor.
And before you scream about this being pedantic, perhaps first reconsider the original premise that you are proposing: automation taking over things and reducing job availability to nil. It's a fantastical premise to set.
Your reaction is only validation of my argument: you are actually arguing for some sort of inevitability of consolidation of the economy as if it is absolutely unavoidable. This is literally the same argument as Marx, disguised.
EDIT: you are also being profoundly intellectually dishonest when you do not acknowledge the plethora of existing SMBs that already compete against larger corporations (usually at local levels).
> Yes, because in this "machine automated society" your supply chain is also coming from "automated" production and thus you have equivalent access to the same-priced goods as any competitor.
What makes you think that the little guy will have access to the same prices as a megacorp? Walmart is famously able to squeeze suppliers[1]
because it has superior bargaining power. I doubt a mom and pop shop can do the same. Even if we somehow assume that the prices for supplies is the same, there's still the matter of cost of production. Large companies can benefit from pooled resources (eg. being able to hire engineering teams to optimize processes), or vertically integrate (eg. like how apple with their home grown processors).
>Your reaction is only validation of my argument: you are actually arguing for some sort of inevitability of consolidation of the economy as if it is absolutely unavoidable. This is literally the same argument as Marx, disguised.
My "reaction" consists of a one sentence question. I'm not sure how anyone would think that's a validation of anything, other than you trying to be smug. As for the reference to marx: I fail to see how it's relevant. Are arguments by him automatically wrong?
>EDIT: you are also being profoundly intellectually dishonest when you do not acknowledge the plethora of existing SMBs that already compete against larger corporations (usually at local levels).
Please check your own arguments before calling others "profoundly intellectually dishonest". You're basically arguing that because some business/sectors haven't consolidated yet, that consolidation isn't happening. By that logic global warming isn't happening either because there's still snow in some places and that some places are even cooling.
Learn to read. I never argued that. I clearly attributed consolidation outcomes in the economy to collusion between Washington and Wall Street.
This is proven. Anti-competitive regulation i.e. regulatory capture is more prevalent than ever.
The most recent example of blatant anti-competitive collusion was the recent case of multiple Big Tech companies colluding against Parler. And the well-paid Wall street puppets in Washington did absolutely nothing about it and often publicly spoke up in favor of it. Pure & corrupt crony consolidation.
Your argument, like Marx, works in favor of crony capitalism because it creates a false dichotomy between "inevitable consolidation" for a top few elite OR complete radical revolution destroying everything and starting over. The purpose of a false dichotomy being of course to obscure the actual truth which is that consolidation of the economy does not occur from a free market but only occurs from corruption, bureaucracy, and anti-competitive tactics.
It's pure idiocy. Full stop.
Go read some Von Neumann and Nash and educate yourself about actually likelihoods of outcomes.
for a standardized product no, but for personalization businesses a company can beat big corps in localized presence,flexibility,time execution (lower bureacracy and simpler org chart), customer service and even price while getting the fatter customers
That's true, and relatedly it would be nice for developed countries to stop discouraging single income two spouse families as some sort of oppressive relic of the past.
As an Spaniard, I can say we have a lot of problems:
- Low industry and industrial market focused to make profit saving in wages, not selling an interesting product or an advanced one, and usually risking the minimum possible. A lot of big companies of different sectors are here because you can pay nearly minimum wage to a trained employee without problem. Most of the people would accept because at least they can have a work.
- Low technology industry, based on giant companies who make cheap and big software, with nearly zero R&D, and wanting the cheapest people possible (they don't want nor need talent or good people). Most of the talented Spaniards that work abroad and get experience and knowledge have trouble getting back to Spain because they are overqualified for most of the jobs.
The past two problems make a physicist, a chemist, or a biologist (for example) hard to find a work in their field, and when they find earn less than working in a fast food restaurant. And that's why there are a lot of then working in sectors who doesn't need a degree (or even high school), or emigrate. That last thing make really difficult to find trained professional here when they are needed.
- An investor market who would only invest in things that could give a lot of money in a really short time period (pubs, home renting, real estate, small companies that are currently in the market and profitable). They won't give an euro to any startup that haven't sold successfully a product already.
- A population that doesn't want to be a freelance worker or making a small company outside some professional groups that have been in that way for decades, like some construction workers, carpenters, smiths, or plumbers, people who have a small shop, etc.
- To worsen the previous problem, is expensive to be a freelance worker or to make a small company. You have to pay taxes even when your professional expenses and profits are zero. The first year isn't too bad (because you only have to pay a small quantity in comparison to the next years, but anyway most people decide to work illegally the firsts months or years to at least have some amount of money when the need to make it legally and start to pay.
- Working on your own not only needs more money, also more time. Depending on where on Spain are you living, the local or regional government will help you less or more, and the procedure will need more or less time, reaching about 10 to 12 months in the worst cases to being able to pay your own taxes to work on your own.
- Corruption in all layers of the society. What politicians care about is how can get more votes, and if they offer something positive for the country in a long term, that won't affect people in actuality, they are gone to lose. Is a vicious circle difficult to find an exit.
- People without education and current difficulties to access it. Some people without education from a few years ago have trouble entering to "Professional training", what could be called "technical school" in the USA, because sometimes there isn't any vacancy to attend it (in public and even in private centres) due to so many people trying to improve their lives in that way.
- An inflated unemployment rate because are people who are working illegally, and this isn't uncommon because they earn their salary and also can access to the unemployment benefit. It's totally illegal, employer and employees could be easily in jail for this, and employees would have to return all the money received, but there isn't any watching this. Other times is accepted in that way because there is the only way to find a job.
With that panorama, how can somebody could have happily a child here?
There are going to be other Spaniard that had some better experiences and actually are happy with what he/she have (this is possible in some parts of the north of the country or in bigger cities like Madrid), and I'm happy that not everybody experience this kind of problems, but that is what I have seen and what I have heard from other people in my circles and the Internet.
Your ancestors traveled over glacial passes in search of the next 8,000lb mammal to eat. Strangely insulting to think life right now is really too difficult to have a child.
But there's lots of truth in it. We thought a long time before having one kid. It doesn't make me happy to bring a kid in a world of state-surveillance, capitalism-surveillance, worldwide resource depletion and ever growing amount (at an alarming rate) of rules and laws.
We don't have high hope and I'm raising my kid telling him and preparing him for a world that may not be as easy as my boomers parent generation had it.
We still have some hope that said and I believe some places on earth shall be better than others. So I'm raising my kid in english so that at least it should be easier to live an expat life (like I do).
And I gotta say: when the states fuck up too much, that's the ultimate resistance. The last stand: saying "screw that, I'm not making kids in this broken state". I cannot fault these people.
Historically, less kids are born during war times or other crisis times. People avoid having kids in dangerous situations. And if you have baby in Stalingrad, you are significantly more likely to die or get raped etc. Along with the baby.
> You find similarly grim numbers in Western Europe too. I mean youth unemployment was over 50% in Spain during the post-Great Recession crisis and is at 38% now.[1]
No, you don't measure the same thing. Those unemployment rates are calculated not on the whole set of youths, but on the relatively small subset which is not in various types of schools, i.e. it is the ratio of the youths which don't work over the youths which are or could be looking for a job.
The South-African figure is against the whole set. If you were to apply the same method for the Spanish and other European countries, the resulting figure would be much smaller than your 38%.
> far below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman
The magically fixed 2.1 figure has been there for decades, but it doesn't factor in many factors, the most obvious one being the changing survival rate (from birth to making the next generation).
It does, it's per woman. You need 2 people to have a baby so you need 2 babies per woman to replace them and something extra to cover attrition, that's where the .1 comes from.
> the solution is relatively available - get youth to first complete high school and then be equipped with skills they can use to earn a living
But is it? Does SA actually have lots of jobs waiting for post-high school people? With requirements which are not trainable in a few months to people who haven't completed high school?
> get youth to first complete high school [...] But is it?
Yes, but it will never happen. I've seen this playbook in 3 countries now (one of which South Africa): attack education so that people aren't educated enough to understand why they need to vote you out.
If you speak to the people who keep voting for the regime, it's "I hate the ANC, but we must vote for them." In terms of destroying education to stay in power, that's a slam dunk.
Educated countries make baffling, crazy choices at the ballot box all the time. Plenty enthusiastically elect "one person, one vote, one time" types of parties, or something close to it. For example, Russia is fairly educated if one believes university graduation numbers. Poland and Hungary are more "educated" than Austria or Czechia. And all of them are so much more educated at every level than Portugal, which has had a string of competent and non-authoritarian governments. Handy coloured maps[0][1] offer little in terms of "ah, I see how the ones who send their young'uns to uni and spend the most on education are the most competently governed".
There's probably some correlation between education quality/amount in very specific areas, like civics and basic economics, and "quality" of elected governments. But I intuitively believe (admittedly without searching for evidence) that these are easily swamped by more important factors, like economic/political crises du jour, history, culture, neighbourhood, etc.
(regarding neighbourhood, I think this is often underappreciated. E.g. maybe if Portugal was surrounded by third-world tinpot dictatorships, it would also join that club, but it's influenced far more by countries like Spain and France; and it's very difficult for an almost-out-of-the-abyss country like Ghana to break out and join the club of reasonably-governed middle-income countries given its neighbourhood).
> Educated countries make baffling, crazy choices at the ballot box all the time.
That's a false dilemma. There are an array of reasons why a populace might make poor political choices. I'm suggesting that education is one of those reasons, and that it's the easiest to exploit.
Speaking as a South African, I would say that the expression of "never attribute to malice that which can be reasonably explained by incompetence" is particularly apt here.
I'm very doubtful that anyone in government is actually trying in any form to keep the population uneducated, instead the poor delivery of education is a result of general apathy and incompetence.
It is further exacerbated by the largely unchecked corruption, whereby too many people in government are more focussed on stealing from the tax coffers than doing the job they're paid to do.
Finally, this is all made worse by the fact that the people keep voting in the ANC (the party in power since 1994) despite their terrible track record of poor service delivery and corruption. I agree that the lack of education is contributing to the problem of voters not recognizing their options and ability to enact change.
My hope is that eventually as the older "blind devotees" to the ANC pass away, that the younger disenfranchised generation's voices become enough to vote them out.
Disturbingly though, a lot of the votes moving away from the ANC are instead going to a somewhat extremist party which promotes wealth re-distribution and their members tend to proudly walk around with berets and (albeit simple) uniforms. (A side rant is that I wish their party leader would get banned from Twitter for inciting violence, but it seems that the US based company doesn't care to look at the case as carefully as they do for US elected leaders.)
> > get youth to first complete high school [...] But is it?
> Yes, but it will never happen.
This implies a model of the world in which education causes prosperity. The fate of large parts of Central Asia, the Caucasus and Mongolia after the end of the subsidies from Russia suggests this doesn’t work that well. Broad based high levels of education weren’t great for Ireland either last century. There were at most three decades 1900-2000 when Ireland didn’t export its people. By contrast China got rich explosively fast once with a population that mostly hadn’t finished primary school starting in the 1980s.
The evidence that education causes prosperity is at best weak. People like to buy education once they have money for similar reasons to west they like to buy nicer houses or travel, intrinsic enjoyment and conspicuous consumption.
> Broad based high levels of education weren’t great for Ireland either last century
Can you clarify this remark? Ireland didn't provide free secondary school education until the late 60's (my Dad was sent to secondary school for three years as he was the smart one), so I'm having trouble understanding what you mean here.
> This implies a model of the world in which education causes prosperity.
That implication assumes that prosperity is correlated to democracy. There's also a vast difference between a democracy and a functioning democracy (which has arguably never existed). The value of democracy is drilled into citizens of democracies, however, when you look at it objectively it's a bitter failure; just like all its alternatives.
The implication is: if you want to control where the votes go, you want an uneducated populace that is more likely to believe emotional/populist arguments. Nothing more, nothing less.
>If you speak to the people who keep voting for the regime, it's "I hate the ANC, but we must vote for them." In terms of destroying education to stay in power, that's a slam dunk.
Even an educated populace won't fight back against exploitative government if it's all they know.
I live in a highly educated US state, one of the most educated, at least on paper. People say the same damn thing but with bigger words and then vote for the ruling party. The stuff the government routinely gets away with here would have the involved parties quickly out of power in some of the adjacent states. But when the .gov is caught misbehaving people just grumble and act as though the way things are here is the only way things could ever be and no other status quo could exist let alone be stable.
I wish I never lived elsewhere. Ignorance is bliss.
I do not think you can come this conclusion in a two party government with first past the post elections. Your choice is always the lesser of two evils.
Ranked choice (or star) voting would provide more insight, but I do not know of a large government that has a long history of using it, but it would be interesting to see that data if it existed.
I don't think the voting system matters that much except as a final refinement on top of an already working system. Some competition is worlds better than no competition. My state is effectively a one party state.
Voting for the lesser of the evils is also voting for the better of the evils. At least with a viable 2nd party there is pressure on the first party to suck less. When people blindly vote for one party they are free to misbehave. Let them get away with that for a generation or and it becomes the new normal.
> Voting for the lesser of the evils is also voting for the better of the evils.
What is the significance of this distinction?
> At least with a viable 2nd party there is pressure on the first party to suck less.
Hence the problem of first past the post voting. With ranked choice or star, you have viable 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, whatever party. I can more accurately relay my priorities via my votes as opposed to solely using my vote to prevent the worst party from winning.
Do they attack education through funding or through rhetoric? I imagine funding is where they would have more power.
I already believed that education should be outside of the purview of the government, but this even more reason to keep them separate. A government whose sole purpose is to protect individual rights (properly defined) would have no ability to gut the education of it's populace.
Also see my sibling comment, but I think it's neither, they don't attack education, they're just apathetic, incompetent and more focussed on stealing from the tax coffers.
This. Just because you have an educated workforce doesn't mean you'll be booming with jobs.
More like you need a business friendly environment with low taxes, minimal corruption and frictionless bureocracy to create a thriving local economy and also attract external investors.
I guess that's one template for booming with jobs.
You can also be a wealthly petrostate (with or without corruption), or a corrupt, dirt-poor state with no labor laws and be booming with outsourced low-wage textile jobs, or a command-economy with plenty of pointless make-work jobs...
If your goal is just to have a lot of jobs to keep your young people busy so they don't foment a revolution, there's plenty of ways to go.
Spain has a 17.3% high school dropout rate though.[1] So education is an issue. Although yeah, many graduates were also unemployed in the crisis.
I think the crisis was kind of exceptional as everyone was going to be pretty screwed either way. But furthermore, it seems that until you reach a sort of 'critical mass' of educated workers it can be hard for them to find employment as it's hard for the country to attract companies that require an educated workforce.
I think the solution would be to continue investing in education to help reach that critical mass and at the same time make it easier for people to set up new companies, start-ups etc.
Spain is pretty bad for this with the harsh autonomo taxes for people trying to start their own business etc., plus all the bureaucracy which often has to be done in-person and appointments are hard to get etc.
At least it seems like things are improving, although the Coronavirus will be a setback.
Right. We have to come to grips with the fact that not all people are cut out for college or to be white collar knowledge workers. Many of the jobs that these people used to enjoy have been shipped overseas, meanwhile large amounts of unskilled labor is allowed to pour in. This has destroyed opportunities to make your way in life as a blue collar worker. But instead of reversing sweetheart legislation that makes it easy to ship jobs overseas and bring in cheap labor at home, we talk about UBI and raising minimum wage. Both of which will have even more devastating impacts on the middle and low economic classes.
Bringing back exported jobs is a short-term solution. It might solve the problem for a few years, but the fundamental problem is that most of the jobs that have left the Western sphere are low-skill jobs that are easy to automate. Moving these jobs back into the Western sphere will massively increase the financial motivation of companies to automate away these jobs, and in a few years we will be back to where we started.
No matter which way you slice it, there are just not going to be enough jobs for everyone in the future, and society needs to adapt to that.
> But instead of reversing sweetheart legislation that makes it easy to ship jobs overseas and bring in cheap labor at home,
No or low taxes on imports is sweetheart legislation? There is no way US labor prices (some of the highest in the world) were ever going to compete with the labor prices in developing countries where families live in a single room. Not to mention the lack of labor and environmental standards.
I am not aware of any US import taxes that were removed to allow this labor price arbitrage to occur. It was simply a fact of international shipping efficiencies making trade and the labor price arbitrage much easier.
I’m familiar with the arguments on how higher minimum wages may harm the lower classes, but how would UBI “devastate” them?
We can bring back the manufacturing, but the jobs are highly unlikely to follow. Rather than 800 unionized workers working the assembly lines, it’s 8 robotics technicians overseeing the machines. This ratio will, obviously, vary depending upon exactly the product being manufactured.
There is a shortage of skilled workers and there is a surplus of unskilled workers.
Google “skill shortage South Africa” or something like that for more info. I don’t think there is an easy solution to bringing that gap, but I’m sure getting the basics right (ie a decent education system) would help a lot.
This might be politically difficult when the skilled workers (or their ancestors) were persecuting the population of unskilled workers for generations.
Not only that, but the said-ancestors established a separate, impoverished, lower-quality education system to ensure that they'd be perpetually unskilled and incapable of competing for skilled jobs even if they wanted to talented. Diabolical.
There is much more funding being provided now, but it's far from enough sadly. In terms of policy, its much more egalitarian on paper in the sense that every student is supposed to study the same material, unfortunately there are still under-resourced schools and egregious negligence and/or corruption. I'd say the black, middle-class-and-higher (or very gifted but poor) students have benefitted the most by getting the institutional roadblocks removed since they already have access to good schools. The the system has improved marginally for the poor, and those who are in remote rural areas (the two are often synonymous)
I would speculate that, on the whole, they’re probably comparable in terms of outcome, the old system was designed for mediocre outcomes whereas the current one is due to negligence. But could be wrong, our former white public schools now serve everyone and presumably are better than the Bantu education schools that black people were previously limited to. These schools are of course the minority.
These situations can become traps for local economies: People don’t want to invest in education without job opportunities. Companies don’t want to invest in more jobs without educated applicants. Self-reinforcing cycle.
The inverse of this situation is why high cost of living cities continue to thrive: It may cost more to hire and retain people, but you’re guaranteed a supply of motivated and educated applicants. It becomes worth the premium to operate in those expensive markets.
I can’t speak to SA, but there are definitely cities and even regions in the United States that have high unemployment but also struggle to hire reliable employees regardless of wages offered. Even if a company pays well, the well-paid and well-educated hires often want to use those jobs as a springboard to move out of the city rather than risk tying their career to a declining local economy. Turnover is high simply because educated and motivated people leave the area.
Interesting that there are marked male/female differences in Turkey, Colombia, and Mexico – followed up by less differences on the high end by Brazil, Costa Rica, Argentina, Chile, and then on the lower end by Slovak Republic, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Czech Republic.
Weirdly enough you could say things are very out of kilter in the Czech Republic because even though the NEET rate for guys is a chart-topping 5% the rate for gals is 15%, triple the amount! (Same kind of goes for Estonia).
It's a fascinating socioeconomic demographic data-set.
By all accounts the Netherlands, Sweden, Iceland, or Switzerland is the place to be if you're young … (And we're all young once, right!?)
> Interesting that there are marked male/female differences in Turkey, Colombia, and Mexico
As someone living in Mexico, it is not at all a surprise to me. Stay at home mom is incredibly common here. Also, I doubt the stats capture the cash based employment economy that many women are in here.
We have a maid that cleans 3x per week. We pay her in cash at the end of each day. She has a full schedule and works six days per week. I highly doubt she would show up in the statistics as employed.
A friend of mine organized a safari business in SA. It was a normal thing for the workers he had to receive the salary pay and disappear for a week until they had burned it, and then will come back.
So he had to pay different people at different times and talk with the women in their environment in order for his business to work.
Sounds familiar. When I was building my house (not in SA) the construction workers would often disappear after getting paid. I would go looking for them in the village and find them on a bender. They would come back when they needed more booze money. It was pretty obvious why they did not have many opportunities to get ahead, and never would.
Having seen such a problem elsewhere, mostly having a stable life, normal family, educated and fed kids etc. Also naturally no addiction that is wasting your life away.
Do you know how much where they being paid? In my experience, this only happens when the wages are very low. I don't know the direction of causality: do higher wages motivate workers not to be more professional, or do low wages result in the 'good' workers avoiding those jobs? Even in the US, a lot of minimum-wage McJobs have relatively high levels of absenteeism
Amazing to see these statistics when, to a foreigner, South African businesses already seem to intentionally overemploy (I would assume as a way of maintaining social stability). It is not unusual for there to be twice or even three times as many people working in a shop than in Europe.
It reminds me of a small coworking space I used in Sao Paulo, with three receptionists, a few "managers", lots of cleaning staff, someone doing just coffee, security, etc. They could do all of that with two employees total. In front of the building, there was a petrol station with one employee per pump. The pandemic was actually a relief for lots of companies that were able to fire expendable staff more easily.
Yeah, in South Africa nobody puts their own gas in their car. There are multiple people at each filling station whose job that is. You also don’t pack your groceries at a supermarket either. You also have a maid and a gardener, it’s so dirt cheap unless you’re really poor there is no reason why you wouldn’t. There are car guards all over, there’s no need to even push your own trolley or pack the stuff in your car, they’ll do it for a small tip. Basically if you earn an average amount money you can enjoy a seriously comfortable life.
The surplus of unskilled workers means that labor is very cheap. Businesses over employ (cleaning staff, security etc), and even homes over employ in terms of domestic staff (maids and garderners), but there’s still a big surplus.
Labour is really cheap in South Africa. It's probably cheaper to employ someone to perform a task than it is to automate it, as is would be in Europe which has higher labour costs
This hasn't been true in decades, but yeah, buses used to have a ticket seller/collector on board (εισπράκτορας). Buses in Greek cities are busy enough that the driver can't do both jobs, like some U.S. systems do, without unreasonable stop dwell times (especially in the days when you could get change on board!). To keep things going, the driver would pull away from the stop ASAP, and the ticket seller would take payment from the newly boarded people while the bus was moving.
On most buses there'd be 1 driver and 1 ticket collector, at least by the 1990s. There might be 2 collectors on long articulated buses, one near the front and one near the back.
The last vestiges of that system were phased out with the drachma/euro conversion around 2000, when everything had to be changed over anyway. Nowadays most Greek cities use a proof-of-payment system, where you have to buy and/or validate a ticket yourself from self-service machines. Then roving inspectors get on buses randomly and fine people who can't produce a current ticket.
The old system has been gone long enough that there are nostalgia articles like, "Do you remember the days when buses had an 'eispraktoras'?". The last two photos here show a ticket collector station at the rear door, which would have a cash drawer under the counter for making change: https://www.enimerotiko.gr/ellada/thymasai-tote-poy-ta-leofo...
I wonder how much Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) is a drag on the economy. A SA company wanted to sell my software locally but the BBBEE and other taxes killed it.
I am from South Africa and can say that 43% is conservative.
The official figure for youth unemployment is 75%
Situation is quite dire and caused by failed political ideology similar to the failed state of Zimbabwe.
Statisticians have about a dozen different definitions of unemployment, depending on how they count retired people, full time parents, people caring for relatives, people on long-term disability, people with part-time jobs, people doing voluntary work, people like actors who are between jobs, people who've given up on searching for work, and so on.
The 'NEET' definition does not consider full-time mothers as employed.
> as much as South Africa has a youth unemployment problem, the solution is relatively available - get youth to first complete high school and then be equipped with skills they can use to earn a living.
> With that in mind, you have to ask: why isn’t the South African government putting all their energy into this?
The list of reasons are legion, but chief among them is corruption - and until those in power get past their 'it's our turn to eat' view point, we're all just wasting our breath.
If full-time mothers are considered NEET then this is quite meaningless. Why in the hell we'd ever consider 100% employment to be a good thing is beyond me.
In addition to the other answers here, there is a large informal economy that essentially caters for the poor. This both provides them with informal means of income but also allows the poor to access essentials cheaply.
For example a typical middle class corporate worker may earn a salary and live a lifestyle that is comparable to European counterpart. This same person may employ a full time housekeeper for $350 a month and this housekeeper somehow gets by because she exists in a parallel economy of sorts.
They might be able to afford to have a company cut their grass, have maids come by once a month to clean, and have food delivered on occasion, but they can't afford to pay a person full time to do all of those things.
Even paying minimum wage, that would be something like $20,000 after taxes. Given that the median household income is something like $60k gross; no, they can't afford domestic staff.
Only people stuck in exploitative situations would make $350/mo for full time work in the United States, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number of people living on ~$350/mo (including rent) is in the six or seven figures.
The economic inequality between the poorer parts of the South, Appalachia, urban projects, etc and wealthy cities can be staggering. The latter subsidize national infrastructure so it's hard to find a town with extremely unreliable electricity like one might find in South Africa, but that's it - we've even got similar segregated parallel economies.
For example, Sudhir Venkatesh from UofC did a study (mentioned in the Freakanomics book) on drug dealers and their income: he found that the rank and file made less than half of minimum wage, working out to under $800 a month full time. Now spread that across the family members that the dealer has to support and $350/mo per adult is not unrealistic.
You don't. Your employer is paying for all the necessities because you can benefit from economies of scale (There are tons of empty spare bedrooms in the US but building extra housing is impossible in most places for example.)
Welfare. A single person would pay no tax and indeed receive several hundred dollars a year in tax rebates. They would qualify for ~$200/month in food stamps and likely get health insurance for free. They would also qualify for low income subsidized housing. With kids the benefits (tax rebates and food stamps) increase by thousands.
It really depends on the job, the boss and the social context.
As a quick example: the son of a restaurant owner can get informally hired as the waiter/bartender. He would get a fair share of the profits, possibly inherit the restaurant or its management, and will probably never be fired.
I can't speak to SA, but worked in Namibia which is adjacent and culturally quite similar. The various tribes own most of the land which is parceled up into farms which is then worked by massive extended families. Life outside of the cities out in the village is actually pretty good. There's basically 0 hunger since its all farms and lots of opportunities for people to run small one-off businesses to make side money. And since families are so extended, there's always a farm you can go work at. If you manage to avoid AIDS and alcolholism the life expectancy is easily 80+. Downside of course is that there's very little opportunity to move out, but the government is pushing rural education programs hard so I'm not sure how else they could deal with that.
Point being, rural unemployment really isn't that big a problem, its the urban unemployment that is brutal.
Surviving in different places in the world requires different amount of work.
If you live in Brazil or Cuba cold weather does not exist and you can wear a t-shirt swinsuit all year long and survive.
If you live in Germany,Japan, Norway or Boston you can't do that. You need to prepare for Winter, and not just you, but your house needs to be prepared, your means of transport needs to be prepared, and so on.
While Winter exist in SA, it is pretty mild for European, Asian or American standards.
Also in lots of places you could have a farm and you don't need to buy lot's of things if you just live a simple life.
And Africa is gigantic, with lots of resources for a population much smaller than Asia or Europe, and way younger.
> The lowest temperature officially recorded in Brazil was −14 °C (7 °F) in Caçador, Santa Catarina state, on 11 June 1952. However, the summit of Morro da Igreja, a mountain situated in the municipality of Urubici, also in Santa Catarina, recorded a temperature of −17.8 °C (0.0 °F) on 30 June 1996 unofficially.
I googled the average winter temperature for those locales and they're all well above freezing - with the exception of the mountain summits - as high as 10-20C in January! Compared to Boston (daily winter lows below freezing) or Germany/Japan (record lows in the -40s), that's basically t-shirt weather.
USA has similar unemployment stats with subsets of their population demographics. This subset largely survives and thrives due to section 8 and EBT/SNAP entitlements.
Well, survive maybe but certainly they're not thriving. The welfare state has all but ensured that those people will never get out of their situation. Maybe their kids have a chance but it's clearly a major contributing factor of generational poverty. It's unconscionable what it has done to black Americans. It gets sold off on well-meaning but ill-informed voters as a way to help people but ultimately it only serves to make those people wards of the state.
So many people "make it" in the off the books economy that the welfare eligible rungs of the social ladder deal in but they can't get up to the next rung because they can't amass the capital to make a clean break and the state will screw them out of everything if they try and go legit slowly.
Imagine your a highly successful under the table mechanic. You have a few under the table employees and work out of a leased space where the owners look the other way. Everything is done in cash or similar. If you want to start a "real shop" you can't just get an LLC, rent a real garage space, put up a sign and move all your tools then slowly start a rolling upgrade process to get all your stuff on the books and above the table as you acquire more profitability to absorb the overhead that entails. The city or state would instantly show up and fuck you over twenty different ways for being off the books and out of compliance. The only way to go legit fast enough is to get a loan and you can't do that because you have no assets, no history, no credit, despite the fact that you are basically already running a successful business.
> It gets sold off on well-meaning but ill-informed voters
Has it? I don't think I have talked to a single person who likes the current state of welfare in the USA. The problem is that some people think it is too generous, and others think it is not generous enough; so we end up with a clearly dysfunctional system as it accumulates changes changes born out of polar opposite views of the problem.
Seems like a pretty arbitrary way of framing things. You could support programs that would help poor people become more independent while framing this as being a more generous social program.
Partially through the informal economy described elsewhere, and a fairly robust welfare system that provides grants and other social support to about 18 million people.
Most likely because this answer is very wrong. You rarely have situations in developing countries where the parents are supporting adults in their mid 20s, and it's almost always the other way round.
The correct answer, as others have pointed out, is the informal economy, with them taking up a bunch of odd jobs one after the other.
To focus on a subset of 15-29 year olds, what do you think 15-18 year olds are doing without either being in school (which is free in South Africa) or holding jobs (which would probably be illegal)? Most likely, supplementing the family income by taking up jobs in the informal economy.
It does indeed happen in the developing world that adults in their mid 20s are supported by older members of their family, it just might not be their parents. In West Africa, for instance, it is common for entire families to be supported off of a couple of lucky relatives who managed to get to Europe.
What you're describing is a real type of person, and one that should be avoided, but that's probably not what's fueling this statistic. Large portions of the population did not suddenly become lazy and lose all ambition. They're not engaged with the economy because they're losing the ability to engage. This is a global phenomenon, and it's getting worse and worse as tech makes most of the population increasingly irrelevant in the job market. We are rapidly approaching a situation with only two end states: Some kind of intense wellfare state, or riots and brutal chaos. Forget South Africa, the US is full of 30-and-unders who are perfectly capable and willing to engage, but can't because there's no place for them. No good jobs, rent and home prices are through the roof, college prices are through the roof and don't buy a good career anymore anyway. And on and on.
The problem isn't that young people are lazy. It's that they're being left behind. And if something isn't done about it soon, society is going to start to crumble. In some ways, it already has.
> Large portions of the population did not suddenly become lazy and lose all ambition. They're not engaged with the economy because they're losing the ability to engage. This is a global phenomenon, and it's getting worse and worse as tech makes most of the population increasingly irrelevant in the job market.
Spot on.
When media hypes up the automation as the doom for employment, they are ignoring the doom of employment already happening around them.
The only country that seriously paying attention to this problem probably is China. CCP is at no time not paying attention to make everyone busy up doing something meaningful (probably more to the state's ends, less so to individual in the western sense).
Of course some young people are lazy. And some are not lazy. I have no idea about South Africa, but in the US I can hardly find a business in my town (especially restaurants) without a "help wanted" sign. This may be a short term issue related to the pandemic.
That would be a pretty useless definition of lazy.
I can hang a sign out asking someone to work for minimum wage during evening hours in an area that requires them to live with 3 other roommates in a 2 bedroom apartment with a 60min commute on an erratic bus.
But I would not classify people not taking me up on this offer as being lazy.
They keep bumping up the starting wage. $12/hr for fast food. You can get a nice one bedroom here for $800/month. No long commutes here.
I never said I had a definition of lazy. I just said that some people are lazy and some aren't. You can't make a blanket statement saying all young people are not lazy. Just pointing out that I've never seen so many help wanted signs as I do now.
They should take that wage and job if they don’t have one. Beggars can’t be choosers.
At the same time they need to get out of that situation as soon as possible.
It’s one thing to look for a job and not find anything - it’s quite another to not have a job for years because the pay/job isn’t what you like and you are burdening the taxpayer in the meantime.
> They should take that wage and job if they don’t have one. Beggars can’t be choosers.
They do, our whole quality of life is based on the bottom 3 quintiles not having better options. It’s a unique situation that COVID caused the government to broadly hand out assistance, giving people the ability to not have to subject themselves to those low wage-low quality of life at work positions.
> it’s quite another to not have a job for years because the pay/job isn’t what you like and you are burdening the taxpayer in the meantime.
It is possible to me, if I were a low wage worker, to look at the data for the past 5 decades and conclude the probability to “get out of that situation” is sufficiently low to warrant opting out of the game entirely.
>Are you really suggesting that the reason 43% of South African youths are unemployed is because they're lazy?
Not at all, it's structural problem. I've seen this in LA as well and it's the number one reason I left. Since I lack the personal capacity to fix LA, I no longer live there.
If anything if you live in a city or a nation where unemployment is rampant , you just need to leave. Not worry about what the government is going to do to fix it.
> you just need to leave. Not worry about what the government is going to do to fix it.
I'm voiding the HN policy and assuming bad faith since you either lack the empathy to see that not everyone is able to "just leave" or you have an agenda to make this a talking point. I'm hoping it is the later.
Do you leave in LA, or had a long and deep history living LA?
Wondering where your bad faith come from.
Back in the old days where I live in China, there were plenty of situations where people had no other way to engage the economy, and had to be lazy. They gamble, they prostitute, they murder as well. The government was absolutely powerless to do anything, simply because they had no whatever resources to fix those. Then people just left. Look at what's happening in China's north east provinces. Same situation.
According to this [1] the unemployment rate in LA is 9.9% vs Chicago 7.5% Is that really the difference between a thriving city and an unlivable hellhole?
What I am getting at is trying to figure out which city minimizes the types of "idiots" you are referring to and i'm finding that no city is really like that. Every city has these kinds of problems to some extent as well as positive aspects.
Maybe you just like a smaller city? ~2-3 vs ~12 million is a big difference.
Your experiences are completely different from mine. LA is the second largest city in the US, so I’m sure it contains all extremes. But in my experience it is full of young people who are striving and hustling. There seem to be more young people there with passionate professional dreams than most places.
Chicago is also huge- maybe you just got lucky in making your move?
While I found your comment interesting, I think this is more specific whereas the article is more or less talking about a society that has a disfunction, not the individuals in it (well I mean it could, but 43 percent is extremely unlikely to be similar to your elder relative).
As a white male from South Africa, I can assure you this wouldn't have been my reality were I still living there. Black people make up approx 80% of the population, and this would disproportionally be theirs. Reasons date back to the Apartheid regime, which deliberately kept non-whites uneducated, as well as some horrendous mismanagement under the current ANC governnment under then-president Jacob Zuma (who himself serious under-valued education in general).
Just as one example: there was a famous incident where, due to some corrupt dealings, textbooks weren't able to be delivered in Limpopo (one of the provinces) for several years in a row. For many years there have been schools with 0% high school graduation rates. The infrastructure and processes that are taken for granted in developed countries are only really available to a minority in SA. This makes a huge difference.