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Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

theatlantic.com

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Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#51

Post by zanny »

jcrites wrote: post #17
hkmurakami wrote: post #14

This is scary, yes. But there's more to any unemployment story than just the stats. What are the prospects of an unemployed young person getting a job at any point in the future, even when the economy recovers? Is there a strong bias towards new grads, that would lead to a "lost generation" that permanently suffers in the job market? How does society look on the unemployed? Do they look at them with sympathy or scorn…

How are they making a living and otherwise providing for themselves? (Serious question.) Is homelessness also skyrocketing, or do the unemployed receive benefits of some kind?

I've lived at home for a year. Since my mother, father, and grandparents (3 homes) are within 30 miles, I end up doing a lot of lawn mowing, appliance maintenance, and obviously IT work for them, in addition to housecleaning (on an epic scale), etc. In return I've had a year to learn a bunch of new tech without job pressure.

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#52

Post by zanny »

zalzane wrote: post #48
potatolicious wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, this is just hysteria. The kind of software engineers that Amazon, Google, Facebook, et al are importing are all above the six-figure threshold, many of them well above it. This community really makes me facepalm sometimes. It is the only group that can, while getting free massages, catered meals, free shuttles to/from work, get paid well into the six figures, and enjoys an incredibly high standard of living even…

Who says all those immigrants are going to be high-end google-worthy engineers? The chances are in favor that they would drive down the pay of the first quartile of programmers based on quality, not the savants making 100k+/y.

This would suck. I got a crappy CS degree from a nobody college, got average (3.5) gpa, got out in 3 years and didn't get any internships my first two years (though I tried) so I've just been doing my own stuff for a year.

I'd hate for the job market to be even harder for fresh CS grads not out of an Ivy League or state school. Most of my graduating class just gave up and went for cheaper masters programs, I figured I'd learn more on my own (and I was right, I learned half a dozen new languages, and a lot of the practical parts of development like regexes, sql, unix commands and sysadmining, etc).

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#53

Post by zanny »

422long wrote: post #3

Is there a correlation between high-unemployment countries and the availability/quality of off-shore tech labor? Sure the local market may be in shambles, and the level of effort/risk to bring on new permanent employees may be out of whack. Assuming the talent and drive exists, shouldn't this drive the freelancing segment?

As someone trying to get into freelancing out of college, it really blows without a portfolio, and can take years to make one, and most of my freelancer friends left 9-5 (more like 6-10) jobs in the industry to do freelance, and used their years of experience and connections from the job as a jumping off point.

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#54

Post by sliverstorm »

mullingitover wrote: post #22
jcrites wrote: post #19

It would be great if the US government provided an expedited Visa program for college-educated foreign nationals who have received a job offer from a company in the US. There is H1B, but that applies to specialty occupations. (I'm not an immigration expert - perhaps this already exists and I don't know about it?) How many people from those countries immigrate to the US or wish to? If they're willing to work, and a co…

As someone who'd like to drive down the value of my labor down to poverty levels, this is a fantastic idea.

If they've already got the job offer, it wouldn't be all that different from what we have now as far as competitiveness for your job.

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#55

Post by sliverstorm »

JamisonM wrote: post #41
kposehn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And another thing: austerity is all that stands between Europe and total collapse. They can't keep writing checks they cannot cash.

Actually, they can keep writing cheques and cashing them, they have their own currency, it allows you to do that. The current problem is that the "core" of the EU thinks it is in their best interest to keep inflation down and let the other nations suffer. The best evidence we have so far indicates that this is a very bad idea.

The best evidence we have so far indicates that this is a very bad idea.

Do we have evidence that indicates the alternative is any better? There's nothing that says both options can't be terrible.

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#56

Post by flexie »

petsagouris wrote: post #46
flexie wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's different from country to country, but in general lot's of them live with their parents and most of them receive some welfare. In Southern Europe it's not unnormal to live with your parents way into your twenties or even early thirties. And it's not considered embarrassing either. In the cafés of Barcelona, Rome, Athens, you will meet the well dressed 31 year old guy with a smart phone in his pocket a laptop on…

There is no free health care in Greece at the moment. Everyone pays to receive treatment from the public health care system even if you pay your health care insurance monthly fees. Furthermore the free education is a hugely false fact. For almost 20 years now if a child is not getting education outside of the public school system he/she will not be getting anywhere close to getting onto the 3rd educational level (Col…

Yes, it's hard to maintain free healthcare and free education like in Northern or Western Europo when Greeks pay little or no tax.

As I understand it unemployed Greeks receive free health care for up to one year. After that period, patients must pay for their own treatment. That's still more than many places in the US.

The fact that public education is (often?) so bad that private tutor schools are needed to enter university doesn't change the fact that education is mostly free in Greece.

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#57

Post by sliverstorm »

icelancer wrote: post #21
jcrites wrote: post #19

It would be great if the US government provided an expedited Visa program for college-educated foreign nationals who have received a job offer from a company in the US. There is H1B, but that applies to specialty occupations. (I'm not an immigration expert - perhaps this already exists and I don't know about it?) How many people from those countries immigrate to the US or wish to? If they're willing to work, and a co…

Why do they have to be college-educated?

It's a reaction to the observation that the most valuable immigrants, the ones that we want most, have options elsewhere and are going elsewhere. So, shouldn't we lower the barriers to entice said valuable immigrants?

College-educated is just an easy metric to approximate this distinction.

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#58

Post by sliverstorm »

benologist wrote: post #24
jcrites wrote: post #19

It would be great if the US government provided an expedited Visa program for college-educated foreign nationals who have received a job offer from a company in the US. There is H1B, but that applies to specialty occupations. (I'm not an immigration expert - perhaps this already exists and I don't know about it?) How many people from those countries immigrate to the US or wish to? If they're willing to work, and a co…

Why does it have to be US? The whole world is shrinking, a centuries-old, artificial line shouldn't be a barrier.

You might think the line is dated and artificial, but so long as that line determines where taxes go, it does matter.

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#59

Post by brownbat »

The conventional (conservative/economic liberal/libertarian) wisdom is that employers are reluctant to hire new youths because these states mandate so many employer provided protections for any new hires. Employers become risk averse, unwilling to give anyone untested a first shot at the labor market.

Evidence is somewhat mixed based on this chart. The UK has traditionally had lower severance ("redundancy") pay requirements, and is lower on the chart, but close to the EU average. Germany is fairly low on the chart as well, so... maybe youth unemployment is driven more by GDP / worker productivity / promotion of internships / demographics, any number of confounding factors.

The risk of even discussing this idea, even agnostically, is it can beg attacks on the social safety net, so everyone drowns in the quicksand of passionate partisan shouting.

Maybe there's a way to sidestep the traditional arguments and get something out of the discussion. Say we assume the European safety net is non-negotiable, but say we also believe that employee protections may make employers reluctant to hire. Is there a way to implement the same social protections that would blunt the unintended consequences?

Re: Europe's Record Youth Unemployment

#60

Post by dnu »

lignuist wrote: post #2

Interesting, how Germany decoupled itself from the rest of Europe in this graph.

This might be misleading. Germany has something named "mini job" or "400 euro job", where you are paid exactly 400 euro which barely covers the groceries and the rent for a room. A lot of young people have such a job, and this keeps the unemployment rate low.
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