Nope. Revolution needs some "force in the middle" - the poor, lazy an uninterested will not start revolution. French revolution was not started by poor people, but by "middle class" who was not able to extend its wealth and influence because of ruling oligarchy (all these barons, etc). The poor were used by them, but were not the driving force.
I am not sure that among young, comfortable, teached from kindergarden about tolerance, socialistic version of human rights there is enough energy to start anything (like making mind effort not to choose stupid and promising every for free politicians).
The intellectual condition of european youth is rather poor. Spaniards have choosen socialistic government who was dealing with important stuff like human rights for monkeys. Go figure...
The youth's don't necessarily start it - but they are primed to carry it on. What happens is a groups with something to lose (the french middle class) takes advantage of another group that has nothing to lose (the poor). You can't start a fire with only a spark; you have to have a fuel source.
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.
Interestingly though, things are going to be reversed in 2013:
"The 17 countries that share the euro will have halved the pace of budget consolidation in 2013 compared to 2012, as the overall budget deficit of the euro zone fell by 1.5 percent of GDP in 2012 but will only shrink a further 0.75 percent this year, the European Commission forecast this month.
The United States plan to reduce their budget deficit by 2 percent of GDP in 2013 against 2012. Unless policies change the overall euro zone consolidation will be only 0.1 percent of GDP in 2014, the Commission said, against 1 percent in the U.S."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/27/us-eu-economy-idUS...
Sweden here. Went through heavy austerity in the 90s. Things going comparatively good now, just to give you some anectodal evidence for the contrary position.
Sure, post-WW1 France vs. Britain are a fairly good natural experiment that was conducted - France devalued and Britain did not, and despite the natural advantage of not being destroyed in the war France's economy generally outperformed Britain's anyway. In the current situation one can look at the US vs. Europe though that is more of a less-austerity vs. more-austerity example and of the course, as with all natural experiments the two subjects are not entirely the same.
That, and the economic models that are consistent with recent behaviour in these economies are saying that the alternative is better. Also, we know the trade-off here - austerity is bad for wage-earners, the poor, people with few, no, or negative assets in the denominated currency. Inflation is bad for net asset-holders in the denominated currency and importers.
Now, given that most of the vulnerable people in a society fall into one group that can be a moral basis for action and it is easy to see which side of the political spectrum is more likely to align on each particular side of the debate.
(I post this feeling assured you probably won't read the response since a whole day has passed, but what the heck!)
Cuts or inflation, it's the same end result. One is just more of a fraud than the other. Inflation is almost universally preferred by the political class because it does a better job of hiding the erosion of purchasing power and standard of living.
They have a similar end result on wages, maybe. It doesn't matter if your paycheck (and public benefits) decrease outright because of austerity or its silently inflated away.
They differ though on who pays overall.
Inflation is a tax on anyone holding €-denominated assets. For those who have denominated debts at a fixed interest rate, it's a boon. I'm sure France wouldn't complain if they end up repaying their 10-year bonds at a negative real return.
Austerity is largely the opposite: countries (and people) who are in the worst financial situation feel the most pain.
It's perfectly understandable that those with money will want more austerity, while those without want more inflation.
Do you mean that you believe austerity will help avoid collapse, or that austerity will bring it on? I think you mean the former. I'm too ignorant on the issue to have an opinion myself.
Unfortunately there is still debate about the benefit/drawbacks of austerity, but if Europe is any indication, it is just degrading the whole situation. What's keeping Europe away from the edge or from a turn to prosperity is the hard-nosed devotion to austerity.
Ah yes, if the troubled European nations would just spend a lot more money they don't actually have while not paying off any of their debts, while pretending they could ever afford the vast welfare states they built, they would find themselves prosperous again. Keynesian faith based economics at its finest. Spend what you don't have, run up debts you can never pay back, and print your way deeper into destruction when all else fails, because inflation is easier to lie about than an equivalent austerity cut.
Keynesian economics, turning first world countries into second world countries since 1936.
You pan Keynesian economics as misguided, and while I'd agree that ramping up public spending is not the solution everytime, clearly austerity is not leading to the "investor confidence" that would spur growth in the periphery. The truth is, no approach is going to work in every situation, but it's almost foolish to say austerity was the best approach to the Eurocrisis.
Of course there are complications when you're dealing with a common currency, but the budget constraints and subsequent skyrocketing of debt hasn't alleviated the situation. If anything its burdened the finances of the periphery with an unbelievable amount of default risk, which if I understand austerity economics correctly, that is exactly what it's meant to avoid via boosting investor confidence. Odd how even though results were different, people still believe it's a good solution to the Eurozone's woes.
Are we just going to pretend that Keynesian economics is some obviously foolhardy strategy and hasn't worked repeatedly in the past? It is understood to have worked with particularly great effect in Australia following the GFC.
No offense, but this comment betrays a very limited understanding of the situation.
First of all, the European countries with the strongest welfare states do just fine. Also, social expenditures are not actually much different in the United States compared to EU countries -- it's just that more of it comes out of pocket [1]; in the end, it still comes out of your paycheck (as an employee) or profit (if self-employed). In fact, the US has higher net social expenditures than Spain (as a percentage of GDP).
Second, money creation does not work the way you understand it. The majority of what economists call the M2 money supply is not created by the government or the central bank, but by private banks through fractional reserve banking [2], i.e. loans.
And as a matter of fact, the M2 money supply [3] in Greece [4] and Spain [5] has cratered in recent years. The private banks have been "unprinting" money, if you like that terminology. While in theory this might have come from money being transferred to Germany etc., money supply growth across the Eurozone as a whole has also slowed down since the crisis [6], as opposed to the US [7]. Note that it is normal for the money supply to grow with the economy, even absent inflation, because M2 (= money in circulation) is an indirect indicator of economic activity.
Finally, much as "printing money" is favored as a term by some people, this is not actually what Quantitative Easing is. What Quantitative Easing does (simplifying a bit) is a central bank making loans in lieu of the private banks when the latter fail to do so in sufficient measure. The QE process has the central bank buying private assets with money it created to compensate for a shortage in the money supply; the crucial difference (compared to printing money) is that the process is easily reversible; when the economy recovers, the central bank sells these assets again and destroys the money it gets back. Thus, the central bank retains control over the total money supply. QE is what the US Fed has been doing to prop up the money supply in recent years because Congress couldn't get its act together.
Borrowing, likewise, is in the current situation in no way comparable to "printing" money. In fact, short term government bonds of most developed countries (T-bills or their equivalent) not called Greece, Spain, or Italy go for yields below the very low inflation rate: investors buy bonds even though they're technically losing money; similarly, those governments could technically make money by borrowing more at the moment because the aforementioned investors are willing to loan it to them at effective negative rates.
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?
Lastly, how do the young unemployed feel? Are they angry? Are they carefree? Or are they filled with despair and hopelessness?
Increasingly, I'm scared this is the prospect faced by youth in the US. There is no doubt the US is in a relatively sounder position than Europe, but the past few years of recent grads not being able to find work has left a bleak prospect in our minds about future work even when the economy recovers.
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 his knees and a girlfriend by his side. He drives a nice little car, goes on vacations once or twice a year, has a master in something soft, which he got for free, and he is covered by free health care. He lives with his parents or - if he is lucky - in one of their spare apartments (lots of Southern European families have more than one home). He may have a low paid job or he may be unemployed living with a bit of government welfare and occational help from daddy.
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 (College or University). The funding and the personnel is inadequate to say the least.
Mind you the public sector is governed by the 5-out-1-in rule (5 people leave 1 gets assigned a position) in general but in the education sector this analogy is rounding up to 10-out-1-in.
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.
Excuse me, but the welfare systems are public, not free. We pay for them with our taxes. At least in Spain, education and health system are public, not free.
Welfare, free health care, free education... Free to him but it has to be paid for by someone. As more people rely on those benefits, the cost goes up for those who contribute to the system. The frightening question is what happens when the well runs dry?
Basic welfare is an unavoidable cost. The only way to avoid paying for food, housing, and healthcare is, to be blunt, to starve or bleed to death in the gutter. And basic welfare doesn't really cost much. The cost drivers for the European welfare systems are healthcare and pensions. With respect to healthcare, the EU countries actually have the enormously inefficient American system beat (often for better quality at lower cost), with respect to pensions, they generally lag behind due to lower fertility rates.
Education pays for itself because it is an investment. The average person will be more productive and earn more (thus increasing GDP and also their personal tax payments) if they have an education rather than being illiterate. ROI for education is extremely good. Countries like Switzerland and Germany do not subsidize education just because it's a nice thing to do, but because it's a positive sum game.
Considering how, in the US at least, wealth and asset holdings has extremely concentrated itself in the top fraction of the population in the last 30 years, probably not soon.
I mean, most of these states aren't raising taxes, but are playing with monetary gears to keep money injection from spurring inflation (albeit they have had huge taxes for decades).
In the end capital ownership and property rights are just concepts we've collectively agreed are legitimate. Once living conditions become dystopian and wealth inequality skyrockets even more than it already has, I suspect society will legitimize "stealing" from the well.
Notably, the well doesn't care whether or not you steal water from it. The water was never 'owned' by it in the first place.
I agree that ownership and property rights are an invention - though one of a free society. And you are correct that society can just as easily decide that these rights are no longer valid, though that is not a society I would ever consider free. To a certain extent that is happening already.
The day the individual is forced to give up his last right and his last dollar to the ugly greed of the 'collective good' will be a sad day indeed.
Imagine a future where self-driving cars (=home delivery taking over retail), 3D printers, fully automated factories, and the death of copyright/intellectual property has put 75% of the population out of work. It's hard to imagine anything BUT some kind of socialist/communist system required.
Well, I think you've certainly got an interesting notion of freedom. I don't consider a life subjected to the will of a state free in any meaningful sense of the word. You're only 'free' insofar as your rulers choose to protect your interests.
This isn't to say that an ownership-oriented society is bad because it is unfree; just that it is inherently unfree, like any other formal system for living in cooperative groups.
So in my view, the argument for private ownership-oriented societies from freedom falls apart. And we're back wondering why we shouldn't 'steal' from the well.
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.
the average age of a homeless person for Poland is 51(f) to 55(m). around Europe to be homeless & young you usually are a junkie, the rest just stays with their parents.
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 company here has offered them a job, I say bring them over!
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free;
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless,
Tempest-tossed to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
(I do get the impression that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. can hire the candidates they want, but is that true for smaller companies as well?)
The article mentioned that about 30% are college educated. It would be interesting to look at a breakdown of degrees. For example, many Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics graduates are highly sought after in industry. Additionally, are the degrees reputable from an international perspective and in fields suitable by commerce and industry?
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 by its own country's standards, still make noises as if they're the exploited proletariat that can't make ends meet.
Whatever the effect of skilled immigration - some argue it raises all boats, others argue it suppresses wages, "down to poverty levels" is dishonest hysterics when applied to our industry.
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).
This isn't a particularly constructive comment, especially the sarcasm.
I can see that you've been on HN for a while, but in the future it would be great if you could consider stating your concerns directly. (Unless you're just trying to make a joke, in which case it doesn't make complete sense to me. We're talking about positions that require college education.)
Or do you genuinely believe that allowing a greater level of immigration will have more drawbacks than benefits?
On one hand you're trying to invoke the emotional imagery of a wave of immigrants coming through Ellis Island, but with the stipulation that they are college educated. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses - as long as they have a STEM degree. You've managed to come across as both populist and elitist in the same argument, so sarcastic replies aren't completely unexpected.
My sentiments exactly. "Let's plunder these unfortunate countries for their talent" is a bit unseemly. I'm not against immigration, in fact I think the US needs it if we're going to avoid having our birth rate go flat/negative. But why couldn't these companies open offices in Spain and Greece instead of trying to siphon off their talent?
The sonnet doesn't set public policy. But I think it's worthwhile to remember the US's historical views towards immigration - that it made the country stronger. On the other hand, since then protectionism, especially the desire to protect American jobs, has grown over time.
> Paul Auster wrote that "Bartholdi's gigantic effigy was originally intended as a monument to the principles of international republicanism, but 'The New Colossus' reinvented the statue's purpose, turning Liberty into a welcoming mother, a symbol of hope to the outcasts and downtrodden of the world".
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.
The point was more that the US is a plausible sink for that excess labor. Yes, it would indeed be great for Belize or Angola to loosen immigration restrictions and make more six figure tech jobs available to young europeans. But...
I think that's a good question. I would support similar views in other countries. However, the US is my home, and I would not presume to dictate other countries policies to them, knowing nothing of their circumstances.
The graphs and the unemployment stats seem to be about people 25 and under, but then when talking about how educated the workforce is, the author talks about 20- and early-30-somethings. The 26 to early 30's part of that stat means it's not directly comparable.
Also, the figures for Greece are the February figures.
The largest industry in Greece, tourism, takes off right about now, and last year on the beach in Greece there were plenty of young Greeks working the beaches, bars and hotels. But of course, many of these jobs are unofficial so they may continue to count as unemployed.
I don't know as much about how the USA works as a union but, no, it sure doesn't look like a union either. :) But they are not threatening to kick California out of the US if it doesn't pay its debts, right?
As for tourism, yes, it's going to be slightly reduced in July, but do you think it's nice to wait for 3-4 months to work?
Also, they are going to vote for an austerity measure to give seasonal workers an unemployment aid not every year but every two years. At the same time a former minister of defence, who is jailed for corruption scandals, is receiving two pensions every month.
In Germany it is common for young people to go from school to a apprenticeship (paid (but extremly little), Apprentices spend half the week at school the other half at the company), these can be anything from plumber, salesman to software developer. So they enter a company at the age of 17 and will often be employed full time when they finish, if not they still have a degree that will enable them to enter the job market on good terms.
This is kind of a win-win situation, youth that did not qualify for university or dont want to go can jump right into a job and learn a profession. They will receive a dimploma from the chamber of commerce and even earn a little bit of money. For the companies, the workers are relatively cheap while they are trained, and they will not only receive pratical training in the company, but also a scholarly curriculum worked out by the chamber of commerce.
In the last years we actually had the situation that companies cannot fill all their places for apprentices and some are actually looking to hire some from Spain.
It is. I think the reasons for it are pretty simple:
They didn't experience a huge housing bubble (like Spain)
They don't have a big productivity problem (like Greece)
Their government's finances weren't totally unsustainable (like Spain or Greece)
They don't depend a great deal on tourism (like Greece). No one seems to want to go on vacation to a rioting and unstable country.
Hopefully things will improve for those countries... but it's pretty easy to be a pessimist given the situation.
The issue with Spain lies is the (private) banks, not government finances. Unlike Greece, where the government needs to get bailed out, in Spain it is the banks that are in trouble.
The banks were in trouble in Ireland, and Ireland stood behind them (which destroyed them). The banks in Iceland were in trouble and Iceland walked away from them. Much less pain in Iceland compared to what Ireland is going through.
Iceland had their own currency though, and from the looks of a graph I googled up they inflated the ISK 100% since before the crisis. Ireland and Spain don't have that option.
Spain's government finances were not unsustainable prior to the recession. In fact, they were in pretty good shape. Spain did, however, face a crippling housing bubble due to the surge of outside investment.
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.
The amount of people employed in such jobs has actually decreased in recent years and nowadays, more people than ever are employed in full social security jobs in Germany.
It seems like it should be possible to run some economic analysis, at least at a high level, based on this type of data and the actions of the countries involved.
I also wonder if Europe has higher unemployment due to a lower frequency of "at will" employment. Hiring someone seems to be a much greater consideration in countries where it's difficult to let someone go. Poor performers are likely to stick around longer and impact the team much more.
Would employment be lower if at-will employment were more commonplace and lawful in Europe?
This is direct result of Euro currency - the strongest economy gets even stronger. Greece, Spain, etc. were producing low quality goods, but they were cheap. Now they are as expensive as better German products. That's why sane governments (UK, Sweden) stay away from Euro - not to kill export.
Clever move from Germany and prescription for the disaster (collapse of EU - that' optimistic and would help Europe to recover, or less optimistic like war) when people realize how they were cheated.
Greece, despite misarable situation, is still buying war ships... from Germany.
Considering that Germany is essentially the ECB -- no, it's not. As a lender of last resort, the ECB has failed. It has failed to acknowledge to lessons taught by history; and it has failed to look itself in the mirror now. Germany reaped the benefits of having small economies join the EU; now they refuse to take full responsibility; hell, they refuse to even allow, say, 4% core inflation for a couple of years to help the struggling economies.
Yes, because they learnt the lessons from history and if there is anything that Germany wants to avoid then it is inflation.
Furthermore, the ECB is controlled by a money-printing Italian and last time I checked, German influence in the ECB was extremely low, especially compared to the relative size of Germany within the EU.
I don't know if that is particularly true. The ECB has been obsessed with inflation since its inception, which is a particularly Bundesbank-like set of priorities. While the official political authority is delegated on a country basis, I suspect that most of the civil servants (i.e. the people who mostly make the decisions) are if not Bundesbank, somewhat influenced by that school of monetary thought.
What's a good website to directly target skilled workers in Spain / Greece / Italy / etc? I'm always on the look for good design, code, marketing, writing, really just about anything (even with a little language barrier).
oDesk and similar don't seem to attract what I would consider to be 70% of a country's workforce. Any sense of if they have training / skills?
As far as I know (I'm Portuguese), everything in Europe is very local so people are looking for work on their countries local job sites. There's also another problem that probably affect more the Portuguese people than the others: if you had a job you were paid a really low salary (the average is probaly around 800 EUR/month net), you were not able to save enough money to go abroad so, for most people, that is not an option.
Nobody's hiring in Southern EU countries, because firing is too difficult/expensive there. All the protectionist laws that were meant to keep the employee secure naturally backfired and resulted in a steadily shrinking job market.
Employing someone in EU is like accepting them into a kindergarten, you assume full responsibility for them as if they weren't adults.
Matt Henderson gives an eye-opening first-hand report from Spain here:
Friends in Greece who work for the government have not been paid for 6 - 9 months. But they stay in the job for whenever the pay day does come.
Friends in Spain work for cash in hand because their potential employers save money on the various social insurance costs they have to put up, but cannot afford because times are tight.
Local mid size companies are using the down turn as a great excuse to let people go, while pushing their own salary up. (Noted from friends who work in payroll who have access to that kinda info)
I don't think the cash in hand thing is happening in Portugal which is kind of surprising giving the small salary you get per month and the amount of taxes you pay now. Maybe they have some catch up to do.
There's a lot of it in Ireland, but then, there was a lot of it in Ireland even when times were good. We have this sense, as a nation, that if you can beat the system and get money for nothing, then you should. Probably a holdover from colonial times, which is sad.
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?
That's pretty much entirely false, at least as I can see it. Employers can and do hire young, inexperienced people on contracts that say "we can fire you when we want and we don't owe you". Those aren't proper long-term labour contracts, true, but it's precisely what you want for someone who's getting a job for the very first time in their life.
Edit: for the record, I'm from Bulgaria and our unemployment rate for under 25 years-olds is 28%, according to latest Eurostat data. Back in 2008 we were at nearly German levels (11% vs 10%). Interestingly, Germany is the only country whose rate has gone down rather than up in the last few years. Their graph is almost perfectly asymmetrical with the ones for countries of Eastern Europe.
That’s because Germany implemented the necessary social reforms before the crash (around 2005), rather than after. It also still has a superior education programme with apprenticeships for standard jobs, as well as cheap university access with extra funding for poorer people.
Edit: You can even see this in the graph. German youth unemployment peaked in 2005, well before the financial crisis but after a decade of slow growth, also cf. [0].
News of this kind makes me confused, scared and angry. Confused because of questions like 'Is Government directly responsible for jobs?', 'What is the skill set of the youth?' etc.
Scared because the youth have families to feed, they have ambitions and this leads to a rise in suicides among the youth.
Angry because the government, due to their poor economic choices, have ruined the dreams of the youth. The government is responsible for providing opportunities and freedom, if not employment. But they fail, for various reasons, including corruption, dirty politics, poor economic choices etc.
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.
The percentages on that page are labeled "Youth Employment Rate" (not unemployment), which would explain why they are higher in the "No Disability" column than in the "Disability" column.
The 60% figure is the employment rate, so unemployment would be less than 40%. That 40% might include full-time students and others who might not be unemployed.
Usually job growth comes from startups, especially in tough times. If Europe had a stronger startup culture, it could've helped, especially for young people.
it's bad, but not as bad as these stats make it seem.
a lot of those youths do have jobs, but simply are paid cash in hand. when asked, they are unemployed for tax and insurance reasons. as long as illegal immigrant workers are working on the fields of spain, uneomployment simply cannot be that bad.
nobody is starving. roads, bars, stadiums are full. money is circulating in the system. it just is black, untaxed.
You've hit the nail on the head there. Go to any cafe or bar in London and the chances are you will be served by a Pole. Think about that for a second: the labour situation in the UK is such that we have to import workers from 600 miles away to make coffee. Now these people aren't being paid under the table, they are legal employees or legitimate companies. So where are the Brits who could be doing these jobs? For whatever reason, unavailable.
I find one thing about the unemployment rate in Europe truly scary:
There are a /lot/ of youths there with nothing to lose.