It is not uncommon to find manure in a Field
While I'm on the short post trail, have a look at this article on some wildly silly comments about youth unemployment by Frank "you were meant to 'think the unthinkable' in the sense of coming up with radical and new ideas, not come up with things that were simply 'unthinkable' because they were stupid, Frank, that's why you're sacked" Field. Talking about youth unemployment is inherently error-prone, and lots of professional economists end up making silly mistakes (I've commented on this tendency in the past in the context of France) because there are so many moving parts and it is so difficult to keep things comparable. I don't think Unity is an economist by trade, so he/she has done a really good job keeping everything clear. (Update: Condescending at all? "yes, very good ... for a noneconomist". That came out a lot more patronising than it was meant to.)
Isn't it widely held by economists that if you wish to reduce youth unemployment, the way to do so is simply to make life more unpleasant for the young unemployed until they magically become employed again?
ReplyDeleteIt's a view widely held by people whose own youth was marked neither by unemployment or by fear of same.
Kind of. The big thing that's going on here is that a high youth unemployment rate is almost always a result of a low youth labour force participation rate, which in turn is usually a result of a high level of university attendance.
ReplyDeleteI've always liked Andrew Orlowski's definition of Fisking:
ReplyDelete"Many of today's debaters prefer 'Fisking'—line-by-line rebuttals where facts are dropped like radar chaff—to rational debate or building a coherent argument."
Though if one uses the orignal example of the genre, Sullivan's, it presumably means distorting an argument until you can make its author look ridiculous. Which means Sullivan's safe, no distortion needed.
Presumably France could improve their youth unemployment rates by locking more of them up. I'm too lazy to do the sums on the UK and US, but I'm guessing it must make some difference.
ReplyDelete"a high youth unemployment rate is almost always a result of a low youth labour force participation rate"
ReplyDeleteI am confused. I thought unemployment rates were always the nominator to the participation rate's demoninator. if you're out of the labour force (non-participating) you're not unemployed are you?
I have a labour economics exam in about a week, i'd better get this straightened out!
that was terribly written - of course the rate isn't the nominator. I mean the rate is unemployed/participating.
ReplyDeleteThe idea is that most youths in somewhere like France are in education (ie not in the labour force), so funny things can happen. Ie (if I can remember this worked example right)
ReplyDeleteStart off with 100 youths.
75 in uni
20 in work
5 unemployed
Youth labour market participation is 25 (15+5) and youth unemployment is 20%.
Now, in a different country, they have
84 in uni
12 in work
4 unemployed.
Youth labour market participation is 16 and youth unemployment is 4/16 = 25%. So this has a higher rate of youth unemployment, but it looks on the face of it like a better place to be a youth.
ah, thanks.
ReplyDeleteI have tried to figure out whether the latter case being worse to be a youth in if you are not in university, is meaningful - I mean if France does have high quoted youth unemployment rates for this reason, how to interpret that only 75% of those youths that are looking for work can find it?
If the UK increased its student population, what would we expect to see happen to the unemployment rate of non-students? Might it not fall, if those new students free up some jobs? Or would some dynamic cause the unemployment rate in the non-student population to rise? Or have no effect.
If higher student populations ought, all else being equal, be associated with lower youth unemployment rates in the remaining youth population, then could the 25% rate still be taken as a sign of an underlying weakness in the labour market of your second example?
I'll have to think about it
If the UK increased its student population, what would we expect to see happen to the unemployment rate of non-students? Might it not fall, if those new students free up some jobs?
ReplyDeletewould depend on whether the jobs freed up were taken by other young people or by people outside the "youth" category. If I were to quit my job tomorrow and go to university, it would most likely fractionally raise the unemployment rate of red-haired people because the likelihood would be that the person who replaced me wouldn't be a ginger.
this is a quite good ref.
http://www.radstats.org.uk/no088/Threlfall88.pdf