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What we talk about when we talk about youth unemployment | Catalina Buciu | TEDxNicosia - YouTube
Channel: TEDx Talks
[0]
Translator: Maria Pericleous
Reviewer: Natalie Thibault
[29]
(applause)
[31]
Good morning everyone.
[34]
The last time I was in a stage
like this was 30 years ago
[38]
and I was in a school play
and had a tiny role
[42]
and forgot all the 5 words I had to say
[46]
(Laughter)
[47]
so I promised myself never
to set foot on a stage again
[52]
unless I had a story that it was
impossible for me to forget
[58]
so here we go:
[61]
螣nce upon a time there were
two young people.
[64]
Her name was Anna
and she was from the United Kingdom,
[68]
and his name was Piero
and he was from Italy.
[72]
They've both been looking for jobs
[75]
they've been looking for a long
long time, years in fact.
[79]
They started out looking
for the job of their dreams,
[83]
now they'd settle for anything
[85]
since they can't find the job
for which they are qualified.
[89]
They have good degrees and beautiful CV's
[92]
they've been to interviews,
dozens of interviews,
[95]
and they've been told,
"you don't have the right degree"
[99]
or "the right skill set",
or "the right attitude".
[102]
They've been told they're
overqualified or under qualified,
[106]
they have too much experience
or not enough experience,
[109]
for one reason or another,
they're not what the market wants.
[115]
Now, they're told it's the economy,
it's the eurozone crisis,
[120]
it's the times we live in.
[122]
So for influential people like
the author of American Psycho
[127]
Bret Easton Ellis,
they're part of "Generation Wuss",
[131]
for many many others
they're part of another lost generation.
[137]
So where did Anna and Piero go wrong?
[142]
Piero did what his father wanted,
so he went to University to read Law,
[146]
because a Law degree is going to
land him a well-paid job.
[150]
Now he is part of the 200,000
people in Italy with a Law degree,
[158]
most of whom are struggling to find jobs
[161]
on a market that could potentially
accommodate 20,000 graduates.
[166]
So the ones who do have
good jobs and drive nice cars
[170]
are much older than Piero
and not about to retire.
[174]
So Piero lives at home with his parents
[176]
in his teenage bethroom
and works as a barista.
[179]
His girlfriend lives with her parents
[182]
neither of them can afford
to move out, or start a family.
[187]
They are both deadlocked in adolescence
[190]
knocking on the door of adulthood.
[194]
Anna, on the other hand, had a passion:
she always wanted to be a midwife.
[200]
Great news, because of the shortage
of midwives in the UK.
[204]
But while Anna powers through
a specialist training course
[208]
as fast a she can, the country
is making up for the shortfall
[212]
by retraining nurses,
hiring recent graduates
[216]
or by buying up midwives
all over the world through immigration.
[220]
Anna doesn't have a life
outside her studies
[224]
because she is telling herself
that being an "A" student
[226]
is going to make it all worth it.
[230]
But by the time she graduates
there may not be a job waiting for her.
[235]
She may have studied
herself into a corner.
[240]
Now, Anna and Piero
are fictional characters,
[245]
I made them up, I'm a novelist,
that's what I do.
[249]
But I make people up based
on real human experience
[252]
and Anna's and Piero's stories
are very common.
[257]
I imagined them while doing research
for my Creative Writing PhD,
[261]
for which I'm writing a novel
about the overeducated
[264]
and unemployed young people in Europe.
[267]
For me, the tragedy of youth unemployment
is graduate unemployment.
[275]
I became interested in this topic because
I grew up in Ceausescu's Romania,
[280]
which was the North Korea
of Eastern Europe
[283]
where the narrative of zero
unemployment and jobs for all
[287]
was an unquestionable truth for decades.
[292]
There was a perfect match
between the education supply
[295]
and the labour market, all coordinated
by one central planning agency
[300]
that ensured that all graduates had jobs.
[303]
And then, it all fell apart
when the revolution happened in '89
[309]
and long held beliefs crumbled.
[314]
Freedom of choice and competition
[316]
entered the mantra playlist
directly at number one.
[320]
Jobs for all got pushed out,
the market took over,
[325]
the market dictated,
the market wanted you or not.
[332]
I left my country 12 years ago
and worked in about 10 countries,
[336]
and everywhere I went
I met people like Anna and Piero.
[339]
Everywhere I went,
[341]
youth unemployment was on the rise
[343]
and with it over-education
and underemployment.
[346]
What fascinated me the most,
was how consistent
[348]
the stories about the pandemic
of youth unemployment were,
[353]
not only across countries,
but also across economic cycles.
[359]
"螘ducation for employability",
a phrase at the core of EU discourse
[365]
is the procrustean bed
from Greek mythology
[369]
on which young peoples'
choices are measured,
[372]
and when they are found wanting
they are bullied and blamed.
[379]
There is no doubt that youth unemployment
is the biggest problem of my generation,
[384]
and part of it may just be
because of what we talk about,
[391]
when we talk about youth unemployment.
[394]
So here's a number of fields of study,
[398]
each of them has a different angle
of research on youth unemployment,
[402]
but we, the public, get a remarkably
narrow view through the lens of economics,
[408]
and the use of one metric,
the youth unemployment rate,
[413]
which is a measure
[418]
that.... sorry
[427]
there is one slide missing, no problem.
[432]
Which is a measure which is used
in a standardized way
[436]
across the globe and charts
the share of young people
[440]
aged 15 to 24 who are economically active,
[444]
looking for a job and who cannot find one.
[447]
Now there are 3 problems
with this picture.
[452]
The first one is the definition of youth,
[455]
the second one is
the definition of unemployment,
[459]
and the third one is the time frame
for such a measure.
[463]
So, this particular time frame
has been questioned
[467]
ever since the beginning
when it was introduced.
[472]
There are a number of reasons
why it has been questioned
[475]
but fundamentally it ignores
cultural differences among countries
[480]
when it comes to their youth population
and the different rites of passage.
[485]
Also, it assumes that economies
are equally youth friendly
[491]
and therefore a 16-year-old in Italy
and one in the UK
[495]
have the same economic opportunities.
[498]
So the degree of participation
in the labor market is comparable,
[504]
but how youth friendly are, really,
these labour markets?
[509]
Let's take a look at
youth employment trends
[512]
in the UK and Italy in the past 15 years.
[516]
Now if you look at these 2 pics here,
[520]
you see that Italy employed
1.6m young people aged 15 to 24
[529]
in its most successful year,
[531]
so nearly one in three
young people had jobs,
[535]
whereas the UK employed consistently
1 in 2 of its young people
[540]
and peaked in 2002 with 4m jobs.
[544]
So what you hear all the time
is comparisons
[547]
between southern and northern countries,
[550]
so Italy is expected to create jobs
that it never had in the first place,
[554]
rather than comparing each country
with the best image of itself.
[562]
So what do we talk about
when we talk about youth unemployment?
[567]
Mainly we get our
information from the media
[569]
so there are 2 angles for this.
[572]
One of them is a straight forward
comparison of youth unemployment rates.
[577]
This one shows you a big gap
[579]
between the Italian youth
unemployment rate at 40%
[583]
and the British one at 20%.
[588]
The second angle
[589]
is where these rates get interpreted
as shares of the entire youth population,
[595]
so for instance we have here
Italy youth unemployment at 42.7%
[604]
and here the 20% UK
youth unemployment rate
[607]
interpreted as 1 in 5
young people without a job.
[613]
Now let's look at actual numbers.
[620]
In 2013 there were 0.9 million
15 to 24 year-olds
[627]
young people in the UK
officially unemployed
[632]
Versus 0.6 million in Italy.
[635]
That's 12% officially unemployed
in the UK versus 11% in Italy.
[641]
And if you look at the trends
[643]
you see that Italy ratio
decreased since 2000,
[650]
while the UK one increased
by 50% since 2000.
[654]
So which is it, is youth unemployment
worse in Italy, or in the UK?
[662]
Here is where the second problem
with the definition comes in,
[666]
the definition of unemployment.
[668]
We think of unemployment
as one big category,
[671]
meaning temporarily out of work.
[674]
But what the official definition means
is two separate categories.
[678]
One is the economically active
officially unemployed
[682]
and the other one are the
not in education no employment
[685]
the so called NEET's, who are
considered economically inactive.
[690]
Now, despite the theoretical division,
[694]
both these categories share
the state of joblessness,
[698]
so if we take joblessness to mean
the real face of youth unemployment,
[702]
we see that there are 1.9m
15 to 24 year-olds out of work,
[709]
both in Italy and the UK,
[711]
that's 1 in 3 in Italy
and 1 in 4 in the UK.
[719]
Now, when it comes to action, the third
problem with the definition comes in:
[724]
the time frame.
[726]
Because the youth unemployment
rates provide a snapshot in time
[730]
and the 15 to 24 year-old category
[733]
has traditionally been
the most dynamic on the labor market,
[738]
with one person
[739]
moving through the 4 states
of not in education or employment,
[742]
education, unemployed and
employed, within one year.
[747]
But if we look at the urgency with which
the EU allocated 6 billion euro
[754]
to the youth employment initiative
nearly 2 years since its launch,
[759]
we realize that many young people
have fallen through the cracks.
[766]
Some have migrated, some have
grown out of that age group,
[770]
some have moved into education,
some have become overeducated,
[774]
and some have found employment.
[778]
So, when we go on and
fund employment programs
[784]
without having a comprehensive
understanding of youth unemployment,
[788]
we should be less puzzled
when such programs fail.
[793]
There are 2 solutions
[796]
that Anna and Piero
constantly hear about:
[801]
one of them is the skills gap
[803]
so now Piero is told
[806]
after he graduated and he can't find a job
[808]
he is told you should have
pursued a vocational degree
[811]
rather than a university education.
[814]
Now, can there ever be a perfect match
between the education supply
[821]
and the market demand
[822]
when the higher education system
is a branch of a country's industry,
[827]
subject to market rules?
[830]
Hypothetically we could end up
with a country of lawyers and architects
[834]
as Italy is pretty much now.
[838]
The second narrative is the superiority
of the German model over any other.
[845]
Anna in the UK hears this all the time,
[848]
and this has happened since the 80's,
[851]
it's always the same,
it's conventional wisdom.
[854]
But if we go back to the youth
employment trends,
[857]
and we plot Germany in blue line
[859]
you can see that the UK employment trends
have consistently been better,
[865]
obviously compared to Italy,
but also compared to Germany.
[869]
We never hear about it, we always hear
about the German model
[874]
and here is the question:
[876]
Can any country adopt
the German dual education system
[880]
without adopting the German
economic structure?
[885]
Now, the crux of the matter is
that we need the data revolution
[889]
when it comes to youth unemployment.
[892]
We need multidisciplinary research
and we need better statistics.
[896]
First of all we need culturally
sensitive youth definitions.
[901]
Who says youth must be 15
to 24 year-olds around the world?
[910]
Because the definition excludes graduates,
[913]
we don't know what happens
with graduate unemployment,
[917]
unless it's patchy and is not consistent.
[921]
We can't really rely on the consistency
of the youth unemployment rate.
[926]
Now, it will be very messy to compare
culturally sensitive statistics obviously,
[932]
but at least we would get a real picture
of what youth unemployment means
[936]
in every context and
comparing real pictures
[939]
with hopefully little more
than North vs South
[943]
performance narratives that are
simply counterproductive.
[947]
The second thing that we need
is better information
[950]
about the supply chain between
education and the labour market,
[955]
because one major assumption
is that young people are rational beings
[960]
who make career decisions based on
return on investment calculations
[966]
in light of perfect information
about the market.
[970]
Can we own up to the fact
[972]
that we don't have perfect information
about the market, but we could have,
[977]
if we invested more
in multidisciplinary research
[980]
and how research is communicated?
[982]
Because labour market statistics
are cryptic to young people.
[987]
Our current statistics
and support mechanisms
[990]
have failed people like Anna and Piero;
[993]
they are 26 so they are
on the wrong side of youth statistics.
[998]
Piero has the wrong degree,
[1000]
Anna has the right one, but she may be
a couple of years too late.
[1004]
By the time they finished the education
they were already standardized products.
[1010]
So standardization may be the key
to a well-oiled global market
[1014]
but in the case of mass youth unemployment
[1017]
differentiation may just be the key.
[1020]
Except that Anna and Piero
don't have enough information
[1023]
to know how they are positioned
on the labor market,
[1025]
and without it they don't know
where they belong.
[1030]
And I speak about differentiation
because that's my heritage.
[1033]
I grew up in the 90's in Romania in
the midst of a socio-economic upheaval,
[1039]
and I did not need
a perfect set-up to make it.
[1043]
I grew up without a computer,
[1044]
with access to a small town library
and some great teachers,
[1048]
in one of the poorest countries in Europe.
[1051]
I read more than anyone else around me
[1054]
because I always asked myself:
[1056]
if I take in the same information
as everyone else what makes me different?
[1061]
But I never looked at education
as a golden ticket for a job;
[1064]
I looked at the necessity
for self development
[1067]
as a lifetime project.
[1070]
I rarely had a job that I knew
existed when I graduated.
[1074]
But I found great mentors,
or they found me.
[1079]
The most precious gift
anyone can give to you
[1082]
is the gift of time.
[1085]
If you can find people who can advise you
on what you can become,
[1088]
you've won the lottery.
[1090]
Do it formally,
do it informally, just do it.
[1095]
Stop waiting for those misleading
youth unemployment statistics
[1099]
to result in employment
programs that work for you.
[1105]
Start asking for better data,
[1107]
so that the next time we talk
about youth unemployment
[1111]
we all talk about the same thing.
[1114]
Thank you.
[1115]
(applause)
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