Young and restive

One thing you do not want, if you're a politician, is a whole slew of unemployed, impoverished youth. They don't have a lot to lose, but they do have plenty of energy. Piss them off and you could have a situation on your hands.

With that in mind, this news from the Telegraph seems fairly alarming:

Youth unemployment has reached 39pc in Spain, 31pc in Lithuania, 28pc in Latvia, 26pc in Ireland and Slovakia, 25pc in Italy and Hungary, 24pc in France.

"There's tragedy unfolding here," said Julian Callow, Barclay’s Europe economist. "This is going to haunt the political outlook for years to come. Europe has been in denial about this because youth are not a powerful lobby like the unions, so they can be ignored.

Ignored, but not forever. In cases of massive unrest (as in Argentina) you see every kind of person on the streets, including elderly women banging pots with spoons. But in the early stages of unrest, in which windows are broken and cars torched, it's young people who carry it out. Consider Greece:

Data showed on Thursday nearly 18 percent of 15-29 year old Greek workers were unemployed in the second quarter, compared with 8.9 percent for the whole population and strongly up from last year.

The issue has proven explosive in the past. Last year leftists and young students took to the streets in Greece's worst riots in decades over the economy and the killing of a teenager by police. (source)

In 2005, riots broke out in many French cities and towns after police killed two teenagers. In that instance, racism and immigration played a role, but those issues are very much intertwined with unemployment and poverty. Young people are disproportionately without jobs and in poverty, both in the US and Europe, and young people have less to lose than older adults.

As the Barclay's economist said above, politicians have felt pretty safe ignoring teenagers and twenty-somethings. They don't vote (much) and have no lobbyists. But having this attitude today, as the world slips into economic Depression, is amazingly blithe.

Here in the US, the situation is worse than Spain or similar to Eastern Europe, depending on the color of your skin:

The September teen unemployment rate hit 25.9%, the highest rate since World War II and up from 23.8% in July. Some 330,000 teen jobs have vanished in two months. Hardest hit of all: black male teens, whose unemployment rate shot up to a catastrophic 50.4%. It was merely a terrible 39.2% in July. (source)

Like I said, racism, immigration, poverty, unemployment-- it's all interconnected, and it's a tinderbox. (It would be helpful if police the world over would stop killing unarmed teenagers, which tends to spark violence; but I'm not optimistic.)

Having some sort of mandatory military service (as the White House Chief of Staff wants), or mandatory civil volunteering, or any other sort of "youth brigade" could become a popular idea if we begin to see destructive protests among teenagers and young adults. (One wonders about the color of their uniforms and whether they will have a special salute?) The military poverty draft is already useful to the establishment as a means of neutralizing -- in one way or another -- poor and potentially angry teenagers.

The thing to get into our heads, I suppose, is that the kids we will one day see on television throwing the tear gas canisters back into the police ranks would truly rather be working, making a living and making their way in the world. In some ways the US is better off than Europe in the longer term, because although we don't produce anything now, we could start making stuff. And that will eventually provide more jobs for those who are 17 or 19 today.