First was an article by Simon Kuper, who I knew earlier for writing so artfully and poetically about football - even though he has a bias for Dutch footballers as betrayed by his Dutch heritage. A brilliant writer whose writings I enjoy reading. Here he hit a chord for discussing the impacts on the career prospects and life experiences of those who graduate into a recession. I was in the UK in 1992 and can still recall how different the UK was then. And in Southeast Asia I lived through the Asian Crisis and its aftermaths.
KY saw both sides of the coin by spending the past 10 years in Greater China, experiencing the ground zero of one of the greatest economic boom mankind has ever seen. While I have been unerring in moving from a depressed Europe (1992-1997) to Brunei when it went bust (1997) and then Southeast Asia in crisis/slow recovery (1997-2005) and to America amidst the tail-end of the housing boom and now the Great Recession (2006-present). I do not think I'd be welcome in many places!
Lessons from the class of ’92 - By Simon Kuper - Published: February 4 2011
I graduated from a British university in 1992, in the depths of what then seemed a bad recession. A year later I was rattling across the country on a road trip with three contemporaries, when a song we had never heard before came on the radio: “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?”
Suddenly all banter died down. Within about a minute we were singing along. Facile as it now seems, the “Loser” song, by another unknown impoverished contemporary of ours called Beck, captured what it felt like to be trying to break into adult life during a recession.
Compared with today’s recession, 1992 now looks like a golden age. Today’s youth are the most educated generation in history, yet about one in five people aged 15 to 24 in developed countries is unemployed, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The figures are even worse in Tunisia, where the revolution began last December when an impoverished 26-year-old burned himself to death, and in Egypt, where the young took to the streets before political groups did.
Things will get better – but not for all these people. Some will suffer for decades for having been young in a recession. That’s what academic research says, and it’s what happened to many in my generation.
As a student, I had vaguely imagined that after graduation I would stride out into the world on a red carpet while crowds threw flowers. It didn’t happen like that. Youth unemployment is the way companies adjust to recessions. In 1992 few businesses were hiring. The height of ambition for many of my peers was becoming a civil servant, because everyone knew that civil servants were unsackable.
Nobody I knew became an entrepreneur. No wonder, because British base interest rates in 1992 were more than 10 per cent. Few of us then knew exactly what interest rates were, but we sensed that nobody was chucking cash at us. (“Easy credit” wasn’t a problem in 1992.) Our parents could barely pay their mortgage interest, so there was no money forthcoming there.
I had friends who got good degrees and began flipping burgers, or waiting tables. Others tried to get to the El Dorado of the day: Japan. In every generation there is a city where penniless young wannabe artists and writers flock, and in 1992 that city was Prague. Luckily, even London then still had many cheap semi-slums.
People would grab any job going. One lunchtime a little before graduation, a gaggle of us met an adult we knew in a sandwich shop. The adult offered a friend of mine a humble assistantship. My friend reluctantly took it. He still works in that industry today.
That’s what happens to many young people in recessions. You take a job, any job. You stick it out for a few years. By then you are in your late twenties, with a mediocre CV. Younger people with pristine CVs who graduated during the recovery overtake you. Soon you have a pram at the door. So you never jump to the career you wanted. More than most people’s, your life becomes a compromise. This is particularly true in immobile societies such as France, where your first proper job often determines your career.
The key cultural sources for our generation – most of them produced in the lone superpower of the day – reflected this frustration. There was Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X, about young people hanging around pointlessly. There was Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction, about lowly gangsters killing people or hanging around pointlessly. And there was Doug Liman’s film Swingers, about young unemployed actors hanging around pointlessly.
Yet Swingers came out in 1996, mid-recovery. The problem was that many in my generation had never quite recovered. Academic economists have persistently shown that entering the job market during a recession can cause “scarring” that lingers for years, sometimes decades. For instance, Lisa Kahn of Yale School of Management studied white males who graduated from American colleges around the early 1980s’ recession, and found that even 15 years later they had lower salaries and less prestigious jobs than similar people who graduated in good times. David Bell and David Blanchflower, economists at Scotland’s University of Stirling, studied people who had been unemployed when young during that same recession, and found that 25 years later they were still unhappier, less healthy, less satisfied in their jobs and on lower wages than comparable people. Ominously, Bell and Blanchflower say that Britons who have become unemployed during the UK’s current recession are disproportionately the young.
When you’re young you inevitably overestimate the potential of your friends. You assume that someone with such a lovely figure, or so good at cricket, or with such word-perfect recall of Seventies’ British comedy, must be destined for greatness. Perhaps it was never going to happen for me and my peers, but the fact that it didn’t probably also has something to do with our graduation date.
Link: http://ww.ft.com/cms/ws/2/94224f5a-2e71-11e0-8733-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1Ec6wyWFt
Why the world’s youth is in a revolting state of mind - By Martin Wolf
Published: February 18 2011
In Tunisia and Egypt, the young are rebelling against old rulers. In Britain, they are in revolt against tuition fees. What do these young people have in common? They are suffering, albeit in different ways, from what David Willetts, the UK government’s minister of higher education, called the “pinch” in a book published last year.
In some countries, the challenge is an excess of young people; in others, it is that the young are too few. But where the young outnumber the old, they can hope to secure a better fate through the ballot box. Where the old outnumber the young, they can use the ballot box to their advantage, instead. In both cases, powerful destabilising forces are at work, bringing opportunity to some and disappointment to others.
Demography is destiny. Humanity is in the grip of three profound transformations: first, a far greater proportion of children reaches adulthood; second, women have far fewer children; and, third, adults live far longer. These changes are now working through the world, in sequence. The impact of the first has been to raise the proportion of the population that is young. The impact of the second is the reverse, decreasing the proportion of young people. The third, in turn, increases the proportion of the population that is very old. The impact of the entire process is first to expand the population and, later on, to shrink it once again.
Contrast Egypt and the UK. Back in 1954, British life expectancy was 70 and the proportion of children dying between the ages of zero and five was 30 per 1,000. In the same year, an Egyptian could expect to live to 44, while infant mortality was a horrifying 353 per 1,000. Fast-forward to 2009: UK life expectancy was up to 80 and its infant mortality down to 5.5 per 1,000. But Egyptian life expectancy was up to 70 and its infant mortality down to 21; an astonishing transformation. The figures for the number of children per woman over these years are just as dramatic, falling from 2.3 to 1.8 in the UK, and 6.5 to 2.8 in Egypt. In Iran it has fallen even further, from 7.0 to 1.8. Religion simply does not determine fertility.
These are revolutionary changes, and ones that are happening far faster in developing countries than in the old advanced countries. Above all, these are happy developments: people are freed from fear of premature death; parents are freed from watching their children die young; and women are freed from endless childbirth.
Such great changes always bring huge social upheavals. Many developing countries are in the early stages of the demographic transition. This means they have more young adults than they might have expected; as recently as 1985 Egyptian mothers still had an average of six children. High-income countries, meanwhile, are entering the final stage of this transition. Their baby-boomers are ageing, with fewer young adults to support them.
In 2011, half of Egypt’s population will be under 25, while 36 per cent will be aged from 15 to 35. These latter are angry young adults looking desperately for employment, in order at least to hope for normal family life. Meanwhile in the UK, where female fertility has been close to two for much longer, only 31 per cent are under 25, but 35 per cent over 50 (against only 15 per cent in Egypt).
Thus, the middle-aged and elderly rig political and economic life for their benefit in the UK: hence the way in which policies on housing or education finance are weighted against the young. In Egypt, the young could easily outvote the elderly. Hence the urgency of the forces behind a democratic revolution that should transfer more power into their hands. Egypt is not the first developing country, nor will it be the last, to be rocked by the youthful majority, at one and the same time idealistic and frustrated.
This, too, will pass. On current trends, the Egypt of 2040 is going to look rather more like the UK of today. According to the US census bureau, 26 per cent of the population will be over 50. But the UK will have moved onwards, as well: 41 per cent of its people could be over 50.
The future is grey. In today’s high-income countries, it will be very grey. Indeed, some advanced countries could be older than the UK: Italy is forecast to have 50 per cent of its people over 50 by 2040, with as many as 9 per cent over 80.
As Shakespeare’s Miranda might say in response: Oh brave old world! That has such ancients in it!
For the countries with a young population, the immediate challenge is to create a dynamic economy that brings hope of gainful employment. It is surely the failure to do this that most threatens rule by gerontocrats such as Hosni Mubarak. The Chinese leadership is well aware of this imperative. Rulers with resource wealth can try to buy off their young. Those without it cannot. They must at least offer jobs. If they fail, they will lose power – and rightly so. The political challenge is to harness the energy of their young, without succumbing to the catastrophes that hit high-income countries at a similar demographic stage: war, first and foremost.
Meanwhile, in high-income countries, older people must work longer than they expected, without making the young believe their opportunities are blocked for what must seem like an eternity. These countries must also balance the fiscal books as the populations age.
In both cases, the young will raise a cry that has surely been heard throughout the ages: “It is not fair.” They are right, no doubt. It never is. But they should remember that the young will win in the end. It is only a matter of time – just more of it.
Link: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6577ca92-3b94-11e0-a96d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1Ec6wyWFt
This article made poignant reading and made me wonder about my age group as a whole; although I am not one to subscribe to an overly deterministic view of life. What can be given can also be lost in an instant, and vice versa. Life is mysterious enough, long enough and abundant enough for any level of redemption. No doubt people's mindset are affected by circumstance, but that only makes it more important for us to be self-aware so as not to close ourselves to other possibilities - by making blanket assumptions or to extrapolate blindly from our meagre initial experiences.
The second is by Martin Wolf, the well known FT writer. I was attracted by the analysis using demography - a tectonic force much greater than the usual ups and downs of current affair, world economics and politics. People have different needs at different stages of their lives and governments need to be tuned in and adapt. In history, population explosions are often times of strife and revolutions. "Explosions" of youth population changes society permanently - a break from the past norms and seemingly endless status quo - as witnessed in the West in the 60s. China was able to timely engage the vast energies of its youth in the past 20 years to build its economic miracle. India is struggling with a similar wave now. Pakistan and Bangladesh are struggling with less success. The Middle-east has been struggling with notable failure. Africa's is coming soon in the next 20 years. In Southeast Asia, the youth boom in Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei and Vietnam is still expanding, but for Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore that time has past. I'd say watch out carefully for changes in the social contract in the Philippines and Vietnam; while Thailand's already started and look set to continue in a fundamental way.
Lessons from the class of ’92 - By Simon Kuper - Published: February 4 2011
I graduated from a British university in 1992, in the depths of what then seemed a bad recession. A year later I was rattling across the country on a road trip with three contemporaries, when a song we had never heard before came on the radio: “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?”
Suddenly all banter died down. Within about a minute we were singing along. Facile as it now seems, the “Loser” song, by another unknown impoverished contemporary of ours called Beck, captured what it felt like to be trying to break into adult life during a recession.
Compared with today’s recession, 1992 now looks like a golden age. Today’s youth are the most educated generation in history, yet about one in five people aged 15 to 24 in developed countries is unemployed, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The figures are even worse in Tunisia, where the revolution began last December when an impoverished 26-year-old burned himself to death, and in Egypt, where the young took to the streets before political groups did.
Things will get better – but not for all these people. Some will suffer for decades for having been young in a recession. That’s what academic research says, and it’s what happened to many in my generation.
As a student, I had vaguely imagined that after graduation I would stride out into the world on a red carpet while crowds threw flowers. It didn’t happen like that. Youth unemployment is the way companies adjust to recessions. In 1992 few businesses were hiring. The height of ambition for many of my peers was becoming a civil servant, because everyone knew that civil servants were unsackable.
Nobody I knew became an entrepreneur. No wonder, because British base interest rates in 1992 were more than 10 per cent. Few of us then knew exactly what interest rates were, but we sensed that nobody was chucking cash at us. (“Easy credit” wasn’t a problem in 1992.) Our parents could barely pay their mortgage interest, so there was no money forthcoming there.
I had friends who got good degrees and began flipping burgers, or waiting tables. Others tried to get to the El Dorado of the day: Japan. In every generation there is a city where penniless young wannabe artists and writers flock, and in 1992 that city was Prague. Luckily, even London then still had many cheap semi-slums.
People would grab any job going. One lunchtime a little before graduation, a gaggle of us met an adult we knew in a sandwich shop. The adult offered a friend of mine a humble assistantship. My friend reluctantly took it. He still works in that industry today.
That’s what happens to many young people in recessions. You take a job, any job. You stick it out for a few years. By then you are in your late twenties, with a mediocre CV. Younger people with pristine CVs who graduated during the recovery overtake you. Soon you have a pram at the door. So you never jump to the career you wanted. More than most people’s, your life becomes a compromise. This is particularly true in immobile societies such as France, where your first proper job often determines your career.
The key cultural sources for our generation – most of them produced in the lone superpower of the day – reflected this frustration. There was Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X, about young people hanging around pointlessly. There was Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction, about lowly gangsters killing people or hanging around pointlessly. And there was Doug Liman’s film Swingers, about young unemployed actors hanging around pointlessly.
Yet Swingers came out in 1996, mid-recovery. The problem was that many in my generation had never quite recovered. Academic economists have persistently shown that entering the job market during a recession can cause “scarring” that lingers for years, sometimes decades. For instance, Lisa Kahn of Yale School of Management studied white males who graduated from American colleges around the early 1980s’ recession, and found that even 15 years later they had lower salaries and less prestigious jobs than similar people who graduated in good times. David Bell and David Blanchflower, economists at Scotland’s University of Stirling, studied people who had been unemployed when young during that same recession, and found that 25 years later they were still unhappier, less healthy, less satisfied in their jobs and on lower wages than comparable people. Ominously, Bell and Blanchflower say that Britons who have become unemployed during the UK’s current recession are disproportionately the young.
When you’re young you inevitably overestimate the potential of your friends. You assume that someone with such a lovely figure, or so good at cricket, or with such word-perfect recall of Seventies’ British comedy, must be destined for greatness. Perhaps it was never going to happen for me and my peers, but the fact that it didn’t probably also has something to do with our graduation date.
Link: http://ww.ft.com/cms/ws/2/94224f5a-2e71-11e0-8733-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1Ec6wyWFt
Why the world’s youth is in a revolting state of mind - By Martin Wolf
Published: February 18 2011
In Tunisia and Egypt, the young are rebelling against old rulers. In Britain, they are in revolt against tuition fees. What do these young people have in common? They are suffering, albeit in different ways, from what David Willetts, the UK government’s minister of higher education, called the “pinch” in a book published last year.
In some countries, the challenge is an excess of young people; in others, it is that the young are too few. But where the young outnumber the old, they can hope to secure a better fate through the ballot box. Where the old outnumber the young, they can use the ballot box to their advantage, instead. In both cases, powerful destabilising forces are at work, bringing opportunity to some and disappointment to others.
Demography is destiny. Humanity is in the grip of three profound transformations: first, a far greater proportion of children reaches adulthood; second, women have far fewer children; and, third, adults live far longer. These changes are now working through the world, in sequence. The impact of the first has been to raise the proportion of the population that is young. The impact of the second is the reverse, decreasing the proportion of young people. The third, in turn, increases the proportion of the population that is very old. The impact of the entire process is first to expand the population and, later on, to shrink it once again.
Contrast Egypt and the UK. Back in 1954, British life expectancy was 70 and the proportion of children dying between the ages of zero and five was 30 per 1,000. In the same year, an Egyptian could expect to live to 44, while infant mortality was a horrifying 353 per 1,000. Fast-forward to 2009: UK life expectancy was up to 80 and its infant mortality down to 5.5 per 1,000. But Egyptian life expectancy was up to 70 and its infant mortality down to 21; an astonishing transformation. The figures for the number of children per woman over these years are just as dramatic, falling from 2.3 to 1.8 in the UK, and 6.5 to 2.8 in Egypt. In Iran it has fallen even further, from 7.0 to 1.8. Religion simply does not determine fertility.
These are revolutionary changes, and ones that are happening far faster in developing countries than in the old advanced countries. Above all, these are happy developments: people are freed from fear of premature death; parents are freed from watching their children die young; and women are freed from endless childbirth.
Such great changes always bring huge social upheavals. Many developing countries are in the early stages of the demographic transition. This means they have more young adults than they might have expected; as recently as 1985 Egyptian mothers still had an average of six children. High-income countries, meanwhile, are entering the final stage of this transition. Their baby-boomers are ageing, with fewer young adults to support them.
In 2011, half of Egypt’s population will be under 25, while 36 per cent will be aged from 15 to 35. These latter are angry young adults looking desperately for employment, in order at least to hope for normal family life. Meanwhile in the UK, where female fertility has been close to two for much longer, only 31 per cent are under 25, but 35 per cent over 50 (against only 15 per cent in Egypt).
Thus, the middle-aged and elderly rig political and economic life for their benefit in the UK: hence the way in which policies on housing or education finance are weighted against the young. In Egypt, the young could easily outvote the elderly. Hence the urgency of the forces behind a democratic revolution that should transfer more power into their hands. Egypt is not the first developing country, nor will it be the last, to be rocked by the youthful majority, at one and the same time idealistic and frustrated.
This, too, will pass. On current trends, the Egypt of 2040 is going to look rather more like the UK of today. According to the US census bureau, 26 per cent of the population will be over 50. But the UK will have moved onwards, as well: 41 per cent of its people could be over 50.
The future is grey. In today’s high-income countries, it will be very grey. Indeed, some advanced countries could be older than the UK: Italy is forecast to have 50 per cent of its people over 50 by 2040, with as many as 9 per cent over 80.
As Shakespeare’s Miranda might say in response: Oh brave old world! That has such ancients in it!
For the countries with a young population, the immediate challenge is to create a dynamic economy that brings hope of gainful employment. It is surely the failure to do this that most threatens rule by gerontocrats such as Hosni Mubarak. The Chinese leadership is well aware of this imperative. Rulers with resource wealth can try to buy off their young. Those without it cannot. They must at least offer jobs. If they fail, they will lose power – and rightly so. The political challenge is to harness the energy of their young, without succumbing to the catastrophes that hit high-income countries at a similar demographic stage: war, first and foremost.
Meanwhile, in high-income countries, older people must work longer than they expected, without making the young believe their opportunities are blocked for what must seem like an eternity. These countries must also balance the fiscal books as the populations age.
In both cases, the young will raise a cry that has surely been heard throughout the ages: “It is not fair.” They are right, no doubt. It never is. But they should remember that the young will win in the end. It is only a matter of time – just more of it.
Link: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6577ca92-3b94-11e0-a96d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1Ec6wyWFt
