Fleecing the Young

摘要

The good news, announced Barack Obama in his 2015 State of the Union address, is that America has climbed out of its economic quagmire. After peaking at 10 percent in October 2009, the official unemployment rate had retreated below levels obtaining at the commencement of the Great Recession. In early 2016 the rate hovers near a relatively comfortable 5 percent. If, however, you are a would-be worker aged sixteen to twenty-four, your chances of being unemployed are more than twice as great-indeed, greater than the worst chances experienced by the overall labor force during the height of the recession ("Monthly Youth" 2016). Nevertheless, young Americans may count themselves fortunate. The euro area confronted in summer 2015 an unemployment rate slightly north of 11 percent, and one in every four youth job seekers failed to secure employment ("Youth Employment Trends" 2015). Of course, aggregate figures hide strikingly different experiences across borders. Characteristically, young Germans do nicely compared to their European generational peers, experiencing 7.2 percent unemployment. The corresponding figure for France, though, is 23.7 percent and for Italy a sobering 40.9 percent. Greece is yet worse, where one out of every two young aspirants is stymied. Because everything in that country that can go wrong has gone wrong, its experience may be excused as anomalous, but Spanish young people also suffer disappointment at the same rate (Trading Economics n.d.). There, appropriately named indignados resort to milling around streets in protest and abandon mainstream political parties for equally feckless populist ones. They and their generational peers across the continent are protesting a future that as far as they can see is without promise. At an age when young men and women are biologically and culturally primed to take on adult responsibilities, they find themselves stuck in an extended childhood. From Madrid to Athens and points in between, young people languish.