Loving how many responding here don't seem to actually realise the socio-economic situation in South Africa is vastly different to that in the US/Europe, and so immediately start making false equivalencies.
As a white male from South Africa, I can assure you this wouldn't have been my reality were I still living there. Black people make up approx 80% of the population, and this would disproportionally be theirs. Reasons date back to the Apartheid regime, which deliberately kept non-whites uneducated, as well as some horrendous mismanagement under the current ANC governnment under then-president Jacob Zuma (who himself serious under-valued education in general).
Just as one example: there was a famous incident where, due to some corrupt dealings, textbooks weren't able to be delivered in Limpopo (one of the provinces) for several years in a row. For many years there have been schools with 0% high school graduation rates. The infrastructure and processes that are taken for granted in developed countries are only really available to a minority in SA. This makes a huge difference.
I’ve never lived in South Africa, but I have two South African parents and have visited the country several times, and can confirm that the parent comment is exactly correct. SA can come as a shock if you’re not expecting it: even just driving from Cape Town airport to the central city, the view abruptly switches from tin shacks as far as the eye can see, to houses (which in comparison are mansions) surrounded by barbed wire and electric fences. And it’s the same no matter where you travel. And this is in one of the more affluent and safe cities in SA — ‘safe’ as in, you’re not actually risking your life if you walk on the street in one of the more touristy areas. Definitely an amazing country to visit, but the inequality is utterly extreme.
EDIT: Here’s an example of what I mean. [0] is a Google Street View of a bridge near Cape Town International Airport. On the one side: tin shacks. On the other side: a golf course, behind middle-class (I think) housing.
Every day millions of South Africans walk in the street and don’t die.
The touristy areas are safer than elsewhere. There isn’t just random non stop killing in the streets.
To other readers: Not necessary to travel to SA to confirm truth of this description. A few minutes “driving” the roads with Google Street View will suffice.
Thank you for your candor! The socio-economic inequality in South Africa is staggering and its a powder-keg that's just waiting to be set off. Additionally, there is a wide chasm between black and white youth unemployment - I believe only 6% of white youths are unemployed.
I think blaming Zuma alone for mismanagement is not entirely accurate: none of the successive governments prioritised eliminating inequality - not the Apartheid government (obviously), but also not Mandela, Mbeki, Zuma or Ramaphosa. The economy is reliant on the exploitation of cheap labour, but this will have to change if the political will is there. BEE (affirmative action) had the right idea, but the execution was not great as it was riddled with corruption. It did help with the creation of a growing black middle class, but the floor wasn't raised.
There is a lot of corruption, but much could have been done to improve the education in under-resourced areas - a lot of rural and township schools do not provide high school science subjects because they do not have labs or lab equipment, not to mention teachers.
The spectre of Bantu Education will haunt non-metropolitan schools for a long time to come. "Bantu Education" was a lower-quality education black people had to endure under Apartheid - just enough to prepare one for non-skilled factory or mine work. A large number of present-day black teachers studied under Bantu Education, or if they are young, were taught by teachers who qualified under bantu education. It's a mess.
> BEE (affirmative action) had the right idea, but the execution was not great as it was riddled with corruption.
Not surprising. Affirmative action and other “right ideas” like this can only result in corruption and racial tensions. Straightforward help to the poor is more useful, but unfortunately it is less politically popular and harder to exploit for corruption.
> The infrastructure and processes that are taken for granted in developed countries are only really available to a minority in SA.
A very small minority. The middle classes don't have access to reliable power, water, government bureaucracy (mail, taxes, passports), law enforcement, etc. South Africa is failing all its people.
In the West, our experience is the West. So we often make the mistake of assuming similar systems, even similar beliefs, when we speak about other areas of the world. Forums like this are useful precisely because there is an ability to have knowledgeable people chime in to help us set a more realistic context for discussion.
Agree completely, but I can tell you for many of them pirating a text book is beyond their means. To do so you need not only internet access, but the sophistication to find pirated text books, and THEN the means to print possibly hundreds of pages. There is a big difference between poverty in the West and in a place like South Africa. Just printing the text book would be prohibitively expensive.
You find similarly grim numbers in Western Europe too. I mean youth unemployment was over 50% in Spain during the post-Great Recession crisis and is at 38% now.[1]
It's pretty sad - young people are living with their parents into their thirties and not having children until their 40's if at all, fuelling a massive decline in the birth rate to one of the lowest in the world at around 1.3 births per woman, far below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman[2]
While true, it kinda hides another issue as well. Salary hasn't really improved in almost 15 yrs now, so youths that are currently employed make barely more than the existential minimum.
Germany has issues as well, even though that specific statistic looks good
Yeah, low birth rates aren't all about money even though that's important. A lot of it is about culture, which affects women's age at first child which affects how many children a woman will ultimately have.
Even with all the incentives (subsidize childcare etc.) you'd still have to modify the harder to modify cultural reasons like people valuing independence, "casual dating"/FWB relationships for years that go nowhere is more common instead of dating with intent to marry, hustle culture/emphasis on career progress, less social pressure/shaming from parents ("why don't you have a husband/wife/kids yet?!"), freedom to "find yourself/travel" or "get sexually experienced/have a ho phase before settling" for years after college, etc.
Most people don't want to go from college to marriage and kids right away these days, and a few years of this type of casual dating/exploration after college eats up a lot of prime reproductive years. But these cultural factors are very hard to change especially with the absence of religion/strong communities these days.
This is not a valid comparison. "Youth Unemployment" is calculated differently than "Youth not in employment, education or training". The equivalent statistic for Spain per the OECD is ~17% now, not 38%.
It sucks but it seems to be where we are anyway headed in a few decades, you simply do not need so many workers, at least not in how the job market is shaped now.
Yuval Noah Harari argues the same [1]. Whereas the 20th century was a century of workers fighting exploitation, now the 21st century might be workers — or more generally people — fighting irrelevance. When so much work can be performed by machines, human labor will not be necessary like it was before.
That's true, and relatedly it would be nice for developed countries to stop discouraging single income two spouse families as some sort of oppressive relic of the past.
As an Spaniard, I can say we have a lot of problems:
- Low industry and industrial market focused to make profit saving in wages, not selling an interesting product or an advanced one, and usually risking the minimum possible. A lot of big companies of different sectors are here because you can pay nearly minimum wage to a trained employee without problem. Most of the people would accept because at least they can have a work.
- Low technology industry, based on giant companies who make cheap and big software, with nearly zero R&D, and wanting the cheapest people possible (they don't want nor need talent or good people). Most of the talented Spaniards that work abroad and get experience and knowledge have trouble getting back to Spain because they are overqualified for most of the jobs.
The past two problems make a physicist, a chemist, or a biologist (for example) hard to find a work in their field, and when they find earn less than working in a fast food restaurant. And that's why there are a lot of then working in sectors who doesn't need a degree (or even high school), or emigrate. That last thing make really difficult to find trained professional here when they are needed.
- An investor market who would only invest in things that could give a lot of money in a really short time period (pubs, home renting, real estate, small companies that are currently in the market and profitable). They won't give an euro to any startup that haven't sold successfully a product already.
- A population that doesn't want to be a freelance worker or making a small company outside some professional groups that have been in that way for decades, like some construction workers, carpenters, smiths, or plumbers, people who have a small shop, etc.
- To worsen the previous problem, is expensive to be a freelance worker or to make a small company. You have to pay taxes even when your professional expenses and profits are zero. The first year isn't too bad (because you only have to pay a small quantity in comparison to the next years, but anyway most people decide to work illegally the firsts months or years to at least have some amount of money when the need to make it legally and start to pay.
- Working on your own not only needs more money, also more time. Depending on where on Spain are you living, the local or regional government will help you less or more, and the procedure will need more or less time, reaching about 10 to 12 months in the worst cases to being able to pay your own taxes to work on your own.
- Corruption in all layers of the society. What politicians care about is how can get more votes, and if they offer something positive for the country in a long term, that won't affect people in actuality, they are gone to lose. Is a vicious circle difficult to find an exit.
- People without education and current difficulties to access it. Some people without education from a few years ago have trouble entering to "Professional training", what could be called "technical school" in the USA, because sometimes there isn't any vacancy to attend it (in public and even in private centres) due to so many people trying to improve their lives in that way.
- An inflated unemployment rate because are people who are working illegally, and this isn't uncommon because they earn their salary and also can access to the unemployment benefit. It's totally illegal, employer and employees could be easily in jail for this, and employees would have to return all the money received, but there isn't any watching this. Other times is accepted in that way because there is the only way to find a job.
With that panorama, how can somebody could have happily a child here?
There are going to be other Spaniard that had some better experiences and actually are happy with what he/she have (this is possible in some parts of the north of the country or in bigger cities like Madrid), and I'm happy that not everybody experience this kind of problems, but that is what I have seen and what I have heard from other people in my circles and the Internet.
> You find similarly grim numbers in Western Europe too. I mean youth unemployment was over 50% in Spain during the post-Great Recession crisis and is at 38% now.[1]
No, you don't measure the same thing. Those unemployment rates are calculated not on the whole set of youths, but on the relatively small subset which is not in various types of schools, i.e. it is the ratio of the youths which don't work over the youths which are or could be looking for a job.
The South-African figure is against the whole set. If you were to apply the same method for the Spanish and other European countries, the resulting figure would be much smaller than your 38%.
> far below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman
The magically fixed 2.1 figure has been there for decades, but it doesn't factor in many factors, the most obvious one being the changing survival rate (from birth to making the next generation).
It does, it's per woman. You need 2 people to have a baby so you need 2 babies per woman to replace them and something extra to cover attrition, that's where the .1 comes from.
> the solution is relatively available - get youth to first complete high school and then be equipped with skills they can use to earn a living
But is it? Does SA actually have lots of jobs waiting for post-high school people? With requirements which are not trainable in a few months to people who haven't completed high school?
> get youth to first complete high school [...] But is it?
Yes, but it will never happen. I've seen this playbook in 3 countries now (one of which South Africa): attack education so that people aren't educated enough to understand why they need to vote you out.
If you speak to the people who keep voting for the regime, it's "I hate the ANC, but we must vote for them." In terms of destroying education to stay in power, that's a slam dunk.
Educated countries make baffling, crazy choices at the ballot box all the time. Plenty enthusiastically elect "one person, one vote, one time" types of parties, or something close to it. For example, Russia is fairly educated if one believes university graduation numbers. Poland and Hungary are more "educated" than Austria or Czechia. And all of them are so much more educated at every level than Portugal, which has had a string of competent and non-authoritarian governments. Handy coloured maps[0][1] offer little in terms of "ah, I see how the ones who send their young'uns to uni and spend the most on education are the most competently governed".
There's probably some correlation between education quality/amount in very specific areas, like civics and basic economics, and "quality" of elected governments. But I intuitively believe (admittedly without searching for evidence) that these are easily swamped by more important factors, like economic/political crises du jour, history, culture, neighbourhood, etc.
(regarding neighbourhood, I think this is often underappreciated. E.g. maybe if Portugal was surrounded by third-world tinpot dictatorships, it would also join that club, but it's influenced far more by countries like Spain and France; and it's very difficult for an almost-out-of-the-abyss country like Ghana to break out and join the club of reasonably-governed middle-income countries given its neighbourhood).
Speaking as a South African, I would say that the expression of "never attribute to malice that which can be reasonably explained by incompetence" is particularly apt here.
I'm very doubtful that anyone in government is actually trying in any form to keep the population uneducated, instead the poor delivery of education is a result of general apathy and incompetence.
It is further exacerbated by the largely unchecked corruption, whereby too many people in government are more focussed on stealing from the tax coffers than doing the job they're paid to do.
Finally, this is all made worse by the fact that the people keep voting in the ANC (the party in power since 1994) despite their terrible track record of poor service delivery and corruption. I agree that the lack of education is contributing to the problem of voters not recognizing their options and ability to enact change.
My hope is that eventually as the older "blind devotees" to the ANC pass away, that the younger disenfranchised generation's voices become enough to vote them out.
Disturbingly though, a lot of the votes moving away from the ANC are instead going to a somewhat extremist party which promotes wealth re-distribution and their members tend to proudly walk around with berets and (albeit simple) uniforms. (A side rant is that I wish their party leader would get banned from Twitter for inciting violence, but it seems that the US based company doesn't care to look at the case as carefully as they do for US elected leaders.)
> > get youth to first complete high school [...] But is it?
> Yes, but it will never happen.
This implies a model of the world in which education causes prosperity. The fate of large parts of Central Asia, the Caucasus and Mongolia after the end of the subsidies from Russia suggests this doesn’t work that well. Broad based high levels of education weren’t great for Ireland either last century. There were at most three decades 1900-2000 when Ireland didn’t export its people. By contrast China got rich explosively fast once with a population that mostly hadn’t finished primary school starting in the 1980s.
The evidence that education causes prosperity is at best weak. People like to buy education once they have money for similar reasons to west they like to buy nicer houses or travel, intrinsic enjoyment and conspicuous consumption.
>If you speak to the people who keep voting for the regime, it's "I hate the ANC, but we must vote for them." In terms of destroying education to stay in power, that's a slam dunk.
Even an educated populace won't fight back against exploitative government if it's all they know.
I live in a highly educated US state, one of the most educated, at least on paper. People say the same damn thing but with bigger words and then vote for the ruling party. The stuff the government routinely gets away with here would have the involved parties quickly out of power in some of the adjacent states. But when the .gov is caught misbehaving people just grumble and act as though the way things are here is the only way things could ever be and no other status quo could exist let alone be stable.
I wish I never lived elsewhere. Ignorance is bliss.
Do they attack education through funding or through rhetoric? I imagine funding is where they would have more power.
I already believed that education should be outside of the purview of the government, but this even more reason to keep them separate. A government whose sole purpose is to protect individual rights (properly defined) would have no ability to gut the education of it's populace.
This. Just because you have an educated workforce doesn't mean you'll be booming with jobs.
More like you need a business friendly environment with low taxes, minimal corruption and frictionless bureocracy to create a thriving local economy and also attract external investors.
Spain has a 17.3% high school dropout rate though.[1] So education is an issue. Although yeah, many graduates were also unemployed in the crisis.
I think the crisis was kind of exceptional as everyone was going to be pretty screwed either way. But furthermore, it seems that until you reach a sort of 'critical mass' of educated workers it can be hard for them to find employment as it's hard for the country to attract companies that require an educated workforce.
I think the solution would be to continue investing in education to help reach that critical mass and at the same time make it easier for people to set up new companies, start-ups etc.
Spain is pretty bad for this with the harsh autonomo taxes for people trying to start their own business etc., plus all the bureaucracy which often has to be done in-person and appointments are hard to get etc.
At least it seems like things are improving, although the Coronavirus will be a setback.
Right. We have to come to grips with the fact that not all people are cut out for college or to be white collar knowledge workers. Many of the jobs that these people used to enjoy have been shipped overseas, meanwhile large amounts of unskilled labor is allowed to pour in. This has destroyed opportunities to make your way in life as a blue collar worker. But instead of reversing sweetheart legislation that makes it easy to ship jobs overseas and bring in cheap labor at home, we talk about UBI and raising minimum wage. Both of which will have even more devastating impacts on the middle and low economic classes.
There is a shortage of skilled workers and there is a surplus of unskilled workers.
Google “skill shortage South Africa” or something like that for more info. I don’t think there is an easy solution to bringing that gap, but I’m sure getting the basics right (ie a decent education system) would help a lot.
These situations can become traps for local economies: People don’t want to invest in education without job opportunities. Companies don’t want to invest in more jobs without educated applicants. Self-reinforcing cycle.
The inverse of this situation is why high cost of living cities continue to thrive: It may cost more to hire and retain people, but you’re guaranteed a supply of motivated and educated applicants. It becomes worth the premium to operate in those expensive markets.
I can’t speak to SA, but there are definitely cities and even regions in the United States that have high unemployment but also struggle to hire reliable employees regardless of wages offered. Even if a company pays well, the well-paid and well-educated hires often want to use those jobs as a springboard to move out of the city rather than risk tying their career to a declining local economy. Turnover is high simply because educated and motivated people leave the area.
Interesting that there are marked male/female differences in Turkey, Colombia, and Mexico – followed up by less differences on the high end by Brazil, Costa Rica, Argentina, Chile, and then on the lower end by Slovak Republic, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Czech Republic.
Weirdly enough you could say things are very out of kilter in the Czech Republic because even though the NEET rate for guys is a chart-topping 5% the rate for gals is 15%, triple the amount! (Same kind of goes for Estonia).
It's a fascinating socioeconomic demographic data-set.
By all accounts the Netherlands, Sweden, Iceland, or Switzerland is the place to be if you're young … (And we're all young once, right!?)
A friend of mine organized a safari business in SA. It was a normal thing for the workers he had to receive the salary pay and disappear for a week until they had burned it, and then will come back.
So he had to pay different people at different times and talk with the women in their environment in order for his business to work.
Sounds familiar. When I was building my house (not in SA) the construction workers would often disappear after getting paid. I would go looking for them in the village and find them on a bender. They would come back when they needed more booze money. It was pretty obvious why they did not have many opportunities to get ahead, and never would.
Do you know how much where they being paid? In my experience, this only happens when the wages are very low. I don't know the direction of causality: do higher wages motivate workers not to be more professional, or do low wages result in the 'good' workers avoiding those jobs? Even in the US, a lot of minimum-wage McJobs have relatively high levels of absenteeism
Amazing to see these statistics when, to a foreigner, South African businesses already seem to intentionally overemploy (I would assume as a way of maintaining social stability). It is not unusual for there to be twice or even three times as many people working in a shop than in Europe.
It reminds me of a small coworking space I used in Sao Paulo, with three receptionists, a few "managers", lots of cleaning staff, someone doing just coffee, security, etc. They could do all of that with two employees total. In front of the building, there was a petrol station with one employee per pump. The pandemic was actually a relief for lots of companies that were able to fire expendable staff more easily.
Yeah, in South Africa nobody puts their own gas in their car. There are multiple people at each filling station whose job that is. You also don’t pack your groceries at a supermarket either. You also have a maid and a gardener, it’s so dirt cheap unless you’re really poor there is no reason why you wouldn’t. There are car guards all over, there’s no need to even push your own trolley or pack the stuff in your car, they’ll do it for a small tip. Basically if you earn an average amount money you can enjoy a seriously comfortable life.
The surplus of unskilled workers means that labor is very cheap. Businesses over employ (cleaning staff, security etc), and even homes over employ in terms of domestic staff (maids and garderners), but there’s still a big surplus.
Labour is really cheap in South Africa. It's probably cheaper to employ someone to perform a task than it is to automate it, as is would be in Europe which has higher labour costs
Readit News
As a white male from South Africa, I can assure you this wouldn't have been my reality were I still living there. Black people make up approx 80% of the population, and this would disproportionally be theirs. Reasons date back to the Apartheid regime, which deliberately kept non-whites uneducated, as well as some horrendous mismanagement under the current ANC governnment under then-president Jacob Zuma (who himself serious under-valued education in general).
Just as one example: there was a famous incident where, due to some corrupt dealings, textbooks weren't able to be delivered in Limpopo (one of the provinces) for several years in a row. For many years there have been schools with 0% high school graduation rates. The infrastructure and processes that are taken for granted in developed countries are only really available to a minority in SA. This makes a huge difference.
EDIT: Here’s an example of what I mean. [0] is a Google Street View of a bridge near Cape Town International Airport. On the one side: tin shacks. On the other side: a golf course, behind middle-class (I think) housing.
[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@-33.9675053,18.5735234,3a,60y,2...
I think blaming Zuma alone for mismanagement is not entirely accurate: none of the successive governments prioritised eliminating inequality - not the Apartheid government (obviously), but also not Mandela, Mbeki, Zuma or Ramaphosa. The economy is reliant on the exploitation of cheap labour, but this will have to change if the political will is there. BEE (affirmative action) had the right idea, but the execution was not great as it was riddled with corruption. It did help with the creation of a growing black middle class, but the floor wasn't raised.
There is a lot of corruption, but much could have been done to improve the education in under-resourced areas - a lot of rural and township schools do not provide high school science subjects because they do not have labs or lab equipment, not to mention teachers.
The spectre of Bantu Education will haunt non-metropolitan schools for a long time to come. "Bantu Education" was a lower-quality education black people had to endure under Apartheid - just enough to prepare one for non-skilled factory or mine work. A large number of present-day black teachers studied under Bantu Education, or if they are young, were taught by teachers who qualified under bantu education. It's a mess.
Not surprising. Affirmative action and other “right ideas” like this can only result in corruption and racial tensions. Straightforward help to the poor is more useful, but unfortunately it is less politically popular and harder to exploit for corruption.
A very small minority. The middle classes don't have access to reliable power, water, government bureaucracy (mail, taxes, passports), law enforcement, etc. South Africa is failing all its people.
Protip: Never the let criminal class keep/hold the majority of the land.
South Africa needs land expropriation without compensation, immediately.
If I were a parent I'd be passing out pirated text books at that point.
Source: am South African.
It's pretty sad - young people are living with their parents into their thirties and not having children until their 40's if at all, fuelling a massive decline in the birth rate to one of the lowest in the world at around 1.3 births per woman, far below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman[2]
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/youth-unemployment-rate
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033179/fertility-rate-s...
Germany has issues as well, even though that specific statistic looks good
Even with all the incentives (subsidize childcare etc.) you'd still have to modify the harder to modify cultural reasons like people valuing independence, "casual dating"/FWB relationships for years that go nowhere is more common instead of dating with intent to marry, hustle culture/emphasis on career progress, less social pressure/shaming from parents ("why don't you have a husband/wife/kids yet?!"), freedom to "find yourself/travel" or "get sexually experienced/have a ho phase before settling" for years after college, etc.
Most people don't want to go from college to marriage and kids right away these days, and a few years of this type of casual dating/exploration after college eats up a lot of prime reproductive years. But these cultural factors are very hard to change especially with the absence of religion/strong communities these days.
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-n...
- Low industry and industrial market focused to make profit saving in wages, not selling an interesting product or an advanced one, and usually risking the minimum possible. A lot of big companies of different sectors are here because you can pay nearly minimum wage to a trained employee without problem. Most of the people would accept because at least they can have a work.
- Low technology industry, based on giant companies who make cheap and big software, with nearly zero R&D, and wanting the cheapest people possible (they don't want nor need talent or good people). Most of the talented Spaniards that work abroad and get experience and knowledge have trouble getting back to Spain because they are overqualified for most of the jobs.
The past two problems make a physicist, a chemist, or a biologist (for example) hard to find a work in their field, and when they find earn less than working in a fast food restaurant. And that's why there are a lot of then working in sectors who doesn't need a degree (or even high school), or emigrate. That last thing make really difficult to find trained professional here when they are needed.
- An investor market who would only invest in things that could give a lot of money in a really short time period (pubs, home renting, real estate, small companies that are currently in the market and profitable). They won't give an euro to any startup that haven't sold successfully a product already.
- A population that doesn't want to be a freelance worker or making a small company outside some professional groups that have been in that way for decades, like some construction workers, carpenters, smiths, or plumbers, people who have a small shop, etc.
- To worsen the previous problem, is expensive to be a freelance worker or to make a small company. You have to pay taxes even when your professional expenses and profits are zero. The first year isn't too bad (because you only have to pay a small quantity in comparison to the next years, but anyway most people decide to work illegally the firsts months or years to at least have some amount of money when the need to make it legally and start to pay.
- Working on your own not only needs more money, also more time. Depending on where on Spain are you living, the local or regional government will help you less or more, and the procedure will need more or less time, reaching about 10 to 12 months in the worst cases to being able to pay your own taxes to work on your own.
- Corruption in all layers of the society. What politicians care about is how can get more votes, and if they offer something positive for the country in a long term, that won't affect people in actuality, they are gone to lose. Is a vicious circle difficult to find an exit.
- People without education and current difficulties to access it. Some people without education from a few years ago have trouble entering to "Professional training", what could be called "technical school" in the USA, because sometimes there isn't any vacancy to attend it (in public and even in private centres) due to so many people trying to improve their lives in that way.
- An inflated unemployment rate because are people who are working illegally, and this isn't uncommon because they earn their salary and also can access to the unemployment benefit. It's totally illegal, employer and employees could be easily in jail for this, and employees would have to return all the money received, but there isn't any watching this. Other times is accepted in that way because there is the only way to find a job.
With that panorama, how can somebody could have happily a child here?
There are going to be other Spaniard that had some better experiences and actually are happy with what he/she have (this is possible in some parts of the north of the country or in bigger cities like Madrid), and I'm happy that not everybody experience this kind of problems, but that is what I have seen and what I have heard from other people in my circles and the Internet.
Total social atomization.
You can't have children through Discord. And why would you? With whom?
As if there isn't enough drama in online places like that. What a nightmare.
Dead Comment
No, you don't measure the same thing. Those unemployment rates are calculated not on the whole set of youths, but on the relatively small subset which is not in various types of schools, i.e. it is the ratio of the youths which don't work over the youths which are or could be looking for a job.
The South-African figure is against the whole set. If you were to apply the same method for the Spanish and other European countries, the resulting figure would be much smaller than your 38%.
> far below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman
The magically fixed 2.1 figure has been there for decades, but it doesn't factor in many factors, the most obvious one being the changing survival rate (from birth to making the next generation).
> the solution is relatively available - get youth to first complete high school and then be equipped with skills they can use to earn a living
But is it? Does SA actually have lots of jobs waiting for post-high school people? With requirements which are not trainable in a few months to people who haven't completed high school?
I'm finding it hard to get answers with public statistics. Looking at https://tradingeconomics.com/south-africa/unemployed-persons for example it seems like SA lost a few million of both unemployed and employees people last year...
Yes, but it will never happen. I've seen this playbook in 3 countries now (one of which South Africa): attack education so that people aren't educated enough to understand why they need to vote you out.
If you speak to the people who keep voting for the regime, it's "I hate the ANC, but we must vote for them." In terms of destroying education to stay in power, that's a slam dunk.
Education is the Achilles Heel of democracy.
Educated countries make baffling, crazy choices at the ballot box all the time. Plenty enthusiastically elect "one person, one vote, one time" types of parties, or something close to it. For example, Russia is fairly educated if one believes university graduation numbers. Poland and Hungary are more "educated" than Austria or Czechia. And all of them are so much more educated at every level than Portugal, which has had a string of competent and non-authoritarian governments. Handy coloured maps[0][1] offer little in terms of "ah, I see how the ones who send their young'uns to uni and spend the most on education are the most competently governed".
There's probably some correlation between education quality/amount in very specific areas, like civics and basic economics, and "quality" of elected governments. But I intuitively believe (admittedly without searching for evidence) that these are easily swamped by more important factors, like economic/political crises du jour, history, culture, neighbourhood, etc.
(regarding neighbourhood, I think this is often underappreciated. E.g. maybe if Portugal was surrounded by third-world tinpot dictatorships, it would also join that club, but it's influenced far more by countries like Spain and France; and it's very difficult for an almost-out-of-the-abyss country like Ghana to break out and join the club of reasonably-governed middle-income countries given its neighbourhood).
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/government-expenditure-ed...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-population-w...
I'm very doubtful that anyone in government is actually trying in any form to keep the population uneducated, instead the poor delivery of education is a result of general apathy and incompetence.
It is further exacerbated by the largely unchecked corruption, whereby too many people in government are more focussed on stealing from the tax coffers than doing the job they're paid to do.
Finally, this is all made worse by the fact that the people keep voting in the ANC (the party in power since 1994) despite their terrible track record of poor service delivery and corruption. I agree that the lack of education is contributing to the problem of voters not recognizing their options and ability to enact change.
My hope is that eventually as the older "blind devotees" to the ANC pass away, that the younger disenfranchised generation's voices become enough to vote them out.
Disturbingly though, a lot of the votes moving away from the ANC are instead going to a somewhat extremist party which promotes wealth re-distribution and their members tend to proudly walk around with berets and (albeit simple) uniforms. (A side rant is that I wish their party leader would get banned from Twitter for inciting violence, but it seems that the US based company doesn't care to look at the case as carefully as they do for US elected leaders.)
> Yes, but it will never happen.
This implies a model of the world in which education causes prosperity. The fate of large parts of Central Asia, the Caucasus and Mongolia after the end of the subsidies from Russia suggests this doesn’t work that well. Broad based high levels of education weren’t great for Ireland either last century. There were at most three decades 1900-2000 when Ireland didn’t export its people. By contrast China got rich explosively fast once with a population that mostly hadn’t finished primary school starting in the 1980s.
The evidence that education causes prosperity is at best weak. People like to buy education once they have money for similar reasons to west they like to buy nicer houses or travel, intrinsic enjoyment and conspicuous consumption.
Even an educated populace won't fight back against exploitative government if it's all they know.
I live in a highly educated US state, one of the most educated, at least on paper. People say the same damn thing but with bigger words and then vote for the ruling party. The stuff the government routinely gets away with here would have the involved parties quickly out of power in some of the adjacent states. But when the .gov is caught misbehaving people just grumble and act as though the way things are here is the only way things could ever be and no other status quo could exist let alone be stable.
I wish I never lived elsewhere. Ignorance is bliss.
I already believed that education should be outside of the purview of the government, but this even more reason to keep them separate. A government whose sole purpose is to protect individual rights (properly defined) would have no ability to gut the education of it's populace.
Germany at the end of the 1920s was one of the best educated nations in the world and its universities were chock-full of pro-Nazi student groups.
More like you need a business friendly environment with low taxes, minimal corruption and frictionless bureocracy to create a thriving local economy and also attract external investors.
I think the crisis was kind of exceptional as everyone was going to be pretty screwed either way. But furthermore, it seems that until you reach a sort of 'critical mass' of educated workers it can be hard for them to find employment as it's hard for the country to attract companies that require an educated workforce.
I think the solution would be to continue investing in education to help reach that critical mass and at the same time make it easier for people to set up new companies, start-ups etc.
Spain is pretty bad for this with the harsh autonomo taxes for people trying to start their own business etc., plus all the bureaucracy which often has to be done in-person and appointments are hard to get etc.
At least it seems like things are improving, although the Coronavirus will be a setback.
[1] https://www.euroweeklynews.com/2020/11/13/spain-has-highest-...
No.
Some countries have a shortage of people. They're hiring, but they can't find people.
However, South Africa has a shortage of businesses. That shortage makes people useless: they're not hired, nobody needs them.
Solution: create policies that favor businesses. Employment goes up, quality of life goes up.
The inverse of this situation is why high cost of living cities continue to thrive: It may cost more to hire and retain people, but you’re guaranteed a supply of motivated and educated applicants. It becomes worth the premium to operate in those expensive markets.
I can’t speak to SA, but there are definitely cities and even regions in the United States that have high unemployment but also struggle to hire reliable employees regardless of wages offered. Even if a company pays well, the well-paid and well-educated hires often want to use those jobs as a springboard to move out of the city rather than risk tying their career to a declining local economy. Turnover is high simply because educated and motivated people leave the area.
(via https://data.oecd.org/youthinac/youth-not-in-employment-educ...)
Interesting that there are marked male/female differences in Turkey, Colombia, and Mexico – followed up by less differences on the high end by Brazil, Costa Rica, Argentina, Chile, and then on the lower end by Slovak Republic, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Czech Republic.
Weirdly enough you could say things are very out of kilter in the Czech Republic because even though the NEET rate for guys is a chart-topping 5% the rate for gals is 15%, triple the amount! (Same kind of goes for Estonia).
It's a fascinating socioeconomic demographic data-set.
By all accounts the Netherlands, Sweden, Iceland, or Switzerland is the place to be if you're young … (And we're all young once, right!?)
So he had to pay different people at different times and talk with the women in their environment in order for his business to work.
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What the heck?
I'd be interested to see the same chart (a) going back another 10-20 years and (b) showing older age groups.