theatlantic | Elevated and lasting unemployment is an awful thing, anywhere, and
for anyone. But it is awful in a special way for young people, cutting
them off from networks and starting salaries at the moment they need to
forge connections and begin to cobble together a career.
A new study from the International Labor Organization
takes a global tour of youth joblessness and finds that what's gone up
won't come down in the next five years. The youth unemployment rate*
among the richest countries is projected to flat-line, rather than fall,
before 2018. As a result, the global Millennial generation could be
uniquely scarred by the economic downturn. Research by Lisa Kahn has showed that people graduating into a recession have typically faced a lifetime of lower wages.
As Ritchie King from Quartz shows in the graph to the left, it's now "harder for a teenager or
young adult to find a job in developed economies than in Sub-Saharan
Africa."
Lurking under the rise of youth unemployment among the richest countries is an even scarier trend -- the rise of long-term
youth unemployment. Long-term unemployment isn't just a difference in
length; it's a difference in kind, because the more time you spend out
of a company, the less likely you are to be hired back into one. In many European countries, particularly Spain,
the increase in unemployment has come almost exclusively from people
being out of work longer than two-years. In advanced economies,
"longterm unemployment has arrived as an unexpected tax on the current
generation of youth," ILO writes. About half of Europe's unemployed
youth have been out of work for more than six months, according to 2011
data.
American audiences are probably most interested in how
our Millennial generation compares to young people around the world. So,
from table B1 at the end of the paper, I picked a few OECD countries and graphed the last eight years of youth unemployment.
