Translator: Maria Pericleous Reviewer: Natalie Thibault
(applause)
Good morning everyone.
The last time I was in a stage like this was 30 years ago
and I was in a school play and had a tiny role
and forgot all the 5 words I had to say
(Laughter)
so I promised myself never to set foot on a stage again
unless I had a story that it was impossible for me to forget
so here we go:
Οnce upon a time there were two young people.
Her name was Anna and she was from the United Kingdom,
and his name was Piero and he was from Italy.
They've both been looking for jobs
they've been looking for a long long time, years in fact.
They started out looking for the job of their dreams,
now they'd settle for anything
since they can't find the job for which they are qualified.
They have good degrees and beautiful CV's
they've been to interviews, dozens of interviews,
and they've been told, "you don't have the right degree"
or "the right skill set", or "the right attitude".
They've been told they're overqualified or under qualified,
they have too much experience or not enough experience,
for one reason or another, they're not what the market wants.
Now, they're told it's the economy, it's the eurozone crisis,
it's the times we live in.
So for influential people like the author of American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis, they're part of "Generation Wuss",
for many many others they're part of another lost generation.
So where did Anna and Piero go wrong?
Piero did what his father wanted, so he went to University to read Law,
because a Law degree is going to land him a well-paid job.
Now he is part of the 200,000 people in Italy with a Law degree,
most of whom are struggling to find jobs
on a market that could potentially accommodate 20,000 graduates.
So the ones who do have good jobs and drive nice cars
are much older than Piero and not about to retire.
So Piero lives at home with his parents
in his teenage bethroom and works as a barista.
His girlfriend lives with her parents
neither of them can afford to move out, or start a family.
They are both deadlocked in adolescence
knocking on the door of adulthood.
Anna, on the other hand, had a passion: she always wanted to be a midwife.
Great news, because of the shortage of midwives in the UK.
But while Anna powers through a specialist training course
as fast a she can, the country is making up for the shortfall
by retraining nurses, hiring recent graduates
or by buying up midwives all over the world through immigration.
Anna doesn't have a life outside her studies
because she is telling herself that being an "A" student
is going to make it all worth it.
But by the time she graduates there may not be a job waiting for her.
She may have studied herself into a corner.
Now, Anna and Piero are fictional characters,
I made them up, I'm a novelist, that's what I do.
But I make people up based on real human experience
and Anna's and Piero's stories are very common.
I imagined them while doing research for my Creative Writing PhD,
for which I'm writing a novel about the overeducated
and unemployed young people in Europe.
For me, the tragedy of youth unemployment is graduate unemployment.
I became interested in this topic because I grew up in Ceausescu's Romania,
which was the North Korea of Eastern Europe
where the narrative of zero unemployment and jobs for all
was an unquestionable truth for decades.
There was a perfect match between the education supply
and the labour market, all coordinated by one central planning agency
that ensured that all graduates had jobs.
And then, it all fell apart when the revolution happened in '89
and long held beliefs crumbled.
Freedom of choice and competition
entered the mantra playlist directly at number one.
Jobs for all got pushed out, the market took over,
the market dictated, the market wanted you or not.
I left my country 12 years ago and worked in about 10 countries,
and everywhere I went I met people like Anna and Piero.
Everywhere I went,
youth unemployment was on the rise
and with it over-education and underemployment.
What fascinated me the most, was how consistent
the stories about the pandemic of youth unemployment were,
not only across countries, but also across economic cycles.
"Εducation for employability", a phrase at the core of EU discourse
is the procrustean bed from Greek mythology
on which young peoples' choices are measured,
and when they are found wanting they are bullied and blamed.
There is no doubt that youth unemployment is the biggest problem of my generation,
and part of it may just be because of what we talk about,
when we talk about youth unemployment.
So here's a number of fields of study,
each of them has a different angle of research on youth unemployment,
but we, the public, get a remarkably narrow view through the lens of economics,
and the use of one metric, the youth unemployment rate,
which is a measure
that.... sorry
there is one slide missing, no problem.
Which is a measure which is used in a standardized way
across the globe and charts the share of young people
aged 15 to 24 who are economically active,
looking for a job and who cannot find one.
Now there are 3 problems with this picture.
The first one is the definition of youth,
the second one is the definition of unemployment,
and the third one is the time frame for such a measure.
So, this particular time frame has been questioned
ever since the beginning when it was introduced.
There are a number of reasons why it has been questioned
but fundamentally it ignores cultural differences among countries
when it comes to their youth population and the different rites of passage.
Also, it assumes that economies are equally youth friendly
and therefore a 16-year-old in Italy and one in the UK
have the same economic opportunities.
So the degree of participation in the labor market is comparable,
but how youth friendly are, really, these labour markets?
Let's take a look at youth employment trends
in the UK and Italy in the past 15 years.
Now if you look at these 2 pics here,
you see that Italy employed 1.6m young people aged 15 to 24
in its most successful year,
so nearly one in three young people had jobs,
whereas the UK employed consistently 1 in 2 of its young people
and peaked in 2002 with 4m jobs.
So what you hear all the time is comparisons
between southern and northern countries,
so Italy is expected to create jobs that it never had in the first place,
rather than comparing each country with the best image of itself.
So what do we talk about when we talk about youth unemployment?
Mainly we get our information from the media
so there are 2 angles for this.
One of them is a straight forward comparison of youth unemployment rates.
This one shows you a big gap
between the Italian youth unemployment rate at 40%
and the British one at 20%.
The second angle
is where these rates get interpreted as shares of the entire youth population,
so for instance we have here Italy youth unemployment at 42.7%
and here the 20% UK youth unemployment rate
interpreted as 1 in 5 young people without a job.
Now let's look at actual numbers.
In 2013 there were 0.9 million 15 to 24 year-olds
young people in the UK officially unemployed
Versus 0.6 million in Italy.
That's 12% officially unemployed in the UK versus 11% in Italy.
And if you look at the trends
you see that Italy ratio decreased since 2000,
while the UK one increased by 50% since 2000.
So which is it, is youth unemployment worse in Italy, or in the UK?
Here is where the second problem with the definition comes in,
the definition of unemployment.
We think of unemployment as one big category,
meaning temporarily out of work.
But what the official definition means is two separate categories.
One is the economically active officially unemployed
and the other one are the not in education no employment
the so called NEET's, who are considered economically inactive.
Now, despite the theoretical division,
both these categories share the state of joblessness,
so if we take joblessness to mean the real face of youth unemployment,
we see that there are 1.9m 15 to 24 year-olds out of work,
both in Italy and the UK,
that's 1 in 3 in Italy and 1 in 4 in the UK.
Now, when it comes to action, the third problem with the definition comes in:
the time frame.
Because the youth unemployment rates provide a snapshot in time
and the 15 to 24 year-old category
has traditionally been the most dynamic on the labor market,
with one person
moving through the 4 states of not in education or employment,
education, unemployed and employed, within one year.
But if we look at the urgency with which the EU allocated 6 billion euro
to the youth employment initiative nearly 2 years since its launch,
we realize that many young people have fallen through the cracks.
Some have migrated, some have grown out of that age group,
some have moved into education, some have become overeducated,
and some have found employment.
So, when we go on and fund employment programs
without having a comprehensive understanding of youth unemployment,
we should be less puzzled when such programs fail.
There are 2 solutions
that Anna and Piero constantly hear about:
one of them is the skills gap
so now Piero is told
after he graduated and he can't find a job
he is told you should have pursued a vocational degree
rather than a university education.
Now, can there ever be a perfect match between the education supply
and the market demand
when the higher education system is a branch of a country's industry,
subject to market rules?
Hypothetically we could end up with a country of lawyers and architects
as Italy is pretty much now.
The second narrative is the superiority of the German model over any other.
Anna in the UK hears this all the time,
and this has happened since the 80's,
it's always the same, it's conventional wisdom.
But if we go back to the youth employment trends,
and we plot Germany in blue line
you can see that the UK employment trends have consistently been better,
obviously compared to Italy, but also compared to Germany.
We never hear about it, we always hear about the German model
and here is the question:
Can any country adopt the German dual education system
without adopting the German economic structure?
Now, the crux of the matter is that we need the data revolution
when it comes to youth unemployment.
We need multidisciplinary research and we need better statistics.
First of all we need culturally sensitive youth definitions.
Who says youth must be 15 to 24 year-olds around the world?
Because the definition excludes graduates,
we don't know what happens with graduate unemployment,
unless it's patchy and is not consistent.
We can't really rely on the consistency of the youth unemployment rate.
Now, it will be very messy to compare culturally sensitive statistics obviously,
but at least we would get a real picture of what youth unemployment means
in every context and comparing real pictures
with hopefully little more than North vs South
performance narratives that are simply counterproductive.
The second thing that we need is better information
about the supply chain between education and the labour market,
because one major assumption is that young people are rational beings
who make career decisions based on return on investment calculations
in light of perfect information about the market.
Can we own up to the fact
that we don't have perfect information about the market, but we could have,
if we invested more in multidisciplinary research
and how research is communicated?
Because labour market statistics are cryptic to young people.
Our current statistics and support mechanisms
have failed people like Anna and Piero;
they are 26 so they are on the wrong side of youth statistics.
Piero has the wrong degree,
Anna has the right one, but she may be a couple of years too late.
By the time they finished the education they were already standardized products.
So standardization may be the key to a well-oiled global market
but in the case of mass youth unemployment
differentiation may just be the key.
Except that Anna and Piero don't have enough information
to know how they are positioned on the labor market,
and without it they don't know where they belong.
And I speak about differentiation because that's my heritage.
I grew up in the 90's in Romania in the midst of a socio-economic upheaval,
and I did not need a perfect set-up to make it.
I grew up without a computer,
with access to a small town library and some great teachers,
in one of the poorest countries in Europe.
I read more than anyone else around me
because I always asked myself:
if I take in the same information as everyone else what makes me different?
But I never looked at education as a golden ticket for a job;
I looked at the necessity for self development
as a lifetime project.
I rarely had a job that I knew existed when I graduated.
But I found great mentors, or they found me.
The most precious gift anyone can give to you
is the gift of time.
If you can find people who can advise you on what you can become,
you've won the lottery.
Do it formally, do it informally, just do it.
Stop waiting for those misleading youth unemployment statistics
to result in employment programs that work for you.
Start asking for better data,
so that the next time we talk about youth unemployment
we all talk about the same thing.
Thank you.
(applause)