Oh, to not be EUROpe

[erudito]

This graph sets out how catastrophically bad youth unemployment is in debt-ridden EUROpe. Meanwhile, in Oz, unemployment is holding steady at 4.9%The euro was a bad idea: lots of economists said so at the time, but the EUrosuperstate decided that it could make it work in a Triumph of the Will. As folk discuss the odds of various states (starting

Comments

[hometime]

A few years ago I was taught be a ballet teacher who had emigrated from Germany for exactly this reason- because she saw that in the EU, her daughter had no clear future. She and her partner could always get work (dance teachers/ choreographers), but her 21 year old daughter was essentially unemployable.

[jordan179]

The flip side of mandating very high minimum wages (Norway's is $20/hr) is that new entrants into the work force become unemployable in the legal economy.

[catsidhe]

Youth unemployment rate, USA, 2008: 10.5%
Youth unemployment rate, Norway, 2008: 7.5%

[ford_prefect42]

Do you have a point? Or did you simply miss the graph at the *very* top of the OP?

Is your purpose in posting to this thread to discredit your cognitive abilities? Because if so, you are suceeding admirably.

Does not mean quite what you think it means

[erudito]

But the overall Norwegian unemployment rate for 2010 was 3.6%, that for 2008 was 2.6%. So youth unemployment in 2008 was three times as high as the overall rate in Norway.

The overall US unemployment rate for 2010 was 9.7%, that for 2008 was 5.8%. So the youth unemployment rate in the US was only twice as high. So US minimum wages (and other labour regulation) disadvantage young jobseekers less than Norwegian labour regulations do. If, in a case of spectacularly bad timing, Congress had not raised the minimum wage in 2007, the comparative disadvantage would have been even less.

[jordan179]

One data point proves very little. Especially one carefully chosen when the current depression had started in America, but not yet spread to Norway.

I could have chosen a similar data point from 1930 to "prove" that just about any Great Power's economy was fundamentally healthier than America's.