Weekly Updates
Weekly Updates
- Young people worry politicians. Concerns about youth employment abound. There is fear that young people not in education, employment, or training (NEET) will become a group lost to productive employment for life.
- However, it is possible that these kids are alright. Governments generally measure education and training numbers quite well (school and university administrators are often good at counting). Where the data becomes decidedly dubious is employment.
- Labor market data has to make assumptions about levels of self-employment. Self-employment is very hard to measure (there is a lot of guesswork). The trend of self-employment shifted with the pandemic, as huge numbers of business startups emerged in developed economies. Young people in particular tend to want to be self-employed—almost 40% of EU youth would prefer self employment over working for someone else.
- Among developed economies, countries with low overall self-employment (like Germany) tend to have lower NEET numbers and countries with high self-employment (like the UK) have higher NEET numbers. This hints at mismeasurement of what young people are doing. The popular idea that young people not in employment, education, or training are just lying about and scrolling through TikTok might be exaggerated. In reality they may be employed as entrepreneurs whose existence is not recognized by dubious quality data.
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