And what do they all want? To make enough money to marry and have a family! What part of unsustainable do SEVEN BILLION people not understand? This isn’t an unemployment problem. It’s an overpopulation problem.

When it’s those with few or no skills that increase in number most rapidly, social pressures escalate rapidly. Those without function in a sustainable society historically become the greatest threat to civil order. They are also, ultimately, disproportionate victims of any shortfall in any of the civil resources that sustain life.

If you remove them, the results are actually quite good then.

“large numbers of them will go wildly into debt to pay for a rapidly-escalating-in-price college education”

Don’t assume that all the world has the problem of high tuition fees that is plaguing the USA.

In countries like Egypt or Germany or Finland tuition fees at public universities are either non-existing or very low.

There is a big scale from countries (like the USA) where people pay much money for their college education to (e.g. some European) countries where university is free and students get paid money from their government for covering their living expenses.

Now, of course if the wonderful and perfect capitalist global free market doesn’t create enough high-paying jobs once those students graduate (have to pay back all that debt, don’t you know, so we can’t go into non-renumerative work like elementary teaching), then we’ll have an interesting situation on our hands…

“To get out of the crisis we need more growth, not more austerity.”

The alternative to austerity is not more growth, the alternative is a large-scale bankruptcy of governments and banks with a huge impact on the global economy (and much higher unemployment rates than today).

“If you talk up growth and add in real incentives for corporates to invest their cash hoards to drive growth, perhaps through selective tax breaks”

The problem is that this won’t work:

Take BMW as an example – they are running their factories in 2011 on average over 110% (sic) of the nominal usage rate for coping with the demand. They don’t need tax breaks as motivation for investing into growing their production.

Many other companies have the opposite problem of not having enough customers for their products – they would not invest in growing their production, no matter what tax breaks are offered.

Therefore tax breaks would result in more debt without much additional growth – making the debt problems even worse.

If you train people to be chefs but you need ten times as many bottlewashers is it surprising you end up with too many of the former and have to import immigrants to perform the latter?

Meanwhile addicted consumers demand more and more for less and less, forcing their children out of jobs and passing over the wealth of Nations to China. If this was war, China would be winning it hands down – and with no losses. Actually, it IS war, the same weapon as used in every other war – money. China learned from how the West won the cold war: by bankrupting Russia. Why are people surprised the tables have been turned this time?

To get out of the crisis we need more growth, not more austerity. If you cut spending, the economy shrinks; when the economy shrinks, debt increases as a proportion of GDP. If you talk up growth and add in real incentives for corporates to invest their cash hoards to drive growth, perhaps through selective tax breaks, the economy grows, tax revenues grow, and the proportion of debt shrinks even if you pay none of it off.

In the 1930s depression interest rates were increased and this lack of liquidity caused things to get worse. Today, economic contraction is having the same effect, and the young are the ones who have to learn to cope with it.

It actually does improve in Germany, the most populous country of the EU, where your chart shows that youth unemployment is much lower than even *before* the crisis, and where general unemployment rates are the lowest in 20 years.

And German companies are now starting to fill open positions with young qualified people from the PIIGS countries, helping to lower the youth unemployment in these countries.

The biggest country’s economy being strong and healthy and able to help to drag the rest out of the mess is an advantage of the EU that’s missing in the US.

Polarization, immigration, education: what’s behind the dramatic decline in youth employment?
by Christopher L. Smith
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/ 2011/201141/201141pap.pdf

Who exactly is the “we” in that sentence to whom you are ascribing causality?

While the trend is disturbing, the problem isn’t YET comparable to that Europe faces. There is really no comparison between 20% unemployment and 50% unemployment.

Moreover, that chart from the Middle East dates back to 2008. Given that youth unemployment has doubled in Europe, and doubled in the US, what makes you think that it hasn’t doubled in the Middle East as well? Those Arab Spring riots didn’t stem from 20% youth unemployment and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Finally, there are two hidden factors in play. First, unemployment for this demographic is strongly influenced by the prevalence of college education. The more young adults who are attending college instead of seeking jobs, the lower the unemployment rate. Second, the *size* of the younger generation is very different between Europe (at one extreme), the US (in the middle), and the Middle Eastern countries.

Combine a *large* influx of young adults with unemployment rates well over 50% and you have massive social unrest. Europe has high unemployment but far fewer young adults. The US has much lower unemployment rates and fewer young adults.

But if unemployment continues to rise among the young? Sure, eventually we’ll have serious trouble. This is a real concern — just not an imminent one.