This article is very true. Unemployment in Europe has been in double-digits for years, with the young being especially hard hit. The solutions are clear: lower minimum wage to allow young people to more easily enter the work force; less union power to stop the excessive pay and benefits, inefficient work rules, protection of poor employees, etc., which hurts opportunities for the young; lower taxes and less regulation to help business, particularly smaller businesses, be created and expand; a smaller government so we can afford fewer taxes; stopping of illegal immigration which floods our workforce with millions of unskilled, uneducated people; and cutting back on welfare for healthy people so as to encourage self-reliance, marriage, hard worker, rather than dependancy and entitlement.

My guess is that very few people will stand up for dumb growth. But what is it exactly? presumably the sort of growth that does not employ young people... or at least a lot of young people. The undeniably dumb growth of 2000 to 2007 probably did employ a lot of young Americans in the construction industry (medium wage, medium skilled work). During that era the unemployment rate hovered around 5% as I recall. What made it dumb was that it was almost entirely based on speculation and borrowed money but you would not find that out that by reading this article. Another quibble; percentages of the unemployed listed in this article do not correspond very well with information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (yes, they record unemployment in other countries too). Mr. Robinson refers to "estimates" without attribution; well, he might be right but who is doing the estimating? and who exactly is "smug"?

Due to the corporatization of our economy, and the great influenze of Wall Street, there does not exist the variety of quality entry level jobs that existed 25 years ago. Two of my early jobs, one at a small, locally-owned downtown hotel, and WaMu, while it was still a mid-sized bank, were jobs where I felt my work added to the value of the company. I knew the owner of the hotel, and I had met several times Lou Pepper and Kerry Kilinger at WaMu. I was not a mere cog at either company. At each company, I learned so much about business, that business school could not teach. Nowadays, young people waste away at Best Buy and Target. They are not in any position to create, nor to see the hows and whys a business functions. Their talents are wasted within companies whose primary mission is value to the shareholders.

Great article, Tony. It is worth mentioning on this 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan, that he is the one that created this mess. He began the race to the bottom and race to global corporatism clearly outlined by shoreline's suggestions.

Great article. If democracy just means “one man, one vote” [sic] this no more guarantees economic justice for the young or anyone than does autocracy—Mubarek and his ilk’s in the Arab world, or their more benign-seeming autocratic equivalents in our own corpocracy. Indigenous values, often tribal, will not simply disappear in the Arab world under the beautiful wave of youth and modernization: they somehow need to be taken into account in systems of government not as liberal as we want to believe the West’s are. As history shows elsewhere, order and liberty, control and freedom, the open competition of different interest groups and a willingness to accept the outcome, and, finally, trade and foreign investment are, together, critical. Achieving that precarious balance, never once and done, will take all kinds of time, patience, and support, political and economic. But envisioning how all this is to happen is the famous “next step.” Freedom first, whatever the subsequent uncertainty that is often the price of getting out of jail.