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)
