The article below by Prof. Norman Bailey appeared in Globes: Israel’s Business Arena and the World Tribune.
Can Israel avoid a lost generation?
With more and more young people becoming unemployable, radical measures are needed on several fronts.
The current issue of The Economist has a cover picture of people being discharged into a trash dump, with the headline “Generation Jobless” and the subtitle “The Global Rise of Youth Unemployment.” In the article inside the magazine it points out that youth unemployment, as reported by official statistical agencies, which undoubtedly miss many of the unemployed, even so totals more than the population of the United States.
Other recent articles were titled “Long-Term Joblessness is a National Emergency” (McClatchy newspapers) and “By Any Measure the Jobs Disaster Continues” (Wall Street Journal). It is obvious that this phenomenon is resulting in, and will continue to increasingly result in, a rising pool of jobless and rootless youth looking for a means of survival in a world which simply no longer needs them. A perfect recruiting pool for terrorist and guerrilla organizations and criminal syndicates. They will retaliate against a world that does not value them by destroying that which they perceive as preventing them from having a meaningful future, or to aiding the criminal bosses in stealing the results of the productivity revolution created by others.