Le statistiche mentono. Servono soltanto a diffondere un’immagine rassicurante della situazione. Esse contengono molti aspetti arbitrari, precisamente come avviene nelle affermazioni ufficiali delle società finanziarie. Queste ultime sono al servizio dei loro scopi specifici e del loro pubblico di riferimento, perché forniscono il tipo di informazioni che gli interessati desiderano sentire. In questo caso si rivolgono all’intera Ue e le statistiche si riferiscono al numero di laureati disoccupati nel mercato del lavoro
Does Education Really Pay off?
Bare truth about Adademic Unemployment in Finland
(Text and Photo by Mikko M Myyryläinen)
Statistics do lie. They are made to look better. There are many discretionaries just like in company financial statements. They serve their main purpose and their main segment and give the type of information the segment wants to hear. In this case the segment is the EU and the statistics the number of Adacemic Unemployed people on the labour market.
FACT 1: Unemployment rate over 10%, more than every fifth young person without work. This statistics does not even take into consideration the number of recent graduates on employment agency. That is much more.
FACT 2: Unemployment among recent university graduates over 40% and growing.
FACT 3: Finland is one of the most expensive country to live in.
FACT 4: Educating people from 0-to B.Sc./M.Sc. level costs around 20 000-120 000 per person.
FACT 5: Without proper job highly educated people move abroad for work.
FACT 6: The future of every country is in the hands of young people. But what is in the hands of young people?
FACT 7. If the young and the most educated people leave the country, who pays the pensions of current and the future pensioners’?
FACT 8. Fundamental problems discouragepeople from becoming entrepreneurs – Risk versus Reward, does not pay off.
FACT 9: Work does not pay of – Welfare traps make working unprofitable for many.
FACT 10: Uncertainty mantra has made free work becoming reality for many. For corporation this situation means free workforce on the market and actually current situation favors corporations.
Finland is not the only country in EU suffering from academic unemployement. Most of the countries in EU suffer from the same problem, and it is getting worse. Often academic employement is seen only as social problem, but it is also an Economic one. If the wealth of developed country is seen to come from higher education and from well educated people then there must be enough high/-end (technology) work in order to get all that expertise into use. If most of the people in one country are encouraged to take higher education who does the lower level jobs? Yes, same people (just with all that experience).
The question is all about market forces: It does not matter if we are talking about stocks or labour market. The same old fellows ’supply’ and ’demand’ rule the game here too. The more we have some level experts (put on sell) on the market, the less are people (employers in this case) willing to pay for that. What you do if you want to sell something and someone is not paying the price you want? Right again, you either decide to sell at price buyer asks or not to sell. But how low can you go? Work for free perhaps and for how long? In this case the question is much harder than in Finance field as unlike e.g. Stocks, people cannot – at least not in most of the cases – wait in the portfolio for better times. People need money, provide food for themselves and for their families and most importantly people need belong into society. As the strongest factor that integrates people into society is work, the lack of it rips people apart from society. If people do not belong into society, where do they belong then?
If home country has nothing to offer for young people, the most educated and most likely also the most capable and talented ones leave the country hoping to find a work elsewhere. When well educated people leave what is left? Debt towards society. In Finland education is free for everyone. This does not mean the education would be free for the government. Not in close. The average education from 0-to M.Sc. costs around 35 000-50 000 Euros (some even 120 000 Euros) for one person. This is just the cost of higher education alone. When we add up all the costs from all education provided for person from birth to M.Sc. we are talking about serious numbers. The only way members of society are going to pay their education back to society is by working (and paying tax). Productive work increases GDP. If young people leave the country this debt still remains as does the undercapacity to boost GDP to grow. So what does Finnish government do? Encourages us to take more debt to use it for living, raises VAT and taxes in general. Just like unprofitable bad business management does, it goes to the wallets of shareholders asking for more money.
If there is no work, why not becoming an entrepreneur? In Finland entrepreneurs have no goverment support if the magical ’if’ happens. If their company goes to bankruptcy they get no money from anywhere. They are literally out. Those who have company do not want to let it grow too big as that will decrease its key figures used by many business analysts. Again you guessed in corporate takeovers. If you are the CEO and want to sell your company one thing you do not certainly want to do is let it grow too much. The more people, the more costs.
Let us again assume that you are Mr. cost concious CEO thinking about secretaty’s pay checks. Would it just be so much easier to take young and well educated new secretary trainee for free? You guessed right…it would (but only on the paper). When this trainee has been at your company for some months and before his/her contract turns into permanent one, you might start to think again about hiring another trainee instead of actually hiring anyone. It is ’free lunch’ after all, right? In a matter of fact you would be supporting this recession even more by artifically keeping the situation favourable to you.
How about the government, could this recession be in the interest of goverment too? Is the goverment only (and not to mention even the only one) losing here? We can examine this problem also from Economic point of view. When in some economy salaries go too high as the work gets more sophisticated, the counterproductive effect can be forcing some players out from goverment support system (entrepreneurs get no support from goverment), free workers are not unemployed people and corporations can get the boost they need by using free labour. Isn’t that ironic? Could supporting unemployement actually be a way how to reshape nations structures and moving from service sector back to production of goods. What if our Economic theorists were wrong after all—what if outsourcing low-end production actually outsources the wealth too?
Mikko M Myyryläinen
