Unemployment Breeds Poor Choices

Without a job, people realize how much their lives lack, not only money, but also structure and a community of friends and associates. From this perspective, preparing students to be entrepreneurs or to move into the careers of the future becomes a priority when traditional jobs are declining and the global population of young job seekers is increasing.

     Patrick Cook-Deegan, co-director and designer of Project Wayfinder (projectwayfinder.com), has been thinking about how to help high school students develop a sense of purpose that will motivate them to prepare for the future. Being told what to do and taking tests for four years fail to connect students to their work in the future. Asking students to consider what the world needs and what their interests and strengths are can lead to the conclusion that life requires a broad outline that accommodates twists and turns rather than a narrow path. There is a need to connect students with mentors from local industries so that they begin to see how their natural instincts to listen to music, play video games, build with LEGOs, study fashion magazines, or read detective stories apply to solutions for real world problems. There also is the need to ask students to think about how to resist being pressured into a career they know they will quit.

     In developed and less developed countries, resilient people can avoid becoming a target for opportunists, because they know what their goals are (they keep their eyes on the prize) even when they are young, old, fat, black, uneducated, poor, disabled, working at a fast food counter, or tending bar.

     During the 2008 crisis in the United States, families could not afford the mortgages on their homes and manufacturing jobs continued to disappear. The Governor of Wisconsin promised to return 250,000 jobs to the State. With his promise still unfulfilled in 2017, the Chinese firm, Foxconn, offered to bring 13,000 jobs to Wisconsin. In exchange, the State agreed to provide financial incentives totaling $3 billion worth of taxpayer revenue and to exempt the company from environmental laws and the need to gain approval to build or relocate power transmission lines.

     The story in Ghana is similar. Traditionally, non-citizens were prohibited from the practice, known as "galamsey," that allows small scale gold mining by licensed local residents using hand tools on their own land. With half the 15-24 year-old population unemployed, Ghana's farmers willing allowed Chinese miners to work their land with excavators and heavy duty dredging machines, to reduce export revenue by smuggling gold out of the country, to pollute rivers, and to encroach upon land farmed for cocoa. As the number of foreign gold miners increased so did trafficking in the cocaine and other narcotics miners use to help them work long hours in mud-soaked, dangerous conditions.

     In the 19th century, China itself was a victim of drug trafficking, when its society fell prey to an opium addition from British imports its inefficient. militarily weak government could not stop.

     Seeing how unemployment creates a climate for poor choices by individuals, States, and countries reinforces the need to prepare young people for the careers, global careers, that will employ them in the future.

(Additional information about gold mining in Ghana is covered in the earlier post, "Africans Learn to Play the Game".