Your youth unemployment editorial (18 September) sees the crisis clearly, but reaches for the wrong tools. Placements, apprenticeships and work coaches cannot conjure jobs that do not exist. We need macro solutions to macro problems. Youth unemployment is not a crisis of skills or geography. It is insufficient government deficit spending. There is not enough money circulating to employ everyone who wants to work and that is a policy choice, not an accident.
Macroeconomists divide the economy into three sectors: government, households and businesses, and the rest of the world. One sector’s spending is another sector’s income. Put simply, government spending is income for the non-government sectors.
