The Standard rips into Farrar for pointing out the unemployment amongst 15 – 19 year olds is much worse since the abolition of youth rates, when compared to the unemployment rate amongst 20 – 25 year olds. They argue that unemployment is cyclical, and during the 1990s recession (funny they call it neoliberal – there was a global recession at the time) and 1998 Asian Financial Crisis the number of 15 – 19 year olds with jobs dipped. This is presented as proof that DPF is wrong. Except that wasn’t DPF’s point – it was that unemployment amongst 15 – 19 year olds is now worse, relative to 20 – 25 year olds.
To test this for myself, FCK went back to Stats NZ and ran the numbers. It seems DPF’s version of the truth was correct – youth unemployment for those 15 – 19 year old has got a lot worse since the abolition of youth rates (the worst since 1993), while unemployment amongst the 20–25 year old has plateaued.
Either something has drastically changed in the economy to lead to more youth being unemployed (e.g. some sort of mechanisation at McDonalds or APN) since Q1 2008; or the abolition of youth rates has led to this increase. I’ll let you be the judge of that.
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Hey1 you are not supposed to be giving kudos for DPF’s troll farm in this blog <G>
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Umm… that rule doesn’t apply when there’s left-wing nonsense to refute.
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Marty’s posts on the standard are generally atrocious from an economics perspective, he starts from a political view and manipulates data to fit his view. I suspect he is either a first year economics student or someone who once did an economics paper before dropping out of uni. Many of his posts contain egregious errors, usually from data mining or ignoring other factors which clearly should not be ignored. I have questioned many times whether he really does have any economics or econometrics training.
Thiis post re farrar was remarkable in the farrar said “Look at the comparison between A and B”. Marty called bullshit on that by saying “I have looked at the relationship between A and Z, and it tells me something completely unrelated, so clearly farrar is a lying devious manipulator of the truth.”
If Marty had handed that analysis into me as a Year 1 economics tutor I would have returned it to him unmarked.
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Its not the economy…
There are more people 15–19 job seekers now compared to 20–24 than at any time since 1990. The period covered by this graph coincides with those 20–24 outnumbering those 15–19, up until 2005 after which parity or very near parity occurs. On pure demographics we should expect youth unemployment rates to surge about now (unless McDonalds or APN are upping their labour intensity) and it does.
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That doesn’t seem right Angus – I’ll look at the Stats to see what comes out, while you may be correct that there are more under 19 year olds looking for jobs, numerically that may not stack up.
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@angus, is that demographic trend enough to make the gap go from 7% to 14% in 2 quarters? is the number of 15–19 yo’s really growing at 12%pa more than that for 20-24yo’s?
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