> get youth to first complete high school [...] But is it?

Yes, but it will never happen. I've seen this playbook in 3 countries now (one of which South Africa): attack education so that people aren't educated enough to understand why they need to vote you out.

If you speak to the people who keep voting for the regime, it's "I hate the ANC, but we must vote for them." In terms of destroying education to stay in power, that's a slam dunk.

Education is the Achilles Heel of democracy.

I don't really buy this line of reasoning.

Educated countries make baffling, crazy choices at the ballot box all the time. Plenty enthusiastically elect "one person, one vote, one time" types of parties, or something close to it. For example, Russia is fairly educated if one believes university graduation numbers. Poland and Hungary are more "educated" than Austria or Czechia. And all of them are so much more educated at every level than Portugal, which has had a string of competent and non-authoritarian governments. Handy coloured maps[0][1] offer little in terms of "ah, I see how the ones who send their young'uns to uni and spend the most on education are the most competently governed".

There's probably some correlation between education quality/amount in very specific areas, like civics and basic economics, and "quality" of elected governments. But I intuitively believe (admittedly without searching for evidence) that these are easily swamped by more important factors, like economic/political crises du jour, history, culture, neighbourhood, etc.

(regarding neighbourhood, I think this is often underappreciated. E.g. maybe if Portugal was surrounded by third-world tinpot dictatorships, it would also join that club, but it's influenced far more by countries like Spain and France; and it's very difficult for an almost-out-of-the-abyss country like Ghana to break out and join the club of reasonably-governed middle-income countries given its neighbourhood).

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/government-expenditure-ed...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-population-w...

> Educated countries make baffling, crazy choices at the ballot box all the time.

That's a false dilemma. There are an array of reasons why a populace might make poor political choices. I'm suggesting that education is one of those reasons, and that it's the easiest to exploit.

Speaking as a South African, I would say that the expression of "never attribute to malice that which can be reasonably explained by incompetence" is particularly apt here.

I'm very doubtful that anyone in government is actually trying in any form to keep the population uneducated, instead the poor delivery of education is a result of general apathy and incompetence.

It is further exacerbated by the largely unchecked corruption, whereby too many people in government are more focussed on stealing from the tax coffers than doing the job they're paid to do.

Finally, this is all made worse by the fact that the people keep voting in the ANC (the party in power since 1994) despite their terrible track record of poor service delivery and corruption. I agree that the lack of education is contributing to the problem of voters not recognizing their options and ability to enact change.

My hope is that eventually as the older "blind devotees" to the ANC pass away, that the younger disenfranchised generation's voices become enough to vote them out.

Disturbingly though, a lot of the votes moving away from the ANC are instead going to a somewhat extremist party which promotes wealth re-distribution and their members tend to proudly walk around with berets and (albeit simple) uniforms. (A side rant is that I wish their party leader would get banned from Twitter for inciting violence, but it seems that the US based company doesn't care to look at the case as carefully as they do for US elected leaders.)

> > get youth to first complete high school [...] But is it?

> Yes, but it will never happen.

This implies a model of the world in which education causes prosperity. The fate of large parts of Central Asia, the Caucasus and Mongolia after the end of the subsidies from Russia suggests this doesn’t work that well. Broad based high levels of education weren’t great for Ireland either last century. There were at most three decades 1900-2000 when Ireland didn’t export its people. By contrast China got rich explosively fast once with a population that mostly hadn’t finished primary school starting in the 1980s.

The evidence that education causes prosperity is at best weak. People like to buy education once they have money for similar reasons to west they like to buy nicer houses or travel, intrinsic enjoyment and conspicuous consumption.

> Broad based high levels of education weren’t great for Ireland either last century

Can you clarify this remark? Ireland didn't provide free secondary school education until the late 60's (my Dad was sent to secondary school for three years as he was the smart one), so I'm having trouble understanding what you mean here.

> This implies a model of the world in which education causes prosperity.

That implication assumes that prosperity is correlated to democracy. There's also a vast difference between a democracy and a functioning democracy (which has arguably never existed). The value of democracy is drilled into citizens of democracies, however, when you look at it objectively it's a bitter failure; just like all its alternatives.

The implication is: if you want to control where the votes go, you want an uneducated populace that is more likely to believe emotional/populist arguments. Nothing more, nothing less.

The Asian Tigers rose precisely through masive investment in education.

Edit: you don't have to believe me, read any half decent economic study about them.

>If you speak to the people who keep voting for the regime, it's "I hate the ANC, but we must vote for them." In terms of destroying education to stay in power, that's a slam dunk.

Even an educated populace won't fight back against exploitative government if it's all they know.

I live in a highly educated US state, one of the most educated, at least on paper. People say the same damn thing but with bigger words and then vote for the ruling party. The stuff the government routinely gets away with here would have the involved parties quickly out of power in some of the adjacent states. But when the .gov is caught misbehaving people just grumble and act as though the way things are here is the only way things could ever be and no other status quo could exist let alone be stable.

I wish I never lived elsewhere. Ignorance is bliss.

I do not think you can come this conclusion in a two party government with first past the post elections. Your choice is always the lesser of two evils.

Ranked choice (or star) voting would provide more insight, but I do not know of a large government that has a long history of using it, but it would be interesting to see that data if it existed.

It's only a two-party system because voters vote almost only for those two parties. Other parties exist but get very few votes.

Other countries also have majority voting systems which immensely favour the first arrived, and yet there are more major parties there: 3, 4, 5...

I do not know enough about other countries voting systems to be able to know why they do or do not have more parties.

But I do know the situation in the US, and I have concluded it is not going to change unless we change from first past the post.

I also do not know why anyone unhappy with 2 party situation would be unwelcoming to ranked choice. It can only help.

I don't think the voting system matters that much except as a final refinement on top of an already working system. Some competition is worlds better than no competition. My state is effectively a one party state.

Voting for the lesser of the evils is also voting for the better of the evils. At least with a viable 2nd party there is pressure on the first party to suck less. When people blindly vote for one party they are free to misbehave. Let them get away with that for a generation or and it becomes the new normal.

> Voting for the lesser of the evils is also voting for the better of the evils.

What is the significance of this distinction?

> At least with a viable 2nd party there is pressure on the first party to suck less.

Hence the problem of first past the post voting. With ranked choice or star, you have viable 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, whatever party. I can more accurately relay my priorities via my votes as opposed to solely using my vote to prevent the worst party from winning.

Do they attack education through funding or through rhetoric? I imagine funding is where they would have more power.

I already believed that education should be outside of the purview of the government, but this even more reason to keep them separate. A government whose sole purpose is to protect individual rights (properly defined) would have no ability to gut the education of it's populace.

Also see my sibling comment, but I think it's neither, they don't attack education, they're just apathetic, incompetent and more focussed on stealing from the tax coffers.

Looking at the atrocity that is academic politics, I am not sure if more education translates to better outcomes.

Germany at the end of the 1920s was one of the best educated nations in the world and its universities were chock-full of pro-Nazi student groups.

We had roughly the same youth unemployment in Spain at the peak of the 2008 crisis. The problem was not education.

This. Just because you have an educated workforce doesn't mean you'll be booming with jobs.

More like you need a business friendly environment with low taxes, minimal corruption and frictionless bureocracy to create a thriving local economy and also attract external investors.

I guess that's one template for booming with jobs.

You can also be a wealthly petrostate (with or without corruption), or a corrupt, dirt-poor state with no labor laws and be booming with outsourced low-wage textile jobs, or a command-economy with plenty of pointless make-work jobs...

If your goal is just to have a lot of jobs to keep your young people busy so they don't foment a revolution, there's plenty of ways to go.

"Youth unemployment" is not measured the same as "Youth not in employment, education or training". Spain's 15-29 NEET rate peaked at 28% per the OECD

Spain has a 17.3% high school dropout rate though.[1] So education is an issue. Although yeah, many graduates were also unemployed in the crisis.

I think the crisis was kind of exceptional as everyone was going to be pretty screwed either way. But furthermore, it seems that until you reach a sort of 'critical mass' of educated workers it can be hard for them to find employment as it's hard for the country to attract companies that require an educated workforce.

I think the solution would be to continue investing in education to help reach that critical mass and at the same time make it easier for people to set up new companies, start-ups etc.

Spain is pretty bad for this with the harsh autonomo taxes for people trying to start their own business etc., plus all the bureaucracy which often has to be done in-person and appointments are hard to get etc.

At least it seems like things are improving, although the Coronavirus will be a setback.

[1] https://www.euroweeklynews.com/2020/11/13/spain-has-highest-...

People don't find jobs because of their corrupted government destroying the economy, not because they don't know calculus.

Right. We have to come to grips with the fact that not all people are cut out for college or to be white collar knowledge workers. Many of the jobs that these people used to enjoy have been shipped overseas, meanwhile large amounts of unskilled labor is allowed to pour in. This has destroyed opportunities to make your way in life as a blue collar worker. But instead of reversing sweetheart legislation that makes it easy to ship jobs overseas and bring in cheap labor at home, we talk about UBI and raising minimum wage. Both of which will have even more devastating impacts on the middle and low economic classes.

Bringing back exported jobs is a short-term solution. It might solve the problem for a few years, but the fundamental problem is that most of the jobs that have left the Western sphere are low-skill jobs that are easy to automate. Moving these jobs back into the Western sphere will massively increase the financial motivation of companies to automate away these jobs, and in a few years we will be back to where we started.

No matter which way you slice it, there are just not going to be enough jobs for everyone in the future, and society needs to adapt to that.

> But instead of reversing sweetheart legislation that makes it easy to ship jobs overseas and bring in cheap labor at home,

No or low taxes on imports is sweetheart legislation? There is no way US labor prices (some of the highest in the world) were ever going to compete with the labor prices in developing countries where families live in a single room. Not to mention the lack of labor and environmental standards.

I am not aware of any US import taxes that were removed to allow this labor price arbitrage to occur. It was simply a fact of international shipping efficiencies making trade and the labor price arbitrage much easier.

There is a black market for labor.

Why is that relevant here? The scale of manufacturing causing jobs to be outsourced surely dwarfs it.

I’m familiar with the arguments on how higher minimum wages may harm the lower classes, but how would UBI “devastate” them?

We can bring back the manufacturing, but the jobs are highly unlikely to follow. Rather than 800 unionized workers working the assembly lines, it’s 8 robotics technicians overseeing the machines. This ratio will, obviously, vary depending upon exactly the product being manufactured.

There is a shortage of skilled workers and there is a surplus of unskilled workers. Google “skill shortage South Africa” or something like that for more info. I don’t think there is an easy solution to bringing that gap, but I’m sure getting the basics right (ie a decent education system) would help a lot.

Not persecuting your population of skilled workers would have also been a good strategy for South Africa.

This might be politically difficult when the skilled workers (or their ancestors) were persecuting the population of unskilled workers for generations.

Not only that, but the said-ancestors established a separate, impoverished, lower-quality education system to ensure that they'd be perpetually unskilled and incapable of competing for skilled jobs even if they wanted to talented. Diabolical.

Honest question: how did that education system compare to the one that previously existed for said population?

There is much more funding being provided now, but it's far from enough sadly. In terms of policy, its much more egalitarian on paper in the sense that every student is supposed to study the same material, unfortunately there are still under-resourced schools and egregious negligence and/or corruption. I'd say the black, middle-class-and-higher (or very gifted but poor) students have benefitted the most by getting the institutional roadblocks removed since they already have access to good schools. The the system has improved marginally for the poor, and those who are in remote rural areas (the two are often synonymous)

I would speculate that, on the whole, they’re probably comparable in terms of outcome, the old system was designed for mediocre outcomes whereas the current one is due to negligence. But could be wrong, our former white public schools now serve everyone and presumably are better than the Bantu education schools that black people were previously limited to. These schools are of course the minority.

Yes I don’t think anyone here disputes the historical cause.

If you were starting a business, like a software company or even, I don't know, a bakery, would you start it in South Africa?

No.

Some countries have a shortage of people. They're hiring, but they can't find people.

However, South Africa has a shortage of businesses. That shortage makes people useless: they're not hired, nobody needs them.

Solution: create policies that favor businesses. Employment goes up, quality of life goes up.

These situations can become traps for local economies: People don’t want to invest in education without job opportunities. Companies don’t want to invest in more jobs without educated applicants. Self-reinforcing cycle.

The inverse of this situation is why high cost of living cities continue to thrive: It may cost more to hire and retain people, but you’re guaranteed a supply of motivated and educated applicants. It becomes worth the premium to operate in those expensive markets.

I can’t speak to SA, but there are definitely cities and even regions in the United States that have high unemployment but also struggle to hire reliable employees regardless of wages offered. Even if a company pays well, the well-paid and well-educated hires often want to use those jobs as a springboard to move out of the city rather than risk tying their career to a declining local economy. Turnover is high simply because educated and motivated people leave the area.