Young people in the UK have it tough

Frozen daisy I like the attitude. We try to remain positive. Humans are strong and adaptable our kids are going to need to be so to thrive. Both the Saturday jobs they have they got through contacts. I think networking is going to become more important. Social and soft skills will be key.

Also, to state the obvious, wealthy people don’t pay corporation tax. Corporations do. It doesn’t impact where wealthy people chose to live.

They don’t have the emigration history of the Irish or polish, for sure. Growing up knowing you’ll leave your family at 18 certainly instills a sense of adventure that British people don’t experience

Depends what you mean by worked. There are many knock on impacts which make life difficult for the Irish public.

Ireland- Which they’ve had for 20 years. Ireland deliberately made their corp tax low to attract global firms. That is not something the uk has ever done, so there’s no change there.

The luddites weren’t wrong. They just lost. Prior to the Industrial Revolution a cottage weaver could support a family. After it the entire family had to work in the mill, in terrible conditions, and still went hungry. It took over a hundred years for living standards and health expectations for ordinary men and women, and especially for children, to return to pre-Industrial Revolution levels.

Thats not the kids fault though. It's the older generation's consistent failure to regulate technology.

Often for fear of alienating big business.

Yes it has. But now, there is a core flaw of using 20th-century tax policies to solve 21st-century labour problems: giving corporate tax breaks to stimulate job creation fails when companies no longer need human labor to scale.
The old "trickle-down" argument was that higher Return on Investment (ROI) frees up cash for businesses to expand and hire. However, global economic data overwhelmingly shows that broad corporate tax cuts do not consistently create jobs. Instead, they primarily fund stock buybacks, shareholder dividends, and international tax restructuring. Which again keeps wealth firmly locked in the upper arm of the K.

Raising employment has seen older people taking many of the jobs that would have been considered starter jobs historically. Technology has reduced the quantity of those that exist in the first place.

It was an unusual 16 year old when I was young that wasn't working. Now its normal they have never had a job. In our town its too much hassle to employ below 16 year olds, only big chains like mcdonald s and family businesses tend to do it.

We do things at GCSE that historically wasn't done until A level. We've put such an emphasis on mental maths, i now have to prompt students, all across the spectrum, to reach for a calculator even when they are allowed to use one and using one is significantly quicker. Thats not real life

We've tried to get the bulk through at a higher level of education which has meant we teach to the lower middle. Unsurprisingly this puts a lot of kids off either because it is too fast or too slow.

There are less jobs that are more skilled. Unless we're suggesting the widespread practice of eugenics, the jobs profile doesn't match the population profile. Of course you are going to have a higher proportion of people on benefits. Even if the jobs are there they aren't for them.

It's not that straight forward. There are lots of entrepreneurs and high-wealth people living in high-tax countries like Scandanavia. They choose to stay because they seen the outcome of their taxes in stability and good quality of life. That would indicate that it's not taxation itself that's the issue, it's that we don't see our taxes translating into good infrastructure. And having a welfare state has been found to be an encouragement to starting a new business, as people know that they will still have food on the table if they fail.

https://www.europeanceo.com/finance/why-scandinavian-entrepreneurs-are-flourishing-in-high-tax-environments/

No, they won't.

Ireland's labour cost aren't particularly cheap but all the US companies have their headquarters there because their tax rate is so much lower than ours.

It has worked for ROI. The pp is correct on that.

I work in HE and worked at an event a few weeks ago with a number of “student helpers” aged about 20-22. With one notable exception who told me he had worked during his gap year with disadvantaged kids, what struck me was a distinct lack of social skills and no initiative from the young people. The event involved speaking to people and answering questions. Most of them sat on chair with their heads down, not interacting, mostly on their phones. They were of little help. I’ve done events like this for over a decade and I’ve not seen anything like this. The guy who’d had work experience was great, going up to people and chatting. If I was an employer I wouldn’t have touched the others with a barge pole.

Corporations will go anywhere where they can maximize returns for their shareholders. Giving them tax breaks (aka trickle down economics) as never worked. Not taxing them doesn't mean they ordinary citizen is going to see much benefit. They will still take their labour where they can get it cheap.

Lockdown totally shafted children and young people, and none of lockdown’s cheerleaders have expressed a shred of regret about this.

The rot set in when Tony Blair made people pay tuition fees, and as others have said, a degree does not guarantee a good job. I remember a press conference with a young person asking him “when am I supposed to get a mortgage?”

"British people aren't very adventurous".
I'm not sure about stereotyping a whole nation by specific personality traits! ☺️

Of course it's the tax.

Businesses invest in the countries with the lowest tax rates if everything else is equal.

Why do you think that US companies have their headquarters in Ireland???

They don't bother though. It was the same with Brexit. There was a vox pop recently, asking young people why they hadn't voted, and some of the responses were extraordinary, eg "we should be able to do it on our phones".
It really is important to have your voice heard.

There are lots of factors involved in why young people are at a disadvantage in finding work. There was a Forbes report that said AI was automating basic entry level work, but also that WFH had affected first jobs too because employers are only going to take on experienced, mid-career people with a proven track record to work remotely.

There's also the outsourcing problem. Like the call centre shift to India which was a huge detriment to the service-based UK economy, we see the same in tech. India and Africa have large, highly educated and skilled, affordable workforces that undercut the UK, so the new jobs created in AI aren't necessarily going to be UK based jobs for young people.

People saying 'automation has always been progress' are only half correct. Automation (robotics) in factories generated more profits for a company but saw entry-level job loses, with the creation of fewer more highly skilled and better paid jobs like engineers.

To future proof against AI automation the choice for young people is to follow the money and train in tech, competing against other countries for specialised roles, or to go into essential but lowet paid people facing work like caring.

Unfortunately as younger people are the demographic which vote the least, politicians are happy to consistently fob them off in favour of the elderly who are more likely to vote 🤷🏻‍♀️ the easiest step towards a solution would be for more young people to vote as it would force politicians to kick their arse into gear and care about them

unfortunately I think we will become the Irish/ polish of the past and emigrate for work. Eastern Europe is booming, as is China and Saudi.

British people aren’t very adventurous (for obvious reasons) so I don’t know how long it’ll take for this to be commonplace

This is such a poor persons view of rich people. Why would they be here if they can’t make money? It’s not the tax that means they don’t come.

dont forget the 20 years of being buffered up by Russian and Chinese investment came with a lot of corruption and fraud.

Much of it is tax the extent of AI has fully been realised. But not being prepared for Ai uptick as this gov isn’t is another factor.