to think the UK offers a bleak future for our dcs?

[kissmyheathenass]

Looking at unemplyment figures in Europe (Greece and Portugal have nearly 50% youth unemployment), I am wondering what future there is for our dcs in UK. Unemployment is set to get worse and I cant see how things will improve. There will be jobs for the children of the priviledged but what about for our ordinary dcs? :(

conpared to? there is a global recession. So count yourself lucky quite frankly

I think cyclically, things will almost certainly improve. China will take the breaks off and the rising tide will lift all boats. I'm not disputing that. What I'm disputing is that things will structurally improve for the UK. You can't point to previous recessions (70's, 80's, 90's) and say well it got better for us then, it'll happen again. The world was a very very different place. The internet/mobiles didn't exist or were in their infancy, which hugely limited remote working/ international outsourcing, for a start. We didn't have a minimum wage. House prices were far lower vs wages. All those things are big big structural problems for the UK in terms of generating thru-cycle growth and investment. Looking outside the UK, for most of our previous recessions, China was a Communist peasant economy with limited contact with the outside world, Russia was still Communist, most of Eastern Europe was Communist for the 70's and 80's.

To massively oversimplify, the rest of the world is getting it's shit together, and we need to start taking it seriously, and not just take the piss out of them for being mathmo geeks.

Since the 1970's, the west has gone down the service sector route, but how many marketing managers does the world really need? The next two decades are going to be the age of hard goods/technological innovation. The geeks shall inherit the earth, first one to split the atom gets a prize etc. Kind of worrying then, that no-one wants to do maths, physics or engineering anymore in the UK.

Perhaps half the reason kids don't want to do Maths etc is partly influenced by celebrity culture.

Seeing people get rich quick from singing a song or going on reality tv probably looks more appealing

Agree real life 100%. It will never return in the way it did the last times the economy receded. Things are different completely. The UK will need to adapt and change or sink

One of the B of E members ( not M King) was asked on news before xmas when he thought we would see prosperity and growth again on a scale that would make for a good standard of living for most in the UK and he said he didn't think it would be in his lifetime.He was about 45.

Porny Maybe, but then I'm not sure the people who aspire to model/WAG, Simon Cowell's latest bitch are the same people who can reasonably be expected to be engineers, or at least that's not the impression I get from watching X-factor

I think part of the issue was that the decline of manufacturing/ extractive industries meant that engineering was unappealing financially vs which other careers were available to people who are good with numbers/ understand difficult concepts. The financial services industry is, and will continue to be, something of a brain drain. Then, because we had no engineers, it was harder to rebuild manufacturing capacity, although I struggle to see what we're going to make competitively now that the rest of the world will buy.

The only thing that can really save us on bog standard manufacturing is if resources/materials (metals, textiles etc) get hugely expensive to the extent that component costs become, say, 90% of total manufacturing cost, taking away the advantage of the low labour cost economies in Asia.