SPENGLER Cairo, Egypt and Cairo, Illinois
By Spengler
Only half of the 51 million Egyptians between the ages of 15 and 64 are counted
in the government's measure of the labor force, which is why the official
unemployment rate stands at only 11%. America's labor force of 153 million, by
contrast, comprises three-quarters of the population aged 15 to 64. If Egypt's
labor force were counted in the same way as America's, the unemployment rate
would be 40%. The effective unemployment rate is even higher, for three-fifths
of Egyptians live on the land, while the country imports half its caloric
consumption.
Agriculture productivity in Egypt is so poor that most farm labor must be
considered disguised unemployment. 30% of Egyptians of the relevant age,
moreover, attend university, while only half
graduate, and of those, few find employment. Perhaps an additional 3 million
Egyptian unemployed are warehoused in the university system.
More than half of Egypt's population has nothing to do, and lives on one form
or another of public subsidy. The world economy does not want them. With a 45%
rate of effective illiteracy, Egyptians are unfit for modern factory work, and
the products of the university system mostly are unqualified for engineering or
administrative jobs. As Egypt's state finances disintegrate under conditions of
unrest, the position of the redundant half of the country's people is becoming
desperate. It is hard to see how a catastrophe can be avoided now that Egypt's
tourism industry has dried up.
Cairo, Egypt - the site of President Barack Obama's effusive address to the
Muslim world in June 2009 - is becoming the world's epicenter of despair. Five
years earlier, as a candidate for Illinois State Senate , Obama also spoke in
Cairo, Illinois, at the southern tip of the state where the Ohio and
Mississippi Rivers converge. It merited a mention in his campaign book The
Audacity of Hope: "We discussed what might be done to restart the
area's economy and get more money into the schools; we heard about sons and
daughters on their way to Iraq and the need to tear down an old hospital that
had become a blight on downtown."
A third of Cairo's population lives below the poverty line and its unemployment
rate is 12%. Three-fifths of its people are African-American. Obama singled it
out as a subject for hope and change. There is a component of the American
population whose marginalization compares to Egypt, and that is
African-Americans aged 16 to 19 years. Their official unemployment rate is
46.5%, although the effective rate is much higher, for only 13% of blacks in
that age bracket actually have jobs. Only a quarter of black high school
seniors will graduate college.
Cairo, Egypt and Cairo, Illinois have another thing in common: their economic
misery is the outcome of political models that warehouse the poor rather than
prepare them for productivity. Like most Third World dictators, the rulers of
Egypt from Nasser to Mubarak kept most of their people poor, illiterate, and
down on the farm, while employing the putative higher education system as a
political pressure valve. Starting with the Johnson administration, America's
incipient welfare state made the poor, and especially the African-American
poor, dependent on a political regime that encouraged economic dependency.
That is why the people of Cairo, Egypt and Cairo, Illinois are starving in the
midst of plenty. There are plenty of jobs for people who can read the new
edition of the manual. Just 4% of Americans with a four-year college degree or
better are unemployed, a remarkable fact given the mediocre quality of American
university graduates. Evidently, basic reading comprehension, basic math and
the ability to produce work on time are sufficient qualifications for a job in
corporate America.
The world economy, meanwhile, can't get enough qualified labor, while it
ignores the untrained, semi-literate victims of state dependency. A 2011 survey
by the Manpower Group, the world's largest human resources firm, reports:
Despite
the slow and uneven recovery from the global economic downturn and lingering
high levels of unemployment in many markets, organizations around the world
still report that they cannot find the talent they need when they need it. They
are looking for evermore specific skill sets and taking longer to fill job
vacancies as they wait for the economy to fully rebound and their businesses to
get back to ''normal.'' But global economic forces have strained existing
models and systems to such a point of tension that they are no longer
sustainable. There will be no return to the pre-recession ''business as
usual.''
The Manpower Group survey adds:
ManpowerGroup
research reveals employers in India, the United States, China and Germany
report the most dramatic talent shortage surges compared to last year. In
India, the percentage of employers indicating difficulty filling positions
jumped 51 percentage points. Nearly one in four employers say
environmental/market factors play a major role in the talent shortage -
employers simply aren't finding anyone available in their markets. Another 22%
of employers say their applicants lack the technical competencies or ''hard''
skills needed for the job.
The unemployment catastrophe in the
two Cairos evidently has little to do with demand for labor as such. The world
economy has changed and left the semi-literate and barely-educated behind,
perhaps permanently. A rising tide does not lift all boats. It swamps the ones
that are anchored to the sea floor. We need to reach back to the 18th and 19th
centuries to find a comparison. As I wrote in a 2006 essay,
What do you do with all the farmers?, Asia Times Online, September 26,
2006:
Every great advance in productivity of agricultural in history
left in the lurch a superfluous population that was ground up in war. The
Carolingian Renaissance of the High Middle Ages brought the horse collar, the
steel plow, windmills for swap drainage, and three-field rotation. The Teutonic
Knights shifted some of the excess population to the Baltic and Eastern Europe,
eradicating the local population in the process. The Crusades absorbed more of
the surplus, until the Black Death of the 14th century made people scarce
again. The Napoleonic Wars dealt with the peasants made redundant by the
agricultural revolution of the 18th century, and World War I repeated the
exercise a century later.
Emerging Asia has raised the bar for
all the economies of the world, as dramatically as the Industrial Revolution
did two centuries ago.
The Industrial Revolution improved the lives of British workers by every
available measurement - life expectancy, consumption, and so forth. But that
was true only for those who survived the agricultural revolution to become
industrial workers. The agricultural revolution that prepared the industrial
revolution displaced a large proportion of agricultural labor. Starvation,
emigration and war consumed the redundant population.
The Napoleonic Wars alone killed 188,000 British men, in a population of less
than 9 million, the equivalent of 6.3 million in today's American population.
An additional 225,000 were transported as criminals to America (60,000) and
Australia (165,000), not counting perhaps 1 million voluntary emigrants during
the 19th century from England, Wales and Scotland.
Altogether, the attrition rate of the English and Welsh population at the turn
of the 18th century amounted to 15%. Scotland must be considered separately,
because the English deliberately cleared the Highlands of people after the 1746
Stuart rebellion. About half a million Highlanders were displaced, almost a
third of the Scots population. Whole villages were transported to North
America.
While conditions of life improved for British workers, machine-spun cotton
destroyed more than a quarter of India's cotton manufacturing industry, and by
1860 had displaced more than half a million workers, leading to starvation in
Bengal, the historic center of India's cotton weaving.
The last time a vast improvement in industrial productivity upended the lives
of millions of people around the world, a large proportion of the affected
populations did not survive, at least not in their own homes, and many not at
all.
In Cairo, Illinois, the lives of the unemployment are not at risk, because
America's social safety net will remain in place. But the lives of the Arab
poor in Cairo, Egypt and similar cities are in urgent peril, and the scale of
the problem is so great that it is hard to envision a solution. It should
surprise no-one that Middle Eastern politics have taken on a new, apocalyptic
tone.
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