Faltering Economy in China Dims Job Prospects for Graduates

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/business/global/faltering-economy-in-china-dims-job-prospects-for-graduates.html?hp

by wallflower • 13 years ago

41 40 13 years ago

danso• 13 years ago

The Chinese government is worried, saying that the problem could affect social stability, and it has ordered schools, government agencies and state-owned enterprises to hire more graduates at least temporarily to help relieve joblessness. “The only thing that worries them more than an unemployed low-skilled person is an unemployed educated person,” said Shang-Jin Wei, a Columbia Business School economist.

Tough situation...subsidizing an excess middle class can't be great in the long term. But what's the alternative? Order people to go work in the fields?

skylan_q2• 13 years ago

The damage caused by economic engineering leaves no good alternatives.

contingencies• 13 years ago

To be fair I think the whole world is facing the reality of increased efficiency requiring less bodies.

clicks2• 13 years ago

That is a pretty naive point of view.

I think the exact opposite of what you posit is closer to the truth of things -- a more carefully planned economy would have resulted in better conditions. If China was straight up laissez faire capitalistic economy it would be a total mess right now.

Read Albert Einstein's take on this, http://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism for why and how (long read, but I promise it's worth it).

kenster07• 13 years ago

So giving a large swath of your population more education doesn't magically stimulate economic growth. Hm, where have we seen this pattern before?

chii2• 13 years ago

the state should be funding huge R&D projects with these educated individuals, instead of priming them for "work in the industry". Think hardcore nuclear research to find methods for fusion, or better energy production. Think genetics research, think materials sciences and more efficient chemical processes, think hardcore robotics.

With this goal in mind, the education system should be taylored for basic sciences, and not on "practical" skills that could be learnt on the job. This would naturally gravitate the ciruculum towards teaching creativity, problem solving, not knowledge aquisition.

TLDR; i think they've been doing it all wrong, and wasted the time "educating" these now jobless people.

dredmorbius• 13 years ago

R&D also has diminishing returns to scale. It may well also _lag_ rather than _lead_ economic growth.

See Joseph Tainter and Nicholas Rescher. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sres.1057/abstrac...

For the Chinese: much of what they need has already been invented elsewhere (so IP appropriation _is_ a highly rational activity). They need to be able to apply it.

Their bigger problem is going to be in providing energy, cleaning up pollution, and assuring other resources (water is also becoming very highly constrained in China) for a very large population. One that's much _less_ large than it could have been, but large all the same.

thatcherclay• 13 years ago

I would love to hear the perspective of a native chinese person here - a little hard to take the New York Times as an unbiased source given the tension there lately.

meric• 13 years ago

I have many chinese friends and many of them are pursuing Master's degrees - because a bachelor's degree just isn't enough help towards getting a good job. It seems for many of them to solution of diminishing advantage of education is simply even more education.

yen223• 13 years ago

A Master's degree also helps fulfill certain visa requirements if you want to pursue a career outside of China.

roy_x6• 13 years ago

Given the poor education that most Chinese graduate school provided, it is really a big waste-of-life for many young guys pursuing it.

The good thing is that it only cost two years to get a master degree now. 10 years ago, I spent 3 years for it. I wish I had the courage to quit it that time.

roy_x6• 13 years ago

A native Chinese is in :-)

It is always tough for new graduates to find a good job in recent years. Given the housing cost got really high in big cities like Beijing/Shanghai/Guangzhou, there is a so called "flee-away-from-tier-1-cities-campaign" word made up by new graduates.

When I graduated a decade ago, there are a lot of proud new graduates whom sincerely believed that they have a bright future ahead. But nowadays, most young people seems not thinking so anymore.

It is difficult to change your social status by education and hard-working. That is something really bad and it is more than faltering economy of this year, it is about the meta-rules of how society running. Most of the traditional Chinese dynasties failed because same kind of problems.

Volpe3• 13 years ago

What do you think a viable solution for the tier 1 cities is?

yourapostasy• 13 years ago

Thanks for the comment from "the inside".

A note for folks who have not been to China before about the sheer scale of the "Tier 1/2/3" cities talked about here. When someone mentions Tier 3 in China, those are cities that are considered big enough to warrant calling a city, but too numerous to know all of them off the top of your head. A Tier 1 city for an American is like NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, etc. For a resident of the UK, Tier 1 = London; France = Paris; you get the idea.

But here is the catch. In America, a Tier 3 city can be in a top-100 list by population, but still be relatively ho-hum and if not unknown, not exactly in the headlines every day. Take the smallest 10 cities in a top-100 list, like Chula Vista, CA, and arbitrarily draw the line for Tier 3 there. These cities barely crack 200,000 in population. In China, I found out Tier 3 "ho-hum" cities (rank 90-100 by population) have no fewer than 600,000 population. That blew my mind when I learned that, and put China's rural-to-city migration into perspective.

Now consider this young work force migrating en masse to Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities due to pricing pressures in Tier 1 cities. If they have a critical mass of the right entrepreneurial factors in place, that's like over 100 Austin, TX (the brightest growth story the US can point to at the moment) popping up nearly simultaneously within the next 5-10 years. Pretty exciting times ahead.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

From the article: "One response, endorsed by the State Council, is to urge more graduates to take jobs at small, private companies. But a generation of people who grew up under the government’s 'one child' policy has proved risk-averse and slow to join or set up new companies.

"'I would not work for private companies, that is not secure — only state-owned ones,' Ms. Yan said."

That search for what was called during the 1970s "the iron rice bowl"--a secure job in a state-controlled organization--makes me wonder how much more innovation can be promoted in China's economy. Desiring that kind of security in employment would never make a Silicon Valley happen.

hkmurakami2• 13 years ago

Whenever we see very different behavior in other countries compared to that of our own, we should recognize that those people have most likely made that decision for very rational reasons. The decision may be grounded in reasons ranging from monetary to status-driven reasons, but people perceive their environment accurately and made the best decisions for themselves and their families. People in general are not blindly dumb or obtuse. The vast majority of the time, they are making sound decisions for their current and future prospects.

I used to think that the "US Way" was the best bar none no matter what the local situation or culture. Working in a different country and then observing the social and corporate dynamics from afar has made me realize that I was wrong.

If people in China desire government jobs, it really does mean that that is the best option for them.

pyre• 13 years ago

No one (at least not in this particular thread) is calling them stupid. The statement was made that when people are risk averse (even if such behaviour is rational), not much innovation (or even a Chinese Silicon Valley) can happen.

chii2• 13 years ago

this line of reasoning is basically what leads to the tragedy of the commons, or problems such as the paradox of thrift (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift), where everyone does what is best for themselves (which is fine in my books), but then leads to the overall decline of the system. The gov't needs to forcast these sorts of situations, and counter it before it becomes a problem.

justincormack• 13 years ago

People in Greece rationally wanted government jobs. Until the entire economy imploded. People in the US rationally wanted jobs on Wall Street until the entire economic.y imploded. In any country very few people are entrepreneurs so anecdotal evidence about a few graduates is not necessarily evidence of problems. Huge numbers of new businesses have been created in China in recent years. Profit margins are low and it is very competitive. But things are changing fast so there are opportunities.

schainks• 13 years ago

look at the average salary of worker bee at corporation X in China versus worker bee at government agency X in China. my money is on the government jobs paying better, too.

Faltering Economy in China Dims Job Prospects for Graduates

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