Luring humans works better than lashing them

Kingsley Amis said it about higher education but it works for governance too: More means worse.

Almost 1m under-25s are not in work or studying, new figures show, underlining the scale of the worklessness crisis as the Government plots a crackdown on benefits.

The number of young people who are not in employment, education or training – Neets – climbed to 946,000 in the three months to September, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

It marks the highest number of workless 16 to 24-year-olds since 2014, and is up by 9pc from 871,000 a year earlier. The number of young Neets has risen by almost one quarter since the pandemic.

Recently we’ve had the cost of employing youngsters pushed up by significantly raising that youth minimum wage. We’ve been insisting for some time now that large scale youth unemployment is the very sign we need to show that the youth minimum wage is already too high. The recent budget also significantly increased the employer tax burden of employing young people. We’ve also had, effectively, the recent nationalisation of apprenticeships. Which has, to no one’s surprise at all, led to fewer apprenticeships.

So much for industrial policy with strict conditionality then.

At which point we’re no doubt about to gain more of that industrial policy - with strict conditionality - to solve the problems caused by the last bolus of it. The lashings of employers will increase until morale improves.

We insist that luring people into employing snotty youth works better.

For example, say we abolished the minimum wage. Teens could go to work and learn stuff in return for a sandwich and a bottle of pop at lunchtime. Employers could try youths out at that same price. Taxes upon employing such tryouts could be zero. Apprenticeships could be freed from the dead hand of the bureaucracy and undertaken upon whatever terms anyone wanted. Finally, we could simply abolish all out of work benefits for those under 24. We’re not wholly sure that even we agree with each and every one of those ideas. But we really are sure that if that were done then youth unemployment would pretty much vanish. Vanish by luring employers into taking the chance rather than lashing them for not.

Or, a little less controversial. Youth unemployment is currently caused by what government has already done. Rather than then asking government to do more to solve the problems it has, itself, created why don’t we run with the idea that government should stop doing the things that cause the problems that require solving?

And once we put it that way around why would we stop at youth unemployment as an area requiring this as a policy stance?

No government isn’t the solution, we are not anarcho-capitalists. But less government has a definite ring to it.

Tim Worstall