I have no difficulty at all believing that the english-language press repeats facts with no basis by simply reading each other's articles. (I've long wondered how many of the very few American correspondents based in France do anything more than simply rewrite what they read in LE Monde and Fig, but thats another story).
But all that said, I am having difficulty understanding the distinction between a "youth unemployment rate" of 22% and "8% of youth are unemployed"? I have a phd but not in economics, so I'm not sure if these are terms of art that I'm not understanding or if its a matter of who is counted.
That said, in response to asdf, I don't see anything wrong with students protesting against a government that has done nothing but muck things up for 4 years, and if their understanding of the policy is that it will hurt them, isn't that enough of a reason to consider the policy a failure? Isn't it an essential requirement of social policy that it convince people that the policy itself is not only economically sound (highly doubtful in this case) buit also democratic in conception and execution. Isn't that the reason that the GOP failed to move its social security privatization scheme even though it had near universal support in the mainstream press here?
But, between ages 15 and 24, a great many people are at school or in training. The proportion of that population that is in school/university varies from country to country. In France it's fairly high. The pie-chart Jérôme provided above shows that (on the left) practically 60% (59.9% exactly) of age 15-24 French are in school. The active population (meaning those with a job or looking for a job) amounts to 26.7% with a job, 7.8% looking for one. Those 7.8% of the total age group amount to 22% of the active population of that age group.
So 22% is not a wrong figure, it's simply misleading in the context in which it's used by the media and the pundits. 7.8% of all young French between 15 and 24 are unemployed; the comparable statistic for the United Kingdom, for example, is 7.4%. Not much difference. Yet the journalists and commentators go on spouting the same stuff about youth unemployment in France.
