On Monday, July 18, 2016, the world celebrated Nelson Mandela International Day, a day recognizing the former president of South Africa’s commitment to fostering peace and freedom. Every year the Nelson Mandela Foundation hosts a lecture, inviting prominent individuals to discuss significant social issues affecting the African continent. For this year’s lecture, Bill Gates was selected to speak on the theme of “Living Together” in front of a packed stadium in Pretoria. Gates focused on a topic Mandela returned to repeatedly throughout his life—the power of the youth. In the words of Gates, “…young people are better than old at driving innovation because they are not locked in by the limits of the past… we must clear away the obstacles standing in young people’s way so that they can seize all of their potential.”

Unfortunately, South Africa, the second-largest economy on the continent, has the highest youth unemployment rate at 54 percent, as seen in the figure below. Surprisingly, according to the figure the highest rates of youth unemployment lie in the upper-middle-income countries as classified by GNI per capita. Additionally, these unemployment rates might be depressed due to the fact that unemployment refers to people looking for jobs, and many of Africa’s youth are forced into the informal sector after giving up on their search for employment.

Although youth unemployment in Africa is often seen as a growing challenge, a number of experts interpret the large youth population as an opportunity, as long as the youth have access to the economic opportunities through which they can channel their energy into progress. As Africa’s youth is predicted to grow exponentially, achieving broad-based economic growth and development will rely on breaking down the barriers to economic opportunity, by investing in human capital (through education) and in improving business environments. 

Figure 2.3. Youth unemployment will continue to be a growing challenge in 2016

Interestingly, GDP and income classification have little correlation with youth unemployment rates. For example, South Africa, which has the second-largest economy on the continent and is considered an upper-middle-income country based on its GNI per capita, has the highest youth unemployment rate at nearly 54 percent. Meanwhile, the Liberian economy, which is nearly 200 times smaller than South Africa’s, has a youth unemployment rate 10 times smaller. Youth unemployment is measured as the share of the labor force (ages 15-24) without work but available for and seeking employment. Estimates may be low in some low-income countries like Liberia because many young people cannot afford not to work to seek employment and as a result, end up in low-paying jobs.

Source: Youth unemployment figures from World Development Indicators and GDP data from the World Bank databank.

See the Brookings Africa Growth Initiative’s Foresight Africa 2016 report, from which the figure below comes, for more highlights on the growing challenge of youth unemployment in Africa. In addition, earlier this month the Brookings Institution hosted an Africa Policy Dialogue on the Hill on jobs in Africa, alluding to the shortcomings of the educational systems and the importance of infrastructure and electricity to support business and attract investment. For a summary of the conversation, see here.

Tor Syvrud contributed to this post.

In the new music video from OK Go, the band uses a drone with a camera to capture some fantastic footage. Businesses, artists, and hobbyists are using drones for a variety of purposes. But, the rock group didn’t film the music video in the United States. They filmed it in Japan and one possible contributing factor is that filming the video in the U.S. may have been illegal. The laws and regulations governing drones are still being sorted out by authorities. Both state governments and the federal government have started to take notice of the problem. Civil liberties advocates have emerged in support for strong federal oversight of drone surveillance to ensure that privacy is protected. Others argue that states and their preexisting privacy laws are already equipped to deal with nongovernment drone surveillance.

Photo credit: OK Go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1ZB_rGFyeU

State Privacy Law

Wells C. Bennett’s recent report Civilian Drones, Privacy, and the Federal-State Balance describes how most state privacy laws could be applied to drone operators. Most states offer three general types of privacy protections:

1. Protection against intrusion: Common law that makes it unlawful for a person to trespass on someone else’s property.
2. Protection against aerial surveillance: Laws in this category are either criminal or civil in nature and aim to specifically block aerial surveillance.
3. Anti-Voyeurism: These laws deal with “peeping toms” and other moments when people have an expectation of privacy.

Federal Aviation Rules

Those who believe that drones ought to be heavily regulated argue that the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) should introduce strong new rules. In 2012 Congress has called on the FAA to develop new rules for drones by 2015. The FAA has long regulated aircraft of all types but the agency has less experience with privacy issues. In 2013, the agency selected six test sites where it would be legal to fly drones. The operators at these sites were required to abide by privacy rules the FAA created, which over time developed into a set of comprehensive standards. These standards ultimately remained applicable to test sites only as the agency was reticent to enforce privacy regulations for the whole country. However, the standards still serve as the foundation for the FAA’s roadmap to integrating drones into American skies and as a set of recommendations for policymakers.

The FAA’s reticence to regulate privacy creates a policy conundrum. Bennett proposes an approach that involves the states taking the lead with policy. The states already have a broad, legal framework that can be applied to privately owned drones. Where the states lack authority, Bennett suggests the Federal government can fill in the gaps. This mixed approach allows the states to use tested privacy laws and for the federal government to wait until it has the mission-critical data necessary to even begin crafting regulations for nongovernment drone surveillance.

Matt Mariano contributed to this piece.

Year after year, federal spending on poverty programs has been going up, but we still see more and more people who have no margin to guard against unexpected expenses or job loss. At the same time, for different reasons, Americans who are not impoverished have seen their wealth decline sharply. Expert Ron Haskins, co-director of the Center on Children and Families, says the problems are growing deeper, despite increased federal spending on programs to assist the poor. Haskins says everyone must sacrifice, but also says, that people in general, who finish high school, get a job, and get married and delay having children until age 21 are better off.

Video

• Solutions to Poverty's Rise in America

The terrible attack in Nice on July 14—Bastille Day—saddened us all. For a country that has done so much historically to promote democracy and human rights at home and abroad, France is paying a terrible and unfair price, even more than most countries. My colleagues Will McCants and Chris Meserole have carefully documented the toll that France, and certain other Francophone countries like Belgium, have suffered in recent years from global terrorism. It is heart wrenching.

From what we know so far, the attack was carried out by a deeply distraught, potentially deranged, and in any case extremely brutal local man from Nice of Tunisian descent and French nationality. Marital problems, the recent loss of his job, and a general sense of personal unhappiness seem to have contributed to the state of mind that led him to commit this heinous atrocity. Perhaps we will soon learn that ISIS, directly or indirectly, inspired the attack in one way or another as well. My colleague Dan Byman has already tapped into his deep expertise about terrorism to remind us that ISIS had in fact encouraged ramming attacks with vehicles before, even if the actual manifestation of such tactics in this case was mostly new. 

This attack will again raise the question: Why France? On this point, I do have a somewhat different take than some of my colleagues. The argument that France has partly brought these tragedies upon itself—perhaps because of its policies of secularism and in particular its limitations on when and where women can wear the veil in France—strikes me as unpersuasive. Its logical policy implications are also potentially disturbing, because if interpreted wrongly, it could lead to a debate on whether France should modify such policies so as to make itself less vulnerable to terrorism. That outcome, even if unintended, could dance very close to the line of encouraging appeasement of heinous acts of violence with policy changes that run counter to much of what French culture and society would otherwise favor. So I feel the need to push back.

Here are some of the arguments, as I see them, against blaming French culture or policy for this recent string of horrible attacks including the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the November 2015 mass shootings in Paris, and the Nice tragedy (as well as recent attacks in Belgium):

• Starting with the simplest point, we still do not know much about the perpetrator of the Nice killings. From what we do surmise so far, personal problems appear to be largely at the root of the violence—different from, but not entirely unlike, the case with the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen.
• We need to be careful about drawing implications from a small number of major attacks. Since 2000, there have also been major attacks in the Western world by extremist jihadis or takfiris in New York, Washington, Spain, London, San Bernardino, Orlando, and Russia. None of these are Francophone. Even Belgium is itself a mixed country, linguistically and culturally.
• Partly for reasons of geography, as well as history, France does face a larger problem than some other European countries of individuals leaving its country to go to Syria or Iraq to fight for ISIS, and then returning. But it is hardly unique in the scale of this problem.
• Continental Europe has a specific additional problem that is not as widely shared in the United Kingdom or the United States: Its criminal networks largely overlap with its extremist and/or terrorist networks. This point may be irrelevant to the Nice attack, but more widely, extremists in France or Belgium can make use of illicit channels for moving people, money, and weapons that are less available to would-be jihadis in places like the U.K. (where the criminal networks have more of a Caribbean and sub-Saharan African character, meaning they overlap less with extremist networks).
• Of course, the greatest numbers of terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists occur in the broader Muslim world, with Muslims as the primary victims—from Iraq and Syria to Libya and Yemen and Somalia to South Asia. French domestic policies have no bearing on these, of course.

There is no doubt that good work by counterterrorism and intelligence forces is crucial to preventing future attacks. France has done well in this regard—though it surely can do better, and it is surely trying to get better. There is also no doubt that promoting social cohesion in a broad sense is a worthy goal. But I would hesitate, personally, to attribute any apparent trend line in major attacks in the West to a particular policy of a country like France—especially when the latter is in fact doing much to seek to build bridges, as a matter of national policy, with Muslims at home and abroad. 

There is much more to do in promoting social cohesion, to be sure, even here in America (though our own problems probably center more on race than on religion at the moment). But the Nice attacker almost assuredly didn’t attack because his estranged wife couldn’t wear a veil in the manner and/or places she wanted. At a moment like this in particular, I disagree with insinuations to the contrary.

As every good teacher knows, education is not just about academics. It is about broadening horizons and discovering passions. (The root of education is the Latin e ducere, meaning “to draw out.”) From this perspective, extra-curricular activities count for a great deal. But as Robert Putnam highlights in his book Our Kids, there are growing class gaps in the availability of music, sports, and other non-classroom activities.

Fewer field trips?

Schools under pressure may also cut back on field trips outside the school walls to parks, zoos, theaters, or museums. In the 2008-09 school year, 9 percent of school administrators reported eliminating field trips, according to the annual surveys by the American Association of School Administrators (AASA). That figure rose through the recession:

Just 12 percent of the administrators surveyed about 2015-16 said they had brought back their field trips to pre-recession levels. Museums around the country report hosting fewer students, from Los Angeles and Sarasota, to Minneapolis, and Columbia, Missouri. None of this is definitive proof of a decline in field trips, since we are relying on a single survey question. But it suggests a downward trend in recent years.

Museums help with science tests

If some children are missing out on field trips, does it matter? They may be nice treats, but do they have any real impact, especially when they take time away from traditional learning? There is some evidence that they do.

Middle school children with the chance to go on a field trip score higher on science tests, according to a 2015 study by Emilyn Ruble Whitesell.

She studied New York City middle schools with teachers in Urban Advantage, a program that gives science teachers additional training and resources—as well as vouchers for visiting museums. In some schools, the Urban Advantage teachers used the field trip vouchers more than others. Whitesell exploits this difference in her study, and finds that attending a school with at least 0.25 trips per student increased 8^th grade scores by 0.026 standard deviations (SD). The odds of a student passing the exam improved by 1.2 percentage points. There were bigger effects for poor students, who saw a 0.043 SD improvement in test scores, and 1.9 percentage point increase in exam pass rates.

Art broadens young minds

Students visiting an art museum show statistically significant increases in critical thinking ability and more open-minded attitudes, according to a randomized evaluation of student visits to the Crystal Bridges Museum in northwest Arkansas. One example: those who visited the museum more often agreed with statements like: “I appreciate hearing views different from my own” and “I think people can have different opinions about the same thing.” The effects are modest. But the intervention (a single day at the museum) is, too. Again, there were larger effects for poor students:

All this needs to be put in perspective. In comparison with the challenge of closing academic gaps and quality teaching, field trips are small beer. But schools create citizens as well as undergraduates and employees. It matters, then, if we have allowed field trips to become a casualty of the great recession.

The terrible attack in Nice on July 14—Bastille Day—saddened us all. For a country that has done so much historically to promote democracy and human rights at home and abroad, France is paying a terrible and unfair price, even more than most countries. My colleagues Will McCants and Chris Meserole have carefully documented the toll that France, and certain other Francophone countries like Belgium, have suffered in recent years from global terrorism. It is heart wrenching.

From what we know so far, the attack was carried out by a deeply distraught, potentially deranged, and in any case extremely brutal local man from Nice of Tunisian descent and French nationality. Marital problems, the recent loss of his job, and a general sense of personal unhappiness seem to have contributed to the state of mind that led him to commit this heinous atrocity. Perhaps we will soon learn that ISIS, directly or indirectly, inspired the attack in one way or another as well. My colleague Dan Byman has already tapped into his deep expertise about terrorism to remind us that ISIS had in fact encouraged ramming attacks with vehicles before, even if the actual manifestation of such tactics in this case was mostly new. 

This attack will again raise the question: Why France? On this point, I do have a somewhat different take than some of my colleagues. The argument that France has partly brought these tragedies upon itself—perhaps because of its policies of secularism and in particular its limitations on when and where women can wear the veil in France—strikes me as unpersuasive. Its logical policy implications are also potentially disturbing, because if interpreted wrongly, it could lead to a debate on whether France should modify such policies so as to make itself less vulnerable to terrorism. That outcome, even if unintended, could dance very close to the line of encouraging appeasement of heinous acts of violence with policy changes that run counter to much of what French culture and society would otherwise favor. So I feel the need to push back.

Here are some of the arguments, as I see them, against blaming French culture or policy for this recent string of horrible attacks including the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the November 2015 mass shootings in Paris, and the Nice tragedy (as well as recent attacks in Belgium):

• Starting with the simplest point, we still do not know much about the perpetrator of the Nice killings. From what we do surmise so far, personal problems appear to be largely at the root of the violence—different from, but not entirely unlike, the case with the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen.
• We need to be careful about drawing implications from a small number of major attacks. Since 2000, there have also been major attacks in the Western world by extremist jihadis or takfiris in New York, Washington, Spain, London, San Bernardino, Orlando, and Russia. None of these are Francophone. Even Belgium is itself a mixed country, linguistically and culturally.
• Partly for reasons of geography, as well as history, France does face a larger problem than some other European countries of individuals leaving its country to go to Syria or Iraq to fight for ISIS, and then returning. But it is hardly unique in the scale of this problem.
• Continental Europe has a specific additional problem that is not as widely shared in the United Kingdom or the United States: Its criminal networks largely overlap with its extremist and/or terrorist networks. This point may be irrelevant to the Nice attack, but more widely, extremists in France or Belgium can make use of illicit channels for moving people, money, and weapons that are less available to would-be jihadis in places like the U.K. (where the criminal networks have more of a Caribbean and sub-Saharan African character, meaning they overlap less with extremist networks).
• Of course, the greatest numbers of terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists occur in the broader Muslim world, with Muslims as the primary victims—from Iraq and Syria to Libya and Yemen and Somalia to South Asia. French domestic policies have no bearing on these, of course.

There is no doubt that good work by counterterrorism and intelligence forces is crucial to preventing future attacks. France has done well in this regard—though it surely can do better, and it is surely trying to get better. There is also no doubt that promoting social cohesion in a broad sense is a worthy goal. But I would hesitate, personally, to attribute any apparent trend line in major attacks in the West to a particular policy of a country like France—especially when the latter is in fact doing much to seek to build bridges, as a matter of national policy, with Muslims at home and abroad. 

There is much more to do in promoting social cohesion, to be sure, even here in America (though our own problems probably center more on race than on religion at the moment). But the Nice attacker almost assuredly didn’t attack because his estranged wife couldn’t wear a veil in the manner and/or places she wanted. At a moment like this in particular, I disagree with insinuations to the contrary.

When Franklin Roosevelt delivered his second inaugural address on January 20, 1936 he lamented the “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” He challenged Americans to measure their collective progress not by “whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; [but rather] whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” In our new paper, One third of a nation: Strategies for helping working families, we ask a simple question: How are we doing?

In brief, we find that:

• The gulf in labor market income between the haves and have-nots remains wide. The median income of households in the bottom third in 2014 was $24,000, just a little more than a quarter of the median of $90,000 for the top two-thirds.
• The bottom-third households are disproportionately made up of minority adults, adults with limited educational attainment, and single parents.  
• The most important reason for the low incomes of the bottom third is a “work gap”: the fact that many are not employed at all, or work limited hours. 

The work gap

The decline in labor force participation rates has been widely documented, but the growing gulf in the work gap between the bottom third and the rest of the population is truly striking:

While the share of men who are employed in the top two-thirds has been quite stable since 1980, lower-income men’s work rates have declined by 11 percentage points. What about women?

Middle- and upper-income women have increased their work rates by 13 percentage points. This has helped maintain or even increase their family’s income. But employment rates among lower-income women have been flat, despite reforms of the welfare system and safety net designed to encourage work.

Many on the left point to problems like low pay and lack of access to affordable childcare, and so favor a higher minimum wage and more subsidies for daycare. For many conservatives, the problem is rooted in family breakdown and a dependency-inducing safety net. They therefore champion proposals like marriage promotion programs and strict work requirements for public benefits. Most agree about the importance of education.

Time to debate some more radical solutions 

It may be that the standard solutions to the problems of the bottom third, while helpful, are no longer sufficient. A debate about whether to make safety net programs such as Food Stamps and housing assistance conditional on work or training is underway. So are other solutions such as subsidized jobs (created by some states during the Great Recession as a natural complement to a work-conditioned safety net), more work sharing (used in Germany during the recession), or even a universal basic income (being considered by Swiss voters in June).