Read through the recent announcement of Pali Lahohla, Director General Statitistics about stagnant job growth in South Africa and you see a gloomy future. Blips and outliers aside, jobs are not growing. However each year around 500,000 new entrants seek employment. The greatest pressure is on youth and that means black youth.
Jolly as he is, the DG falls into racist thinking that can damage us structurally. Believing that unemployment is caused by race, leads to tilting at windmills, employment equity quotas, BEE, NSFAS, RET and any number of initiatives that have yielded well – nothing. (the DGs results not mine) White youth are largely fully employed and the other groups have issues. Yes but that is not the cause of problem.
You can't legislate against the 1% because their skills are simply too mobile. The reason that racists legislation fails to increase employment in the 99% is that race is not the cause.
To understand why race is the result and not the cause, you have to understand Granger Causality. Yes there may be a correlation between race and unemployment, but the cause is lack of mathematics. If you leave race out of it, you will find that the 5000 or 1% of the 500,000 that achieved a distinction for Maths have a golden future. While others discuss hustling for a living, the Quants are looking at racking up jobs at R 50,000 a month. The demand supply is so skew that you can't even find the candidates to fill the outstanding vacancies . The hustlers will join the unemployment ques or at best be paid intern wages.
Welcome to the rollerball economy, or knowledge economy to those that seek to avoid the ugly truth - The knowledge economy is upon us. Machines work better than people. The best for people is programming the machines. Did anyone notice that the value of Naspers now exceeds the entire capitalization of the South African Mining Industry? This, while it employs a fraction of the workers.
Take the data and rearrange. Instead of using race as a criteria, use grade 12 Maths Distinction pass and I will wager a cyber-wallet of crypto that you will see a 90% correlation, and Granger Causation. This is why I have spent such a great deal of the last year developing a MOOC that starts with Grade 12 Maths.
At a macro level, our languishing at the bottom of the WEF rankings on Maths education is why the rest of the world has recovered from the recession and we are plummeting.
If you have a child or know a child in or approaching Grade 12. The best thing you can do for them is put them on the right path to getting a distinction for Mathematics. It may be the most important exam of their lives. That, more than any other factor than inheriting a family fortune, is their gateway to the 1%.
