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One thing to bear in mind is the aging of the European population. Their youth unemployment rates are higher not just because of the numerator - high numbers of unemployed - but also the denominator - relatively fewer young people compared to the USA. I attached graphs for Germany, Spain and the US to show the breakdown. Still, even when you adjust for the demographics, the difference between Europe and the US is strong.
The social and economic model in European welfare states is designed to protect the jobs of those already in the workforce, with generous welfare benefits to buy off everyone else. European businesses are closed shops, with few job openings and significant restrictions on hiring and firing to protect these workers. The regulatory state also creates barriers to entry which prevent entrepreneurs from starting competing businesses. It is not really socialism in many cases, but more like fascist corporatism, where unions, business owners and government officials collude to protect their interests.
And, as Margaret Thatcher observed, the system appears to work until eventually you run out of other people's money to fund it. The Germans were perfectly happy to fund Greece's welfare state as long as buying off the Greeks meant they had somewhere nice and sunny to go on their government-mandated six-weeks of vacation. But now European debt threatens their benefits too.
In many European countries, the young people's unemployment problem has another, darker [no pun intended] consequence. Because of low birthrates among native Europeans, not only is the population aging in general, but immigrants and minorities are an increasing percentage of the younger people who are there. So in France, for example, you have the same problem of high unemployment among the 16-24 year olds which the article highlights (I can't find current numbers, but France is somewhere in between; worse than Britain but better than Spain, Greece, Italy and Portugal). But in France, the unemployment rate among younger North Africans is significantly higher, likely greater than 50%.
This is worse than the problems in the US, by contrast, where minorities, especially black men, have much higher unemployment rates, not merely because of the raw percentages (16-24 as a whole, 18% or so, blacks aged 16-24, 30% or so), but because many immigrants and minorities, especially Muslims, are unassimilated. So the rioting we saw in France in the 2000s wasn't merely urban youths venting their frustration at low job prospects, but arguably a proto-insurgency among people who don't see themselves as French or European and who don't buy into the European social contract I noted above.
So the European social contract itself is threatened by the debt bomb, and potentially the most threatened are those for whom Europe and the whole Western value system means the least. In a few years, we may look back nostalgically on those Greek pseudo-anarchist rioters in the news of late.
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