One out of ten Tunisians is an elderly dependent today; as the present generation ages, the ratio will rise to about the same level as in Western Europe, or two out of five. Even for wealthy Western Europe, caring for this army of pensioners will strain resources to the limit; a poor country simply has no way to manage. The trouble is that Muslim countries that invest heavily in education, of which Tunisia is the best example, never achieve a critical mass of graduates capable of competing with their East Asian peers in world markets. Excepting a thin stratum of Turkish university graduates,
One out of ten Tunisians is an elderly dependent today; as the present generation ages, the ratio will rise to about the same level as in Western Europe, or two out of five. Even for wealthy Western Europe, caring for this army of pensioners will strain resources to the limit; a poor country simply has no way to manage. The trouble is that Muslim countries that invest heavily in education, of which Tunisia is the best example, never achieve a critical mass of graduates capable of competing with their East Asian peers in world markets. Excepting a thin stratum of Turkish university graduates, the products of Muslim universities are mostly unemployable. Wherever Muslim countries have invested heavily in secondary and university education, they have wrenched their young people out of the constraints of traditional society without, however, providing them with the skills to succeed in modernity. An entire generation of young Muslims has lost its traditional roots without finding new roots in the modern world. The main consequence of more education appears to be a plunge in fertility rates within a single generation, from the very large families associated with traditional society to the depopulation levels observed in Western Europe. Suspended between the traditional world and modernity, impoverished and humiliated, the mass of educated young Muslims have little to hope for and every reason to be enraged. In maleducated, underemployed, and depopulating Tunisia, the world can s...
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see the impending future of Arab societies. Note from Daniel: I actually find this relatable. I left college (in America) quite unprepared for professional life and had to do a lot of work to catch up on what I missed. Universal education really does feel like a scam pushed on everyone during the 1960s/70s.
