Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina begins with the familiar line: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." If we were to paraphrase this notion as it applies to today's youth, we might say that young people need no reason to leave home and make their way in the world; but each one that continues to shelter in the parental nest has a litany of reasons why. Some argue their case well. Others have no understanding of the seriousness of the problem. Still others have nothing to say about their choice.

Mike (not his real name) is a 23-year-old man with a certificate in food and beverage management from a private vocational high school in central Taiwan. He is also the much-beloved only male in his generation of his extended family. But all of his family's doting has sapped Mike's will to stick with things when the going gets tough--when he runs into trouble, he quits.

After finishing his military service, Mike expressed interest in working in the hospitality industry. Drawing on family connections, his father landed him a starting job as a dishwasher at a five-star hotel. A mere two months later, Mike threw in the towel claiming that the workload was too heavy.

The story replayed itself several times, with Mike never holding any job for more than six months. His father called on the goodwill of everyone he knew, but Mike's record of "firing bosses" was simply too fantastic. In the end his family gave up and Mike gave himself over to a life of leisure.

Clare, 28, is a teaching assistant at an English-language cram school whose greatest ambitions are to study abroad before she turns 30 and eventually to live overseas.

To realize this goal will take a great deal of money, so Clare also works at Starbucks, bringing her total income to about NT$30,000 per month.

Because both jobs are part time, she receives neither National Health Insurance cover nor vacation time. She nonetheless has no interest in seeking a full-time job.

"Full-time jobs saddle you with more responsibility," she explains, "which would leave me with no time to study English or foreign cultures." And since she lives with her parents and eats the meals her mother prepares, she's never had to go hungry.

Globalization provides numerous opportunities, but is also creating more and more young people who are drifting instead of establishing themselves in careers. Many, overwhelmed by feelings of insecurity and the fear that they cannot escape their circumstances, simply give up on "growing up."

A global problem

The reasons for the younger generation's reluctance to grow up and their unwillingness to leave the parental nest vary from nation to nation.

For example, in the US in the 1970s, university students would generally enter the job market immediately after graduation. However, automation and globalization have created a far more competitive employment market, both in the US and around the world. Jobs are harder to find now that companies are demanding more highly skilled workers. Without a master's degree, it can be difficult to find white-collar employment. The slumping economy, the disappearance of whole categories of jobs and headcount reductions have made job hunting all the more difficult, with the result that many young people are simply moving back in with their parents. These returners are known as "boomerang kids" in the US.

There have been many Clares in Japan since the 1990s, drifting in and out of the job market after they graduate from school, the better to pursue some nebulous "ideal." When they run short of money, they might pick up a job working at a convenience store or a gas station, their reluctance to take full-time work keeping them always at the fringes of the working world. The Japanese call these vacillating young "freelancers" with no career plans "freeters."

These freeters are attempting to break out of the prison of Japan's lifetime employment system--they don't want to spend their lives marking time for a corporate paycheck the way their parents did. But part-time work is inherently unstable and they often run short of funds. If they are unfortunate enough to have maxed out their credit cards, their debts can ensnare their parents or even push them to commit crimes.

Japan has also been dealing with another similar problem since 2004--the so-called NEETs (for "Not in Employment, Education, or Training"), that is, young people who have virtually no interest in work at all.

The term NEET originated in the UK, where it refers to people who have not worked, attended school, or been engaged in job training for three months to one year. Such people earn no money and do nothing all day.

Genda and Maganuma's NEET highlights the awful choices Japanese young people face in the job market and details how they get by. Its cover depicts a young woman who looks as if she's lost her way in the woods. Unable to forge ahead, she has little choice but to turn around and go home. More than 1 million Japanese young people are similarly baffled by contemporary society. While they think only of escaping "boring lives" as rapidly as possible, they are incredibly passive about making changes to their lives. They ultimately decide that their only option is to live at home, thus becoming NEETs.

The Japanese government's September 2004 white paper on the labor economy defines NEETs as 15-34 year olds who have completed school, do not work, are unmarried, are not homemakers and are not furthering their educations. Japan was home to an estimated 520,000 NEETs in 2003, six times 1997's number. Statistical models that include individuals thought to be missed in sampling give an even larger estimate of more than 1.4 million NEETs.

In recent years, Taiwan has seen the emergence of a similar phenomenon. One difference is that the importance Taiwanese place on education and diplomas provides young people with a plausible means of living the NEET lifestyle without being categorized as NEETs--they simply delay their graduation from school. They might do this in any number of ways. They can, for example, spend seven years in college, as if they were getting an MD instead of a bachelor's degree, turn a two-year master's program into a four to five year adventure, or drag out a PhD for as much as eight to nine years. Though they might live on a shoestring, they prefer studying and working as a teaching assistant, earning their tuition or a paltry monthly stipend, to graduating and entering the working world.

Yang Yu-cheng, a student in the architecture department at Taipei University of Technology, claims that many of the department's graduate students don't want to face a job search, so they do their utmost to postpone their graduations or pursue ever-more-advanced degrees. "The PhD program is the worst," he says. "It has students who are over 30 years old and have never held a real job. A lot of them."

There are currently more than 1 million NEET youth in Japan, most of whom are male. Some of those who are holed up in their parents' homes haven't taken part in social activities for years: their only contacts with the outside world are the computers on their desks. The number of NEETs in Taiwan is growing too.

Looming crisis

On the one hand, young people's disinterest in looking for work is acting as a drag on industry. On the other, young people who persist in being NEETs are giving new meaning to the "three no's"--no marriage, no children, and no support for their own parents--and are thereby weakening the underpinnings of both family and society. The increasing number of young people who choose not to stand on their own two feet is detrimental to both the economy and society at large, and as such has become a major source of concern for governments around the world.

In late September 2006, a report on the working circumstances of young people by the Geneva-headquartered International Labour Organization showed that the number of the world's unemployed young people 15-24 years of age rose from 74 million to 85 million from 1995 to 2005.

The report also argued that young people who lack jobs or are engaged in demeaning work are more prone to pessimism and alienation, to the detriment of their personal development. Young people make up a significant portion of the population (10.83% in Europe and 8.16% in Japan). Youth unemployment therefore constitutes a significant waste of potential that could lead to stagnation in the developed nations and unbearable losses for the developing ones.

In Japan, for example, young people who should be entering the workforce and maximizing their productivity are instead taking low-paying part-time jobs that require few skills and produce little. Some are not working at all. As a result, they have little income and little capacity to consume. But consumer spending is one of the key drivers of a nation's economic growth. According to the Japanese government, the average salary of a full-time worker 15-34 years of age is about NT$1.2 million per year, versus a freeter's NT$500,000. Consequently, a full-time worker consumes more than double the goods and services that a freeter does--about NT$880,000 per year versus only NT$320,000.

If you don't have income, you can't consume. Neither do you pay taxes to the state. According to a report by the UFJ Institute (now Mitsubishi UFJ Consulting), freeters reduced national consumption by approximately ¥8.8 trillion (NT$2.2 trillion) in 2003. In addition, freeters paid only about one-fifth of the taxes that full-time workers paid. Worse, these young freeters who should be helping to provide for Japan's future have, because they cannot support themselves, become a burden on their parents' generation, striking yet another blow to a Japan already battered by ten years of little or no economic growth.

Financially dependent upon their parents, NEETs are unlikely to marry or have children, worsening the aging of Japanese society. Living at home as "single parasites" they also needn't buy or furnish their own homes, which saps the strength of one of the economy's major drivers--the housing market.

The Council for Labor Affairs is hoping that practical training courses that provide students with internships and opportunities to explore their interests will foster a healthy attitude towards work. Pictured here are trainees at a Daimler Chrysler vehicle repair workshop.

Taiwan's dependent youth

This isn't a uniquely Japanese problem: a crisis is brewing in Taiwan as well. But do the parents of NEETs realize what is happening to their children?

"As long as he's happy, it doesn't matter that he's at home," says a resigned Ms. Huang, an award-winning civil servant. Her son holds an advanced degree from the Institute of Biotechnology at National Taiwan University (NTU) but hasn't been in any rush to find a job. In the six years since he graduated, he's largely confined himself to the house, studying art and preparing to take the civil service examination (which fewer than 5% of examinees pass). He rarely even attends the weddings of former classmates, preferring to mail a gift instead.

Chen Yu-hua, an assistant professor in NTU's Department of Agricultural Extension who studies family demographics, says that the NEET phenomenon isn't as visible in Taiwan as it is in Japan, but that isn't to say that Taiwan's young people are doing any better. "In Taiwan," she explains, "it's very 'normal' for parents to support their children through school and even until they marry." This masks how widespread the problem is. Chen points out that the number of NEETs is actually rising noticeably in urban areas, where job opportunities have traditionally been more abundant and young people less inclined to go on the parental dole.

It is very possible that this increase is a result of the growing distance between the individual and society caused by the rise of individualism.

"From the perspective of NEETs, is a late entry into the job market beneficial or harmful?" asks Chen. "It's not an easy question to answer. But it's certainly not a good thing from a government standpoint because NEETs become accustomed to maintaining a distance from society. This, in turn, translates into a less engaged public which inhibits the formation of civil society."

How many NEETs are there in Taiwan? Chen Yi-min, director-general of the Bureau of Employment and Vocational Training (BEVT) at the Council for Labor Affairs (CLA), says that some 88,000 of the 15-34-year-olds who were not in the labor force in 2004 fell into the category "other." But he estimates the number of actual NEETs (i.e. the number of "other" minus those in transition between school and military service) to have been about 79,200.

The term NEET first emerged in the West, where generous social welfare benefits or abundant family resources allow young people to fritter away their time without having to worry about their material needs. But idleness has robbed them of drive and skills.

Socially isolated

It's a truism that we only ever see the tip of the iceberg. While the government was breathing a sigh of relief over a declining rate of unemployment, figures from the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) were ringing alarm bells. While Taiwan had only 55,000 long-term unemployed (defined as persons without work for more than one year) in 2005, the data showed that the proportion of long-term unemployed with at least a junior-college degree was on the rise. In fact, it increased from 18% in 2001 to more than 36% in 2006, when it for the first time surpassed the percentage of long-term unemployed with only a high-school diploma.

One reason for this involves the recent rise in the number of universities, which has increased the number of university graduates during a period without corresponding growth in white-collar jobs. In addition, highly educated people have greater salary expectations and are less willing to take low-level work. Though people can seem fine on the surface, over time unemployment takes its toll on their confidence and their willpower.

A 2006 DGBAS survey revealed that there were 75,000 Taiwanese (or 1.36% of the potential workforce) who wanted to work but had never held a job or had limited work experience and had given up looking for a job. What isn't obvious from the numbers is that the impact of the NEET phenomenon extends beyond the socioeconomic sphere to the inner lives of individuals as long, unsuccessful job searches can cause jobseekers to question their self-worth.

Preparing for a rainy day

The emergence of the NEETs isn't something that can be resolved by simply blaming young people for not rushing to take responsibility for themselves. Chen Yu-hua says that traditional frictional unemployment (short-term unemployment that reflects the time it takes workers to find new jobs) and structural unemployment (unemployment resulting from the changing industrial trends that arise as an economy transitions to a new stage of development) can be addressed by a number of measures, including transforming and upgrading industry, offering job training and providing job referrals. But the government cannot readily aid those who are out of work because they are unwilling to work.

On the other hand, for all that policy measures can ameliorate structural unemployment--not a uniquely Taiwanese issue by any means--they cannot eradicate it. And determined action on the part of policymakers can drive educational reforms that can improve people's work ethic.

According to Yang Jui-ming, principal of National Ilan Commercial Vocational High School and winner of a 2005 national award for leadership excellence among vocational high school principals, the most basic anti-NEET strategy involves restructuring three axes--the family axis, the work axis and the life axis--of young people's values systems.

The CLA has already rolled out a program that arranges internships for students to give them experience in the working world. The BEVT's Chen Yi-min says that the point of the program isn't to teach young people how to do a particular job, but to help them feel connected to society and "grow them up a little."

Long-term plans include the On-the-Job Youth Training Program, the National Youth Human Resources Development Council and the Elite Study Abroad Program. But Chen also points out that no matter what incentives the government offers young people to stand on their own two feet, they themselves have to develop the will to earn a living and take charge of their lives.

Racing against time?

As the popular 1980s singer-songwriter Hou Dejian put it in "When You're 30," a song he wrote after becoming famous as a young man: "When you're 30 you'll understand, sooner or later what will come will come / When you're 30 you'll understand, you're free to love what you love.... No one wins their race with time / No one loses the love they've given."

In the no-job, no-spouse, no-education age, "freedom" is the best reason for saying no. But, just as the song says, "nobody wins their race with time" and what will come will come. Time's wheel continues to spin and children who refuse to grow up grow old nonetheless. The weakness of a generation isn't merely a personal tragedy, but a national crisis. It's time to nip the NEET phenomenon in the bud.