Irony is when I walk past a set of tents pitched in New York, or Washington, DC's McPherson Square, and my colleague, who works on international development in the Arab world, exclaims surprise at the number of homeless people and unemployed youth occupying those tents.
The Occupy Wall Street movement coincidentally emerged a few months after Tunisia's and Egypt's underemployed youth organized in the streets. As Americans, we are told to shift our focus from exporting goods to exporting services. In an earlier blog post, Angela Glover Blackwell, CEO of PolicyLink, said that the U.S. must embrace its diverse demographics to propel a "knowledge economy." Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph E. Stiglitz, specifically calls this the "creative economy" because the U.S. has already spent its 20th century knowledge investment. What does that mean? And where do we go first? Let's work backwards from the goal: employ energetic, fresh graduates who might set up tents after an unsuccessful six-month job search or underemployment.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Mehrunisa Qayyum: America's Knowledge Economy Needs Its Creative Youth
