Someone who clearly doesn’t know me very well sent me this meme. Apparently, it is from one of our many cognitively challenged politicians suggesting that the unemployed should all go into the armed forces. Whilst, it is a profoundly stupid idea as we will see in a minute it will no doubt play well with those parts of Australia where teeth, IQ points and sexual partners who are not related to you are in short supply.
Despite this it is an incredibly instructive piece about the power of a simple phrase which is merely a short narrative and the need to actually think. The meme seems to in a clear manner solve several assumed problems.
Unemployed youth are a problem.
It assumes that unemployed youth are a problem themselves as a matter of character.
The military can fix these problems because the military fixes character flaws.
Unemployed youth will be better when they come out of the armed forces.
It will save us money because they won’t have to be paid unemployment benefits.
You will also note that like all strong simple narratives it contains an element of bias. It assumes that there is something wrong with the group being referred to and they can be fixed quite easily. It is at this point that most people stop thinking and fail to consider the implications of what they have read.
To look at the reality of dumping all the unemployed youth into the armed forces I have done a bit of dodgy back of the envelope number crunching. Currently the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) personnel number 57,982 – a relatively small but professional organisation. The current budget for the ADF is $34.2B. Both these numbers are important since the form the basis for my broad brush guesswork. As best as I could tell from the labyrinthine government statistics there are about 300,000 unemployed youths between the ages of 16 and 24, which also neatly is just on the lower limit for selection. I couldn’t readily find a better breakdown so I am going to assume that this is our effective population available for service.
In the first of my really sweeping generalisations I am going to assume that we dump all 300,000 into the ADF, so the size of the ADF goes from 57,982 to 357,982. It is here that our brilliant slogan begins to run into trouble because you have to feed, cloth, house and train this suddenly resurgent military lest you have 300,000 bored bastards sitting in a field outside Puckapunyal looking for rocks to paint.
If we assume continuity in levels of training and equipment then the ADF’s budget is going to have to go through the roof. If it costs us $34.2B to have a military of 57,982 then I going to assume that to expand the military almost five fold then we will have to expand the military budget fivefold. All of a sudden the ADFs budget goes from $34.2B to $171B (I have assumed folding in the current expenditure).
This number needs to be put into context. It would mean we have the third largest military budget in the world behind the US and China. It would be about 7% of our GDP and about $68,000 per person – giving us the most expensive military in the world based upon GDP and per head expenditure.
So how much does this save us?
Apparently the most expensive part of the unemployment/welfare miasma is the Newstart allowance which approximately $10B per year which is shared among 858,373 recipients. Again assuming a simple pro rata breakdown our 300,000 unemployed youths cost us $3.5B per year. Therefore the brilliant decision to lob everyone into the ADF costs us $167.5B per year ($171B – $3.5B)
I accept that my dodgy figures are probably off by miles but it still easily shows what an incredibly stupid idea it is. Even if I am off by an order of magnitude it is still stupid but more importantly it was easily shown to be stupid with little more than a pencil and a piece of paper. Consider this in the context of your own trading, most of the things you hear are stupid and can be shown to be so with a little bit of critical thinking. But is it is this critical thinking bit of the equation that lets people down, we are primed for simplistic explanations and slogans. Thinking is a metabolic and emotional cost because what you find out may run counter to what you believe to be true and nobody wants that to happen.
Brilliant LOL
Why is it surprising that Jacqui Lambie would come up with a simplistic, populist, impractical solution for any given perceived problem? Anyway , I thought that she invalided out of the military with a bad back after doing some backpacking. So, CT you have to further factor in the ongoing compensation to be paid to all the work related injuries that will be incurred by the recruits.
Good point
I posted the link to this on FB… one of my friends wrote a lengthy discourse disparaging of CT’s “dodgy back of envelope” work, and proceeded to explain in detail how cheap he could train up a bunch of unemployed people to be fighters way cheaper, totally missing the point about critical thinking. I wasn’t totally surprised, he’s a big fan of conspiracy theories, the majority of which can be dismissed as rubbish with a little critical thinking
In my humble opinion unemployed youth are not the problem, their existence is an outcome from the many forces acting in our economy and general way of life. Whilst not a fan of Lambi, she does raise an important point in that idle youth is a national issue to be somehow resolved but her solution is too simplistic and as opposed to “unfunded” would be “unfundable”
I do note with some interest that the countries with the lowest rates of youth unemployment also have the highest rates of vocational youth training.
Whilst agreeing with CT”s arithmetic and his reasoning that drafting 300,000 is impractical, I do believe, as a “Nasho” who did National Service Training in the army in the 1950s, that such training is character building. I saw many of those boys come out as men and some of them joined up to the army, and so had a permanent career – without the initial training they may have joined the ranks of the unemployed.