Tale of Two Kingdoms

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Americans who have become accustomed to seeing Arab potentates shower lavish gifts upon American universities such as Georgetown or Harvard might be surprised to learn that young people from that region do not fare too well, although they tend to blame the United States for their condition.

“Today Arab youths see the United States sending money and jobs overseas to China and Southeast Asia, while trying to democratize the Middle East,” stated Professor Djavad Salehi-Isfahani. “These youths want jobs not democracy.” An economics professor at Virginia Tech, Dr. Salehi-Isfahani argued that the primary problems found in the Middle East stem not from political instability (as is the current U.S. belief) but rather from economic instability.

Unlike the rest of the world where “the strongest weapon in the fight against poverty is improving a country’s basic health and education,” Dr. Navtej Dhillion and Dr. Tarik Yousef have discovered that “links between education and the demands of the labor market appear weak [in the Middle East], resulting in a higher incidence of joblessness.”

Both fellows of the Wolfensohn Center for Development at the Brookings Institution, Dr. Dhillion and Dr. Tarik explain how over the past twenty years the Middle East has invested more money into primary and secondary education than all other developing regions of the world, yet has been unable to produce jobs for the newly educated in their study Inclusion: Meeting the 100 Million Youth Challenge. “The world’s average youth unemployment rate is 14 percent, but in the Middle East, that figure is 25 percent—the highest in any region.”

“Today, secondary school degrees are at best guarantors of an informal wage job, demonstrating a dramatic devaluation of education credentials and, as a result, tremendous dissatisfaction among the educated,” write Dr. Dhillon and Dr. Yousef. And, it is this dissatisfaction among young educated Arabs that directly correlates with their sentiment towards America, the study found.

Arab “youths want jobs not democracy.” Young Arabs see the interests of the United States in contrast with their own. Instead of spending billions of dollars attempting to institute new political structures in the Middle East, these young Arabs would like the United States to invest in the economies of the Middle East, thereby creating what the Arab world wants—jobs.

Moreover, their research leaves unanswered the question of why profits through petro dollars and other enterprises have not resulted in job growth in the region.

Lance Nation is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.