> You find similarly grim numbers in Western Europe too. I mean youth unemployment was over 50% in Spain during the post-Great Recession crisis and is at 38% no

> You find similarly grim numbers in Western Europe too. I mean youth unemployment was over 50% in Spain during the post-Great Recession crisis and is at 38% now.[1] No, you don't measure the same thing. Those unemployment rates are calculated not on the whole set of youths, but on the relatively small subset which is not in various types of schools, i.e. it is the ratio of the youths which don't work over the youths which are or could be looking for a job. The South-African figure is against the whole set. If you were to apply the same method for the Spanish and other European countries, the resulting figure would be much smaller than your 38%. > far below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman The magically fixed 2.1 figure has been there for decades, but it doesn't factor in many factors, the most obvious one being the changing survival rate (from birth to making the next generation).