The Deep Dive: What Is the Biggest Long-Term Cost of NEET Loss?

There’s a real irony in how the narrative around work has flipped. Just a few years ago, the job market was so hot that young people were making TikToks about “quiet quitting” and “bare minimum Mondays,” fueling the storyline that they simply didn’t want to work. But that narrative blinded us to a deeper shift that was already taking shape.

The problem was never disengagement; it was exclusion. And today we’re living the consequences. A growing share of young people never even gets the chance to opt in. This is quiet exclusion, a slow and largely invisible process where young people slip out of education, miss the first rung of the labor market, and lose access to the structures that help them build adult lives. It is the rise of young people who are not in education, employment, or training, the NEET generation. It may be a NEET loss generation.

The NEET generation is becoming one of the most overlooked economic risks of our time. Today, 282 million young people — 21 percent of the world’s youth — are NEET. In parts of Southern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, and India, the rates run from 20 to 35 percent. In India, nearly half of young women fall into this category. Meanwhile, countries like Germany, South Korea, and the Netherlands with strong vocational and training systems maintain low NEET levels and outperform in productivity and competitiveness. The contrast is obvious: economies thrive when young people have pathways. They stagnate when they don’t.

This is NEET Loss — the economic and human cost of leaving millions of young people on the sidelines. You see it in delayed adulthood, young people drifting between short-term gigs, or simply stepping out of the system altogether. Confidence erodes, direction fades, and purpose dissolves, one life at a time.

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We’ve known for decades that work is more than income. Marie Jahoda’s research shows work provides time structure, identity, status, friendships, and a shared sense of purpose, all essential for mental health. When those disappear, well-being collapses.

Multiple longitudinal studies show that unemployment especially prolonged or among youth is strongly associated with higher rates of depression, anxiety, and psychological distress, often persisting long after re-employment. The OECD and WHO show clear links between prolonged youth unemployment and anxiety, isolation, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation.

This isn’t hypothetical. After the 2008 crisis, Spain’s youth unemployment hit 50 percent. A University of Barcelona study found the psychological effects lasted for years, even after people reentered the workforce. Greece saw similar spikes in depression among young men who felt their futures had evaporated.

Over the past few decades, women have made enormous progress higher educational attainment, better graduation rates, and a steady rise in professional achievement. But while women moved forward, men, especially young men, have moved in the opposite direction. Richard Reeves’s work in Of Boys and Men lays this out starkly: boys and young men are falling behind on almost every major metric education, completion rates, early-career development, and mental health.

By their mid-20s, a large share of young men has no degree, no stable work, and no clear path precisely the group most vulnerable to drifting into NEET status. Reeves calls it a “purpose recession,” and he’s right. When young men lose purpose, entire communities start to fray. Societies don’t just lose productivity; they lose stability.

All of this is happening just as Gen AI is reshaping the labor market. For the first time, a major technological shift is targeting white-collar entry-level jobs. Previous waves of automation replaced manual labor. Today’s wave replaces writing, analysis, research, and coordination the tasks that once defined junior roles. Goldman Sachs estimates 300 million jobs globally could be automated or transformed by AI. And the first to go are the roles young people depend on to enter the professional world.

When traditional career ladders shrink, young people don’t just lose jobs, they lose the whole transition into adulthood. Many end up in limbo, sending out applications for months with little progress. A smaller group manages to thrive through polywork freelancing, consulting, content creation, coding, and running side ventures powered by AI. But most do not have the skills, networks, or confidence to build these alternative paths. That is how the trajectory gap widens: one group accelerates into the AI future while the other quietly slides backward.

Government systems are not keeping up. The programs young people actually need vocational training, apprenticeships, digital and AI literacy, affordable housing, childcare support remain outdated or chronically underfunded. But this is a policy choice, not fate. Countries that keep NEET rates low do so deliberately. Germany’s apprenticeship model, South Korea’s national reskilling system, and the Netherlands’ mix of flexible work and accessible childcare show what real on ramps into adulthood look like. These countries treat youth as strategic infrastructure, not an afterthought.

Addressing NEET Loss requires the same mindset. Build training pipelines tied to real jobs. Teach digital and AI skills early. Fix housing and childcare so young people can build stable adult lives. Give boys and young men stronger support in school and in the first years of adulthood. A country’s future depends on its young people, their skills, their direction, and their belief that they have a place in the world. AI will shape who rises and who falls, but it cannot replace the energy of an entire generation. The societies that win the next era will not be the ones obsessing over quiet quitting. They will be the ones that refuse to quietly lose their youth.