TOO many people, especially young graduates, are chasing too few jobs. It's no big mystery why. Save on its northern rim, Europe 30 years ago began exporting manufacturing jobs to other parts of the world; today, those countries are building up the high-skill labour Europeans thought we'd keep for ourselves.

Britain has held on to financial services, but the City can't make up for the shortfall in the country.

At a personal level, what should a kid do about this? One answer I've explored with my students at the London School of Economics is emigration. There are in fact plenty of jobs for British graduates in the Far East and in Latin America, where British degrees are in demand. Emigration carries a high personal human cost — loss of connection with family and friends, the risk that life may move on and you may not be able to return — but increasingly, many are willing to take that risk.

A less drastic answer involves dealing with ‘flexible’ labour markets — ‘flexible’ means short-term work with no job security and few prospects for advancement; if the current government in the UK has its way, and employers are able to fire on a whim, labour will become even flexible.

One way my students deal with this is to make unstable day jobs tolerable by night work of a more sustained, personally meaningful kind, like writing a book or doing voluntary service. This, however, is a solution only for highly motivated kids, and it requires a thick psychological hide; daytime stress, insecurity and depression can dislodge the night anchor.

Our masters celebrate the entrepreneur, and for a few of my students the startup is an option so long as they do not fear failure. About 60 per cent of small businesses fail in their first year, and 76 to 80 per cent in three years, principally for lack of capital. I've students of Kant who have set up a cooperative food network.

But this is no long-term recipe for a whole generation. What galls me about the current situation is that a structural problem of capitalism has been dumped into the lives of young people as their personal problem; even though emigration, the night anchor, and the startup can help some, the system remains intact.

There are, however, ways to prevent young graduates from becoming a truly lost generation. The most potent of these solutions is job-sharing. The Dutch have experimented with dividing a full-time job into two or even three parts, with government providing supplemental income support.

The writer is professor of sociology at London School of Economics. — The Guardian, London