This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

Somehow or other, we have to help, nudge or push young people into their first jobs – into the habit of working. We all know that, and there is a string of ideas on what needs to be done. The Tories have just come up with the idea of halving employers’ national insurance contributions for workers aged between 21 and 24.

The Government has for several months had in place a national Youth Guarantee policy, with extra apprenticeships, youth hubs, a youth guarantee gateway, more work and training opportunities, and so on. There’s more to come, with Pat McFadden, the Work and Pensions Secretary, telling the Labour conference that there would be “decisions to make and responsibilities to take” on the benefits system, a signal that the Government was planning to restrict payments to young people who didn’t have jobs.

So lots of things going on. A few days ago, Alan Milburn, the former Labour minister who has been charged with writing a report on how to get young people into work, came up with what is surely a novel idea. It is that the whole idea of getting a job should be introduced to children when they are at primary school.

Primary school? Four or five-year-olds? Well, yes, for as he put it in a BBC interview, “in primary school, it’s........

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