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by loki540
3822 days ago
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No, that's not it - of the people 20-24 who "don't have a job and aren't looking for them", the number of people who said it was because they were retired doubled. Other answers were "disabled" and "staying at home". That being said, I don't see how anyone can retire at 20-24 - if it was 30-34 it'd make a lot more sense. . . |
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One of the side effects of moving to a fluid labor market is that you can basically get a job whenever you want. Moreover, you're forced to, and you're forced to stay up-to-date with market conditions so you can get a new job at any time. If you have to make this bargain anyway, who's to say that those jobs need to be contiguous? Why not take a job paying $90K for two years, live as if you had a job paying $60K, and then take a year off to travel?
My wife and I both did variants of this (her: bond trader => Peace Corps, me: financial software => startup => Google => startup), but we took our downtime in socially sanctioned, labeled ways and so don't fit into the "retired" statistics. But what about, say, the friend of mine who interned on a salmon fishing boat, took a job in economic consulting, did a multi-year sex tour of Southeast Asia, and now runs a hedge fund there? Or the friend of mine who runs a profitable SaaS remotely and is now doing Hacker Paradise, traveling the world? Where do they fit into the employment statistics? "Retired" is a lot better descriptor than "disabled" or "staying at home".
The numbers in the BLS report were on the order of 1-2%; I could easily believe that 1-2% of 20-24 year olds are doing gap years, or have software businesses that generate passive income, or have worked for a year or two at a lucrative profession and now saved up enough to travel the world.