| Anecdote: I'm a midwesterner and half of my siblings, most of my wife's siblings, and some of my friends' siblings are in their late 20s, have no jobs (or <10 hrs a week), and live with their parents. From the outside, they look nervous / afraid to try to get into the job market or to date people. Men & women, but it leans men. The ones in poorer families stay home all day and play video games, and the richer ones venture out to spend their parent's money at restaurants or on trips but otherwise do the same. Half of them were doing minimum-wage work and left at the start of the pandemic and the other half have never had jobs. I could just be in a local pocket of people like this, but I'm worried about how many people must have fallen off of the wagon and will never get back on. Trying to get a skilled entry-level job after having done literally nothing for 5 years is hard for a lot of reasons. One being the mental hurdle you have to get over: you know you'll face a lot of rejection, you're out of practice, and your work peers will be a lot younger. -------------- Controversial opinion:
The whole thing has burnt me on UBI. I am afraid that the average American doesn't have the discipline to be productive if we introduce too much free income / free state of subsistence. A great counter-argument is "well why does someone have to be productive? why should anyone have to work?". I don't know anything, but I suspect that we get to ask that question because of how dominant/rich the US is, and that is bound to end if we aren't more than competitive against countries that work their asses off. Another counter is something like: exceptional people are responsible for the 10x-1000x outcomes that carry the economy, but those individuals are only the catalyst and do it on the backs of the rest of us. Takes all parts to make the machine work. -------------- Back on topic. Here's some graphs: FRED Graphs: Hours worked by full-time and part-time employees by year:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B4701C0A222NBEA US Pop:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/POPTOTUSA647NWDB Median weekly real earnings:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q Employment-Population Ratio - 25-54 Yrs.:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060 Real gross domestic product per capita
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA
-------- US Employment rate by age 2000-2021:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/217899/us-employment-rat... |
If your local economy is in decline, you see more people demoralized and jobs dry up in a cycle.
I think I read the term “futureless generation” recently and that stuck with me.