... So why is youth employment so bad? There's no pithy quotes to put here, so I'll paraphrase in lieu: a lot of shit happened sequentially that added a great deal of uncertainty which makes...
The economists Adam Ozimek and Nathan Goldschlag recently took a deeper look at the data and found that a significant number of young workers without college degrees had simply given up looking for a job, artificially improving the unemployment rate for young workers without a degree and thereby giving the appearance that recent college graduates were doing uniquely poorly. This is the labor-market equivalent of a school’s worst-performing students simply not showing up on standardized-test day.
Using a different employment measure that includes all working-age adults 25 and younger (except full-time students), Ozimek and Goldschlag found that those without degrees have experienced an even worse decline than their college-educated peers since 2023. “It turns out the labor market for young people—all young people—is even worse than we thought,” Goldschlag told me. “That makes me doubt that this is an AI story.”
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Perhaps the most compelling reason to doubt that AI is to blame for the job market is that workers at the highest risk of AI displacement aren’t seeing the worst outcome. In an August report, Goldschlag and his co-author, Sarah Eckhardt, evaluated five different measurements of which occupations were most exposed to AI-related disruption to see whether any of them correlated with changes to employment outcomes from 2022 to 2025. “No matter how we cut the data,” they concluded, they didn’t “see any meaningful AI impacts in the labor market.” The economist Ernie Tedeschi has shown that since June 2023, unemployment for young workers has increased the most for those in occupations least exposed to AI, such as construction workers and fitness trainers. Most other studies have come to similar conclusions. “I’m very open to the possibility that AI could displace entry-level workers,” Martha Gimbel, the executive director of the Yale Budget Lab and a co-author of one of these analyses, told me. “But we’re just not seeing it show up anywhere in the data.”
So why is youth employment so bad? There's no pithy quotes to put here, so I'll paraphrase in lieu: a lot of shit happened sequentially that added a great deal of uncertainty which makes companies hesitant to hire, especially new employees.
In the US, it went from inflationary fears and rate hikes in 2022-23, to high levels of political uncertainty 2024 with the US elections, to Trump's tariffs in 2025, to invading Iran in 2026. It's not an environment where companies want to invest in new employees, just hunker down with the ones they have.
Add to this the global housing crisis, the climate crisis and the polarization (men vs women, left vs right etc.) in all facets of life, things do become quite bleak. It's hard willing to invest...
Add to this the global housing crisis, the climate crisis and the polarization (men vs women, left vs right etc.) in all facets of life, things do become quite bleak. It's hard willing to invest your time, effort and money into something that doesn't seem all that rewarding. And birth rates declining is a direct result from all of this.
I'm wondering how as a society we can heal from all of the issues you listed, if at all. I hate to be a doomer, but it genuinely feels like too many different things to solve while the amount of...
I'm wondering how as a society we can heal from all of the issues you listed, if at all. I hate to be a doomer, but it genuinely feels like too many different things to solve while the amount of problems grow more intense each day. I suppose the feeling I have is shared across many companies and young people too.
...historically, the answer has always been fresh horizons for a new generation; they never solve the prior generations' problems so much as leave them behind to occupy unburdened new spaces......
...historically, the answer has always been fresh horizons for a new generation; they never solve the prior generations' problems so much as leave them behind to occupy unburdened new spaces...
...i use horizons and spaces metaphorically: the temporary autonomous zone could be physical lands, polities, societies, technologies, arts, markets, wherever novel social intercourse sows a new commerce free of zero-sum rent-seeking, at least for a little while...
...from one perspective, those old problems dies with the old generations, but from another they always evolve to colonise unspoiled spaces until a fresh horizon emerges elsewhere, waves of innovation, exploitation, and atrophy washing across the sea of civilisation...
My company is doing this: hiring principal level employees. It makes no sense to me — get an entry level and train them up on what you need. Way cheaper and gives a way higher return on...
My company is doing this: hiring principal level employees. It makes no sense to me — get an entry level and train them up on what you need. Way cheaper and gives a way higher return on investment. I’ve been yelling at my manager to stop trying to hire senior folks and start hiring entry level.
I've seen this so many times, too. It's even worse with the upper-level management class, who have become completely decoupled from actual work. There's a whole community of creeps who cycle from...
I've seen this so many times, too. It's even worse with the upper-level management class, who have become completely decoupled from actual work. There's a whole community of creeps who cycle from startup to startup, mismanaging the hell out of product, marketing, even engineering groups at the C and VP level. All they have to do is pretend to have vague expertise and clueless startups will give them months or even years of runway. And they of course have no respect for the underlying culture of the company, let alone the product or any hard-learned lessons from the early years.
I see this in a lot of places, not just startups. May the gods save us from mediocre white men. Where I work has also been hiring a lot of director level people and very few actual workers, much...
All they have to do is pretend to have vague expertise and clueless startups will give them months or even years of runway.
I see this in a lot of places, not just startups. May the gods save us from mediocre white men. Where I work has also been hiring a lot of director level people and very few actual workers, much to everyone's bafflement.
...
So why is youth employment so bad? There's no pithy quotes to put here, so I'll paraphrase in lieu: a lot of shit happened sequentially that added a great deal of uncertainty which makes companies hesitant to hire, especially new employees.
In the US, it went from inflationary fears and rate hikes in 2022-23, to high levels of political uncertainty 2024 with the US elections, to Trump's tariffs in 2025, to invading Iran in 2026. It's not an environment where companies want to invest in new employees, just hunker down with the ones they have.
Add to this the global housing crisis, the climate crisis and the polarization (men vs women, left vs right etc.) in all facets of life, things do become quite bleak. It's hard willing to invest your time, effort and money into something that doesn't seem all that rewarding. And birth rates declining is a direct result from all of this.
I'm wondering how as a society we can heal from all of the issues you listed, if at all. I hate to be a doomer, but it genuinely feels like too many different things to solve while the amount of problems grow more intense each day. I suppose the feeling I have is shared across many companies and young people too.
...historically, the answer has always been fresh horizons for a new generation; they never solve the prior generations' problems so much as leave them behind to occupy unburdened new spaces...
...i use horizons and spaces metaphorically: the temporary autonomous zone could be physical lands, polities, societies, technologies, arts, markets, wherever novel social intercourse sows a new commerce free of zero-sum rent-seeking, at least for a little while...
...from one perspective, those old problems dies with the old generations, but from another they always evolve to colonise unspoiled spaces until a fresh horizon emerges elsewhere, waves of innovation, exploitation, and atrophy washing across the sea of civilisation...
My company is doing this: hiring principal level employees. It makes no sense to me — get an entry level and train them up on what you need. Way cheaper and gives a way higher return on investment. I’ve been yelling at my manager to stop trying to hire senior folks and start hiring entry level.
I've seen this so many times, too. It's even worse with the upper-level management class, who have become completely decoupled from actual work. There's a whole community of creeps who cycle from startup to startup, mismanaging the hell out of product, marketing, even engineering groups at the C and VP level. All they have to do is pretend to have vague expertise and clueless startups will give them months or even years of runway. And they of course have no respect for the underlying culture of the company, let alone the product or any hard-learned lessons from the early years.
I see this in a lot of places, not just startups. May the gods save us from mediocre white men. Where I work has also been hiring a lot of director level people and very few actual workers, much to everyone's bafflement.