I was looking over some economic stats on young Americans, AKA “millennials,” and they look awful. Much is made of the tendency of young Americans to still be living at home with their parents (40% of young men), but I don’t see that as the biggest problem. It’s more a symptom of the underlying disease.

The real bad news is in the employment numbers. Of young Americans from ages 18-29, only 43% are employed full time, and this is despite dropping marriage and fertility rates. Although my employment record was on and off until I was in my early 20s, after that I never went for more than a couple months or so without a job until the recession. Jobs were pretty easy to find. Since then, something has changed fundamentally in the economy and the way people are hired. It used to be that you could walk right in wherever there was a “help wanted” sign and get a job on the spot. I don’t see those signs much these days, and the employment process has become extraordinarily tedious and convoluted. You have to present an impeccable resume, go through credit checks and provide references to drive a truck these days. Forget about getting an office job without an embellished resume and a college degree (which less than 20% of millennials have).

Businesses have gone from hiring healthy young people to trying their best to keep them out. I sometimes hear grumbling about age discrimination from older workers, but I think these people are complaining a bit too much. Look at the stats and it’s pretty clear that it isn’t the old who are being passed over, but the young.

This is going to be an enormous problem, because low earnings in youth tends to mean low earnings later in life. The poverty of America’s younger generation all but guarantees that there won’t be enough of an economy to support the socialist programs that are keeping the US from falling apart at the seams. Given the size of the US, there will be no easy fix. Immigration – even the selective kind that allows only wealthy immigrants – will not do the trick, and may exacerbate the problem even more than it already has.

Some say this means that people won’t be able to retire at 65, but this is already part of the problem. Older workers are keeping jobs that should be open to people in their 20s or 30s. In fact, labor force participation has grown only for men older than 55, and women over 45.

Consider that the peak baby boom years were in the mid 50s, after which the boom started to tail off in the early 60s. These peak boomers will be hitting retirement age en masse by 2020, and for most of the 2020s millions will retire every year. The loss of income that represents simply cannot be made up given millennials’ prospects. Entire sectors of the economy will collapse, and health care expenses for aging boomers will be a crippling social cost.

Of course, nobody really knows what the fallout from all this will be, but I think we can make a few predictions:

  • The real-estate market will tank, badly.
  • Immigration will be restricted as the reality of paying for millions of unemployable single mothers with anchor babies hits the budget hard.
  • There will be increasing support for “assisted suicide” to dispose of the inconvenient elderly.
  • Traditional professions such as law and medicine will contract as services are no longer affordable to most Americans.
  • Prison and police budgets will be cut, and crime will rise as a direct result of this. In some places (northern cities), crime will rise significantly; in others (rural midwest), not so much.
  • Education budgets will be hit hard, and we will see, for the first time in a long while, a serious decline in primary school standards, particularly in heavily Hispanic regions, which will become de facto foreign territory. Illiteracy will rise to levels unseen in decades.

I’m sure there’s much more to it, but it really doesn’t look like the good times are going to come back again any time soon.

So what are the implications for men? Although our standard of living will probably continue to decline, our relative status will likely rise. Without public largesse to rely on, women will start to think twice about ejecting husbands. However, I can see women becoming a lot more materialistic. For comfortable middle-aged guys with good jobs, finding a significantly younger girlfriend won’t be too hard. As is the case in much of the world, younger men are going to have to learn how to “share” their girlfriends.

As for the awful family law that’s still on the books, I doubt they’ll repeal it, but I’d imagine that enforcement is going to be a lot less vigorous than it used to be. This cuts both ways, because women who violate court orders will get away with it even more than they do now, but on the other hand men will have a bit more leverage in custody disputes if women know that courts won’t be as strict on them.

All in all, it looks like we’re in for a pretty crappy couple of decades, at the very least. It’s shameful to see what a raw deal young men are getting today compared to their parents, but corruption, selfishness, incompetence and greed are just facts of life.