One often reads that the reason younger Americans are having a hard time finding work is that skills and knowledge are more important than ever. However, despite being the most educated generation in US history, employment rates for young people continue to lag far behind those of older workers. Being somewhere in the middle, I have a little perspective on this.
Older workers are not more tech-savvy, they are not more educated, and their skills, in most cases, can be learned relatively quickly by younger workers. However, in comparison to their younger counterparts, they are more connected, more politically powerful, and occupy jobs in which, despite the window dressing, things haven’t changed much in decades. Perhaps most importantly, they are comfortable working and doing business with their peers.
Aside from a few specialized professions, most jobs do not require a particularly high skill level. On the high end we have surgeons and software developers, and on the low end human signs, but there’s an enormous middle ground that includes real estate agents, insurance salesmen, teachers, mechanics, flight attendants and myriad others that require training but not necessarily superior talent. Over the last few decades I’ve watched this middle sector get steadily older and grayer (it’s really obvious if you’ve been flying since the 1980s, for example). In the meanwhile, youth unemployment is chalked up to “lack of skill.” Nonsense. It’s pure demographics.
Sometimes, I wonder whether pushing kids – many of whom do not benefit from it – into higher education hasn’t been a means of warehousing them in an economy that has little use for them.
If you think of the implications, this trend helps explain some of the breakdown in family formation in the US. Delayed employment correlates with delayed family formation, but it does nothing to stop biology, hence the rising illegitimacy rate among the young. It’s only one of several important factors, but over the last decade it has been a growing problem.
