recession

NPR is up with a piece this week suggesting that today's youth, many of whom have never known anything other than an over-saturated jobs market, are "lost."

As we discuss teen unemployment numbers--at last glance, 25 percent of teenagers were jobless--it might be easy to blow it off and assume that parents will take on the added burden. One expert explains why that's a narrow and faulty assumption.

"It's tempting to look at the teen unemployment rate and sort of shrug and assume that ... the only consequence is that maybe the parents are giving [teenagers] money to go out to the movies this summer instead of the kids earning the money themselves," Saltsman says.

But working a summer job as a teen is not just about earning extra spending money. Saltsman says it's also about learning skills so you can become a good worker later in your adult life.

"The risk is that if [teenagers] miss out on [the summer job experience], they become part of this lost generation of teens who never had a chance to get a foothold to take that first step on that career ladder," Saltsman says.

While the lost paychecks are compiling every day, another, often unlooked component of this crisis is the lost opportunity for young people to create and develop a pool of skills for future employment.

As this reality sets in, teens are becoming desperate. There haven't been any riots yet, but young people are going to alarming ends to pay for college and to pay back student loans. One high school student from the District of Columbia describes what he's noticed among his peers:

Jacquan Clark, 16, would have liked a job this summer, but he says the competition among his teenage peers is brutal.

"It's like crabs in a barrel," the Washington, D.C., resident says. "We're trying to all get jobs, but we're also pulling each other back because we want the jobs."

The more I read stories like this, the more I find the notion of cutting services to be ridiculous. What will our government's inaction on behalf of today's young people cost us tomorrow? It's frightening to think about.

Liz Shuler, Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO, has got a great post up on HuffPo. As a national AFL-CIO officer, she's traveled across the country talking to workers and advocating on their behalf. One thing she has found - young people (she specifically mentions those between 18 and 34) are being hit the hardest by the economic downturn. She has some really interesting statistics:

• One in three young workers is worried about being able to find a job--let alone a full-time job with benefits.
• Only 31 percent make enough money to cover their bills and put some aside--that is 22 percentage points worse than it was 10 years ago.
• Nearly half worry about having more debt than they can handle.
• One in three still lives at home with parents.

To me, those are some pretty insane stats. ONE in every THREE young workers still lives at home? Only 31 percent make enough to cover their bills and still save? Wow...The report these statistics are taken from is called Young Workers: A Lost Decade and it's really a good read.

Liz thinks the workers this study covers could very well be the first in recent history to end up worse off than their parents. She says the way things are done now (our health care system, the low-wage workforce, attacks on unions, etc.) is simply not working for young people. She listed five steps she believes need to be taken immediately to improve the situation.

Young people don't trust their employers and believe their job situations could be improved, according to the study. The top three issues they would like Congress and the President to focus on? Creating jobs, ensuring the availability of affordable health care for all, and enhancing public education.

Even though they've been hit hard by the recession, young people are still informed, involved, and for the most part (see the map? on the right? yeah...) progressive. Example: 50% of workers OVER 35 expressed confidence in President Obama's agenda. For those under 35 the number expressing confidence was 62%.

We know the turnout among younger voters was amazing in 2008. We know that they have been more engaged and excited than they have been in years. I think we can carry this momentum forward and I agree wholeheartedly with Liz - "Young people are being hit hard in this jobs crisis. But I believe they provide much of the fuel we need to get out of it."

She was too shy to include it in this morning's Quick Hits, but our intern Rachel Krause hit a career milestone this morning with her first piece published in Campus Progress: Killing the Programs We Need Most.

Rachel's piece is an in-depth look at the relationship between youth violence and economic downturns, and what happens when funding for prevention programs run out in the times of greatest need. It's a great topic with particular relevance to the 80 Million Strong youth jobs summit happening today.

Fantastic job Rachel, and congratulations on the publication. We look forward to reading many more.

The summer months are already known for recording increased levels of violence, but when the damaging effects of a recession are combined with the added freedoms of summer, what appears to result are the perfect breeding grounds for youth violence. Criminologists use numerous factors to explain why youth turn to violence, such as poor family relationships, poor grades in school, economic conditions in the community, or drug, alcohol, and tobacco use; however, experts point out that it is difficult to pin-point the cause of a rise in youth violence to one specific variable.

“Youth violence, specifically homicide, seems to move in waves, and social scientists have not been very good at predicting these waves. The recession is one reason why we should expect youth crime to increase, but many other factors, such as what’s happening with drug markets also matter,” says David Hemmenway, Harvard University professor of health policy and Director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Youth Violence Prevention Center.

[...]

The U.S. Conference of Mayors Workforce Development Council says that there are numerous successful youth violence prevention programs that have been implemented, such as Peacebuilders in Hartford, Building Futures in Seattle, gang prevention in San Diego, and the After School Matters program in Baltimore. But because of the economic recession, many successful youth violence-prevention programs might teeter on the verge of disbandment during a time when they are needed most.

Go read the whole piece.

Emily Bazelon wrote a great article at Slate.com this Thursday, using a handful of emails to paint a picture of how today's twentysomethings are handling the recession. It's not pretty.

"Forgive the inelegant analogy, but it's like I got on the train I was supposed to and dozed off for a bit and now that I've come to I have no idea where the hades we are and I do not recognize any of these stops," writes a woman, who didn't want to give her name (let's call her Shala), who is from Michigan and lives in Brooklyn. She's actually employed—she graduated from college in 2007 and got a low-paying job for a nonprofit that does digital services for libraries and museums...

It's looking ahead that is the grim part. I was prepared to worry about choosing a home in a subdivision or the city, how I would invest for retirement and travel, how my siblings and I would split our parents' properties when they retire or pass away. But now I do not know if I will have much choice about where I live, retirement seems as far away and unreal as my own mortality, and I don't even know how solvent my parents are—I just hope they can live out their days without going into (much) debt.

[...]

Since twentysomethings are often accused of whining, let me say that the e-mails in my inbox don't do that. They are about scrambling to make sense of changed, and reduced, expectations and are not filled with self-pity, or at least not of the maudlin, unjustified sort. Generation Y has a pretty good argument for being the worst off right now. They may not have kids and significant family responsibilities and bills yet. But along with their school debt, they havea lot of loss to contend with as they peer forward into the uncertainty ahead.

Those fortunate enough are able to recalibrate their lives on the fly. Coming out of college and can't find a job? Apply to grad school, take shelter from the storm, and wait and come out when the sun makes another appearance.

But there are many, like Jennifer, who simply can't move forward in life because of the current circumstances.

"...Still, this is the time in our lives when we're supposed to be making a future for ourselves, yet our seemingly good salaries don't get us anywhere. In 10 years, when I'm 39 and my husband is 40, we'll be in exactly the same place we are today—living in a starter condo … with no children of our own."

Check out the whole article.

The New York Times' Week in Review had an interesting article this weekend that tried to predict the impact that Depression 2.0 would have on younger Millennials and those who follow them on the generational ladder: Generation OMG. The crux of the piece centers around one question: will today's youth become more like the Greatest Generation, which rose out of depression into history, or the Silent Generation that followed, practical bureaucrats who lived much safer, buttoned-up existences?

IN 1951, Time magazine set out to paint a portrait of the nation’s youth, those born into the Great Depression. It doomed them as the Silent Generation, and a generally drab lot: cautious and resigned, uninterested in striking out in new directions or shaping the great issues of the day — the outwardly efficient types whose inner agonies the novel “Revolutionary Road” would dissect a decade later.

[...]

So what of the youth shaped by what some are already calling the Great Recession? Will a publication looking back from 2030 damn them with such faint praise? Will they marry younger, be satisfied with stable but less exciting jobs? Will their children mock them for reusing tea bags and counting pennies as if this paycheck were the last? At the very least, they will reckon with tremendous instability, just as their Depression forebears did.

“The ’30s challenged the whole idea of the American dream, the idea of open economic possibilities,” said Morris Dickstein, an English professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, whose cultural history of the Depression will be published in September. “The version you get of that today is the loss of confidence on the part of both parent and children that life in the next generation will inevitably be better.”

Some are predicting (and I think Craig's piece yesterday on the rise in environmental studies majors is reflective of this) that many young people will go into service and look to create new institutions and structures to replace those that are failing us in the current political and economic environment.

Surveys have shown young people becoming more civic-minded in the last four years, and those who study them suggest this will increase, if only because the jobs will be in creating the public institutions and infrastructure of a new economic order.

And with the assumptions of the past decade now popped, the older among the recession youth might feel bolder striking out in more creative directions.

Typically, applications to medical and law schools go up in a downturn, as young people look for safe haven. Applications to the Peace Corps and Teach for America, meanwhile, are up, as are those to some divinity schools and public policy programs.

Professor Dickstein notes that the 1930s, too, were freeing for a particular kind of young adult. There was no art market to speak of, so artists felt less constrained by commercial expectations. The thinkers who would go on to be the public intellectuals of their day, people like Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, did not seek the traditional path of a doctorate because they knew there were no academic jobs (though in some cases, this was as much because they were Jewish as because of the economy).

Others say that - particularly younger Millennials not yet out of their parents house - could become an echo of the Silent Generation, dutifully staffing and diligently running the institutions put in place by their older siblings.

Today’s youngest children — the recession babies — are being raised in the same kind of protective bubble as the Depression babies. (When Mr. Howe’s Web site did a contest to name this next generation a few years ago, the winner was “the homelanders,” as in security). They stroll in sidewalk versions of sport utility vehicles, learn to swim in U.V. protective full-body suits.

So while today’s high school and college students will be the ones creating the new public agencies and Internet infrastructures, Mr. Howe predicts, those who follow “will come of age wanting to participate in a system they trust and take for granted” — the next Silent Generation.

Regardless of their age, members of the recession generation will most likely be shaped by a return to Things That Matter, a re-definition of values.

In today's participatory cultural and political environments, I find it hard to believe that those who follow the Millennials would become a rehashed, 21st C version of the Silent Generation, but only time will tell. I think the more interesting question would be not so much how they are alike to the Silent Generation, but rather, what does the Gray Flannel Suit/Organization Man even look like in a hybrid economy?

I was offline the last 5 days and I'm now attempting the sisyphean task of going through my email and google reader to get caught up on all that happened. If I owe you a response to an email, please be patient. In the meantime, here's something that will likely give you more perspective on the economic crisis. Click for a larger view.