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New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker

randalolson.com

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Re: New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker

#121

Post by SecretDreams »

azan_ wrote: post #88
throwaway27448 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just our young—that just receives disproportionate attention. The entire country is being actively looted under the guise of "economic growth". Anyway, increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity, but the Ezra Klein dunces aren't ready for that conversation yet.

Isn't basically every decile getting richer (i.e. able to afford more things) thanks to economic growth?

No. It's a k-type curve where the high deciles are getting higher and the lows are getting lower, so to speak.

There is increasingly becoming more of a divide between haves and have nots, and it has a temporal component because of how equity has appreciated over the last decade or so. Both housing and stocks.

People from a decade ago have seen absolutely unsustainable appreciation in their assets while doing nothing. That is putting them at structural advantages against younger generations that will not see those same appreciations. It's like the bus has left without them. No matter how hard and fast they run, someone asleep on the bus will always be ahead of them.

Re: New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker

#122

Post by bluedino »

epistasis wrote: post #58

The story here isn't college grads as much as young people in general. We are eating our young. We stopped building new housing, which turns housing into a transfer of wealth from those who don't have it (the young) to those who have been holding it (the not young). We have eliminated entry level positions, saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities, and created great security fo…

We've spend the last fifty years shipping every job and industry overseas. What did we expect to happen?

Re: New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker

#123

Post by majormajor »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #114
epistasis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason SF seems inaccessible is that the prior generation down zoned and said "no more housing here, we don't want growth." Which worked out well for them but robs young people and immigrants of climbing the same ladder they climbed. Building new clusters of expertise and economic opportunity is extremely hard, nearly impossible, everybody has been trying to replicate the Bay Area's tech success for decades…

The problem (edit: "a problem") is that this down zoning is basically state and federally enforced. Temecula would happily grow but they can't just repeal their laws and say "go for it" because in order to get their citizens tax money back in the form of grant money (with strings of course, because that's how grants work) they have to have these laws because these "we will mandate parking, and then we will create beu…

> Temecula would happily grow but they can't just repeal their laws and say "go for it" because in order to get their citizens tax money back in the form of grant money (with strings of course, because that's how grants work) they have to have these laws because these "we will mandate parking, and then we will create beurocratic hell for anyone who wants to pave anything" in order to check some sort of "municipalities shall implement..." type law.

> And it's not just the clean this or that act, it's every goddamn issue and area of regulation.

> So basically SF not only gets to eat its cake, but it gets to prevent every other city in the state from doing something drastically different from what they're doing.

> And you can run this example in any state, just change the cities. And it happens federally too.

I don't think you can run this example in any state.

Maybe Mansfield, TX; or Waxahachie, TX (both south of the DFW metroplex) would love to grow. And there's not much stopping them regulatory-wise there. Yeah, car infrastructure and parking is necessary, but that's literally true everywhere within a few hundreds of miles, and isn't really restricted at the state level or by geography anywhere in the area, including the places like Frisco or The Colony on the north side of the Metroplex that have grown like crazy in the last 30 years.

But the Metroplex "proper" - which now includes the popular new surrounding cities - has gotten a lot more expensive over the same time frame.

There's a demand aspect that means some places can build into the growth, and others can't. What's the old saw? Location, location, location. There's all the land in the world to grow outwardly in the area, but it doesn't happen uniformly in every direction, and it hasn't prevented rising costs in the popular areas. It's less acute than SF because the raging single-family-zoning NIMBYism isn't accompanied by being landlocked, but the combo of NIMBYism + popularity/demand constraining where new construction happens mean that supply hasn't kept up with demand. And the money you'd save by living somewhere else, for many, doesn't justify giving up the location they want, so those other areas don't have a strong economic case for growth (why invest in a project there instead of a project on the north side?).

(THAT part is universal, and part of why I wonder just how much Temecula would actually want to grow: would growth just look like Riverside or San Bernadino? Folks with means aren't choosing the inland locations first... and unlike in TX, the weather is enormously different.)

Re: New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker

#124

Post by [deleted] »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #98
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #93

I think the article is correct to point out remote work as a big culprit, but for the wrong reasons. The article says "Employers, the Fed argues, are wary of hiring inexperienced people into remote roles, where the on-the-job mentorship that turns a new grad into a productive worker is hard to deliver." And I agree that's a factor, but I really think that what changed in the late teens is that remote software and net…

So what are remaining high-paying white collar jobs which aren't exposed to this type of foreign competition? I'm thinking lawyer, since legal skills aren't as portable across international borders?

[deleted]

Re: New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker

#125

Post by bombcar »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #118
throwaway27448 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just our young—that just receives disproportionate attention. The entire country is being actively looted under the guise of "economic growth". Anyway, increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity, but the Ezra Klein dunces aren't ready for that conversation yet.

The biggest problem that increasing housing supply can solve is the gap between minimum and median apartment price. In places with very constrained housing markets the cheapest slumlord apartments are very expensive (~70-80%) compared to the price of well maintained apartments. Increasing housing supply doesn't do much to the median housing price (since new houses are expensive), but it lets the price of shitty apart…

This is the problem - not that a brand new McMansion is going for 3,000 square and $900k - it's that the 750 crackshack is going for $500k.

Re: New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker

#126

Post by ashdksnndck »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #98
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #93

I think the article is correct to point out remote work as a big culprit, but for the wrong reasons. The article says "Employers, the Fed argues, are wary of hiring inexperienced people into remote roles, where the on-the-job mentorship that turns a new grad into a productive worker is hard to deliver." And I agree that's a factor, but I really think that what changed in the late teens is that remote software and net…

So what are remaining high-paying white collar jobs which aren't exposed to this type of foreign competition? I'm thinking lawyer, since legal skills aren't as portable across international borders?

Forget white collar. Figure out a career that makes use of your hands.

Or make enough money to retire in the next couple years.

Re: New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker

#127

Post by bombcar »

majormajor wrote: post #123
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem (edit: "a problem") is that this down zoning is basically state and federally enforced. Temecula would happily grow but they can't just repeal their laws and say "go for it" because in order to get their citizens tax money back in the form of grant money (with strings of course, because that's how grants work) they have to have these laws because these "we will mandate parking, and then we will create beu…

> Temecula would happily grow but they can't just repeal their laws and say "go for it" because in order to get their citizens tax money back in the form of grant money (with strings of course, because that's how grants work) they have to have these laws because these "we will mandate parking, and then we will create beurocratic hell for anyone who wants to pave anything" in order to check some sort of "municipalitie…

> Maybe Mansfield, TX; or Waxahachie, TX (both south of the DFW metroplex) would love to grow. And there's not much stopping them regulatory-wise there. Yeah, car infrastructure and parking is necessary, but that's literally true everywhere within a few hundreds of miles, and isn't really restricted at the state level or by geography anywhere in the area, including the places like Frisco or The Colony on the north side of the Metroplex that have grown like crazy in the last 30 years.

I still think the solution involves rapid transit (which could be cars maybe) - you need the outlying towns where there is space and room to be directly connected to the economic centers in a way that makes them practical.

Then the area that is low density can grow - connected to the city center but not contributing significantly to vehicle traffic.

Re: New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker

#128

Post by WarmWash »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #67
epistasis wrote: post #58

The story here isn't college grads as much as young people in general. We are eating our young. We stopped building new housing, which turns housing into a transfer of wealth from those who don't have it (the young) to those who have been holding it (the not young). We have eliminated entry level positions, saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities, and created great security fo…

It's not just our young—that just receives disproportionate attention. The entire country is being actively looted under the guise of "economic growth". Anyway, increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity, but the Ezra Klein dunces aren't ready for that conversation yet.

I guess I'll be the one to point out that the richest American demographic is the 50-95%. And the ~75-85% are the actual backbone of the economy, with their relentless spending.

If there is a reckoning, the most pain will be the demographic here on HN, living in the suburbs. Not the billionaires living in the Hamptons or Napa.

The fuel of this fire is white collar high earners. Its also why not much is probably going to change, because these people also vote a lot. It's not billionaires and Black Rock driving up home prices, that's for sure...

Re: New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker

#129

Post by bombcar »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #100
epistasis wrote: post #58

The story here isn't college grads as much as young people in general. We are eating our young. We stopped building new housing, which turns housing into a transfer of wealth from those who don't have it (the young) to those who have been holding it (the not young). We have eliminated entry level positions, saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities, and created great security fo…

We build new housing, but it just isn’t keeping up with demand in those few hot cities where young people want to live. Yes, Toledo and Buffalo (in the USA) have cheap housing to get, but those aren’t where people want to live.

This is a big part of the problem; in the past when you had these situations the "kids" would move to new cities where new activities were happening and build them up (hell, Silicon Valley is basically an example of this).

That seems to have dried up, nobody is building massive employment centers far from the existing major cities.

Re: New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker

#130

Post by ashdksnndck »

Telemakhos wrote: post #75
tamimio wrote: post #50

Now I want to see the males/females ratio in that graph, I bet most of the unemployed are males, which is something weird I noticed where everyone who’s complaining about the job market are men, meanwhile women are hired and sometimes working two jobs on top of that.

You're getting downvoted because people don't like what you say, but NPR had a piece confirming this just this April: https://www.npr.org/2026/04/10/nx-s1-5773327/women-men-jobs-... > Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by me…

> Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men.

This presentation of the stats sounds really misleading to me.

Let’s say there were 10 million quits and 10.369 million hires in that period.

5 million quits and 5.021 million hires among men.

5 million quits and 5.348 million hires among women.

In that case, yes it’s true that employment among women improved more than employment among men. No, it’s not true that an unemployed woman was 17x more likely than a man to find a job.

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