New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by epistasis » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 2:26 AM UTC

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #97

epistasis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality. It creates austerity which means the wealthy do just fine while those with less suffer and overpay and transfer what little they do have to the wealthy. Degrowth is a fundamentally unequal program which causes massive inequality and suffering. Only with growth does power lessen for those with the most.

>I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality. People say that right up until someone wants to do something and then it's all "not in my back yard" and "won't somebody think of Alex Jones and his gay frogs" or whatever their line is. I'd say nobody is willing to put their money where their mouth is but it's not money. They'd made more money with growth. It's speculative bullshit "w…

I think the direction goes the other way, people are NIMBYs so they come up with reasons to justify why it's OK to block other people from living close to them.

The idea "oh but a richer person than me benefits" becomes the reason for blocking housing, eliding the fact that a poorer person benefits, the true thing the NIMBYs try to prevent.

At least, that's true in my area. People that already have housing, are comfortable, start to rail against all this economic growth and say that we should block all change to buildings to prevent it.

Anybody who is actually serious about providing more opportunity to those with less realized that we need more housing, where the jobs are. It's the homeowners and well-established that pursue degrowth and austerity.

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

#172

Post by epistasis » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 2:28 AM UTC

xboxnolifes wrote: post #101

epistasis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality. It creates austerity which means the wealthy do just fine while those with less suffer and overpay and transfer what little they do have to the wealthy. Degrowth is a fundamentally unequal program which causes massive inequality and suffering. Only with growth does power lessen for those with the most.

I don't see aversion to growth. I see aversion to filling to pockets of the top 0.1% at the expense of the bottom 90%. A rising tide raising all ships sounds great and all, until you notice the tide seems to only be rising on one side.

I see people who are comfortable and prioritize their needs, and ignore those with less, as if they don't matter and don't affect them. They cover up this disdain for those with less by trying to focus on the 0.1%, but stopping that apartment building doesn't stop the 0.1% from making money, they just invest in something else, so any concern about trying to stop the 0.1% is clearly fake.

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

#173

Post by Retric » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 2:30 AM UTC

Georgelemental wrote: post #164

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…

> defunding universities No, the problem is that the universities are too bloated, not that we need to take even more in taxes from working people to feed the bloat

The bloat was a result of withdrawing government funding / oversight and replacing them with student loans.

Looking like the DMV was no longer accepted as you needed to actually attract students, which means supporting an ever wider array of different things. Daycare, job placement, etc etc individually get tacked on and before you know it administrative overhead has gone wild.

You see similar effects with housing where people buying stuff with major loans are simply less cost conscious. Saving even 1,000$ on a kitchen is a big deal for most people if you need to write a check for it today, split it over 30 years and suddenly it seems largely irrelevant.

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

#174

Post by ckw » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 2:34 AM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #128

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.

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…

From GPT-5.5 via mostly FRED (e.g. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXUTOTALEXPLB1510M):

  Group   Wealth    Income/yr  Spending/yr
  50–95%  ~$75–80T  ~$11–13T   ~$9–11T
  95%+    ~$95–105T ~$7–9T     ~$5–7T
  75–85%  ~$18–22T  ~$2.5–3.0T ~$1.4–1.8T

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

#175

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 2:37 AM UTC

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…

> transfer of wealth from those who don't have it

How can you transfer wealth from people who don't have it?

> saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities

The debt came from rising tuitions due to the government making it too easy to get loans.

> created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people.

???

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

#176

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 2:42 AM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #155

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Building adequate housing also brings down the medium cost, by a lot. At worst, it prevents the median house from rising in price. Prices are set through a combination of supply-demand and cost of providing housing. Almost all increase in housing costs are coming from land price increase, due to land shortage from planning policies that limit land use density. Housing has been made into an investment first, and a hom…

I lost money on the houses I've bought. This is because I factor in the cost of the mortgage, property taxes, real estate commissions, maintenance, insurance, etc.

Houses are lousy investments.

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

#177

Post by roenxi » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 2:45 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #175

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…

> transfer of wealth from those who don't have it How can you transfer wealth from people who don't have it? > saddled college graduates with massive amounts of debt by defunding universities The debt came from rising tuitions due to the government making it too easy to get loans. > created great security for older people by taking away opportunity for younger people. ???

> ???

Worth expanding on these ??? I think - old people have less security if young people have less opportunities. The opportunities of the young is the surplus generation that creates the resources to support free riders (like old people).

In the extreme case, if the young literally don't have any opportunities at all, eventually they're going to have to just let the old people die off horribly because there aren't enough resources for everyone to make it to the end of the year.

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

#178

Post by forgetfreeman » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 2:47 AM UTC

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…

As popular as this narrative is it's all revisionist propaganda intended to distract from the actual culprits. "We" never stopped building houses. What we stopped building is 1k sq ft starter homes and made manufactured housing uneconomical, thereby effectively removing the bottom rung on the ladder of home ownership. These weren't consensus-based decisions made by older generations. They are changes to the real estate landscape that were intentionally engineered by a handful of massive developer firms. Even this ignores that a large part of the rise in housing demand is due to a flood of economic refugees from rural communities that have been gutted by a combination of pro-corporate neoliberal economic policies and the corporatization of the AG industry.

You correctly indicate that all of this is a transfer of wealth to those individuals who are already wealthy. Where you're mistaken is in suggesting this is a generational transfer when it is corporations and by extension the 0.01% of the wealthiest individuals in our society that are the clear beneficiaries.

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

#179

Post by forgetfreeman » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 2:49 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #176

epistasis wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building adequate housing also brings down the medium cost, by a lot. At worst, it prevents the median house from rising in price. Prices are set through a combination of supply-demand and cost of providing housing. Almost all increase in housing costs are coming from land price increase, due to land shortage from planning policies that limit land use density. Housing has been made into an investment first, and a hom…

I lost money on the houses I've bought. This is because I factor in the cost of the mortgage, property taxes, real estate commissions, maintenance, insurance, etc. Houses are lousy investments.

You may be the worst real estate investor I've ever heard of. If housing was actually a lousy investment Blackrock and Berkshire Hathaway wouldn't have real estate holdings and they're both in the residential market in a big way.

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

#180

Post by seanmcdirmid » Sun, Jun 07, 2026, 2:51 AM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #129

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a reverse migration of sorts back to the rust belt and Deep South (well, Georgia and Tennessee at least), and most of that migration is driven by cheaper housing and cheaper cost of living. And this is really how it should be, we will never be able to build past demand here in Seattle without Chinese construction powress, and the unions and residents would never allow for that anyways. However, Toledo has plenty of nice places to live in (my dad was in nuclear power, so I got to live in a lot of these places also). Jobs are kind of moving with the lower COL flow, it’s just too bad the tech companies chickened out on WFH or we could have solved so many problems.