Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

randalolson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 320 posts

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

#221

Post by laughing_man »

SecretDreams wrote: post #121
azan_ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's not true. The highs are getting higher and the lows are getting higher as well.

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

#222

Post by jjav »

paulddraper wrote: post #163
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.

Increasing housing supply will absolutely decrease housing prices. That’s so obvious it’s nearly a truism. Rate of new houses is below the rate of new households, and it’s been that way for years.

> Increasing housing supply will absolutely decrease housing prices.

> That’s so obvious it’s nearly a truism.

And that is why Manhattan, due to having the most housing units per square mile, is one of the cheapest places to live in the US.

Since it's not, it is not a truism that merely increasing the housing supply will decrease prices. It takes more than that.

As long as you have excess people willing and able to buy $1M studios, every new studio will get snapped up. Prices can only begin to drop if you build so many that you exhaust the supply of people willing to pay $1M and the highest bid left is $900K.

Think of it as analogous to bond issuances. Just because the government issues more and more bonds the price won't drop as long as there are buyers to clear the price. Bond price only drops when they run dry of buyers at the higher price and must start accepting lower offers.

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

#223

Post by laughing_man »

epistasis wrote: post #167
bluedino wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is absolutely not the case in any way. The US is the most vibrant and productive economy in the world, the envy of every other country. China is literally trying to climb the economic ladder up to the type of hugely productive, high paying jobs that the US is. And somehow the US got tricked into thinking that the low paying, less productive manufacturing jobs are what we should be climbing down to.

It's true in some very important ways. Manufacturing employment is something like 15% of what it was fifty years ago. We only do manufacturing for things that require a lot of technology and a sophisticated skill set.

But not everyone in society is cut out to manufacture integrated circuits. It used to be that a person on the left half of the IQ bell curve could go out and get a job making brooms, or plumbing fixtures, or toys, or any number of things that are only manufactured in China now.

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

#224

Post by s1artibartfast »

ryeguy_24 wrote: post #131

I keep going back to the debate with myself. Do I give my now-young kids 500K in an ETF in 14 years or do I send them to college? And the debate is not about how they will spend it (I can hold on to it too), it’s about whether to spend the money or just pass on the wealth to them. People have given me tons of reasons why college is good for them - independence, etc etc. I can find a way to give them independence with…

My father offered me a similar deal 25 years ago. I chose college, but itsnt clearly correct. 250k (my offer) would be 2 million today, which is more than my savings from 20 years of work. I would have needed a different career, but that could be better or worse. If I had that and was an electrician for example, I would be far better off

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

#225

Post by laughing_man »

horns4lyfe wrote: post #189
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 haven’t eliminated entry level positions, we decided it was better to import foreign labor than to train up new grads. Because we’re dumb, and in some cases tribal.

That's the opposite of tribal. If we were tribal we wouldn't be importing low skill people from India to fill our entry level positions.

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

#226

Post by laughing_man »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #178
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 esta…

Yes. A lot of this is down to environmental restrictions and building codes. Every rule a good idea in isolation, but taken together they mean you can no longer build an inexpensive house.

I have a builder friend who told me in the SF East Bay he can't make money building houses except for 4000 sq ft luxury homes on tiny lots.

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

#227

Post by WalterBright »

epistasis wrote: post #220
WalterBright wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you factoring in the value of a living space in this calculation, the rent that the house generates? When you live in your own house, it's called "implicit rent" but when you actually rent it out at market rates it's just called "rent." There are a few housing markets where what you say will be true, but it's not true of most of the US by any means.

No, I did not factor in implicit rent, I was looking at from the point of view of it being an investment.

Renting a place out has other costs. Tenant damage, tenants who don't pay rent, tenants who sue you (and landlords always lose), lawyer expenses, time when it sits vacant, vandalism, advertising, having to deal with the tenants, etc.

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

#228

Post by s1artibartfast »

b3ing wrote: post #153
nradov wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Supporting adult children after they've finished education equates to putting family last , not first. Some youths need a forcing function to reach their full potential.

People in other countries don’t do this. Some live at home until they are married

But they probably work while doing so.

There are massive numbers of unemployed college grads in US that would rather be unemployed than take a job they see as beneath them.

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

#229

Post by laughing_man »

ilamont wrote: post #25
Rotdhizon wrote: post #12

This is the easiest niche to pick on but I am mid career for cybersecurity. I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable. Really I'm not sure how new people to tech could even enter the industry, it seems like at the lower levels the entire i…

> I spend a decent amount of time trying to advise people away from this career field for college. So so so so so many people are going to college for cyber not realizing when they graduate, they are in totality unemployable. My spouse knows a recent grad who took this path through an undergraduate program at the University of Maine ( https://www.uma.edu/academics/programs/cybersecurity/cyberse... ). As you said, he…

Big tech companies use their influence to push the "shortage" narrative in the media, because it gives Congress political cover to increase the H-1(b) cap.

I had a tech career spanning from the late '80s until the 2020s, and I read articles in major media outlets about a shortage every single year. In all that time we had a actual, bona fide shortage for about two years in the late '90s.

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

#230

Post by jjav »

paulddraper wrote: post #185
forgetfreeman wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Increasing housing supply will absolutely decrease housing prices." True if it's the government building the houses, otherwise you hit a point where construction margins tank well before market saturation is reached. In practice new housing developments have a tendency to drag local real estate prices up (see also: gentrification).

You’re saying that prices are bounded by construction costs. Sure, as with every other good. But there’s a long way to go between current property prices and raw construction costs.

> But there’s a long way to go between current property prices and raw construction costs.

How much? Searching a bit suggests that net profit margin in housing industry is about 8.7%

Consindering an investor can get ~3.75% in zero risk T-bills without lifting a shovel, that's about an extra 5% net profit to get involved in building housing.

Which isn't nothing, it's a decent profit. But I also wouldn't call extra 5% a huge difference.

Post reply on HN