Those are all turning to dust.
Anne Case quoted in a Washington Post interview describes our times in a nutshell:
“In a previous generation, you had the chance of getting a good job with only a high school degree — a job where you could move up the ladder, where there would be what we call ‘returns to experience’: that as you grew older, your wages would rise.
“A lot of those jobs are gone — jobs with health benefits, jobs with on-the-job training. And without that kind of a job, it’s much harder. Your marriage prospects are much poorer. So you might move in with a woman or with a man, but unlike in Europe, where cohabitation is quite stable, in the U.S. cohabitation is quite fragile.
“So you not only don’t have a job that gives you structure, you also don’t have a relationship that gives you structure. And this is all happening in a point in time where religions that are being chosen also don’t give you much structure.
“So all those things that would be helpful in building a stable life, a middle class life, those are all turning to dust.
“We think that it’s consistent then, in response to that, people take to drink, or people think ‘I don’t want to be a burden on people’ and they kill themselves, or start taking drugs.”
J. Bezos
April 8, 2017
Pretty sure, Mr. Mansfield, the obvious answer is we need more immigration to make me more money, or I mean, solve these problems.
C. Slim
April 12, 2017
Seconded JB.
MC
April 13, 2017
This is related to your post, only further up the income/skill scale.
I live in a state that hit economic and population boom times right as the baby boomers were reaching the beginning of their careers. The boomers who moved here have been more or less running the state (public and private sector) ever since. And now they’re reaching retirement age. I’m expected to replace my boomer boss later this year.
So last week I was sitting at lunch with several co-workers, most of them about 25 years older than I am. And I halfway-jokingly asked them what was going to become of the state when they retired.
The consensus was that it is EXTREMELY difficult to attract highly skilled people to our state anymore. Or if you do attract them, they leave as soon as they get a little bit of experience. At first they characterized this as a lack of loyalty among my generation. After some prodding from me they acknowledged that, accounting for inflation, the pay being offered to my people wasn’t nearly as good as what they got, and the change from defined benefit to defined contribution had gutted the incentives for any one person to stick around for their whole career. That’s to say nothing of the fact that any of us could be let go at any time with little fanfare. There’s no loyalty on either side.
One guy mentioned that it took his daughter 10 months after getting her master’s degree to find a real job. I noted that employers are so exacting about the amount of experience they expect that it is extremely difficult for entry level people to get any start at all, so it’s understandable that after finally getting a little experience they want to hit the job market again.
The talent problem seems a bit paradoxical, because the lousy job market for young people should lead to a surplus of cheaply available talent. The pay for these careers isn’t what it used to be, but it’s a lot better than Starbucks. Where is the disconnect?
I think I may have gotten a flavor of it later that day, speaking with an attorney from a local firm. He’s one of the boomers who moved here and built a successful solo practice. Then his son went to a Top 3 law school, and is now a full partner in the practice. Except…the son lives in NYC. Which is really, really far from here. I don’t know the particulars of the arrangement, but the firm’s website does not indicate any substantial NY business. It sounds like dad wanted to turn his valuable legal practice over to his son, but the son is not willing to come to flyover land to claim his birthright. So he’s working remotely while going to hipster flea markets in Williamsburg.
I guess the picture that I’m seeing is that successful young people are increasingly concentrated in a few fields, and in a few places, in no small part because the social and financial rewards for them to branch out are ever-decreasing. Not only because jobs don’t pay what they used to, but also because if you don’t marry until your late 30s, then the impetus to get a Company Man job is not all that strong.