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NOTE 17. Generation Sloth

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CHAPTER XVII. GENERATION SLOTH. SEPTEMBER 7, 2009.

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It's Labor Day, but there's nothing to celebrate. On July 24th this year, the government raised

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the minimum wage to $7.25, which is another way of saying that unemployment is mandatory

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for anyone who is otherwise willing to work for less. You have no freedom to negotiate

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or lower the price for your service. You are either already valuable at this rate or you

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are out of the game. Here is how it works. I've never been good at shaping pizza dough by hand,

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throwing it up in the air the way those guys do, so it would certainly cost more for any pizza joint

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to hire me at that high rate than I could bring them in revenue. I would be a sure money loser.

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As a result, the government has made it effectively illegal for me to attempt this kind of work.

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This is done to help me, so they say. This predicament is no longer isolated to a

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small sliver of the population that no one cares about, namely people who dabble in second careers,

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such as the pizza example, and the poorest of the poor. Now the problem is culture wide,

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August data show that more than a quarter of teenagers looking for work cannot find employment

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at the existing wage floor. Many have just stopped trying. The teen unemployment rate

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is nearly three times the national rate, and it is four times the rate of skilled and experienced

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in the United States.

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The data have only been kept since 1948, but we can be quite sure that never in U.S. history

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have so many teens been so alienated from gainful employment and work experience.

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These are the years in which young people learn valuable skills and ethics that they

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will carry with them until they die.

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At work, they meet a great variety of people and have to learn to deal cooperatively with

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different temperaments and personalities.

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They learn how to do things they do not really want to do and they also discover the relationship

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between work and reward.

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They gain their first experience with independent use of money, acquiring and spending, and

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how to calibrate the relationship between the two.

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These are skills people draw on forever, they are far more important to their future than

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is the main activity taking up their time, sitting at school desks.

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This portends terrible things for the future of the American workforce, people dumped on

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the labor market after college will be ever more worthless than they are already.

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And when I read that the stimulus package includes funding for job training for teens

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As a way of addressing this problem, I couldn't stop laughing. Government funded job training

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has a long record of being a full employment program for tax-funded job trainers, but otherwise

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amounting to a big nothing. Interestingly, there is a corresponding trend affecting those

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who are getting their first jobs out of college. It turns out that half of college graduates

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under the age of 25 are working in jobs that require no college education at all.

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Think of Starbucks, The Gap, Target and the like.

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Not that there is anything wrong with these jobs, but here's the thing.

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These positions used to be held by young people before they finished college, which is in

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turn devoting itself to remedial education on the basics.

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Do you see what is happening here?

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The minimum wage, subsidized college loans, child work laws and other interventions are

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conspiring to prolong adolescence as long as possible, to the point that these young

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adults are seeing as much as a full decade of life experience pretty well stolen from

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them.

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And there are no signs that this will change once the recession ends.

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After the last recession, youth unemployment never recovered its losses.

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Why are we not seeing the million-teen march on Washington?

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Not everyone understands what is happening or why.

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I doubt that one in one hundred teens would consider that the minimum wage is what is

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keeping them unemployed.

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And the college grads themselves are pretty well befuddled as to why the great promise

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of future riches if they stay in school is not panning out.

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Other than be angry at government, most of these kids are merely cynical and dependent

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on periodic parental bailouts.

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College students themselves lack work experience so they don't have a realistic understanding

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of what the work world requires of them.

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They major in management and imagine that with this fabulous degree, they will possess

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the right to earn big bucks by bossing people around, a degree in communications will get

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get them on Fox News. An urban planning degree will provide the opportunity, nay, the right

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to build cities and highway systems. Then the day of graduation comes, and reality

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hits hard. There is no one who wants what they know, and, in fact, they know very little

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that makes them useful. Their resumes are barren, without a single professional reference

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or anything that is connected to the real world.

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All they really know is how to vegetate in class and socialize with peers on nights and

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weekends.

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For example, I've been personally shocked at the lack of basic software skills that

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college grads have.

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There is hardly any professional position anywhere that doesn't require some facility with software

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and technology.

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Is this not common knowledge?

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I guess not. People are continuing to graduate today with no more technical skills than it

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takes to manage a Facebook page. As for work ethics and the ability to add value to an

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enterprise versus merely serving their own interests, forget it. Generation sloth knows

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nothing about this. It's probably not their fault. Aside from the economic costs, the

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The biggest cost is to the human character. It encourages the worst possible value system

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during the critical years in which character is shaped. Our country is caging people up

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for a quarter of their lives in government holding tanks and then dumping them on a cold

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cruel world for which they are not prepared. It's true that this trend began back in the

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1930s when FDR decided that he could help the unemployment problem by making it illegal

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for Young Teens to Work, unless, of course, they are child actors like Shirley Temple.

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That's like losing weight by rigging the scale to lie to you.

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Ever since, federal law has tightened and tightened to the point that nearly the entire

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teenage population is being barred from the division of labor and otherwise told nothing

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about what it requires to be part of it down the line. I end on an optimistic note, and not

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merely because it is customary. The digital age is providing ever more opportunities for

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people to make their own way in this world, outside the old definition of formalized work.

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The government closes doors. The market, incredibly and fortuitously, keeps opening them.