CHAPTER XVII. GENERATION SLOTH. SEPTEMBER 7, 2009.
It's Labor Day, but there's nothing to celebrate. On July 24th this year, the government raised
the minimum wage to $7.25, which is another way of saying that unemployment is mandatory
for anyone who is otherwise willing to work for less. You have no freedom to negotiate
or lower the price for your service. You are either already valuable at this rate or you
are out of the game. Here is how it works. I've never been good at shaping pizza dough by hand,
throwing it up in the air the way those guys do, so it would certainly cost more for any pizza joint
to hire me at that high rate than I could bring them in revenue. I would be a sure money loser.
As a result, the government has made it effectively illegal for me to attempt this kind of work.
This is done to help me, so they say. This predicament is no longer isolated to a
small sliver of the population that no one cares about, namely people who dabble in second careers,
such as the pizza example, and the poorest of the poor. Now the problem is culture wide,
August data show that more than a quarter of teenagers looking for work cannot find employment
at the existing wage floor. Many have just stopped trying. The teen unemployment rate
is nearly three times the national rate, and it is four times the rate of skilled and experienced
in the United States.
The data have only been kept since 1948, but we can be quite sure that never in U.S. history
have so many teens been so alienated from gainful employment and work experience.
These are the years in which young people learn valuable skills and ethics that they
will carry with them until they die.
At work, they meet a great variety of people and have to learn to deal cooperatively with
different temperaments and personalities.
They learn how to do things they do not really want to do and they also discover the relationship
between work and reward.
They gain their first experience with independent use of money, acquiring and spending, and
how to calibrate the relationship between the two.
These are skills people draw on forever, they are far more important to their future than
is the main activity taking up their time, sitting at school desks.
This portends terrible things for the future of the American workforce, people dumped on
the labor market after college will be ever more worthless than they are already.
And when I read that the stimulus package includes funding for job training for teens
As a way of addressing this problem, I couldn't stop laughing. Government funded job training
has a long record of being a full employment program for tax-funded job trainers, but otherwise
amounting to a big nothing. Interestingly, there is a corresponding trend affecting those
who are getting their first jobs out of college. It turns out that half of college graduates
under the age of 25 are working in jobs that require no college education at all.
Think of Starbucks, The Gap, Target and the like.
Not that there is anything wrong with these jobs, but here's the thing.
These positions used to be held by young people before they finished college, which is in
turn devoting itself to remedial education on the basics.
Do you see what is happening here?
The minimum wage, subsidized college loans, child work laws and other interventions are
conspiring to prolong adolescence as long as possible, to the point that these young
adults are seeing as much as a full decade of life experience pretty well stolen from
them.
And there are no signs that this will change once the recession ends.
After the last recession, youth unemployment never recovered its losses.
Why are we not seeing the million-teen march on Washington?
Not everyone understands what is happening or why.
I doubt that one in one hundred teens would consider that the minimum wage is what is
keeping them unemployed.
And the college grads themselves are pretty well befuddled as to why the great promise
of future riches if they stay in school is not panning out.
Other than be angry at government, most of these kids are merely cynical and dependent
on periodic parental bailouts.
College students themselves lack work experience so they don't have a realistic understanding
of what the work world requires of them.
They major in management and imagine that with this fabulous degree, they will possess
the right to earn big bucks by bossing people around, a degree in communications will get
get them on Fox News. An urban planning degree will provide the opportunity, nay, the right
to build cities and highway systems. Then the day of graduation comes, and reality
hits hard. There is no one who wants what they know, and, in fact, they know very little
that makes them useful. Their resumes are barren, without a single professional reference
or anything that is connected to the real world.
All they really know is how to vegetate in class and socialize with peers on nights and
weekends.
For example, I've been personally shocked at the lack of basic software skills that
college grads have.
There is hardly any professional position anywhere that doesn't require some facility with software
and technology.
Is this not common knowledge?
I guess not. People are continuing to graduate today with no more technical skills than it
takes to manage a Facebook page. As for work ethics and the ability to add value to an
enterprise versus merely serving their own interests, forget it. Generation sloth knows
nothing about this. It's probably not their fault. Aside from the economic costs, the
The biggest cost is to the human character. It encourages the worst possible value system
during the critical years in which character is shaped. Our country is caging people up
for a quarter of their lives in government holding tanks and then dumping them on a cold
cruel world for which they are not prepared. It's true that this trend began back in the
1930s when FDR decided that he could help the unemployment problem by making it illegal
for Young Teens to Work, unless, of course, they are child actors like Shirley Temple.
That's like losing weight by rigging the scale to lie to you.
Ever since, federal law has tightened and tightened to the point that nearly the entire
teenage population is being barred from the division of labor and otherwise told nothing
about what it requires to be part of it down the line. I end on an optimistic note, and not
merely because it is customary. The digital age is providing ever more opportunities for
people to make their own way in this world, outside the old definition of formalized work.
The government closes doors. The market, incredibly and fortuitously, keeps opening them.