Those silly young people

Those silly young people
Nov 7th 2011, 19:37 by R.A. | WASHINGTON
WITH interest growing in Occupy Wall Street and the troubled, underemployed, indebted young, newspaper editors are hitting the streets, tracking down representative individuals and publishing their story. Only, these are the stories they're coming up with:

A few years ago, Joe Therrien, a graduate of the NYC Teaching Fellows program, was working as a full-time drama teacher at a public elementary school in New York City. Frustrated by huge class sizes, sparse resources and a disorganized bureaucracy, he set off to the University of Connecticut to get an MFA in his passion—puppetry. Three years and $35,000 in student loans later, he emerged with degree in hand, and because puppeteers aren’t exactly in high demand…he’s working at his old school as a full-time “substitute”…[earning less than he did before].…Like a lot of the young protesters who have flocked to Occupy Wall Street, Joe had thought that hard work and education would bring, if not class mobility, at least a measure of security…But the past decade of stagnant wages for the 99 percent and million-dollar bonuses for the 1 percent has awakened the kids of the middle class to a national nightmare: the dream that coaxed their parents to meet the demands of work, school, mortgage payments and tuition bills is shattered.
As Alex Tabarrok says, this seems to reflect less poorly on the unfortunate puppeteer than on the editor who thought this sounded like a true hard case. Mr Tabarrok's fellow blogger, Tyler Cowen, seems anxious to read great portent into this genre of stories, however. He links to a similar piece and writes:

She has heavy student debt and does not know how to pay it back; in the meantime she has become an activist against Bank of America’s proposed debit card fee. She doesn’t have a full-time steady job and her story is here.She majored in art and architectural history and spent her summers interning at art museums...I should stress that I am sympathetic with some of her choices (not the tub of beer), and you can read this as reflecting some strengths of American higher education. Still, not all liberal arts students have her organizational and media talents, and this kind of story goes a long way toward explaining the current job market malaise for the young. Even she is having a hard time finding remunerative work and getting on a career track. Furthermore, she doesn’t seem to be striving for that.
Personally, I think this kind of blog post—Mr Cowen's—goes a long way toward explaining the current job market malaise for the young. It is remarkable to me how readily old, successful professionals dismiss the labour-market difficulties of young adults as the product of their poorly-chosen majors and general lack of ambition, and on what flimsy evidence they're prepared to base these views. There are now 3.3m unemployed workers between the ages of 25 and 34. That's more than twice the level in 2007. There are over 2m unemployed college graduates of all ages; nearly three times the level of 2007. There are many millions more that are underemployed—unwillingly working less than full-time or unwillingly working in a job outside their field which pays less than jobs in their field. As far as I know, the distribution of college majors didn't swing dramatically from quantitative fields to art history over the past half decade.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal provides us with a handy interactive graphic examining unemployment rates by major according to the 2010 Census. Coming in toward the top of the list and ahead of "art history and criticism" are the sorts of degrees you'd expect, like those falling into "miscellaneous fine arts", but also "computer administration management and security", "engineering and industrial management", "international business", "electrical and mechanic repairs and technologies", "materials engineering and materials science", "genetics", "neuroscience", "biochemical sciences", and "computer engineering". I bet those graduates are all trying to break into puppetry!

I am sure that many young graduates feel entitled to better work than they've managed to find, and some of them probably chose poorly when it came time to matriculate. But I see little evidence that high unemployment is due to the shiftlessness of youths and far more evidence that high youth unemployment is due to systematic weakness in labour markets associated with a shortfall in aggregate demand.