The hyper-productive and frequently interesting Joel Kotkin writes at Unherd about the trend across developed nations of young people dropping out of both politics and the workforce. It is even a problem in China and Japan.
Today, an estimated one-third of America’s working-age males are not working.
A recent analysis of Federal Reserve data shows that young Americans with a college degree today earn about as much as their Boomer grandparents without degrees did at the same age. Upwards of 40% of recent college graduates have jobs that don’t require a degree at all. In 2018, half of all college grads made under $30,000 annually, and another recent study suggests that most underemployed graduates remain that way permanently.
This prospect — of governments providing their citizens with unearned lucre to boost consumption — would seem a natural fit for a population that is unmotivated and often lacks useful skills. Rather than working, people can live in subsidised apartments and spend their time feeding their cats, losing themselves in the emerging metaverse, drinking, and smoking pot as they grow old without ever starting a family.
Marxists and social democrats, whatever their flaws, traditionally celebrated work. They did not envision a a stagnant, oligarchic society that would come to resemble the last centuries of the Roman Empire or Qing dynasty China. As author Aaron Renn suggests, societies where income transfers have become a way of life tend to be bad for their members.
We see this new, ugly reality emerging as unemployment rates, employment rates, and birth rates decline. Increasing numbers neither work nor look for work.
To which I’d add, where do all the fentanyl deaths come from? The only place you’d get fentanyl is street drugs. Do they use drugs because they’ve given up, can’t stand their own pointlessness?
I’ve known families where access to funds-earned-by-parent basically destroyed adult children’s lives. It is the phenomenon described above happening within a family, and a horrid example of unintended consequences.
We do healthy, adult, working-age people no favors when we make it possible for them to live without working. People with that much free time and lack of structure get into trouble.
