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Leave saving the world to the men? I don't think so.
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Apt. 11d 
Before looking at the link, I thought, “Off-Track Betting”? I really don’t think that’s the answer to these people’s financial problems.
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Heh. Student loan debt? Nothing an afternoon at the track with a bourbon can’t cure!
I think we have a new advertising slogan, Matt.
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“Play the ponies to pay the Perkins.”
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I don’t think you can generalize here. Sure, the problem with your babysitter may be a failure to adjust to changing circumstances. Working with her can improve her chances of getting a good job (compared to the other applicants.)
But that doesn’t work on a society-wide level. The answer to 9% unemployment isn’t: “Everybody needs a good resume review and interviewing tips! Also, doesn’t everyone’s uncle work for Merck? We should all call him and see if he can get us all an interview.”
I think a big obstacle to solving problems like these is that people tend to see the “big problem” (9% unemployment) as a big version of the “small problem” (I don’t have a job!) and think the solution scales up.
It’s the same thing with the economy. I cringe every time I hear government debt compared to “running up the household credit card” or something like that. They are problems of different types and require solutions of different types.
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Dealing with entitled students is sometimes a pain, but frankly their view of how the world should be works better for me in this case. Poverty in Minnesota is up 29%, I think? Somebody seeing this as undesirable is a good. So they are articulate and maybe even motivated by self-interest, but that arc of progress would be better shifted to a world that’s good for them (us).
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Dan Drezner nailed it. Entitlement plus time to protest plus risk of adverse consequences after college. Welcome to 1967. This time, however, corporate complicity with the government doesn’t bring many defense contractor jobs.
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Laura,
If she follows your advice, you’ll probably need a new sitter. Bummer.
“The answer to 9% unemployment isn’t: “Everybody needs a good resume review and interviewing tips!”
But the answer for a lot of people may be to leave where they are now and go someplace where their services are needed and valued. I heard a radio call-in recently from a truck driver in Saskatchewan who (if I heard him correctly) is making $90k (Canadian, presumably) a year. That’s Canada, but presumably, the lesson to draw from it is that boring, low-unemployment parts of the US with active oil exploration projects would be a good place to start looking.
My grandma is not very forthcoming about her family’s Depression experiences, but you can tell that they were always on the move. She was born in Oklahoma, played basketball in high school in Iowa, went to a little college in Arkansas, and eventually was inspecting radios for Boeing in Washington during WWII. That was the 30s and 40s. We’re a lot more mobile now, as well as a lot richer as a society than we were in the 30s. If the kid can’t find a good job in New Jersey, it’s suicide to stay.
“I cringe every time I hear government debt compared to “running up the household credit card” or something like that. They are problems of different types and require solutions of different types.”
I cringe whenever a liberal pundit muses that just a little bit more inflation would be just what the doctor ordered. I’ve become concerned at how often I’ve heard that particular solution mentioned–it must be very close to conventional wisdom in some elite quarters. I hope the White House isn’t listening to those people, because inflation is a highway to hell for a national economy. It’s not the only one, of course, but it’s a very well-trodden path. Step one: just a little inflation to ease our debts and rev up the economy. Step two: oops! Step three: maybe a little more?
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Another thing–all that Depression mobility was with a family of 8 kids.
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Another thing–if this young couple is to stay in New Jersey, one of the best things that could happen to them is for home prices to fall at least 50% from peak.
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I’l be waiting continue.
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“Their plan was for him to get a fancy pants finance job and for her to be a Stay at Home Mom.”
I seem to know a lot of people with the same plan.
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http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/
doesn’t look like entitlement to me.. I see more sense of entitlement amongst the malefactors of great wealth.
how much student debt do your babysitter and her boyfriend carry, I wonder. Note that even if medical bills drive you into bankruptcy, the student loans can’t be written off – that debt will load you forever.
There are no low-unemployment parts of the US – only the farm states, and there isn’t much hiring going on there..
Yes ND has oil jobs, but it looks like the ghost of Tom Joad to me.. migrant laboring isn’t going to get those student loans paid off and it sure ain’t much of a career path.
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I have started to think of Occupy Wall Street as the 21st-century American version of the French Revolution’s cahiers de doléance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahiers_de_doléances). This time, instead of elected notables with the time and money to travel to Paris to present grievances, it’s the people without money but with time who have taken it on themselves to air a wide variety of grievances on behalf of a suffering nation. Some of whom are kids, some of whom are elderly, and some of whom are middle-aged and unemployed.
And just as with the cahiers de doléances, where concerns ranged from the petty (some peasants were just really tired of their local lord’s game rabbits munching the peasants’ vegetable patches) to the sublime (potential for social mobility, protests against absentee wealthy abbots not establishing charity or alms houses in their local parishes), so too does Occupy Wall Street run the full gamut.
Certainly the Abbé Sièyes and Mirabeau felt entitled… perhaps entitlement offers staying power in pushing for reforms?
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“But the answer for a lot of people may be to leave where they are now and go someplace where their services are needed and valued.”
If you are personally in need of a job, and you don’t have one, you need to do something different. Move, change jobs, search for something new, not wait around for rescue. You need to do those things even if you’re simultaneously advocating for a rescue for people like you.
I don’t see an issue with both believing the system is broken and believing that individual have to do what they can (without harming others) to take care of themselves in it.
Rather than entitlement (whatever that means), I’d say that the issue is with children today (and maybe yesterday, too) is the idea that following a set of rules or rubrics will result i the”A” or success or a job in a world that keeps changing and dealing with chaos and risk is a fact of life.
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Megan McArdle has a riff on Steve Job’s speech that I think is kind of interesting and relevant.
Relevant here, and to academics and the various discussions we’ve had about those topics.
I think my advice is probably similar to MM’s, to follow your dreams, but know what your bottom line is. I try to teach my children to have a low enough bottom line (i.e. no prada hand bags on their needs list) so that they have more flexibility in following their dreams. I fantasize about leaving them enough of an inheritance that their bare minimum bills (food & shelter) will be covered.
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“migrant laboring isn’t going to get those student loans paid off and it sure ain’t much of a career path.”
True, but the kind of job a college graduate might plausibly obtain in a boom area (assistant store manager at Walgreen’s, or some such) looks a lot better on a resume than three years of unemployment.
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A few more thoughts:
1. As we’ve discussed before, the NE can be a misery for moderate income people. Given the same jobs elsewhere in the US (yeah, I know, that’s like “assume a can opener”), this young couple could easily marry, buy a home, and live happily ever after. The student loans would still probably be a problem, but there isn’t the ferocious NE rat race in pursuit of homes in a safe neighborhood with a decent commute and acceptable school districts. In our area of Texas, I think you can get into the hotsy-totsiest suburban school districts with at most the purchase of a $200k house (and from looking at Trulia, there are quite a few for sale in the mid and upper 100s).
Back around 2006-2007, I was in a house hunting frenzy in the DC area, trying to find something just under $400k, metro-accessible and with OK public schools. My husband had just gotten tenure and a raise, but I was getting more financially sophisticated, and it was finally dawning on me that we would be broke on $70k a year and unable to buy a house prudently, a totally ridiculous situation. Meanwhile, in our current city in Texas, the graduate students buy homes (although I wish they wouldn’t) and wives who stay home with babies (at least a bit) and often have two or three kids before they leave town. It’s just a completely different environment for family formation. (When I was pregnant with my second child in DC, I once had to call up the hospital to sign up for some classes. The hospital employee asked my age. “29,” I said. “Oh, a young mommy,” said the hospital employee. Uh, no.)
2. As I have mentioned before, one of the solutions to long-term joblessness is to create a job or jobs. That was my family’s situation during the early 80s. For a while, there wasn’t a lot of traction, but do two or three or four or five things and make money at all of them, and you have a chance of eventually making a real living, which is what eventually happened with my parents.
3. And speaking of the Joads, my grandma and her 7 siblings almost all did very well in the Okie diaspora. One grew up to be a department chair at Chico State, another ran several radio stations, a sister had a big job with the Washington Department of Education and wrote a bunch of school textbooks and the rest mostly just had quiet, ordinary lives. You don’t know where you’re going to end up based on where you start. When I was a kid, I certainly expected my future to involve a lot more manure.
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“True, but the kind of job a college graduate might plausibly obtain in a boom area (assistant store manager at Walgreen’s, or some such) looks a lot better on a resume than three years of unemployment”
Unfortunately, not really, right, for some kinds of jobs? It wouldn’t help in getting a job in academia, or at most law firms, or, I suspect, in “high finance.” It probably wouldn’t help for government jobs.
I think this is part of the problem these kids are facing, having to make decisions in the short term that may in fact affect their long term, especially if their long term was a formerly predictable and rigid pipeline. Now, I don’t know whether 3 years of unemployment is similarly prohibitive to any of those paths (but, I do believe that getting the walmart job won’t make academics/law/finance any more reachable). What they’re facing is figuring out where they can go from the walmart job, and they’re having a tough time letting the old dream go in favor of a new, risky, and unpredictable path.
And I do wonder, how are they surviving, with no income/little income?
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While I agree that some of these kids are pretty clueless, I find that the big movements are always credited to the young. There are a lot of us boomers who support Occupy Wall Street, those of us who’ve worked many years, have college degrees, interviewing skills, and no jobs. 9% unemployment (the figure someone quoted above) isn’t 9% of people are unemployed, it’s 9% of people whose benefits haven’t run out, who are reporting looking for jobs, and who haven’t given up after years of being told that they’re overqualified.
Mobility is also an issue. It’s getting harder and harder to pick up and move, not because we’re attached to things or have it easy, but because it’s harder and harder to pay for transportation then find some sort of really cheap, but safe, housing. I’ve moved cross country for years going to better and better jobs, but now I can’t even consider it in this economy. There have been times I’ve arrived in a new city with less than $200 in my pocket.
Back in the day, there was one comedian (and I forgot his name, his “thing” was shouting obnoxiously) who had this one joke about the suffering and famine in Africa, and he said this “YOU LIVE IN A F*CKING DESERT! GO TO WHERE THE FOOD IS!” Back then we realized that was easier said than done. Now, in our economy? Where do we go?
And… BTW… 9% is a heck of a lot better than where we live, but I know I can’t compete in that market at my age, with a disability, and my degrees.
These kids might be seen as a bunch of whiners, but they’re whining about the right thing. We have enough wealth in this nation that we SHOULD have a right to fair wages, and not be gouged by a few bankers and business owners. We SHOULD be able to afford our own homes (maybe not the huge monstrosities being built these days, but reasonable homes)… and be able to keep them with the pay from the jobs available. We SHOULD be able to pay for our (and our kids’) medical care, afford to keep food on the table, and NOT shoulder the tax burden for the rich. We SHOULD be able to have politicians that represent the needs of majority of the populace, and not the special interests of corporate CEOS who can afford to wield influence on Capitol Hill.
I’m NOT a 20 something, but I AM the 99%
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Most jobs in academia, law, or finance require a graduate degree. And if you’ve been looking for three years, and haven’t found one of the finance jobs that doesn’t require a MBA–those are mostly commission jobs which require excellent sales skills–then you aren’t going to.
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“Most jobs in academia, law, or finance require a graduate degree. And if you’ve been looking for three years, and haven’t found one of the finance jobs that doesn’t require a MBA–those are mostly commission jobs which require excellent sales skills–then you aren’t going to.”
Right, unless you can come up with some sort of resume filler to explain those three years.
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“It’s getting harder and harder to pick up and move, not because we’re attached to things or have it easy, but because it’s harder and harder to pay for transportation then find some sort of really cheap, but safe, housing.”
It’s different being an early 20-something with no kids and little stuff (or little that you wouldn’t mind just leaving on the curb), particularly an early 20-something guy. I think back to when I was that age, and I had almost no stuff at all. When I got married, I literally didn’t own a spoon (although I know–judging from the moving trucks I see–that young people today have more stuff). In my early 20s, I didn’t mind crashing on somebody’s floor in a sleeping bag or sleeping on a sofa, and when I got up in the morning, I didn’t ache all over as I would if I did that today. For me today, moving will be an expensive month-long disaster, and it will be easily a year or two before I totally unpack. 15 years ago, it just meant packing a suitcase and a backpack and mailing a box or two of books to myself. Transportation is similar. As a single gal, I just needed a single seat. As the mother of a family, I need four seats, frequent potty breaks, snacks, entertainment and (in earlier years) car seats.
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“Back in the day, there was one comedian (and I forgot his name, his “thing” was shouting obnoxiously) who had this one joke about the suffering and famine in Africa, and he said this “YOU LIVE IN A F*CKING DESERT! GO TO WHERE THE FOOD IS!””
Sam Kinison.
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If you can camp out in downtown Manhattan for a few weeks, you can certainly move across country. Contrariwise, if it seems harder to move than it did 25 years ago–I have the same problem!–the change is in you, not something that has gone deeply wrong with America. My teenage daughter has no problem going pretty much anywhere, by bus, and knowing someone to stay with when she gets there, due to the worldwide girl electronic network.
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“”The answer to 9% unemployment isn’t: “Everybody needs a good resume review and interviewing tips!””
This is a good point. Entitled is a weird word too. Any one person isn’t entitled to a job but they certainly are entitled to a society that tries to do something about 9% unemployment.
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“Any one person isn’t entitled to a job but they certainly are entitled to a society that tries to do something about 9% unemployment.”
I’d personally like to see some success, rather than trying.
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Okay, but a job in hospital administration requires a masters degree (in a related field) and about a decade of experience. So. That’s not really a helpful suggestion for the short term.
It sounds like the boyfriend does need a different tack, though without knowing what his degree is in and what kinds of jobs he’s been applying for, it’s hard to say what that should be. Health care is supposed to be a growing field, so I checked out Monster’s database: entry-level health care jobs in the state of NJ that require only a bachelors degree. There were four. Two were scams. For one you need a degree in a science field. For the other you need to know Japanese. Does he know Japanese?
I suspect that if you’re not picky (meaning that you’ll do things that are not part of any career path, that you may find distasteful, and if you don’t expect to live on your salary), then eventually you will find a job. But that’s a pretty dismal set of “ifs,” and people are unhappy about it.
The NY Times says there are plenty of onions that need picking in Colorado.
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“Health care is supposed to be a growing field, so I checked out Monster’s database…”
I have a lingering sense of unease about the rush into nursing. Everybody who has hit a patch of bad luck or doesn’t know what to do with themselves is going into nursing (my dad’s remedial community college classes are packed with wannabe nurses). It’s like when everybody was becoming a realtor or a flipper or a mortgage broker. I’m also concerned about what’s going to happen when the Feds start trying to control costs. It’s quite possible that nursing and other medical jobs will 1) become less lucrative and/or 2) will become less available.
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At least locally, Monster isn’t much help in health care around here. The big places only list most positions on their own site and the newspaper (because they are required to I think).
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I think it’s a mistake to assume that young people are all free agents. I’m shocked by the number of my college-age students who have caretaking responsibilites for their parents or grandparents (the kids’ parents work full-time and the students have more flexible schedules). They may love to move for better career prospects but can’t abandon the family. On the flip side, it makes more sense to stay with your tribe/support system if the world is closing in on you. Who is going to spot you rent money in a new town? Now if the whole family moves, like Amy P’s grandmother, that might be viable.
“If you can camp out in downtown Manhattan for a few weeks, you can certainly move across country.” My understanding of some of the key young organizers is that they may personally have some options ahead of them and are actually choosing to spend some time protesting on behalf of those who simply are too poor, sick, or overworked to do it themselves.
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To be a bit flip about it: First all the Nirvana tributes last month and now it sounds a bit like the rehash of the “slacker kids” arguments from when I graduated into the recession of the early ’90s.
The difference to me seems to be that a) they’re not as apathetic; in a way I almost blame reality tv for the idea that their stories have merit and b) they have access to technology that makes organizing and support possible. The ‘net was coming online more accessibly then but I remember looking for public internet access (in Toronto) in 1992 and it was basically Freenet and bumming accounts from people enrolled in universities.
The point about a computer with a web cam and internet access and a Tumblr account not being poverty didn’t entirely impress me; those are base job search tools.
I don’t know if .com is going to save the day this time though (or some equivalent).
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Entitled? No kidding.
For about a year now my company’s been putting out periodic help wanted notifications through the usual channels, not because we’re planning to hire anyone, but because we’re curious what kind of compensation package prospective employees are anticipating.
It’s incredible just how many of the current crop of college grads, with nothing more than a B.A. and some student-job or summer-intern work under their belt, will immediately turn down a job if they’re told there’s no health benefits attached. It’s always the first thing they ask about; we can offer as much as $9.50 an hour and their eyes just glaze over. Christ. Even folks who can’t account for a YEAR OR MORE of their lives, with a resume dead-in-the-water blank since 2009, express no interest in a position once they’re informed it would be benefits-free. You’d think they’d want to work for us just for the opportunity to put a professional-class job into their middling work experience list.
There were some applicants who understood the value of work and experience, and were willing to take a reasonable pay cut for the sake of ending their unemployment–but those folks tended to be older, laid off, ready to begin again, ready to work hard. They were ready to accept practically any money we’d send their way, for the chance at a steady job. (We even kept a few of their resumes on file, as we might need to pull someone in for the rush season a couple months from now.) By contrast, the fresh-out-of-college kids were almost to a person completely uncomprehending of just how weak a bargaining position they were in.
If I can get a professional staff who write well and have experience directly interacting with clients for a couple bucks over the minimum wage–folks who realize how important to their career advancement it is to demonstrate they can hold a steady job, and to get in-field experience and exposure–where on Earth do jobless college grads get off turning their noses up at an offer substantially above what anyone under my management is receiving?
It’s not just entitlement, it’s insanity.
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“On the flip side, it makes more sense to stay with your tribe/support system if the world is closing in on you.”
Right. I wouldn’t stick around in Michigan, though, if I were under 40 and underemployed.
“Who is going to spot you rent money in a new town?”
I wonder how mobility and modern communications interact with this question. High mobility is a distinguishing feature of the modern upper middle class, while very low SES families may cluster together in a very small geographic area (that comes up in Unequal Childhoods). I was reading somewhere somebody pointing out that in case of natural disaster or similar (for instance Katrina), that means that middle class families are more able to draw on out-of-town relatives, while poor extended families might all be in the same distressed situation and unable to help each other. The geography of upper middle class life (and particularly academic life) in some ways resembles an archipelago within the US. When we relocated to a new college in Texas, I suddenly found myself reunited with a second cousin (coincidentally from the Okie side of the family) that I hadn’t seen since we were kids in Washington State, thousands of miles away and a couple decades earlier. I wouldn’t say that either of us leaned that hard on the other, but she was a lot of help to me in adjusting to our new home, and I was able to help her too, in various small ways.
Thanks to modern communications, just about everybody (including poor young people, but probably not all older poor people) has the opportunity to make friends with people in other areas and gather information about living conditions there. Internet friendships have a way of turning into real-life friendships, given shared interests and half a chance.
In some ways, I think this may be an exceptionally good time for relocation, since it is so much easier to do prep work from far away.
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Speaking of migration, I’m not sure exactly what the sequence of events was, but somehow my grandma and two of her sisters all wound up migrating to Washington State out of the Oklahma-Arkansas-Missouri-Iowa corridor where they had grown up. One older married sister moved to WA from the Midwest and then my grandma moved in with her to work at Boeing and got married. I’m not sure when the third sister and her husband arrived on the scene, but the story reminds me a bit of what I’ve heard about chain migration, which is usually talked about as an international phenomenon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_migration
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So, you’re posting ads for jobs that don’t exist in order to figure out exactly how thoroughly you can exploit the workforce and are surprised that workers are unwilling to be exploited (except the most desperate) . Well that kind of entitlement, on the part of the workers is the good kind, the kind that’s the same as self respect. It’s sad that some folks are in such desperate straits that they can’t afford self respect.
And that’s where the politics comes into play.
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I just don’t understand why a company would go through the hassle of advertising a job that doesn’t exist. And then the interviewees get dressed up, hire a babysitter, get nervous, get their hopes up. All for nothing. Wow. And the desperation of the older job hunters. No health benefits. That has to the saddest comment ever.
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You’d think they’d want to work for us just for the opportunity to put a professional-class job into their middling work experience list.
Those types of employers are going to be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. I remember how much of my time they have wasted over the years. The infomercial people have more honest ads.
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To be clear, I’m grateful to most of the people who gave me crappy jobs that paid a couple of bucks over minimum wage. That’s why they offered (not in so many words) and that’s what I needed at the time, so it all worked out. But every ad that mentioned building your work experience or that kind of thing was basically a fraud. Most of them were about “helping the environment” or selling vacuum cleaners.
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Kevin Drum, in case any of you don’t read him:
“Are there some crackpots at the Occupy Wall Street protests who will be gleefully quoted by Fox News? Sure. Are some of the organizers anarchists or socialists or whatnot? Sure. Is it sometimes hard to discern a real set of grievances from the protesters? Sure.
“But so what. Ignore it. Dismiss it. Explain it away. Do whatever strikes your fancy. But don’t let any of this scare you off. We can put up with a bit of mockery if we keep the chart above firmly in front of our faces. Just keep reminding yourself: a mere three years after the financial industry nearly destroyed the planet, Wall Street is bigger and more profitable than ever while a tenth of the rest of us remain mired in unemployment. Even after nearly destroying the planet, virtually nothing has changed. That’s the outrage, not a few folks with funny costumes or wacky slogans. Always keep in mind whose side you’re on.”
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Steve and I have been talking about Sally’s comment all morning. I appreciate your honesty, Sally, about the fact your company is interviewing people to determine how little workers are willing for. I guess a BA buys you a 2 dollars overinimum wage job and no benefits. I wonder if it is illegal to advertise a job that doesn’t exist. Fraud? At least, it is unethical.
I only linked to that OTB piece to play devil’s advocate for a minute. I want to take it down now.
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I wonder if it is illegal to advertise a job that doesn’t exist.
The closest I’ve seen to that is advertising a job that is already filled (usually done to meet a government requirement even though everybody has an internal candidate). I don’t think that is nearly as bad because the applicant could actual get that job (not that I’ve seen that happen) and because the best applicants tend to get hired for the next posting (which I’ve seen happen a half-dozen times).
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Are there some crackpots at the Occupy Wall Street protests who will be gleefully quoted by Fox News? Sure. Are some of the organizers anarchists or socialists or whatnot? Sure. Is it sometimes hard to discern a real set of grievances from the protesters? Sure.
But so what. Ignore it. Dismiss it. Explain it away.
Wait, so we’re not supposed to reject entire social movements because someone can put a few of its craziest signs up on a blog? It’s almost as if you’re telling me the “New Civility” demonization of the Tea Party post-Tucson was merely a way to score some cheap political points off of the slaughter of six people.
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missed it ’cause I don’t do feeds. oh well. comments are interesting at least.
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If you didn’t read the original post, then you don’t know date on which the world ends.
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I’m here by mistake. I started reading and I should tell you that your site is great. You are writing so many interesting things. I disagree with many of them, but it’s OK. I will probably visit your site more often. I would like to use your words on my own blog. Is it possible?
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