“Being young and having no job remains stubbornly common. Wages for young people fortunate enough to get a job have gone down. Inflation-adjusted wages for young high school graduates were 11 percent higher in 2000 than they were more than a decade later, and inflation-adjusted wages of young college graduates (four years only) have fallen by more than 5 percent. Unemployment rates for young college graduates have been running for years now in the neighborhood of 10 percent and underemployment rates near 20 percent. The sorry truth is that a lot of young people are facing diminished job opportunities, even several years after the formal end of the recession in 2009, when the economy began to once again expand after a historic contraction.”
– Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over, 2013
“There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.”
– John Adams, 1826
“The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that can handle money, but fools the generation that has worked and saved money.”
– Adam Smith
“Debt drains away vital resources from economic growth. Fighting a debt crisis with more debt is doomed to failure, yet that is not only what global central banks did during the crisis but long after markets stabilized (though the crisis never truly ended, just slowed). This was an epic policy failure that continues today.”
– Michael Lewitt, The Credit Strategist
I fully intended to end my series on “Angst in America” last week, moving on to portfolio construction and what I call the Great Reset. But as I did my regular reading and research this week and reflected on it, I realized there was one piece missing from this series. That is a discussion of the angst that the Millennial generation and generations that follow are facing. And this is not just a US problem; it’s global.
As most of you know, I am working on a book called The Age of Transformation. It’s about how the world may look in 20 years. I hope to finish it before 2037! Things keep changing, and at an accelerating pace. One of the most important chapters – and the most difficult to write – is on the future of work. I entered into this project with a techno-optimist perspective. New technology, while destroying old jobs, would create new jobs and opportunities.