The Financial Times has a new piece on a growing social problem in many countries: the fate of young adults who fail to land jobs after college or high school. While it’s hard to get good data on this cohort, there is plenty of evidence of high levels of youth unemployment, not just in Western economies, but China as well, pointing to the risk that these individuals become socially isolated and never become integrated into “normal” life.
This is yet more evidence of the pattern set forth in Karl Polyani’s classic The Great Transformation. Polyani described how the operation of capitalism was destructive to society, and that that process was blunted but not halted or reversed by reforms and regulation.
Here, what we see is both business leaders and governments abandoning their duty to provide for sufficient work in a system where for the considerable majority, selling one’s labor is a condition of survival. Corporations been somewhat stealthily and in recent years, openly hostile to increasing their workforces, more and more depicting headcount shrinkage as a badge of honor. These cuts have been falling hard on entry level workers. We have been pointing since the inception of this site to periodic cries for help on the tech site Slashdot, of fresh computer science grads failing to land jobs and seeking advice. The greybeards confirm that this is a serious issue yet can seldom give guidance as to what to do. Starting in the early 2010s, there were more reports of technology decimating entry level jobs in the law, where scut-level research and drafting were critical to yeomen learning their trade.
We see these practices as destructive even on the level of individual companies. Managers have come to treat their workers as disposable and seem to relish the power that greater employee precarity give them. But disposable workers will not be loyal. In addition, turnover comes at the cost of screening for replacements and training them (they at least have to learn certain procedures and rules). But the boss class might not mind that because that extra effort falls on them, falsely increasing their claims to value.
But even if one can contend that these new norms are good for individual enterprises, they are clearly damaging on a larger societal level. Having more and more young adults become dependents, either of their families or of the state, impedes household formation and child-bearing. Demographic growth is one of the two drivers, with productivity growth, of economic expansion. It is true that slowing/reversing population growth is necessary to have any hope of ending resource depletion, environmental degradation, and species loss. But the manner in which this is happening is to enrich the top wealthy, who are not cutting back on their profligate, destructive lifestyles, offsetting potential planetary benefits.
One of the odd features of this modern immiseration of the young is that the soma of devices may be serving the elites by shunting energy and attention into isolation, when in decades past, at least some of the disaffected young might have taken to the streets or otherwise joined organizations not part of respectable society (including gangs). But a cynic might point out that smartphone addiction not only leads to disengagement but often depression, and medicating the young is another way to milk them without having them become perceived liabilities in the form of pesky workers.
Before turning to the Financial Times story, some snippets confirming the extent of the underlying driver of high levels of youth unemployment. The last official US jobs data in the US, for August 2025, showed that college graduates aged 20 to 24 had an unemployment rate of 9.3%, markedly higher than that of older degree holders (25 to 34 years olds came in at 3.6% jobless). The pattern of high levels of unemployment for new grads has been in play since the pandemic.
Even with a lot of the young sitting on their hands, many employers are instead bringing in foreign labor:
Around one dozen Vermont ski resorts are hiring close to 1,400 J-1 visa workers from overseas this winter.
America's a big country with soaring youth unemployment.
Why not recruit at home? pic.twitter.com/f4FiCBxRwZ
— Barefoot Student (@BarefootStudent) November 12, 2025
And it’s not just the US:
EU #youth #unemployment in September 2025:
🇪🇸25.0%
🇸🇪24.0%
🇷🇴23.5%
🇫🇮21.5%
🇱🇺20.9%
🇪🇪20.6%
🇮🇹20.6%
🇬🇷18.5%
🇫🇷18.3%
🇵🇹18.1%
🇱🇻17.6%
🇨🇾17.2%
🇭🇷16.7%
🇸🇰16.2%
🇱🇹15.2%
🇪🇺14.8%
🇧🇬14.5%
🇭🇺14.4%
🇩🇰13.9%
🇧🇪13.8%
🇵🇱13.0%
🇮🇪12.2%
🇸🇮12.2%
🇦🇹11.9%
🇨🇿10.2%
🇲🇹10.1%
🇳🇱8.8%
🇩🇪6.7%@EU_Eurostat— EU Social 🇪🇺 (@EU_Social) November 5, 2025
Canada's Youth Unemployment Rate significantly understates the Youth employment crisis. This is because the Youth are leaving the workforce.
Now, after importing millions to compete with them for jobs, the Boomer Party of Canada is asking them to hold the bag. Shameful. pic.twitter.com/c3dS7xkweX
— Richard Dias (@RichardDias_CFA) November 5, 2025
Reading the IMF Asia Outlook and youth unemployment is up across the board, especially in South Asia and China. pic.twitter.com/MLP2aQk7kk
— Trinh (@Trinhnomics) October 31, 2025
After China’s youth unemployment rate came in at over 20% in 2023, the government retired its method of calculation and issued a new series in December 2023. Even so, this “new better” approach reported youth unemployment at 18.9% in August, which did improve to a mere 17.7% in September.
Countries that show lower levels of unemployment in the young may be suffering from exits:
Italians still keep moving away from Italy. That’s one reason why youth unemployment improved over the last decade (there are just no young Italians left to be unemployed). Germany remains the top destination. HT @maps_interlude pic.twitter.com/6JUirEX9hv
— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) November 1, 2025
Now to the Financial Times account. Even though this is a UK-centric piece, many of its observations hold true for other nations. It starts with efforts, starting in the UK in the 1990s, to identify NEETs, as in young people Not in Education, Employment or Training. The wee problem is that this cohort would also include stay-at-home moms and so naive data collection would be misleading. Even so:
The concept rightly went on to become a staple of international economic statistics, with research consistently finding that NEETs are at risk of life-long socio-economic scarring, remaining at significantly elevated risk for worklessness and health problems for decades….
The figures are concerning enough, but there are additional factors beneath the surface which mean both that these groups are struggling more than in the past and that reversing the trends might be growing more difficult.
One factor is the deterioration in housing affordability seen in many countries, leading to a growing share of young adults never leaving the parental home, which can diminish the incentives to work.
Another big challenge is the role played by anxiety and other mental health conditions.
In the UK, a large and growing share of socio-economically isolated young adults report suffering from a mental health problem that prevents them from working or seeking work. This, combined with the nuances of Britain’s welfare system, may be one reason the UK’s long-term youth worklessness trend is so steep. Changes in the relative rates of unemployment and disability benefits have led many people to transition over from the former to the latter, and once on health-related benefits many fear they will lose them if they seek to re-enter the workforce.
An additional UK-specific concern is that steep increases to the youth minimum wage and policy changes that increase the cost to businesses hiring low-wage workers are hitting employment rates for young people.
A third point highlighted to me by Louise Murphy, senior economist at the UK’s Resolution Foundation think-tank and a specialist in young adult worklessness, is that this group has been acutely afflicted by the rise in time spent alone as smartphones and other digital technologies have displaced in-person socialising. In the US, young people who are not in work, studying or raising children now spend seven hours per day completely alone, up from five a decade ago.
In the US, where we have stunningly high medical care/insurance costs adding to housing costs as a barrier to independent living, there a cliff effect with Medicaid. Even states with expanded Medicaid typically have a cutoff of 138% of the Federal poverty line. And consider states like Alabama, with a cutoff for singles at a mere $1,014 a month,, or Arkansas at $1,044, or Colorado and Georgia, both at $994. But those are generous compared to Kentucky at $235 and Maryland at $350.
So the relentless march of neoliberalism is now doing serious harm to the young, who have historically been the promise of the future. And fevered tech overlord dreams of further cutting employment levels among the educated have only just started getting going (many argue that the round of big company job cuts under the market-pleasing justification of AI were to a fair degree to unwind over-hiring during Covid). But neoliberalism, enabled by smartphones, has succeeded well beyond Thatcherite dreams of creating atomization and wrecking the sort of social cohesion that in earlier generations might have engendered pushback or mutual help associations, not just from stuck-at-home grads but also the parents still supporting them.
In other words, to quote a curmudgeonly friend, “If you want a happy ending, watch a Disney movie.” Aside from slowing and reversing population growth in high-resource-consuming societies, it’s hard to find one here.
I would contend that young people have not disengaged from work. The economy has simply disengaged from them. The various explanations like AI, imported labor, the old NEET and its dual (In) Education or Training, seek to place the blame on other factors, especially individual agency/moral-failings. But the reality is there are no jobs because western countries are transitioning to poor, underdeveloped places with no industry. No amount of individual go-gettem-ness is going to make job opening appear in a society that is being sold down the river.
And yes, this means China doesn’t have a youth unemployment problem.
But deeper in the article it says
The range is 16-24 years olds and excludes full time students. Western governments would kill for a situation where 80% of non-collage going high scool graduates were employed in their first 5 adult years. Instead they suck their teeth about drug problems and avacado toast.
This is an economy issue, and the result of political policy.
Do not Make Shit Up.
In the US, uemployment among high school grads has never been as high as 20% in the last 20 years except very briefly during Covid. The worst before that was again briefly in the post-crisis period where it only got close to 12%.
I agree with this, in the deeply neoliberal and decaying West, the economy doesn’t really exist to serve society any longer, while China at least seemingly has a government that gives enough of a crap to try and solve the problem. The loathsome crapitalists that run Western societies literally could care less, because they have no sense of loyalty or gratitude to the people of their homelands and their own societies, or really any understanding on why they might want to. Human beings are nothing but fungible units on a spreadsheet to them. An ideology that worships “Shareholder value”, “line must go UP” and “there is no such thing as Society™” will care nothing about discarding an entire generation of young people. In their minds, they can just import Gurdeep to do the job instead, problem solved™.
Medicated with anti-depressants and smartphone apps to keep them in check. But they are growing as a voting block every year. Reckoning will be coming. Don’t expect mercy. (As an older Gen-X I expect to be at the receiving end of that).
Voting alone does not seem to have much impact on what candidates are selected to appear on the ballot.
Older GenX here also and don’t disagree. My hope is we will assume our role for this Fourth Turning by serves as pragmatic managers, gray champions, and institutional reformers who steer through the storm without grand illusions.
Grit it out, fix what’s broken, and hand a stabler world to the next High. At least I hope…
An important finding is how the youth unemployment + disengagement is so widely distributed in the world. This merits very serious analysis and this post is an excellent starting point. Modern economies have a serious blind spot.
That tweet with the flags and percents? That has my attention too. Surprising. I’m also interested in how it varies outside of Western economies.
Plus the tweet by Trinh about young unemployment rising in some Asian countries.
> Here, what we see is both business leaders and governments abandoning their duty to provide for sufficient work in a system where for the considerable majority, selling one’s labor is a condition of survival.
Indeed. And what about the strategic policy consideration: does a consumer economy such as the USA survive if people don’t have the income to be consumers?
I would contend that young Americans have it tougher than most because they are competing against god knows how many foreigners with whatever visas that they have. Those Vermont ski resorts hiring close to 1,400 J-1 visa workers from overseas this winter are a perfect example and there are many ordinary jobs that young Americans can do, and once did do, but are being closed out from. Even Trump is onboard with this idea saying that Americans can’t do those jobs but as someone pointed out, they took housewives in WW2 and taught them how to build modern bombers and tanks so that claim by Trump is false if not an outright lie.
Trump is a tool of his class. He never had a youth unemployment problem because he went to work for Daddy just as his sons now work for him. Our elites have no empathy because they have no experience of other ways of life.
By contrast Polio made FDR a great president and “class traitor” to those who hated him. But he also came along during a much more democratic era. Hollywood used to make fun of rich people.
So it’s not just lack of character at the top. The country has changed and somewhat in a good way since back then racism was much more of a thing.
Some very good points here. But the FDR reference is countered by
our experience with Biden. Great job during the pandemic, but utterly
failed 2nd term. Grant had the same problem.
What on earth are you on about, Biden served one term.
Yes and no. H1 and J1 visas are an abuse of the system, and are mainly used to hire foreigners as indentured servants to undercut white collar Americans. It’s a scam that’s at least 30 years old at this point.
There are also all kinds of mismatches between where the training/advice sends young people (way too many people got trained in IT and Pharmacy – where there’s now a glut), and where there are real shortages (construction, skilled trades and skilled factory work). On top of that a lot of skills have simply been lost as the people who did them retired/died and/or the industry moved on. If the US was to restart shipbuilding on a significant scale – they’d need to bring foreigners in to train people. Same for a lot of electronics manufacturing.
It’s a mess. Fortunately AI… (LOL).
Maryland’s $350 Medicaid monthly income cut-off rate is for those 65 and over who qualify for Medicare. For a single person aged 19-64, the limit is $1,801 per month:
https://checkmedicaid.com/maryland-medicaid-income-limits/
No idea why the cut-off is so low for those on Medicare or all the ramifications, but I know Maryland’s benefits for low-income people tend to be generous, so I checked this out.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s slogan for the state is a worthy one: Leave No One Behind.
Yeah, I know: easy to say. Anyway, Wes Moore will run for his second term next year.
Governor Moore is going to have some problems with his plans because Maryland budget is currently looking at a 1.4 billion US$ shortfall. There are a number of reasons for that, some external like the shutdown and changes coming from the federal government. But a big internal one is the Blueprint for Education based on the Kirwan commissions plans. The Blueprint is controversial in Maryland because there’s little evidence that we know how to spend the money to do any good. Too many captured board of educations that waste money on contracts and webservices which don’t help kids or save money.
But even if you ignore all that, getting to the point in the FT article, Maryland is just as guilty as many other US states in screwing over their youth. For example, the estimated cost of attendance for instate students at UMD is about 30k$ per year. Tuition only is about 12k$ per year. Both amounts are difficult for full time students to come up with unless they take out loans. The awful education loans available to young people have been well documented on NC. Why can’t Maryland make it easier for in-state students to afford college? Why can’t we direct more funds towards trade schools so kids don’t have to go to college if they don’t want to take on that kind of debt?
There’s been a lot of talk about “finding new revenue” in Maryland but our taxes are high enough and we’re still shedding jobs fo Virginia and Delaware. It’s a safe bet that whatever is done in Maryland it won’t help this problem.
To be fair , one of Moore’s signature policies has been a form of youth job corps that provides young people opportunities to serve their communities
A curious feature of this situation is that it coexists with a fear-induced discourse that says there are not enough young people to pay for the pensions of the elderly, therefore we must import young immigrants to Europe (who of course will one day be elderly, but let’s not complicate things.) But if that were so, then you would expect an overheated labour market, and labour shortages especially of young workers. But the opposite is evidently the case, and youth unemployment suggests that there is in fact a surplus of young workers. In fact, the situation is worse than it appears. For decades, successive French governments have encouraged young people to go to university as a way of keeping the unemployment numbers down, irrespective of whether they benefit or not. Many drop out, even if they are still notionally registered as in education. A widely-accepted figure is that 25% of 18-25s are effectively unemployed or only notionally being educated. And yet we should be giving more work visas to young Algerians, because ….
Hola Aureliren
En España con la mayor tasa de desempleo juvenil que veo arriba en la estadística, los sindicatos mayoritarios CCOO y UGT, ambos subvencionados ampliamente por el gobierno, son los principales defensores de la inmigraci
Maria José. Quite I like your commentary but here, as you can see, the conversation is in English. I recommend you to post here in English. Yet, i am going to explain your commentary:
Here Maria José Tormo, in the context of Aurelien’s observations, complains that the main Unions in Spain (CCOO and UGT), which in turn are heavily subsidized by the state, heavily defend immigration.
If you let me add a small correction Maria José i think that yes, these trade unions have in the past favoured migration though i think the position might be somehow changing. The Unions dislike “irregular” migration which goes with “informal or irregular employment” without rights. One fact that Aurelien didn’t mention is that much of the work immigrants are doing is, well, work that natives don’t want to do and not only because wages are depressed by migration but because the tasks aren’t… well… fancy. This probably correlates with the push to university mentioned by Aurelien. This dynamic has been running now for decades and changing it would require a lot of thinking and some imagination.
Yes, there are clearly some structural issues – as you say, on the surface it doesn’t seem to make much sense that we can have what is claimed to be a demographic crisis, while at the same time the young can’t get jobs. A extreme example is South Korea, which has some of the worst demographics in the world, an apparently very healthy economy, yet still has a major problem with youth unemployment. I’ve seen figures that suggest that one underlying issue is that structural changes mean that the creation of jobs is being narrowed down to a high level elite of younger people who are doing exceptionally well (a relative recently told me of her son, with a BSc in Physics, getting his first job on a higher pay than his upper middle management father). One of the articles in the links today on China strongly indicates that the same thing is happening there. Asian education systems in particular tend to focus on cultivating the highest quality students, while leaving the rest to fend for themselves.
Just one point about the figures – youth unemployment figures are notoriously difficult to compare across countries, as even quite minor quirks of the measuring systems can result in some odd distortions. As an example, youth unemployment in Ireland is around 12%, which seems disproportionate given that the overall unemployment figure is 5%, which is considered essentially full employment. The anomaly makes more sense when you realise that students in Ireland who declare themselves looking for part time work can avail of some social welfare benefits – but are then counted among the unemployed. Many also opt for part time courses so they can qualify for benefits. Of course, in other countries it tends to work the other way (as with France), where they try very hard to conceal the real problems.
When I graduated from high school back at the end of the 70s, a number of my classmates sought and obtained union jobs at the paper mills in the nearby towns of Rumford and Berlin. (And yes, their fathers worked there.) I remember debating the merits. The biggest point against this choice was the life choice that went with it. Did I want to fast-track to the house with a white picket fence when there was a whole unexplored world waiting?
When I quit university, there was a robust restaurant industry workforce waiting for me (A safety net!), all family/chef owned, which fed me and provided a living wage in exchange for a reasonable amount of my labor.
How times have changed. Neither of our un-credentialed gen z boys can find employment that will earn them enough to get by. (We are left to pick up the slack.) Those paper mills are for the most part shut down. That tiny college town that supported seven fine dining establishments back in my day has but two today.
Imagine being an undergrad or high school student today. What’s the point of an education when the future is ephemeral to the point of invisibility?
Similar story here. I got a union job in a chemical plant owned by the corporation whose address was Number One Times Square at the time, in the Deep South as a 17-year-old high school graduate. In June 1973 The work was on the Labor Gang, with a stint as a mercury handler (don’t ask), but it taught me as much, perhaps more, than all the formal education I have had, first grade through PhD. The annualized wage in 2025 dollars was $54,000, not including overtime at time-and-a-half (double time on holidays; Christmas was a gift) that would have added 5-10% to the total. The eight months I worked over the two years before the Ford Recession of 1975 killed the job paid my tuition and living expenses, along with a 20-hour per week part time job at $2 per hour.
My friends who stayed put did very well until five of the six large union industrial shops in town had closed by the mid-1990s. One of those shops made the containment structures for nuclear reactors, where those welders and mechanics were very well paid. Since then, many of my friends have struggled, as have their children. That they are MAGA to the core is totally unsurprising, even if my PMC peeps maintain their willful disunderstanding (sic) of the situation.
Several years ago I got into a conversation with a contemporary as we walked nine holes after work one summer afternoon. His personal history was similar to mine. But he railed about the “lazy kids of today” who didn’t want to work. That is, until I reminded him that his job in a local textile mill (previously of New England and now long gone to SE Asia) actually paid more than mine in the chemical plant, and all he had to do was walk into the personnel office (the bane that became HR did not exist yet) as a high school graduate and sign up. The typical high school graduate of today who finds himself or herself in our shoes has the opportunity to go to work in retail, fast food, or a convenience store for less than $10 an hour, with no benefits, defined schedule, or future. We on the other hand were making between $25 and $30 an hour in current dollars, on a regular schedule with full benefits, when gasoline was 38 cents per gallon and gas pumps flipped over at $9.99 (if that was possible for an analog meter; I never saw it happen) instead of $99.99.
There was a TV show in the 1960s, Route 66, which portrayed an America that did exist for a segment of the population during a unique window of time, in which a high school grad could maintain a meaningful and attractive lifestyle (and oh, that convertible!), supported through well paid, readily available temporary work. I imagine young people today would view this show with a mixture of disbelief and envy.
The MAGAs think the Andy Griffin show is a documentary.
Penny shy, pound foolish. A domestic work program similar to the CCC of old would likely be much cheaper and more beneficial overall than whatever we’re spending on military shenanigans and tech subsidies, and would foster the kind of social cohesion that’s disappearing.
My other concern is that these tech moguls, in handing out digital SOMA (and thinking they’re mollifying the populace), may instead be laying the kind of landmines we can’t really fix. Atomizing the youth and stripping them of thoughts of solidarity might well make them rich, but it might be fueling a horrifying growth of nihilism that I can barely wrap my head around.
The TrueAnon podcast had an episode titled 764 101 with journalist Ali Winston that takes a very broad overview of a seemingly growing “movement” of incredibly violent terror and nihilism (with ties to Nazi ideology) that might have found incredibly fertile ground in the masses of discarded youth (it’s deeply disturbing and depressing). TrueAnon and Chapo also both interviewed Daniel Kolitz on his long form piece in Harpers dot org on gooning, which, while not seemingly violent, is the non-violent (except maybe to self) flip side of the nihilism espoused in the former movement.
I don’t think I’m overselling it, but these might be symptoms of growing collapse. And since it’s starting with the young, the implications are vast. Idle minds will be exploited by devils, tech or otherwise. While I don’t necessarily recommend any of the media above, it’s probably incredibly important. I’ve only just begun to grapple with these phenomena, but they scare the shit out of me.
Good bookend to this topic is Alastair Crooke’s latest essay.
In English
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/11/10/western-cross-currents-cultural-populism-vs-deep-architecture/
The ‘geological’ fault line here is that there is not one American (or European) economy, there are two quite separate economies: A financialised cornucopia as one, and structured privation as the other. The two do not meet. The West has invested too heavily in the ’cornucopia’ model to be able to change it at short notice. It would mean turning deep ‘architectural structures’ inside out.
and in Spanish
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/11/11/corrientes-cruzadas-occidentales-populismo-cultural-contra-arquitectura-profunda/
La falla “geológica” aquí es que no existe una sola economía estadounidense (o europea), sino dos economías bien diferenciadas: una cornucopia financiarizada y otra basada en la privación estructurada.
Las dos no se encuentran. Occidente ha invertido demasiado en el modelo de ‘cornucopia’ como para poder cambiarlo a corto plazo. Significaría alterar profundamente las ‘estructuras arquitectónicas’.
How long ago was it that John Edwards talked about “the two Americas”? “Learn to code” kept things afloat for awhile but now AI is even coming for that if nothing else. If some of us argue that we Boomers had it easy it is because we came in at the tail end of a social contract that the “predator state” was out to deep sink. The minimum wage used to be worth a lot more than it is now.
But the Boomers did have to deal with Vietnam as did the country and some might argue that the 60s war was the turning point and LBJ as flawed and blameworthy as our presidents now. It’s we the people versus power corrupts.
And it was specifically Edwards that Obama was trashing with his happy-horsezhit speech about ” One United States of America”.
Kind reminds me of the movie Harry Brown, a pensioner who’s friend is murdered by a drug dealing gang of youngsters that hang around the public flats terrorizing people.
I remember a reviewer saying that he found that movie disturbing in its acceptance of fascism as a crime-fighting solution, since even drug dealers are still people (not to mention actors who have to wear barbed wire around their necks for the sake of drama). Also Michael Caine is the pensioner, so I tend to think of the entire movie as more of a Liam Neeson-style vehicle for him to wreak vengeance.
For me, the height of unreality was Caine saying, “You should have taken her to ’ospital”. The incongruity of that scene, and the idea that Caine could ever be a sad, trodden-down pensioner, still makes me laugh. Still, I thought the movie was extremely well-made, to the point where I wouldn’t watch it again (too effective).
I can speak to the ‘why not recruit at home?’ question regarding the VT ski areas. A couple years ago I was visiting my family in VT and was thinking of going skiing at the little area where I grew up. My cousin told me that all the Peruvian employees’ contracts were up and they were going home the next day and the area was closing for the season, so I couldn’t go skiing even if I wanted to.
This was odd to me for two reasons. Firstly because the little ski area rarely makes any money to begin with so closing it when there’s still a lot of snow didn’t make much financial sense. And second, thirty five years prior, my friends and I used to do these jobs. We’d work on weekends and school holiday breaks, which were the busiest times when they needed more help. My high school class graduated about 120 kids though – these days they are down to around 70. The cost of housing in the area has become astronomical and most people can’t afford to raise kids there any more. So one reason at least that the ski areas don’t recruit locals is because there are a lot fewer locals anywhere near where workers are needed.
This is what unrestrained capitalism has created – a two tired society where the rich who demand more services live in one area and drive up the cost of living, and those who work can’t afford to live close to where the jobs are.
The practice of hiring those from either the Antipodes or South America in ski resorts has been going on for a long time out west, at least 30 years by my reckoning.
Covid put a rather large monkey wrench into things in 2021-22.
In the Wal*Mart in Frisco. Co (handy to 5 different ski resorts) all of the employees-save the cashiers, were all men from Mauritania and had the most amazing lilt to their voice. Hell, it might take you 2 or 3 days to fly to America from there, sheesh.
In Frisco, condos are $500k-$1M, homes are double that, where exactly would you find the local hired help for Wal*Mart?
I still see plenty of regular Joe domestic ski bums working the lifts, they aren’t in it for the money…
In the winter of “82 I worked as a lift rat. Minimum wage plus overtime, free skiing. With zero experience, I was hired on the spot.
My buddy’s youngest is street legal now, and we were talking about getting him to be a ski bum-like mom and dad were @ Steamboat Springs back in the day for a season or 2, not something you’d want to do all your life.
Yours truly was merely a ski bum who tried to ski every day for at least an hour @ Homewood on the west shore of Lake Tahoe, 40 years ago~
I also worked at Vail and Alpine Meadows in the early 90s. There might have been non-USian workers at the time, but they weren’t brought in as part of any labor program – they were just ski bums like everybody else who showed up in town looking for a job that let them ski for cheap.
Side note: if people knew what the average ski area employee were up to during their workday (and the night before), they’d never ski again out of fear for their lives. When I was a lift op, the primo gig was working the top lift shack with the tinted windows. Then you could just take a nap to work through the hangover without anybody noticing.
Quibble. Youth unemployment in China today is not the same as youth unemployment in the West today, and here I am basing my view on stories and even a documentary by CGTN on the issue. [On their Youtube channel, somewhere, going back about a year.]
China has dramatically expanded their university enrollment in just the past decade. Almost literally going from 8 to 80 million concurrent students since the 2000s, and generating 55 million graduates over 2021-2025. This is a huge expansion of the upper end of the worker base, and, surprise surprise, jobs have not kept up. In very basic terms, most of these grads want to be investment bankers or architects, not construction or warehouse workers. In part also because of high societal expectations, i.e. it’s been so hard to get into universities for so long, that you’re “expected” to remain a high achiever after graduation.
And so the job fairs right now are a complete zoo (at least, the ones CGTN showed film of) slash buyer’s market, while at the low end of the worker base (e.g. construction) there might actually be modest shortages, depending on the province. But at least this part of the equation is potentially, maybe, possibly fixable. Though I have no idea what the higher-ups are doing, if anything at all, to actually fix it. On the other hand, if CGTN is running stories about the problem, then someone in Xi’s vicinity must clearly see it as such.
“Polyani described how the operation of capitalism was destructive to society and that that process was blunted but not halted by reforms and regulation.”
Yet it is hard to find economies today whose production systems are entirely planned and lack any private ownership.
On my more reform enthusiastic days, I would argue that as people seem to increasingly earn income from multiple sources simultaneously (such as small-scale forms of self-employment and platform-based work) there appears to be a growing phenomenon of individuals straddling the roles of both workers and capitalists.
Is there any possibility that down the road this contradiction between capital and labor income could be incrementally transcended? Maybe some type of capitalization attempt from the bottom based on a rejuvenation of small bank lending making more credit available to small manufacturing and service businesses.
Having not read Marx myself (or any of the big important economic works), don’t take anything I say as a criticism – I don’t know much about many things.
However, I would say that the increase in small-scale employment, either as a content creator, or side hustle, or whatever cutesy term is popular today speaks more to the increase in precarity versus any real shift towards becoming a bona fide capitalist. These people may call themselves that, and may believe it, but to me they’re still workers through and through.
In the end, they sell whatever they’ve made, or whatever content has been created (their labor), for money. More importantly, they do so on someone else’s platform, to whom they pay some kind of cut. The creators have zero power, and no matter how much they make, they can be unceremoniously launched from the platform with zero recourse.
Despite being the creators of the content consumed (or widget), the real production line is the one they’re on – one tweak of the algorithm, or maybe even a drop in their output, and the unknowable favor of the platform moves on to the new hotness. The creator’s thing, no matter how unique, is just another identical cog in the greater machine.
I don’t know if Marx spoke to this, but power dynamics and platforms are essentially the means of production, and those are owned by the vaunted tech elite.
In the USA at least it seems like many of those disaffected young men are finding purpose and employment with ICE.