Sunday, September 9, 2012

College Grads Dropping Out of the Labor Force


Labor force participation in the United States has been dropping steadily since 2000.  Often times this is dismissed as a blue collar phenomena--factory jobs disappearing with nothing to take their place.  Wrong!  Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that labor force participation has been declining steadily for college degree holders as well (via Zero Hedge  ).  Indeed, there is little difference in LFP between high school (red series) and college graduates (blue series).

VDH On the Terrifying New Normal


Victor Davis Hanson has a brilliant (as usual) piece on the struggles facing young people in America today. 

Unemployment rates of those 16-24 are now officially over 50%. Even the cohort between 16 and 29 suffers from 45% unemployment. In short, in four years we have become Europeanized: young people with no jobs who are living at home and putting off marriage and child raising — a “lost” generation in “limbo,” etc. etc. They may have a car, borrow their parents’ nicer car for special occasions, watch their parents’ big screen TV, and have pocket change for a cell phone and laptop by enjoying free rent, food, and laundry, but beneath that thinning technological veneer there is really little hope that they will ever be able to maintain that lifestyle on their own in this present day and age. Meanwhile, just like some Middle East tribal society, “contacts,” “networking,” and “pull” are the new gospel, as parents rely on quid pro quos to offer their indebted, unemployed (and aging) children some sort of inside one-upmanship in the cutthroat job market.
 
This is the part that really hurts:

But these days, the game has changed somewhat — or rather been downscaled: the PhD is not being hired for anything other than part-time teaching; the JD is reduced to the law library gofer; the freshly minted MD is the equivalent of a salaried, high-paid nurse; the credentialed high-school teacher is subbing; the engineer is a draftsman; the carpenter is cobbling together home repair mini-jobs. The new plum job? Landing one of those federal or state regulatorships, inspectorships, or clerkships, which are paid for with borrowed money, produce little, and grow as those they audit and fine shrink.
 
Read the whole thing.  

Romney Ryan Polling Well With Young People


Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are making headway in wooing young voters to the GOP.  A Zogby Poll finds that Romney now has over 40 percent of the vote among voters under the age of 30:

For the first time since he began running for president, Republican Mitt Romney has the support of over 40 percent of America's youth vote, a troubling sign for President Obama who built his 2008 victory with the overwhelming support of younger, idealistic voters.
Pollster John Zogby of JZ Analytics told Secrets Tuesday that Romney received 41 percent in his weekend poll of 1,117 likely voters, for the first time crossing the 40 percent mark. What's more, he said that Romney is the only Republican of those who competed in the primaries to score so high among 18-29 year olds.
The Zogby poll is not an anomaly.  According to a poll by CIRCLE Romney was already doing much better than McCain among young voters even before the addition of Paul Ryan to the ticket.


Peter Levine, the director of CIRCLE -- a nonpartisan group that conducts research on young Americans’ political participation -- said that Romney clearly has improved over McCain’s standing with young voters but that the Arizona senator’s campaign set a low benchmark at a time when Republican youths were particularly unengaged.
“I don’t believe the fact that Ryan is relatively young himself has that much of an appeal,” Levine said. “There’s a tendency to think young people are just into superficiality, but I tend to find they vote based on their policy views.”
In a nationwide poll conducted online and released weeks before the addition of Ryan to the GOP ticket, CIRCLE found that Obama was leading Romney by a 55 percent to 42 percent margin among 18-to-29-year-old voters.