New Graduates Need Not Apply

Can fate leave them alone for God’s sake

I.

I suspect the younger generations must have committed some unforgivable sin in their past lives. And it’s come to haunt them. A financial recession we still haven’t recovered from, the COVID pandemic that turned their most valuable years into a forced lockdown, no kids, no sex, no love, no friends, a housing crunch that nudges them to stay with their parents, a rampant epidemic of anxiety and depression enabled by an invention they didn’t ask for and can’t escape, the uncertainty of AI that dazes and worries them in equal measure, another Trump term — about which I have no comments — and now it turns out that not only do jobs not pay a subsistence income, but there aren’t any.

Derek Thompson, a sharp journalist known for diagnosing the most urgent modern issues — from anti-socialization to abundance to AI — is the one who might offer us a better hypothesis, because if this bleak outlook is not the misdeed of some otherworldly force, then I’m out of ideas. Let’s see how he answers the big, big question: Why has employment among young university graduates in the US dropped so drastically, to the point that they’re worse off than the average?

I’m going to skim right past the first two causes he proposes — not because they’re unimportant or wrong, but because I have nothing to add. The first is that the culprits are the Great Recession and COVID: what we’re seeing is the continuation of a trend we’ve been watching for…