Extraordinary Observations

Penelope Trunk thinks that young people ought to be grateful this Thanksgiving for their immunity to turmoil in the job market:

I know that we have a bad economy, so bad that we have a not-yet-President who is running the country from the Chicago Hilton so that the markets don't implode while Bush gives pardons for cronies. But can we just take a minute for a reality check? It's not really bad for people who are young. It's a part of the world you don't hear much about in mainstream media. Think about it. Most media is in NYC, and you don't make a lot of money as a writer, so most people who are writing in the tri-State area are married to bankers. Yes, this is a huge generalization, but it is a stereotype because it's true. Two neighborhoods—Montclair, NJ, and Park Slope, NY—are the bastions of media elite married to banker elite. And it's a combustible moment there, demonstrated by how we get a lot of reporting about how sad it is for the bankers right now. Who are mostly middle aged. And we get a lot of reporting about how sad it is for older people in the workforce because those are the people getting laid off. The baby boomers love to report about how much discrimination there is against them. And they have huge pulpits to report that from.

Aside from the fact that the media elite is comprised of disconnected writers married to struggling bankers, Trunk extrapolates on three distinct reasons why young people are doing just fine in the current market. I would be inclined to believe her analysis had another article not appeared in the Washington Post last August:

The numbers aren't pretty. Unemployment among 20- to 24-year-olds, the typical post-undergraduate age group, is sharply higher than the overall population. In the second quarter of this year, joblessness among this group reached 9.8 percent, according to the Labor Department. That is up from 7.7 percent last year at this time and 8.1 percent in the second quarter of 2001, about the time the last recession hit. Overall, unemployment rose to 5.7 percent in July from 5.5 percent the previous month, and the economy lost 51,000 payroll jobs.

Aside from the fact that official unemployment numbers are nearly twice as high for young people as they are for the general population, the Post article is full of anecdotes about recent college graduates who literally cannot get a job, examples of career fairs with fewer companies offering fewer jobs, and interviews with recruiters and hiring managers confirming the story behind the numbers.

Who should we believe? They say that you know the economy is in a recession when your neighbor loses her home, and a depression when you lose yours. I suppose the same could be true here. A graduate with a job lined up is probably more likely to believe Penelope Trunk; someone who sends out 60 resumes and gets nowhere is probably more inclined to agree with the Post.