Remember, a full employment policy lifts all boats....rng

Wow, does this hit home!!! Maybe getting that college degree wasn't such a great idea after all.  But it's all right, what we need is a good economic policy and some people with a little common sense. ----lee

Cory Doctorow at 10:25 PM Wednesday, Jul 7, 2010 

Dismal news about the American "jobless recovery" in yesterday's NYT. I've always thought the phrase "jobless recovery" illustrates the perfectly idiotic cognitive dissonance at play in financial thinking. If the thing you use to measure the health of your economy has gone up, but no one has a job, then surely you are measuring the wrong thing to gauge the health of your nation.

The outlook this time is not so clear. Starved for jobs at adequate pay, the millennials tend to seek refuge in college and in the military and to put off marriage and child-bearing. Those who are working often stay with the jobs they have rather than jump to better paying but less secure ones, as young people seeking advancement normally do. And they are increasingly willing to forgo raises, or to settle for small ones. "They are definitely more risk-averse," said Lisa B. Kahn, an economist at the Yale School of Management, "and more likely to fall behind."

In a recent study, she found that those who graduated from college during the severe early '80s recession earned up to 30 percent less in their first three years than new graduates who landed their first jobs in a strong economy. Even 15 years later, their annual pay was 8 to 10 percent less. 

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