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Why Only One in Four Teens is Employed
- dublinclontarf 15y agoCorrelation causation?
- Locke1689 15y agoI'm not sure he proposed a causation, but he did show a negative correlation with an increase in minimum wage (which suggests not causation).
- silverbax88 15y agoWe need more of this kind of breakdown from our economic and financial media.
- jbooth 15y agoThis is just some guy with a blog, he's not the media. The media are Very Serious People, and things like empiricism and statistics aren't part of Good Journalism. They have a much more impartial system, where they ask a democrat and a republican, then average the responses.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mey 15y agoGenerally I don't support snark on HN (even when I myself am the one being snarky), but I clicked the upvote reflexively after reading your comment. Edit: to clarify, consider this a use case for voting undo option.
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoAgreed; deleted.
- HockeyBiasDotCo 15y agoSheesh... Research much? This 'some guy with a blog' happens to be very highly thought of in many financial circles. See http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/media-review/ http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/media-review/
- silverbax88 15y agoActually, they don't have an impartial system at all; that's the concept, but not the practice. Journalism isn't just 'we report everything everybody says', true journalism means digging to find out the actual facts and report those, and then possibly include the opinions of those who have a vested interest in interpretation. And saying 'just some guy with a blog' is not an argument. That's just the old trick of 'shoot the messenger'. What, exactly, qualifies someone with a television camera or a printing press as more credible than someone who is writing for a blog? Why would that make any difference as to the whether the content is true or not? It doesn't. When studying journalism in college, you learn that when someone tries to discredit the source of an article rather than attacking the article on merit, then it's a near-certainty that the content in the article is true.
- Locke1689 15y agoJbooth was being facetious.
- chevas 15y agoWould it make sense that unemployment is the fault of the government's institution of minimum wage? Legally I cannot hire a 12 year old to mow my lawn for $3 / hr. Therefore, only the wealthier are hiring 12 year olds and the rest are still playing tons of video games while many, who have zero income, would love to even make $3 hr. I realize this is a microcosm of the larger issue, but the minimum wage is an encroachment of my freedom to hire and jobless youths to make cash.
- icefox 15y agoGiven that old people actually vote (after a little more research to corroborate it) I would put money down that the minimum wage will raise soon. Or spin another way what company could you create that would have minimum wage type jobs that you would trust someone older to do, but not a teenage? edit: spelling
- neuroelectronic 15y agoI think it's generally accepted at this point that the WSJ has become the conservative mouthpiece of Murdoch since it's acqusition in 2007.
- ahi 15y agoThe Wall Street Journal editorial page is, and always has been, garbage. Poorly sourced and poorly argued, whenever I accidentally come across it I always end up in a foul mood. Not that the other papers of record, Washpo and NYT, are all that great either.
- walexander 15y agoWhere are the statistics to suggest that people 55+ are taking all the minimum wage jobs? Why does this author mention "Bush" four times? The blogger is editorializing worse than the WSJ here (not that the WSJ article was much better). Essentially all of the counter points were mentioned in the WSJ article up front, then they focused on minimum wage worsening the effect. I'm not necessarily agreeing with WSJ on this one, but this guy's article is just as meaningless.
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoStatistics and correlation are not meaningless. The criticism of the WSJ may be (probably was) unwarranted, but the rest is not meaningless.
- walexander 15y ago> Statistics and correlation are not meaningless. Granted. However, in a post about how correlation between unemployment and minimum wage is overstated, I feel his defense should be more rigorous than: A) Irrelevantly point out Bush was in office, and B) Simply post another correlating statistics.
- jbooth 15y agoIt was entirely warranted, because they're a newspaper and they were reporting in direct contradiction of the actual facts on this subject, in order to fit a pre-conceived narrative.
- walexander 15y agoDid you actually read the WSJ article, or just the rebuttal to it? The actual article mentions almost everything he does, then focuses on wage increases as worsening the effect. This blogger decides to focus on 55+ employment, which he already wrote about. How is one pre-conceived narrative and the other not?
- jbooth 15y ago
- benjohnson 15y agoState laws frequently call for higher minimum wages than the federal laws. Our Washington State law is above $7 per hour. There's also the paperwork burden: Here in Washington State - it's technically illegal to pay a non-family memeber $20 to mow the lawn without filling out pages of L&I forms and withholding a percentage of the $20 and sending a check to the State.
- georgieporgie 15y ago...it's technically illegal... Why is the burden on the buyer of the services? Isn't it the responsibility of the mower to have incorporated, then pay him/herself and file taxes?
- repiret 15y agoIts the responsibility of the employer to follow employment law, and you can easily end up with the guy you hired to mow your lawn as your employee whether you like it or not. At the federal level, there's enough special treatment for household employers that its not terribly burdensome, but many states make you jump through the same hoops as a small business (hoops that might be reasonable for a small business but can be quite burdensome for a household employer) Also, incorporate? One need not incorporate to do business.
- georgieporgie 15y agoI don't believe your assertion that paying for the service of someone to come around and mow your lawn legally constitutes an employer-employee relationship. One need not incorporate to do business. Indeed, I was trying to be brief. Incorporate, register an LLC or DBA, or simply informally conduct business.
- benjohnson 15y agoOn a federal level, you're right. But here in Washington - if the lawn mower isn't a licensed business and isn't paying L&I insurance and he hurts himself on the job and starts to collect disability, the state will get their pound of flesh out of you as his employer.
- Yzupnick 15y agoI don't think the WSJ is lying to make it's point.The graph can be interpreted differently. Up until 2007 employment seems to be following a fairly regular cycle. In fact right before it seems to be going back up, then there is a sudden drop. That could be what the WSJ is talking about/
- rajpaul 15y agoHas anyone put forward a better theory as to "Why Only One in Four Teens is Employed"?
- Confusion 15y agoI was wondering the same. The question isn't actually answered by either the WSJ article or this blog post. Are high school diplomas and college enrollment up? Or is the same thing happening that is also happening in Spain: massive youth unemployment due to, plain and simply, a lack of jobs?
- Zak 15y agoPossibly related is that we as a society seem to be treating teenagers more as old children and less as young adults in recent years. Such treatment may lead teens to see themselves in the same way and be less likely to want to seek employment without external pressure to do so and may lead parents to seek to limit that sort of pressure.
- dkarl 15y agoTo me it seemed the opposite. Working at a minimum wage job to have a few bucks to spend on pizza or clothes seemed childish. Working a minimum wage job has no connection or relevance to adult life unless you're planning on being poor. It's economically meaningless compared to the money a kid expects to earn after college, so what matters for a teenager's adult life is to get a leg up on college admissions by working on academics or extracurriculars. Now, that attitude may not be accurate. Maybe working at McDonald's or some other typical teenage employment provides valuable experience or some skills that will be relevant to their adult life. However, few if any middle-class parents tell their kids that, because they don't want to encourage them. For kids to get used to working a minimum wage job -- to get a taste of self-sufficiency too early -- to believe that life is possible without college -- these are not things that ambitious middle-class parents and teachers want for their kids. They don't want their kids to see life as a highway with exit ramps and rest stops at various points along the way. They want their kids to see life as a railroad to lucrative professional employment, with any departure from the path resulting in a catastrophic derailment.
- jbooth 15y agoThere's a bunch of lessons inherent in min-wage jobs, "You get stuff done by doing it", "Not showing up to work means you're fired", etc, that apply to all jobs.
- mjdwitt 15y agoWhile I agree with you, I don't believe that the current culture of college admissions agrees. In my (anecdotal) experience, most universities in the US value the kid who volunteered at all the politically correct places, took all the right AP classes and passed their corresponding exams, played varsity high-school sports, and knows how to write formulaic essays with minimal effort. Also, any money that a teenager earns before college only raises the amount that the teen is expected to contribute to their college expenses, effectively lowering their financial aid.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- 7rurl 15y agoI'm pretty sure you are wrong, and the original author is correct. The subject of this sentence is "one teen", so the verb should be singular, so "is" is correct.
- wjy 15y agoIn that sentence, "one" is the subject and "in four teens" is a prepositional phrase. When choosing the verb form, we look at the subject, which is this case is singular. So, "is" is in fact the correct form to use. A more detailed explanation can be found here: http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/prepositionalphrase.htm http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/prepositionalphrase.htm
- jeggers5 15y agoSurely 'teens' is the subject of the sentence? I have literally never heard anybody construct a sentence like that and use 'is'.
- starwed 15y agoWell, consider how the idiom works. It is asking us to consider a representative sample of four teens, and makes a statement about one of them. That's different than if you said "only 25% of teens are employed".
- rgarcia 15y agoWhere is the comparison to the employment ratio of the entire workforce? Without this it is difficult to look at subsets (like 16-19 yrs old, 55+) and draw much of a conclusion. I would guess that population/macro effects probably tell a lot of the story.
- madcaptenor 15y agoThere have been other minimum wage increases, right? Wouldn't it be possible to see if those correspond to other drops in teen employment?
- carsongross 15y agoHistoric 30 year debt bubble collapses are a bitch, and there isn't much useful either side, left or right, has to say about them. It's like arguing whether to turn the wheel left or right after the car has gone off the cliff: it'd be funny if I wasn't in the car. Decimated productive capacity plus easy credit and the associated malinvestment and over-consumption equals charlie foxtrot every time. Sociologically speaking, what I find curious is that so far the young haven't really started shooting back in this generational war. It will get interesting if and when they do.
- alexsb92 15y agoI am still amazed at the fact that the minimum wage was so low. In Ontario, the general minimum wage is $10.25 increased in March 2010 from what used to be $9.50 . The student minimum wage (which applies to students under the age of 18 who work 28 hours a week or less when school is in session or work during a school break or summer holiday) is $9.60 increased from what used to be $8.90.