05.14.12
2012 USA: Youth, get lost
Sometimes if Paul Krugman harps on unemployment and publishes data extracted from the Bureau of Labor Statistics enough, minor things get done. Someone unspecified in Congress either gets anxious about the state of affairs or wishes they had statistics to refute arguments that employment opportunities in this country are dreadful. So the Congressional Research Service is commissioned to write a report.
And the CRS is, generally speaking, unfailingly honest.
This has resulted in two papers, published by Steve Aftergood at the Secrecy blog, on youth employment in this country, and its trend over the last twelve years.
The CRS report “Youth Labor Force Background Trends,” is unremittingly bleak.
From the age of 16-19 I either worked at the Pine Grove Municipal Swimming Pool or managed it. It wasn’t hard to get that job.
However, in the last twelve years, the trend for youth employment has always been downward, except for a slight leveling in the middle of the decade. Since 2009, conditions have become markedly worse.
“Over the past decade, teens and young adults have experienced a precipitous decline in employment …” it reads.
A figure in the report maps youth labor market trends from 1948 to the present.
From 1948 to 2002, the youth labor market was fairly stable, showing slight cyclical ups and downs, perhaps tied to bad economic conditions much less severe than presently, and which eventually passed. In fact, for the age group 20-24, people fresh out of training or college and entering the workforce, there was even a slight upward trend overall.
After 2002, and especially after 2008, things became bad for everyone young, differing in matters of degree — sometimes large, depending on whether you were white, Hispanic or African American. (In that order.)
And the group which has taken the worst shot has been the very young, aged 16-19.
A second report, “Vulnerable Youth: Employment and Training Programs,” gives a quick historical overview of government projects aimed at combating poverty and creating jobs.
Old names like the War on Poverty crop up.
In view of the trends mapped in “Youth Labor Force Trends” one might expect the investments in youth job training in “Vulnerable Youth” to be unremarkable over the same period.
And such is the case.
Tucked away in the back of “Vulnerable Youth” is a table of investments in youth jobs. Except for a slight bump in 2008, national expenditure on such programs has been stagnant, even decreasing slightly, in opposition to labor statistics which show irrefutable and pressing need.
It is another study of one symptom of national decline.
Why someone in Congress requested such reports is a mystery because, of course, nothing will be done.
Also among the latest posts on Secrecy blog is a longish piece on the National Security Agency’s effort to avoid minor embarrassment over an old report on US reconnaissance aircraft flights over the old Soviet Union during the Cold War.
“[The] article does present what appears to be some valuable ‘new’ information including some fine details about [signals intelligence] coverage of the U-2 incident in May 1960,” writes Steve Aftergood of Secrecy blog.
“But the author himself acknowledged that all of this is ancient history.”
In 1960, labor trends were far better than now. People had reason to have hope. However, generally speaking, the data trends now show they can stop wasting time on such pipe-dreaming.
Remember, too, that in 1960 the country’s population was 179 million. Today it is 312 million. So the labor force employment, shown as percentages in the CRS report figures, indirectly indicates much higher raw numbers of people unemployed or underemployed now than in the period marked. Use of percentages, while still a good metric, applies a relative smoothing to the graphical presentation of the material.