How the Job Market Will Shape the Next Generation

What accounts for such a stark change? After all, as I also noted in an earlier column, the unemployment numbers for college graduates grew only mildly worse. Did the start of a second Donald Trump Presidency stoke despair in these voters, who strongly prefer the Democratic Party? Was it all the stories that they were hearing about artificial intelligence?

No single one of these trends tells us much about how the future will go, but, together, they do show that something unusual is happening to young people, something different from what their parents and grandparents went through. Many people can feel the difference: in 2src2src, according to a Pew study, forty-two percent of Americans thought that today’s youth would be better off financially than their parents. In the spring of 2src24, that number had fallen to twenty-six per cent.

Here’s my read on what has happened in the past five or so years. Although young college graduates still experience relatively low unemployment and make decent wages, they have clear and sound reasons to feel more financially precarious than one might expect. The most obvious and long-standing reason is housing: many young people measure their economic maturity through homeownership, and buying a house is becoming nearly impossible in many major metropolitan areas. The second reason is that entry-level white-collar jobs appear vulnerable to A.I., especially in fields where A.I. is already being used to automate tasks once done by humans. A.I. does not yet account for much job loss, but its arrival has magnified negative sentiments and has helped to create a collective despair, especially among the young and educated.

I ended my previous series, on the future of the university, with a series of predictions, which I hoped would be clarifying, even if many of them ended up being wrong. This time, I have five predictions about what the future will look like for young people and the job market.

A.I. won’t replace all entry-level white-collar jobs, but it will cause an extended period of pain, during which an increasing number of employers, wowed by new advances in technology, decide to quietly stop hiring many recent college graduates. This will accelerate the already widening unemployment gap between young, college-educated people and everyone else. If unemployment for this group goes from, say, five per cent to ten per cent, their confidence in the job market, already rapidly trending downward, will dive toward a true bottom.

What will happen then? Possibly a deepening and widening of populist politics, as both the far right and the far left win over more of the allegedly indolent youth. It seems quite possible that establishment politicians—whatever that means these days—will pivot to the left on key issues, such as military aid to Israel and health care, in an effort to ward off a truly disruptive populist revolt. But we are currently in our sixth year of a Trump Presidency; normalcy certainly is not guaranteed in this country.

A.I. job loss will be extremely uneven across industries. It seems perfectly possible, for example, that law firms will decide that, even though an A.I. bot can do most of the work of a junior associate, it’s in their best interests to charge clients for the time of someone who went to Stanford Law School as opposed to a few million OpenAI tokens.