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Comment by bgun | Hacker News Reader

The actual article does indeed address most if not all of the exact issues you just raised, for example:

Why aren't teens working?... They're being crowded out of the workforce by older Americans, now working past 65 at the highest rates in more than 50 years. Immigrants are competing with teens for jobs... College-bound teens aren't looking for work because the money doesn't go as far as it used to.

Perhaps the headline is asking a "willfully ignorant" question; but the reason is to get you to click through to the article, which does seem to be trying to put forth some theories.

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It also points out that more teens are in school during the summer. I certainly was, and that was many years ago.

Also, I can't resist griping about this:

> The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 4.3 percent in May, the lowest in 16 years, ...

The article later discloses that the labor force participation rate is now about 63%. And it hasn't recovered at all since 2008. It's just plateaued.

Here's an online tool to explore the labor force participation rate over the past several decades: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000

Since 1970, the rate has varied between 60% and 67%. It peaked at around 67% in 1998 and is currently around 63%.

Thanks.

It hovered around 60% until 1970, and then increased, hitting about 67% in 2000. I'm guessing that reflected increasing paid employment of women, at least in part. Since 2000, it's dropped, plateauing at around 66% until 2008, and then plateauing at around 63% since 2012.

With the caveat that for anyone actually looking for a nuanced article, that headline is far more likely to cause them to dismiss it than to click through. But I suppose there will always be other information sources targeting that demographic, with titles along the lines of "Emergent incentive structures for labor participation of middle class teens in labor over-supplied developed economies"[1], or something of the sort.

[1] Entirely fictitious title, was too millennial and lazy to find a proper article studying this ;)

I'm surprised there's no mention of the minimum wage pricing teenagers out of the market.

That's because the buying power of the minimum wage has been getting lower over time, while teenage employment has been going down. It's not the reason teenagers aren't working.

A lot of these arguments about retirees taking minimum wage jobs and all that is simply increased supply of labor which should push wages down. But they can't possibly go down below the minimum wage. Remember, the minimum wage is just the legal requirement that employers prejudice against the least productive members of the work force. If minimum wage is $10/hr but your fair market wage is $5/hr, you're unemployed.

Teenagers don't work summer jobs for spectacular buying power, they usually work for experience. In most modern jobs, however, there's hardly any way an inexperienced part-time teenager can add value quantified at or above minimum wage levels.

Why? It has nothing to do with it.

Minimum wage is the single greatest cause of unemployment on the lower end of the salary/productivity spectrum. If you have $5/hr worth of productivity but minimum wage is $10/hr, then you're unemployed.

Not necessarily. See this Cornell study re the restaurant industry. http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/chrreports/2/

a rhetorical question - very useful for getting one's point across.

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