It’s Summer, but Where Are the Teenage Workers? | Hacker News Reader

It’s Summer, but Where Are the Teenage Workers?

nytimes.com

21 pointseplanit8 comments

> “We don’t know to what extent they’re not working because they can’t find a job, or aren’t interested, or are doing other stuff — like going to summer school, traveling, volunteering, doing service learning,”

> What is clear is that those who need a job the most are often the least likely to get one. To a large extent, the higher a household’s income, the more likely a teenager is to get a job.

So it seems to follow that we don't know what these low household income teenagers are actually doing when they've chosen not to work during the summer. It seems to me that this should've been something to figure out, rather than imply that those teenagers are not being productive. For example, they could very well be attending summer school which one could argue to be more "productive" than working.

the higher a household’s income, the more likely a teenager is to get a job

The "well-connected intern" phenomenon. Also, I suspect most of those are white-collar jobs. Bit of web design, that kind of thing.

Since the government tries as vigorously as possible to make it risky and expensive to hire the inexperienced and low skilled, the fact that more of them are unemployed should be no surprise.

Yeah, I did lots of manual farm labor for family friends as a kid, but there's no way we could do that together at under the regulatory regime here today. I'm not sure if we could successfully do it surreptitiously or not.

Leave it to the NYT to not even consider minimum wage increases as a contributing cause of unemployment for new or unskilled workers.

Its highly questionable if wage floors correlate to increased unemployment. There have been many studies on the topic and there has been consensus about almost nothing.

We should start paying teenagers to attend educational programs over the summer in math, science, or tech.

Seems like this would just help create the exact same situation as in academia: way too many people (i.e. Ph.D.s) are qualified for way too few jobs.

Else, a whole bunch of bullshit jobs would be pulled out of nowhere, and we'd have teens spending their summers making internal websites for banks.

If there's really excess money burning a hole in someone's pocket, I'd rather see it go to a community garden or something than creating artificial demand for even more tech.

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