Low Skilled Humans Need Not Apply: The Employment Future For A Child Born Today

In this 3rd article of a set of 4 I am going to discuss the labor market and education opportunities a child born in 2015 could have when they are 16–20 by looking at how technology will disrupt the majority of jobs young people can only perform. I also show the unequal opportunity and discrimination a child of a certain race and/or gender currently faces. Finally I predict how a disenfranchised group of young men may develop as they are less likely to gain the higher skills vital to participate in the future job marker and some of the issues this could cause on a local and global scale.

A College Education Will Be Vital

It’s normally the youth who find it hardest to find work, more than one in eight (13.8 percent) of young Americans ages 16 to 24 are neither working nor in school, according to a new report from the Social Science Research Council’s Measure of America project. They may find their limited skills even more marginalized in the future.

Many young people could fail to get a foot onto the skills ladder for that first bit of experience if there are severely reduced retail, fast food jobs and other low skilled entry level opportunities.

They will face competition from middle skilled and low skilled adults whose jobs have been disrupted too.

We can predict from trends discussed previously in article 1: Exponential Job Disruption that many low skilled jobs, which are normally teenagers first job, will be highly reduced, competitive and have less job security and employment benefits.

In article 2: The Growth, Quality And Polarization Of New Jobs I discussed the growth and quality of new jobs and the increase in job complexity required for the jobs immune from automation and outsourcing. I also explained how the new models of employment and the decrease in collective bargaining power from workers is causing stagnant wages.

Young people who are not working or in school between the ages of 16 and 24 are nearly twice as likely to live in poverty, three times as likely to have left high school prior to obtaining a diploma, and half as likely to hold a bachelor’s degree than their connected counterparts. More than one in five (21.6 percent) of black youths are disconnected compared to just 11.3 percent of nation’s white youths are disconnected.

Measure America — “When young people miss out on these opportunities, they suffer short- and long-term harm. The blows to one’s self-confidence and sense of self-efficacy at this critical juncture are painful and damaging, as is the social isolation that often accompanies youth disconnection. In addition, disconnection in late adolescence and early adulthood has deleterious effects — some researchers call it “scarring” — across the life course. Failure to find work is distressing for anyone, but unemployment in youth increases the risks of unemployment in later life, both by limiting the ability of young adults to accumulate work experience and skills and by signaling to potential future employers a lack of productivity.

These scarring effects can manifest themselves in other areas as well. Possible romantic partners can interpret unemployment and lack of educational credentials as a sign of limited earning potential or evidence of poor motivation, affecting one’s personal life. Researchers have also found that disconnection has scarring effects on health, happiness, and job satisfaction — effects that endure years later.

By one calculation, young Americans aged 20 to 24 will lose about $21.4 billion in earnings over the next 10 years. That’s roughly $22,000 less per person than they could have expected had they not suffered through the recession.”

The best evidence warns that lack of work experience now will lead to dismal consequences for these jobless young people down the road in the form of repressed wages, decreased employment, and reduced productivity. But even getting that first bit of experience may prove more difficult in the future according to a recent report looking at the future job opportunities for young Australians. It found that;

“Economic changes are transforming work through automation, globalisation and more flexible work.

This could bring opportunity. But it could also further disadvantage young people in labour markets.

For example, the report shows currently around 70% of young Australians are getting their first job in roles that will either look very different or be completely lost in the next 10 to 15 years due to automation. Nearly 60% of Australian students (70% in VET) are currently studying or training for occupations where at least two thirds of jobs will be automated.”

Foundation for Young Australians: The New Work Order — Young people are likely to be disproportionately hurt by automation. Young people tend to get their break into the labour market, or their first few jobs, in occupations that are forecast to be highly affected by automation. Around 70% of young people (15–24 years) in Australia get their foothold in occupations that will be highly affected by automation in the next 10–15 years.

Young people tend to get their first jobs in fields like retail, admin, and laboring. These fields are highly exposed to the impact of technology. Economists have forecast that jobs like checkout operators, receptions, personal assistants and fast food workers will either be lost or radically changed by technology. By contrast, young people tend not to get their foothold in the workforce in occupations that are less exposed to automation, such as managers and professionals. Less than 20% of young people are employed in these more secure occupations.

These early work experiences and junior roles often help young people ‘learn to work’. Tomorrow’s young people risk losing the opportunity to gain crucial work experience, employability skills and entry-level roles in the labour force.

Putting even more pressure on young people without academic ability is the the entry-level wages for high school-educated men and women. In 2011 they were far below their 1979 or 1973 levels. For instance, the entry-level hourly wage of a young high school-educated man in 2011 was 25.3 percent less than that for the equivalent worker in 1979, a drop of nearly $4.00 per hour (in 2011 dollars). People with just a high school education will face decreasingly lower human capital in the future as unskilled labour becomes a global commodity.

A study by Georgetown University found that 65 percent of jobs will require some sort of postsecondary degree by 2020. “This includes vocational degrees and post-secondary certificates, not just degrees from two-year and four-year institutions. More students are enrolling in post-secondary education than ever before, but the numbers are still falling short, and even fewer are completing those degrees.”

Yet the Center for College Affordability and Productivity found that increasing numbers of recent college graduates are ending up in relatively low-skilled jobs that, historically, have gone to those with lower levels of educational attainment. The study found 48 percent of employed U.S. college graduates are in jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) suggests requires less than a four-year college education. “Past and projected future growth in college enrollments and the number of graduates exceeds the actual or projected growth in high-skilled jobs, explaining the development of the underemployment problem and its probable worsening in future years.”

If the first case is true many low skilled people will struggle to work in new jobs, if the latter is the case then many people with a college education who can’t find high skilled work but have expensive loans to payback will take low/medium skilled work. It’s not just outsourcing, and automation which is much more likely to affect low skilled roles, it’s now also high skilled workers that low skilled people have to compete with for low skilled jobs. Low skilled people need not apply in the future job market.

Whichever the case, most jobs requiring skilled workers, or skilled workers unable to find high skilled work, both decrease the value of what low skilled people can offer in the future job market and their incomes are likely to continue to diverge.

McKinsey Institute: The world at work — In the wake of the “Great Recession,” the deteriorating position of low- and medium-skill workers has raised concerns about income inequality across advanced economies. However, the growing polarization of income that is so apparent today reflects a long decline in the role of low- and medium-skill labor(workers with just high school education or some post secondary schooling at most).

Such workers were once essential to the growth of advanced economies. But since the last 1970s, companies have come to rely on increasing on investments in labor-saving machinery and information technology to raise productivity. They have also invested in R&D and knowledge workers to help drive innovation. As a result, the demand for the kinds of workers who make up three quarters of the labor force has fallen-and, along with it, the share of national income that goes to workers. After rising steadily from 1950–1975, labor’s share of national income in advance economise fell from the 1980s onward, and now stands below the 1950 level.

High skill workers(those with college degrees) remained in high demand and saw their wages rise-by about 1.1 percent a year in real terms in the US while wages declined slightly in real terms for workers who did not complete high school. Over 30 years, this has led to a widening gap between incomes of college educated workers and workers with lower skills: the average college graduate earned 2.8 times the wage of an average high school dropout in 2008, up from a premium of 1.7 times in 1980.

For advanced economies, such imbalance would likely lead to more long term and permanent joblessness. More young people without post secondary training would fail to get a start in the job market and older workers would drop out because they don’t qualify for the jobs that are being created. The polarization incomes between high- and low-skill workers could become even more pronounced, slowing the advance in national living standards and increasing public sector burdens and social tensions. In some advanced economies, less skilled workers could very well grow up poorer than their parents, in real terms.

Young Invincibles — “Rapid changes in technology mean that the jobs of the future may be vastly different than what we see today.The future workplace will require an increasingly educated and skilled workforce with a level of comfort with technology vastly different than previous decades, and capable of adapting to technologies radically different than those which exist today. In some ways, Millennial workers are ready and waiting for these changes. However, those two demands — skills and technological savvy — could also threaten to widen existing disparities even more in the decades to come”

Of the 2.9 million “good jobs” created during the recovery from 2010 to 2014, 2.8 million — or 97 percent — have gone to workers with at least a bachelor’s degree, according to Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce. Good jobs were defined as those with median annual earnings of more than $42,700 (in 2013 dollars), placing them in the top of three tiers according to wages of the occupations in which they’re classified. The future job market will, in general, not provide good paying jobs for low skilled/uneducated people.

Most jobs in the future that are not immune to outsourcing or automation will be complex and require some type of post-secondary education, and individuals that only possess a high school diploma will have fewer employment options. This means opportunity for the educated and disadvantage for those without.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee — “Rapid and accelerating digitization is likely to bring economic rather than environmental disruption, stemming from the fact that as computers get more powerful, companies have less need for some kinds of workers. Technological progress is going to leave behind some people, perhaps even a lot of people, as it races ahead. As we’ll demonstrate, there’s never been a better time to be a worker with special skills or the right education, because these people can use technology to create and capture value. However, there’s never been a worse time to be a worker with only ‘ordinary’ skills and abilities to offer, because computers, robots, and other digital technologies are acquiring these skills and abilities at an extraordinary rate”

Opportunities for young people born in a poor neighborhood could be worse if there are less job opportunities available or if poor public transport infrastructure makes it difficult for you to travel to jobs or college easily. It may be difficult for poorer parents to pay for a car, inusurance, fuel and driving lessons for their child, making it even harder and disadvantaged for that young person to get on the job ladder and develop skills, decreasing social mobility.

If parents lose jobs and can’t offer financial support this could affect peoples opportunity to pursue higher education, the average savings account balance in the U.S. was $5,923 in 2011, according to a 2012 report by Pitney Bowes.

A college degree looks like the best way to get a good paying job and to avoid unemployment, poverty and to perform the new complex jobs that will arise to replace disrupted low skilled jobs, that's why it is vital.

But if current trends continue college will be hard to financially save up for for many people, especially if less full time work is available. It will also be a struggle to find part time work to support your studies if less/no low skilled part time work is available or if families are struggling too as parents jobs are disrupted and can no longer offer financial support.

Many young people from poorer backgrounds may be excluded from the opportunity to gain higher skills in the future, through no fault of their own. This doesn't even factor in if you have the academic ability or motivation to graduate from college, high skills are not easy for everyone to attain.

It’s much less likely you will get into a good college if you are poor. In a Crimson survey of the Harvard Class of 2017, about 14 percent of incoming freshmen said they come from families with reported incomes above $500,000 a year, putting them among the top roughly 1 percent of earners in the United States. More than half of Harvard freshmen reported coming from households that make more than $125,000 a year. In comparison, the median household income in America is just over $50,000, according to recent U.S. Census data.

The barriers to gain a degree and graduate job are even more difficult for certain types of people due to discrimination in society which is denying equal opportunity for many people.

When men and women negotiated a job offer by reading identical scripts for a Harvard and CMU study, women who asked for a higher salary were rated as being more difficult to work with and less nice, but men were not perceived negatively for negotiating. According to one survey, more than a third of African Americans reportedly experienced racial discrimination during a hiring process.

In a randomized, double-blind study by Yale researchers, science faculty at 6 major institutions evaluated applications for a lab manager position. Applications randomly assigned a male name were rated as significantly more competent and hirable and offered a higher starting salary and more career mentoring, compared to identical applications assigned female names. One well-publicized study found that fictitious resumes with white-sounding names received 50 percent more callbacks for interviews than those with African American-sounding names, despite the rest of the resumes being identical.

Anytime you on the topic of automation you hear “well they create new jobs maintaining and designing the robots”, it is not entirely true, they mostly create new jobs for white or asian males. There is a huge diversity issue in the US tech industry.

Despite the industry’s rapid growth, the percentage of female workers has actually decreased, from 35 percent in 1990 to just 26 percent today. Those with degrees in science, engineering and technology quit private-sector tech jobs at twice the rate of men, driven out by macho cultures, sexual harassment, lack of mentors and similar factors, according to a study published in the Harvard Business Review.

Just 18% of computer and information sciences bachelor’s degree recipients were women in 2013 and according to the Harvard Business Review, 41% of women working in tech eventually end up leaving the field (compared to just 17% of men). Nadya Fouad surveyed 5,300 women who had earned engineering degrees (of all types) over the last 50 years, and only 38% of them are still working as engineers.

African-American and Latino workers also now represent 29 percent of the general workforce population, but just 16 percent of the advanced manufacturing workforce, 15 percent of the computing workforce and 12 percent of the engineering workforce.

Another thing people forget to mention when they say “more jobs looking after the robots” is the huge upgrade in skills needed for these new roles. The truck driver with an average age of 55 can not simply become a computer vision expert for the driverless truck.

Not every person has the ability to learn these difficult skills — almost half of US bachelor’s degree students who entered STEM fields between 2003 and 2009 had left these fields by spring 2009.

In engineering, of every one hundred who start, only fifty-five make it to a degree.

And last of all, there will not be enough jobs created in “programming the robots” to absorb the sectors of workforce they replace. A 2014 study by the National Science Board found that of 19.5 million holders of degrees in STEM, only 5.4 million were working in those fields.

The Atlantic: A World Without Work — “Technology creates some jobs too, but the creative half of creative destruction is easily overstated.

Nine out of 10 workers today are in occupations that existed 100 years ago, and just 5 percent of the jobs generated between 1993 and 2013 came from “high tech” sectors like computing, telecommunications and software. Our newest industries tend to be the most labor-efficient: they just don’t require many people.

After Graduation

If people aren't put off by increased college tuition fees, potential discrimination, and if they have the opportunity, finance, desire and academic ability to attend and to graduate college, they still may find it difficult to find a graduate job, even after accomplishing all off that.

Many ‘graduate/entry-level/junior’ position jobs now require experience such as an internship from employers nowadays. Employers no longer want to spend time and money training people.

BloomBurg: It’s Not a Skills Gap — “Cappelli cited data suggesting that in 1979, young workers received on average about 2.5 weeks of training per year. That dropped quickly: By 1991, Census data found only 17 percent of all employees reporting that they received any formal training that year. Several surveys of employers around 1995 indicate that somewhere between 42 and 90 percent of employers offered some training with the amount of training an individual received per year averaging just under 11 hours.”

Young people will have weaker human capital development due to reduced investment in training. In 2011, an Accenture (ACN) survey of U.S. employees found that only 21 percent had received any employer-provided formal training in the past five years. Cappelli “That means almost 80 percent had no training in five years. With employees switching jobs more frequently than they used to, it’s easy to see why businesses have cut back on workforce training: They might never recoup their investment.”

This has placed a disproportionate value on experience among new hires. In particular, companies want employees who have already done the job somewhere else. That shows up in data about how much employers value internships, which often don't pay anything, making it much difficult for poorer students without financial support to get on the jobs ladder, even with a degree.

Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation- “It’s become a way for young people to gain job experience, and it shouldn’t be, record rates of youth unemployment have been directly correlated with the rise of unpaid internships, which replace jobs and drive inequality, not only does the practice allow companies to get graduates’ skills on the cheap, it gives those who can afford to work for free an unfair advantage over their less well-off peers.”

If you do manage to get a job after college you will find it pays much less than it used to. Wages for university grads are 2.5 percent lower than what they were 15 years ago, according to the latest edition of the Economic Policy Institute’s annual report. The research found that young college grads’ hourly wages currently sit at an average of $17.94, or just over $37,000 annually. In 2000, the average hourly rate was $18.41.

The Class of 2015 — “Young workers who have the bad luck to enter the labor market during a downturn not only have worse outcomes in the short run than if they had entered in a healthy labor market; these negative effects can last a very long time. Research shows that entering the labor market in a severe downturn can lead to reduced earnings, greater earnings instability, and more spells of unemployment over the ensuing 10 to 15 years. In short, the labor market consequences of graduating in a bad economy are not just large and negative, but also long-lasting”

Graduates not making as much as they used to combined with higher amount of debt to pay off, choices such as homeownership, vehicles or family planning will have to put off longer.

57% of people ages 18 to 40 say that having student loans has forced them to limit travel and nearly 20% say it has limited their ability to date and have romantic relationships, the Citizens Bank survey reveals. A study reported by Bloomberg, which was based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and estimated that roughly 125 million Americans over the age of 16, or 50.2 percent, are currently single. That’s up from 37.6 percent in 1976.

With more single people not getting together this creates more demand for housing. Home ownership for Americans under 35 hit an all-time low last year, according to the Housing Vacancy Survey, which began tracking this data in 1982/ an analysis unveiled last year by John Burns Real Estate Consulting hints at the same thing, concluding that, for people ages 20 to 39, student loan debt caused an 8% decline in home purchases.

In 2012, 36% of the nation’s young adults ages 18 to 31 — the so-called Millennial generation — were living in their parents’ home, according to a Pew Research.

Housing Crisis — How many are avoiding buying a home because of this debt? It seems like people are simply ignoring this housing crisis. Some just tend to think that rising rents and home prices with no subsequent rise in income is somehow the standard way of doing things.

In fact, that is not the case. This is a new trend. But it is a trend brought on by cheap money in the hands of a few chasing after assets in the real economy. This is why many surveys show that most Americans are not participating in this recovery. Residential construction is simply not there like it has been in past recoveries. Why build when your audience can’t afford to buy?

An analysis from the Committee of Economic Development of Australia warns that 60 per cent of it’s rural jobs could disappear in the next 10 to 15 years because of technological advancements. Similar disruption could happen to American rural jobs which could push more people to move to cities looking for work, raising demand and increasing already high housing costs in cities.

Median wages have stagnated or decreased over the past decade in four of the five sectors hiring the most millennials today, according to a report issued this week by Young Invincibles, a group that focuses on the economic issues facing young workers.

Young Invincibles: Will Millennials ever be able to retire? — “When Millennials have the option to use a retirement account through payroll deduction, they participate more than other generations did at this age. But, and this is the big catch, only half of young adults have access to 401k plans or IRAs.

Those nice defined benefit pension plans of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations? Most Millennials would be lucky to see one. The rise of part-time employment across our generation could explain why fewer Millennials have access to retirement accounts. A quarter of all young adults are working in part-time jobs, which rarely offer such benefits. Millennials now have a savings rate of negative two percent.

Young people could face financial insecurity and lower employment benefits due to changing employment models. A 2013 report estimates that roughly a third of the US workforce, more than 40 million, consists of temps, part-timers, contractors, contingent workers, freelancers/independent workers and those who are under-employed or work without employer-sponsored health insurance, 401Ks or FLEX accounts” according to a report by the Harvard Business Review.

A study by Deloitte found Canadian organizations are reaching out to the “open talent economy.” 47% of Canadian respondents plan to increase their use of contingent, outsourced, contract or part-time workers in the next three to five years. 80% view workforce capability as an important trend — and 53% see it as a long-term priority for their organization.”
“Traditional employment will no longer be the norm. replaced by contingent workers such as freelancers and part-time workers. The long-term trend of hiring contingent workers will continue to accelerate with more than 80% percent of large corporations planning to substantially increase their use of a flexible workforce.”

By 2020, 40 percent of the US workforce will consist of freelancers according to a study by Intuit. One out of every four employed 18 to 34-year-olds is working only a part-time position, as opposed to one in six adults over 34 years old, young people will be squeezed most by living costs increasing faster than income, and the way employment models are trending many will never be able to get secure employment offering regular hours.

Automation is meant to make goods and services cheaper yet increases in the cost of housing, healthcare, and college is taking away any of these gains. If these cost continue to rise and automation replaces jobs there will be fewer and fewer employment opportunities through which to afford these essential goods and services. First-time home buyers account for 33 percent of home purchases nationwide, compared to an average of 40 percent from 1981 to 2008.

The number of people living in high-poverty areas — defined as census tracts where 40 percent or more of families have income levels below the federal poverty threshold — nearly doubled between 2000 and 2013, to 13.8 million from 7.2 million, according to a new analysis of census data by Paul Jargowsky, that’s the highest number of Americans living in high-poverty neighborhoods ever recorded.

Because of wages not being able to keep up, a large portion of the economy is based upon debt. Student debt in America now totals $1.2 trillion, up more than threefold over the past decade. Students at for-profit schools fare the worst: nearly 20% default within three years of leaving college.

Antidepressant prescribing has risen nearly 400% since 1988, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). More than 1 in 10 Americans over age 12 now takes an antidepressant, the study finds, and yet two-thirds of those with severe symptoms of depression do not take antidepressants at all. About 60% of people had taken the medications for two years or longer, and 14% had taken antidepressants for more than a decade.

More than half of 18-to-29-year-olds reported one or more financial problems in the past year, a 2014 Pew Research Center survey found. Financial insecurity may be why the share of people under age 30 who own private businesses has reached a 24-year-low, according to new data.

The idea of a single education, followed by a single career, finishing with a single pension is over for young people.

Even a single or double income is no longer enough to raise a family. Raising children contributes to 43% of American Poverty.

The dream of being able to give your child a better life than you had is diminishing, especially considering more than half of US public school students live in poverty. The report found in 2012, out of 35 economically developed countries, only Romania had a higher child poverty rate than the US. Another factor which will make it difficult to support children is due to the increase of having to support the elderly.

James J. Hughes — “A second major dynamic that will frame responses to technological unemployment will be the growing ratio of retirees to working age adults, known as the old-age dependency ratio. As fertility rates have fallen world-wide life expectancies have risen. As a consequence, even without technological unemployment, most industrialized countries are facing a decline in the ratio between the number of workers contributing to state health and pension systems and the seniors dependent on those systems.

In response to rising life expectancy and associated pension and medical costs, governments around the world have been cutting benefits and attempting to raise the retirement age to encourage seniors to stay in the labor force.

The impact of technological unemployment will likely be borne most heavily by younger workers with fewer accumulated skills, leading to an intensification of the current inequality between the relatively affluent seniors and the impoverished young and middle-aged. This will contribute to political demands for “generational equity” and “entitlement reform” to trim Social Security and Medicare or disability, older people are staying in the labor force at a higher rate.”

By not allowing younger workers onto the job ladder this creates problems in their future earnings, which will make it harder to tax for social security and pensions for the elderly generation.

The labor-participation rate in June was 62.6% which is the lowest since October of 1977. The ratio of workers to retirees is getting smaller, the amount is expected to drop to two workers per retiree by 2030.

Young low skilled workers also face competition from immigrants for jobs. A 2009 Federal Reserve study concluded that, for every 10 percent increase in the number of immigrants, the work hours of native teenagers fall by as much as 3.5 percent.“Employers can choose from a larger pool of relatively unskilled adults with more job experience than teenagers and that’s what they’re doing,” said Gary Burtless, a labor economist with the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

It’s currently much harder for teens to find work than it was for other generations. What happens to the millions of kids born today when they turn 16 who can’t get their first step on the job ladder due to overwhelming competition for a diminished amount of low skilled roles and dont have the academic ability or financial resources to attend college.

They may have to compete with millions of now unemployed taxi, truck and van divers as just one example. Will they face sustained youth unemployment at levels similar to Greece or Spain? The labor force participation rate is already decreasing, many unemployed/underemployed/inactive adults looking for work will continually make it harder for young people to get an opportunity.

Another big concerning trends is the reduced social mobility in the US. America has considerably less social mobility than Canada and Europe. There is a 42 percent chance that the son of an American man in the bottom fifth of the income distribution will be stuck in the same economic slot. The equivalent odds for a British man are 30 percent, and 25 percent for a Swede. The American dream is turning into “Don’t be born into a poor household”.

For children born today with current policies, they can expect a bleak future of having less/stagnant income and less career security if they can even find a job, extortionate tuition and housing costs, lower social mobility, decreasing financial security and less employee benefits due to reduced full time work opportunities, leading to less relationship and family prospects.

As well as inheriting the environmental cost of global warming and the monumental cost into the trillions of two wars they had nothing to do with, young people will have to support an ageing population that left them this economic mess.

Unequal Opportunity

The future of a Black/Hispanic child born today looks especially difficult. At least 90 public schools in New York City failed to pass a single Black or Hispanic student on the state standardized tests in 2013. As noted by BAEO, “at 31 city schools with a combined enrollment of 1065 Black students, none passed the state math exam, state reading exams saw similar results.”

African American aged 25 to 34-year-olds are twice as likely to have dropped out of high school than their white peers, and are roughly half as likely to have a post-baccalaureate degree.

One study suggests that an African American male without a high school diploma has an approximately 70 percent chance of being imprisoned by his mid-thirties. These dropouts are, in turn, far more likely to experience a lifetime of substance abuse, chronic malnutrition and poverty.

There are more African American men incarcerated in the U.S. than the total prison populations in India, Argentina, Canada, Lebanon, Japan, Germany, Finland, Israel and England combined. One in every three black males born today can expect to go to prison at some point in their life, compared with one in every six Latino males, and one in every 17 white males, if current incarceration trends continue. Having a felony on one’s record makes meaningful employment extremely difficult to find.

In May 2014, six-and-a-half years after the start of the Recession, African American millennials (18- to 34-years-old) faced a 16.6 percent unemployment rate, they make up over a quarter of the unemployed 18- to 34-year-old population.

Black males have significantly lower employment rates than black females. Black men (aged 18 to 34) faced an 18.3 percent unemployment rate, compared to a 15.0 percent rate for black women.

In 2011, 34% of whites completed a four-year college degree, whereas just 20% of blacks and 13% of Hispanics did. Without a college degree, poverty and unemployment is much more likely in the future.

Even with a college degree, earnings and employment are worse off, the return on investment in college is much higher for whites than for blacks and Hispanics. A white family at the median sees a return of $55,869 from completing a four-year degree whereas a black family sees $4,846 and a hispanic family $4,191.

The median income of a white 18 to 34 year-old was $25,000, compared to $19,800 for an African American millennial.

The deprivation and unequal opportunity of Black and Hispanic children who often start at the bottom and are almost set up to fail because of low social mobility, which allows poverty to persist and transmit from one generation to the next must be addressed to have a more equal society in the future for young people.

A Future Of Unemployed Angry Young Men?

Men are earning much less than they used to. Over the past 40 years, a period in which U.S. GDP per capita more than doubled after adjusting for inflation, the annual earnings of the median prime-aged male have actually fallen by 28 percent. Indeed, males at the middle of the wage distribution now earn about the same as their counterparts in the 1950s

Reduced Earnings for Men in America — In 1969, the average male college graduate working full time earned about 55 percent more than an average worker with only a high school diploma. Four decades later, this wage premium was 116 percent. Powerful economic forces, including technological change and globalization, have reduced job opportunities for less educated, less-skilled workers while increasing them for higher-skilled workers.

The disruptive effects of changing trade patterns and “labor saving” innovation have been ever present in American economic history. In the past, however, technological advancements benefited a majority because most workers adapted by investing in skills and education. When mechanization replaced unskilled labor in factories in the first half of the 20th century, Americans with high school degrees found better jobs elsewhere.

The difference today is that men have largely stopped upgrading their skills — the portion of young men who complete college has hardly budged since the late 1970s.

Less men are graduating from college compared to women, young males with with less education and expertise will fall behind. By 2012, the share of young women enrolled in college immediately after high school had increased to 71%, but it remained unchanged for young men at 61%.

As a result of going to college less, young uneducated men, particularly black and hispanic men, are going to suffer the worst in the future labor market and this should be of great concern for society.

For the males that are still able to live at home with their parents and not have to pay the current extortionate living costs they might see their failure to be able to be independent as their own fault.

Foundation for Young Australians: The New Work Order — “While our unemployment rate may be low, our factory floor workers have not seamlessly switched their hard hats for a healthcare job. Instead, unskilled workers, especially men, have stepped out of the labour force on mass. Over the past 25 years, nearly one in ten unskilled men lost their jobs and did not return to the labour force. Today, more than one in four unskilled men don’t participate. Big economic shifts are not costless for everyone.”

They will find it increasingly difficult to to court a partner living at home with parents.

Many low skilled men will find it much more difficult to conform to society’s definitions of masculinity to be “the breadwinner” in a relationship, which will affect their confidence and desirability to potential partners unless gender norms change.

As the possibilities to have a relationship, home, raise a family, earn good incomes and so on as their parents once did dwindle, they may become disillusioned and frustrated as they realise the American dream is lost for them, and simply drop out from labour force or lose the desire or capacity to find a partner or interact with society. It could be similar to a the Hikikomori trend in Japan which is affecting an estimated 500,000 to two million in Japan.

It could even lead to increase in severe depression and suicide. In 2013, 41,149 suicides were reported, making suicide the 10th leading cause of death for Americans. In that year, someone in the country died by suicide every 12.8 minutes. After cancer and heart disease, suicide accounts for more years of life lost than any other cause of death. Of those who died by suicide in 2013, 77.9% were male.

In this lost generation, an alienated underclass may develop, particularly young men, where many become depressed about their deteriorating situation and future, they may develop stress, anger and mental issues, turn to drugs, crime, prison, and all over side effects correlated to poverty, unemployment and lack of opportunity.

If you have an increase of unemployed, hopeless, angry young men then expect social unrest such as rioting, more than half of the people between the ages of 16 and 64 were out of work in Sandtown-Winchester in Baltimore during the recent riots.

In the more severe case they may become frustrated or scared and either side, the people who don't have jobs and the people who do work but whose living conditions have deteriorated and see more people of a particular race on welfare(through no fault of their own except being born into unequal opportunity as discussed in the above section), may direct their anger in those area creating more social tension and unrest.

If young people can’t use their energy productively they tend to use them unproductively, particularly in destructive behavior. It will be tempting and easy to blame scapegoats such as different races, ethnicities, culture, immigrants, religion, foreign countries, minorities, people on welfare etc.

Politicians may take advantage and use people's fear and anger to gain power which is a big fear of mine, similar to how Donald Trump recently said “[Mexico] are sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs, and bringing crime, and their rapists”. I discuss these concerns in the next article where I devote a section to overcoming the politics of division as one of the solutions for to have an optimistic future.

Global Issue

This is not isolated to any country and not just developed ones, this is not just a national problem but a global problem, countries are interdependent on one another in a globalised market economy. Oxfam added that on current trends the richest 1% would own more than 50% of the world’s wealth by 2016.

Oxford Martin School’s report Now for the Long Term (2013) is the estimation that 621 million young people (15–24 year olds) worldwide are ‘idle’ — that is to say, not in education, work or training, or even looking for work. Of that figure, about 74m are actively seeking work.

In 20 years time,“if” they have found jobs it will be lower paying compared to the same age a generation ago as they have gained less skills, experience climbed up the ladder and so on. The US is still one of the biggest manufacturing countries so if Europe has less money to buy products then that can affect the US economy negatively.

If current trends continue, global unemployment is set to gradually worsen, reaching more than 215 million jobseekers by 2018. During this period, it is estimated that around 40 million net new jobs will be created every year, which is short of the 42.6 million people who will enter the labour market each year looking for work. Meanwhile, the global youth unemployment rate is almost three times as high as the adult unemployment rate. In certain countries, almost one-quarter of young people aged 15 to 29 are now neither in employment, nor in education or training.

By 2050, world population is expected to increase from the current 7.2 billion people to 9.6 billion and there will be almost as many people in Nigeria as in the US, Ethiopia will have twice as many people as projected in the UK or Germany. With poor infrastructure and resources in poorer countries, many will lack the ability to gain higher skills.

A study by the Mckinsey Institute found — Based on current trends in population, education, and labor demand, the report projects that by 2020 the global economy could face the following hurdles: 90 million to 95 million more low-skill workers (those without college training in advanced economies or without even secondary education in developing economies) than employers will need, or 11 percent oversupply of such workers

Advanced economies will need to double the pace at which the number of young people earning college degrees is rising — and find ways to graduate more students in science, engineering, and other technical fields; these workers will be in high demand, and their contributions will be critical for meeting the rising productivity imperative. Secondary and vocational training must be revamped to retrain mid-career workers and to provide job-specific skills to students who will not continue on to college.

Even then, in the next two decades, the world is likely to have too many workers without the skills to land full-time employment. In both developing and advanced economies, policy makers will need to find ways not only to produce high-skilled workers but also to create more jobs for those who aren’t as highly educated.

Sustaining that many people if they can’t find employment, add into the mix environmental disruptions from global warming causing even more resource scarcity in poorer regions, leading to more civil unrest, wars, migrancy and possibly more extremist groups like ISIS could develop by the abundant amount off disenfranchised, marginalised, destitute, frustrated uneducated young men who can easily be manipulated and radicalized. A a future ISIS may one day have access to potentially advanced tools of terrorism in the use of AI killer drones or bio/chemical weapons. The future looks very precarious, nationally and globally as we enter a fast moving era of exponential disruption.

Conclusion

There have been distinct losers in recent economic adjustments, particularly unskilled youth and workers unable to develop skills in demand, such as older males made redundant from traditional manufacturing roles.

Even if there was no labor surplus because a new sector emerged to absorb all the displaced workers, the societal upheaval and impact on the economy of many people without a steady income training for new jobs, the change may be too great in such a short amount of time for people to be able to adapt safely.

Jon Perry — “Change always brings with it risk and opportunity. The rapid emergence of a growing number of technologies that can replace human “work” presents both risks and opportunities. The real possibility of widespread and chronic technological unemployment could result in unacceptable individual and societal instability and adversity. But those same technologies also have the potential to enrich our lives and to free us from the drudgery and danger of manual, boring labor and to enjoy a higher quality of life.

To make this happen, our laws, policies, assumptions and social contract must evolve as quickly as our technologies will. There is thus an urgent need to identify, evaluate and implement policies that can help manage and smooth our transition into the new technological era”

With so much change possible it should be great in the long run but bad in the interim period as society and governments struggles to adjusts with pace of change. Many forget to mention how terrible the transition was for workers during the industrial revolution who faced disruption from agriculture to factory work, and just focus on the end result, our governments may be doing the same.

Do we want to prepare and try to prevent any problems a large disruption could bring, or do we want to carry on dismissing it as Luddism?

We should, and we can all equally enjoy the wealth and prosperity what all this wonderful technology is bringing us and transition into the digital age smoothly. We can make it so our children will have better lives than any generation before it. I discuss solutions to achieve this in the next, and final article, Preventative Luddism.