The Young Recessionary Hustle

Posted by Josh Friedlander | 6 Comments

Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours.
-Ronald Reagan

We’re at the end of a cycle begun by Reagan, and we’re heading into a depression. The pendulum is set to swing the other way, back towards higher marginal income tax rates, increased social services, declining military spending, reduced foreign engagement, and perhaps a return to flattening incomes. As long as you’re not horrified by the notion that you might not become a multi-millionaire, the next 10 years are probably going to be worth celebrating.

But that’s me. I like the idea that my neighbor and I might not be fantastically different from each other in terms of our financial resources. I don’t believe that however much you earn or what you own is a meaningful prediction of your happiness or contentment. There’s some statistical evidence that richer people have less stress and live longer, but that’s largely because they know they’ll be taken care of if something bad happens. A health care safety net would spread that feeling of security. So to, government-funded education.

If John McCain is our next President, all the above will still happen, but we’ll have to wait a bit longer. We tried it your way, Reaganites and now we have a disfunctionally unregulated banking system, a food monitoring system that seems to tell us about poisonous tomatoes or spinach or beef at least twice a year (and who knows what we’re not being told), a product safety record that feeds lead paint to our children, an auto and energy policy that harms our wallets and the environment while financing terrorist states, massive speculation in commodity markets, the breakdown of Glass-Steagall and expanding use of securitization that does not actually spread risk but, in reality, allows lenders to ignore risk and thereby make loans without concern for repayment (and a Wall Street machine that can sell these crap loans to foreign governments and dumb pension plans), no financing for the upkeep or public works or public parks, no individual public defense for the poor in our legal system (2 million prisoners and going strong!) … and tax advantaged treatment for corporations. Yes, all this has worked quite well! Viva la revolución!

Bob Herbert in today’s NYTimes points out the obvious:

A shudder went through the markets when the Labor Department reported that the official jobless rate had jumped one-half a percentage point in May to 5.5 percent — the sharpest spike in 22 years.

The young people I’m talking about wouldn’t have noticed. These are the teenagers and young adults — roughly 16 to 24 years old — who are not in school and basically have no hope of finding work. The bureaucrats compiling the official unemployment rate don’t even bother counting these young people. They are no one’s constituency. They might as well not exist.

My brother is in this group. The Reagan revolution of personal responsibility hasn’t been much help to him. He’s been looking for a job for six months. I’ve seen him bang the phones. He’s made multi-page lists of companies he’d like to work at and called them all, trudged up to Harlem and down to Wall Street and everywhere in between going on cattle calls and sketchy interviews while getting his resume tossed in the Maybe file because no one is hiring.

There are four million or more of these so-called disconnected youths across the country. They hang out on street corners in cities large and small — and increasingly in suburban and rural areas.

If you ask how they survive from day to day, the most likely response is: “I hustle,” which could mean anything from giving haircuts in a basement to washing a neighbor’s car to running the occasional errand.

That’s it exactly. My brother finally got a full time job, but not in his field. His Barista skills, learned while working at a Borders Books coffee bar over a summer in college, got him a job in our ever enlarging service industry. Hustle? You bet. Since graduating, he’s delivered (and still delivers) subpoenas for various law firms, temped at tech firms, fixed friends’ computers, and tried to land jobs (tests taken, interviews attended) with the Nassau and Suffolk County police departments (where he’s been wait listed), and with the NYPD (not even worth the effort).

My brother has a college degree. His grade point average is higher than mine. He’s more motivated than I ever was. And he’s one of the lucky ones. Think about all the kids without his advantages or spunk and tell me we haven’t been going in the wrong direction for nearly 30 years. Equality of opportunity was supposed to apply to everyone. Now that we’ve had years of doling out more opportunities on the top of the income ladder, it’s not surprising that the most pain, when the system breaks down, is felt on the bottom rung.

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