For Teens, More Summer School, Fewer Summer Jobs. NewsWire.

NEWSWIRE: 8/19/19

• According to a new analysis, summer vacation for teens today means more school and less leisure time. Compared to a decade ago, 15- to 17-year-olds now spend about 2 more hours a week on educational activities—and while the amount of time they spend relaxing in front of screens has held steady, they’re socializing and going to parties less. (Pew Research Center)
• NH: Over the last thirty years, the biggest shift in teens' use of time during the summer has been the decline of the summer job. Back in the business-cycle peaks of the late-1970s and late-1980s, Gen-X teens took summer employment rates to their postwar highs. By the late '90s, as Millennials began to enter their teens, the summer employment rate declined. In the early '00s, it plummeted. And even by 2018, near the likely peak of another business cycle, the teen employment rate (34.6%) was barely half of what it had been at its 1978 peak (58.0%). So Homelander teens show no sign of reversing the trend. (See "The Dying Summer Job" and "Millennials Get Parents to Help with Job Search.")
• Why the decline? Mostly, because parents and teachers decided, starting in the '90s, that paid summer jobs were dangerous and pointless and that teens would be better off "investing" their time in the acquisition of skills more directly related to their future career success. This included everything from summer school and related extra-curriculars (to score well on tests and get into better colleges) to sports clubs (to win college scholarships) to unpaid internships (to get used to a "professional" vocation). Most Millennials, who were well-provided for at home and had less use for spending money, were perfectly OK with this trend. Why would a "special" kid want to toil in a dangerous adult setting for measly pay? Did it really make much sense to flip burgers or roll tacos when you could be learning calculus or test-prepping or volunteering for some save-the-world NGO?
• Structural changes in the economy have also made teen jobs scarcer. During the '90s and '00s, the surging immigrant inflow depressed the pay of many traditional teen jobs--especially in foodservice. More recently, the massive attrition in brick-and-mortar retail employment has squeezed the demand for teens in sales jobs. Apprenticeships for blue-collar jobs have atrophied as well. And the incessant message from teachers and political leaders--that every teen be should "college-ready"--has eroded the trades as a dignified career option.
• Throughout the decline, white teens have maintained the highest rates of summer employment. Blacks have the second-highest rate, Hispanics third-highest, and Asians have the lowest rate. The reasons for this ranking may be both economic and cultural. Hispanic teens, for example, are often recruited to work (not for pay) for their parents' own businesses. And Asians teens are the most likely to be steered by their parents toward educational and extra-curricular programs.
• The new Pew Report doesn't report much decline in teen employment from 2003-07 to 2013-18 because most of the decline had already happened by the mid-00s. But it does report an ongoing rise in summer classes--which, from one decade to the next, has roughly doubled from 2 to 4 hours per week during the month of July. Teens are also spending about 2 hours more per day doing sports and exercising.
• So where is all that time coming from? What are teens doing less of? Well, they're spending about 2 hours less on attending entertainment or sporting events. (See "Emerging Generation of Fluid Fans"). They're also spending less time socializing and a bit less time on their screens (including TV). But of course, we're talking about teens and summertime. The total amount of time they spend on their screens in July remains massive--3:40 per day, or nearly 25 hours per week, according to Pew. And even this figure seems low compared to estimates by Nielsen and eMarketer. Half of 12-to-18 agree they "feel addicted" to their mobile phones. (See "Tech-Lash Batters Silicon Valley.")

 

 

• Faced with shrinking populations, the populist governments of Poland and Hungary are rolling out multiple “baby bonuses” to boost their birthrates. Their leaders want to rely on births instead of immigration, but critics insist that the results of these programs do not justify their vast cost. (Christian Science Monitor)
• NH: As a growing number of nations worry about their declining birthrates, political leaders are starting to experiment with bold new policies to encourage more births. (See "Nations Labor to Raise Their Birthrates.") The problem? No one really knows what works. Because fertility behavior is so intimately connected to the unique institutional structure of each society, it's hard to know how much one government policy can move the needle. A well-controlled experiment here is not really possible.
• Still, most demographers tend to sort effective fertility drivers into two big baskets. The first is flexibility--that is, the flexibility of society to accept women as both mothers and workers and the flexibility of schools and workplaces (e.g., with part-time and parental leaves) to adapt to both roles. The United States is fairly flexible in this regard--and this is positive for its fertility. Both Italy and Japan, on the other hand, are notoriously inflexible: Women in these countries tend to face an either-or choice between motherhood or work. And in the case of Italy, this leads to both a low female employment rate and a very low fertility rate.
• The second basket is public incentives. How much does government, in the way it distributes taxes and benefits, reward or punish women who decide to become mothers. It is fair to say that the rise of expensive pay-as-you-go social insurance has tended to tilt the playing field away from having children--since childless adults (who bear few of the costs of raising kids) can still be supported by other people's kids. Most demographers believe this is one important reason why fertility rates in affluent societies have broadly declined. Having children used to serve the parents' own economic self-interest. Today, it no longer does.
• Most current pronatalist reforms take most of their ideas out of this second basket: Spending more publicly to help women have children.
• Yet here the road forks into two broad alternatives. One, pursued by most liberal democracies, focuses mainly on spending more on programs that will help mothers in the workforce--mandatory paid leave, paid childcare, universal public pre-K, etc. (Both U.S. Democrats and Republicans support some variant of paid leave.) These ideas obviously complement workplace flexibility.
• Another road, pursued by the more autocratic governments of Russia, Poland, and Hungary (Victor Orban proudly calls Hungary an "illiberal democracy"), focuses mainly on programs that will reward mothers whether they work or not--for example, tax breaks, loan cancellations, or direct cash benefits. All of these are currently in place in Hungary. A Hungarian mom who has a fourth child no longer has to pay any income tax. Work flexibility is less integral to these programs since mothers need not work to benefit from them.
• The jury is still out on how effective these pronatalist policies are. If there is a success story, it's Russia--where fertility has jumped over the past decade. But this jump may be unrelated to Vladimir Putin's new measures. (See "Russia's Demographics Are Anomalous.")
• Critics charge that these "birth bounties" are vastly more expensive than (say) paid childcare since they don't require moms to work. And they're right about that. But since someone has to spend time raising children, the real question is whether hired childcare is more cost-effective in the long run than moms and extended families. That's a tough question, and to answer it we may need to appeal to cultural values as well as sheer economic efficiency. After all, pay-as-you-go retirement benefits to every senior are also vastly expensive--yet we rarely ask whether it is "efficient" or not.
• If cost were the only consideration, then the cheapest way to for a society to create the next generation of workers would be to invite in more immigrants and give up raising its own children. Yet voters in most countries have said no to that strategy--and we're not just talking about voters in the notorious autocracies, but voters in most liberal democracies as well.
• Though the latest jobs report was largely good news, lurking in the numbers was one cause for concern: a major slowdown in goods-producing jobs. Hiring in manufacturing, mining, and construction has slowed to a crawl, which observers chalk up to the trade war as well as other economic forces. (The New York Times)
• NH: Given the recent slump in manufacturing PMIs--plus the fading price of oil and faltering housing starts--I'm surprised that goods-sector employment has performed as well as it has. It is slowing down, sure. But it still eked out positive net jobs gains in June and July.
• The good news for the economy is that the jobs growth is fairly well balanced. And that the pace of earnings growth over the past two years (both nominal and real) has accelerated a bit without inflation. More good news is healthy productivity growth over the past two quarters (1.8% and 1.9% YoY, respectively). Rising real earnings incentivizes firms to economize their use of labor, and higher productivity, in turn, generates rising real earnings. So this is a virtuous circle.
• The bad news for manufacturing is that its own contribution to productivity over the past year has been zero to negative. So yes the declining demand for goods must be squeezing the margins of many goods-producing firms--which may soon lead to outright job cutting.
• The worse news of the economy is that jobs and productivity are backwards-looking indicators. They don't say much of anything about what is ahead. And unfortunately, the view out the front window is not as favorable.
• While Millennials have gotten the most attention for being “sober curious,” drinkers of all ages are cutting back. The share of Americans who say that they’re drinking less than they were five years ago is roughly 40% across all age groups, with most saying it’s because they want to live healthier. (Morning Consult)
• NH: We've already covered the news that Millennials (and Homelander teens) are drinking less alcohol than people their age used to drink. This is true whether we look at the share of people who drink at all, at the share of people who are "binge" (i.e., problem) drinkers, or at total per-capita alcohol consumed. (See "The Truth About Millennials and Alcohol.") We've also written about the rising youthful "sober curious" movement. (See "Sobriety is the New Black.")
• But this update is both confused and confusing. IMO, the author needs some help in understanding the difference between a phase-of-life effect and a cohort effect. What's the phase-of-life effect with alcohol? Well, it's that young adults drink more on average than adults in older age brackets. What's the cohort effect? It's that Millennials are drinking less for their age than recent earlier generations. And that Boomers and early-wave Xers are drinking more for their age than recent earlier generations.
• So just because adults in every age bracket over age 30 say that they're drinking less than they used to does not mean that all generations are contributing to lower alcohol consumption. That's just a phase of life effect. Boomers may be drinking less than they used to (and that was a lot!), but they are still drinking moreover age 60 than the Silent or G.I. Generations drank over age 60. So it's fair to say that their cohort (or "generational") impact on total U.S. per-capita alcohol consumption has been positive, not negative.
• Ditto for this author's discovery that lots of seniors drink alcohol-free beer and wine. Seniors have always been prime consumers of such lite fare. What's novel is the widespread attraction young adults feel for such fare. That's something we haven't seen before. That's the generational "news."

• Fed up with traditional cultural norms, Japanese women are increasingly postponing or opting out of marriage. For these women, marriage is tantamount to giving up their freedom—and no amount of pro-marriage messaging from government officials can change their minds. (The New York Times)
• NH: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been fairly successful in raising the participation of women in Japan's traditional men-only workplace. Since the GFC, Japan has experienced rapid gains in female employment. Japan's female LFP is now up to the EU average. And this is great for raising the growth rate of real GDP when your total working-age population is shrinking every year.
• Abe's agenda, however, wasn't just about economic growth. It was also about higher fertility. Abe was hoping that Japan would adopt a more flexible work environment in which women could raise children at the same they work.
• Here, Abe has been much less successful. Japan's total fertility rate. hardly budging over the past decade, remains very low. (See "Japan's Birthrate Hits a New Low.") The problem isn't so much that employers won't accept working moms (though that still can be a challenge). The problem is that the Japanese institution of marriage remains a highly traditional, either-or proposition. Wives are expected to devote full-time attention to their husbands, their children, their children's schooling, their household, and their in-laws. Women could get around this by having children outside of marriage. But very few women pursue this option. Extra-marital children remain highly stigmatized.
• As a result, more employment opportunities for women in Japan--rather than spurring births by raising family income, as it might in America--may have the opposite effect. It may discourage births by offering women an alternative life path: Permanent singlehood. Back around 2000, the Japanese media coined the term "parasite single" (parasaito shinguru) to describe career women in their late-20s and early-30s who were refusing to get married. Now the phenomenon is aging into midlife.
• According to demographer Kazuhisa Arakawa (author of The Super Solo Society), an estimated 23% of men and 14% of women were unmarried at age 50 in Japan in 2015. (Single men outnumber single women because male births are favored and also because men typically marry younger women, who in a shrinking population are typically smaller in number.) Those percentages sound astounding enough in a society that traditionally has no role for celibacy, bachelorhood, or spinsterhood. Yet by the year 2035, Arakawa projects, an estimated 33% of men and 20% of women will be unmarried at age 50.
• What triggered the rise of Solo Living in Japan, says Arakawa, was the rise of equal employment opportunity for women and the decline of upward economic mobility--both of which occurred during Japan's Lost Decade of the 1990s. The shift in economic incentives is illustrated by the very high correlation between the earnings of young women and their unwillingness to view marriage favorably.
• Traditional culture is often viewed as support for strong families and high birthrates. But sometimes tradition can itself become the problem. Japan has a long history of "remaking itself" out of traditions that no longer work. Let's see if Abe can remake Japan out of this one.
• Young Americans are stressed out about what the future holds, with those in their teens and early 20s even more worried than older 20-somethings. Three-quarters of 15- to 21-year-olds say that they’re stressed about getting good grades, finding a career that pays well, and paying their living expenses. (TD Ameritrade)
• NH: This the second interesting TD Ameritrade youth survey in as many months. We recently reported on the first (see "Don't Bring Up Personal Finances with Millennials.") Both offer a quick overview of how Millennials and Homelanders look at their future: There's a lot of stress, a growing reliance on parents and family, worries about persistent debt, and anxiety over being viewed as a failure.
• The latest survey highlights some emerging differences between Homelanders and Millennials--may be derived from the "generational learning" that happens by observing the mistakes of your older siblings and friends. Homelanders are less interested in going to the "best" college and are more open to non-college paths to a successful career. One especially good question asked of older Millennials was what they wished they had done differently at age 18. Top answers? I wished I had earned more money while in college. I wished I had studied harder and/or graduated sooner. I wish I had paid off my credit cards in full every month.
• An Economist piece argues that Western democracies are on the verge of becoming ungovernable. Governments from the U.K. to the U.S. to Spain aren’t failing in the sense they’re riven by riots or assassinations, but they can’t get anything important done. (The Economist)
• NH: Along with so many leaders of moderate or centrist political parties (like Matteo Renzi and Emmanuel Macron), The Economist wrings its hands over the growing "ungovernability" of western democracies. The evidence is all around us. Centrist political parties are attracting a declining share of all voters, and centrist leaders are no longer as trusted as they once were. Effective governing coalitions are getting harder to form. People no longer defer to the opinions of officials and experts. The public is increasingly polarized in its political views. No one cares as much about due process.
• Why is the West becoming ungovernable? Maybe because the people actually want more government than they are currently getting. My "turnings" thesis suggests that there are two basic turning points in a society's approach to community, security, and order. One is a Second Turning (awakening), when institutions offer plenty of order but when people suddenly want less of it. And the other is a Fourth Turning (crisis) when institutions offer little order but when people suddenly want more of it. Back in the 1970s, when Boomers were coming of age, we were in the midst of a global, generation-long awakening era. Today, with Millennials coming of age, we are in the midst of a global, generation-long crisis era.
• Remarkably, The Economist comes to a similar conclusion. "An odd feature of contemporary politics" is that it "turns the experience of the 1970s upside down. Then, inflation was rampant, unemployment high and strikes common. There were riots and assassinations and, in America, conscription into an unpopular war. Yet, with exceptions such as the Watergate scandal, the business of government continued to rumble along... Now, matters seem to be reversed. Inflation is tamed, unemployment is low and wages are inching up. But governments are stalemated. Compared with the 1970s, societies are less disorderly but politics is more so."
• Well said. The "sixties" convulsed society and culture (the inner values world). What's happening now is starting to convulse politics and the economy (the outer civic world). I could hardly have said it better.
• New data show that rates of colorectal cancer have risen dramatically since 2006 among Canadian adults in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. This pattern is similar to that observed in the United States, where epidemiologists also surmise that rising obesity is at least partly to blame. (JAMA Network Open)
• NH: This Canadian study, which focuses on colorectal cancer, has much in common with a recent U.S. study focusing on all forms of cancer whose incidence is associated with obesity. (See “Millennials at Higher Risk for Obesity-Related Cancers.") The conclusion of both studies: Over the last decade, above age 50, the age-specific risk of cancer has been declining; and under age 50, the age-specific risk of cancer has been rising. This breakpoint coincides pretty well with the birth cohort (circa 1950) that begins to mark an acceleration in lifelong obesity rates. (See also "Older Millennials Less Healthy Than Xers Were at the Same Age.")
• A recent David Brooks column serves as a “Baby Boomer Report Card,” with the generation faring best in social movements and pop culture (grade: A). But he doesn’t think much of the Boomers' impact on politics (C-) or manners (C)—and while his tone is tongue-in-cheek, it clearly reflects real frustration. (The New York Times)
• NH: This is an amusing op-ed. David Brooks once wrote Bobos in Paradise (2000), a seminal account of how the Boomer cultural elite reshaped America in the 1980s and 1990s--how, in other words, Boomers transformed from hippies into yuppies. As such, Brooks is well qualified to write this report card.
• I was also impressed by how Brooks has redefined the Boomer birth years. "We're only counting real boomers here — those who had youthful, lived experience of events like Vietnam and Woodstock. Despite what the Census Bureau people say, those born after 1960, like Barack Obama, don’t count."
• Amen to that. Bill Strauss and I have been defining Boomers that way for decades. Similarly, we have always identified the first Xer birthyear as 1961. Yes, that's when Obama was born. That's when Doug Coupland was born--the author of Generation X, the novel that gave a name to this generation. And that's also the year David Brooks himself was born. Brooks thereby elegantly takes himself out of the ranks of the accused.
• A new article digs into the many problems facing Victoria’s Secret, whose sales are slipping in a culture where sex doesn’t sell like it used to. While other apparel retailers have been able to change with the times, few have attached themselves to highly sexualized marketing as much as this brand has. (Bloomberg Businessweek)
• NH: What do Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF) and Victoria's Secret (part of L Brands, or LB) have in common? Well, first, both brands originally prospered by marketing a highly idealized and male-oriented definition of erotic sexuality. Second, both have suffered over the last decade with the rise of Millennials--and especially since the rise of #MeToo. Third, both brands were turned into commercial successes under the tutelage of Les Wexner (age 81), the billionaire retail genius. Wexner bought up Victoria's Secret in 1982 and still helps to manage that brand today. And he bought up A&F in 1982, turned it into a hot youth retail brand, and floated it as its own IPO in 1994. (See "Victoria's Secret's Struggles Are No Secret" and "The New A&F--Tamer and Cooler.")
• Now Wexner is in the news for an unexpected reason. It turns out he was a close friend and confidant of Jeffrey Epstein, who at various times served as Wexner's financial advisor and as Victoria's Secret's "talent scout." Apparently, Wexner is one of the few people who knew Epstein well, and at one point he gave Epstein his power of attorney. Naturally, L Brands is vehemently denying any connection to Epstein.
• Still, I remain fascinated by the role of the Wexner's Silent Generation--those who came of age in the '50s and created America's r-rated pop culture in the '70s--in developing these brands. The Silent also included fabled publishers like Hugh Hefner and Bob Guccione and fabled film producers like Roman Polanski and Woody Allen. In their own eyes, every transgression of sexual propriety they committed was an act of genius. And plenty of younger Boomers (like Epstein) were happy to join them for the ride. Now, at a distance, the memory has tarnished. (See "New Woke-er Version of Playboy--by and for Millennials.")

DID YOU KNOW?

Where Americans Are Making Progress (or Not). Support for same-sex marriage has risen dramatically over the past decade—and over the same period, implicit anti-gay bias has fallen sharply as well. That’s according to new research from Harvard University. The study is the first to examine long-term changes in implicit attitudes over time—that is, how people feel about certain issues based on their responses to indirect measures, namely the Implicit Association Test, as opposed to explicit measures like surveys. Using data from 4.4 million tests, researchers found that between 2007 and 2016, Americans’ implicit anti-gay, anti-black, and anti-dark skin attitudes all shifted toward neutrality. Attitudes about sexual orientation changed the fastest, with anti-gay bias falling by 33%. What’s more, this shift was observed among all ages, men and women, and liberals and conservatives. Other forms of implicit bias, however, have remained stable (negativity toward the elderly and people with disabilities, which has shifted by less than 5%) or worsened (negativity toward overweight people).