A NEET Crisis

Or is it?

I think one of the consistent fears in the US is that our young population will just give up the ghost on trying to work. We have a situation where parents of younger people are Boomers and Gen Xers that have the resources (and sometimes the inclination) to keep their kids in a form of arrested development. After all, there’s always money in the banana stand:

So what is a NEET? It’s merely a person that is Not in Education, Employment, or Training. Traditionally, this has always been higher for women because being a stay at home parent is not considered “employment.” This is usually something that is closely watched by economists for people between the ages of 16-24. Why? Unoccupied youth tends to be the marker of a lot of bad things like civil unrest. The My Chemical Romance school of Economics states it plainly: Teenagers scare the living shit out of me.

Broadly, the percentage of NEETs in the US has gone down, largely because we have fewer stay at home moms between 16 and 24. That said, no one really talks about the decrease of NEETs for women because teenage pregnancy remains a not-good thing and women going to college and making their own money is generally pretty positive.

The men percentage has been relatively flat. It was around 10% 30 years ago, but has spiked due to a few things like the 2008 Financial Crisis and Covid.

So we are up. By a little. Why is the sky falling?

Indeed, you can see the above graph is from the American Institute for Boys and Men, and if you tune into any conservative (or even some liberal) institution these days, it is about how young men are being left behind. Young black men and rural men more so, but it’s just not a good picture even if unemployment is still quite low and, as you can see, the NEET population is still fairly in line with the past.

I think there are a few things at play.

The first of which is that this group of people in this age range are usually not the type of people who are normally NEETs. Many of these people have degrees, sometimes in STEM fields that are traditionally thought of as being quite lucrative. Indeed, the nature of the tech sector currently crashing and burning when it was seen as the place for a lucrative career for men is having an outsized impact.

The other thing is that men don’t settle for work while women are more willing to take jobs as available. You can check out this article for a bit more of a look into that research.

If we’re talking Vibes, maybe it’s from how these young people interact in the workforce. There is a hard truth: Gen Z is very much disliked as a workforce. This Survey has some results that are troubling:

I was talking to an executive at another company, and I was literally hit with the “Nobody wants to work” line. Personally, I think that is not true, but I will say that it is a definite sentiment among the Gen X class.

That’s right, I’m putting the blame where it belongs. Boomers have been the sin eaters for the Gen X class for too long now. At this point, boomers are aging out of the executive roles and are retiring or stepping away. At this point, your grievances, if you work in corporate America, are with some aging Gen Xer.

Winona Ryder would be so disappointed in them:

So is this a real concern or a vibes concern? I think it’s a vibes concern rooted in a real but ever present problem of young people being young people. I think one of the sentiments I saw expressed actually sounded very 80s to me. What I heard was that young men specifically view careers as winner take all propositions. You are either making a ton of money and have a lot of ame and are successful or you are garbage. The middle has dried up.

The vibes part is that is not true statistically. There are certainly middle income earning young men. The Vibes part is that could definitely be the feeling among the Gen Z workers due to social media making people think absurd things about what earning really is.

NPR has called this money dysmorphia. Feels pretty truthy.

I’m not really in the advice business, but I am in the vibes business. What should the reaction be? Should we be worried? Vibes can create issues all on their own after all.

I would say that the goal should be to emphasize entrepreneurship. Not just dropshipping or trying to get into short term rentals. Open a surveying and site planning business with a degree in Civil Engineering. Get into wiring people’s houses with Cat6 ethernet. Do businesses that are difficult to offshore that are in demand. To that end, local, state, and the federal government can lower barriers and make compliance cheaper and easier.

There are small businesses available for skilled professions that can unlock real wealth and income. Give Gen Z men a path to own their own income and wealth in ways that are value add to society.

Otherwise, we’re just waiting for the NEET Isekai genre to hit our shores. That’s going to be the real tragedy.