Derek Thompson

I'm Derek Thompson.

This is Planned English.

Roger Carmo, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

It's great to be here.

So today's podcast is a bit of a mystery.

And the mystery is why the labor market sucks for young people.

And before we get into guesses and theories and diagnoses, I want to just establish some baseline facts here.

What are the facts about young college graduates and unemployment today?

And this is happening during a period where unemployment is low, as you said, and hiring rates have basically declined every single year since, what, 2022, roughly?

This is a phenomenon that you have called in The Atlantic the Big Freeze.

What is the Big Freeze?

It's like a hotel with full occupancy.

If you're in the hotel, you've got a room, it's cozy, everything is working fine, but if you're locked out of the hotel, there's no vacancy.

And so it's really weird because typically economies that are healthy

are like a game of musical chairs where there's always an extra chair for someone who wants to hop into the economy.

After all, if the economy is growing, it's creating demand.

It's creating work.

But we're in this weird steady state where it's like the economy is full.

It's the hotel with perfect occupancy where demand for work equals the supply of workers in the workforce, and so there's no room for someone to come in from the outside.