Noam Scheiber

So when it comes to the economy, things really did stay bad for a really long time.

All the way through the end of the decade, employment rates for young college grads are still pretty low.

Wages never really recover.

We have this thing called scarring, which shows that if you graduate into a recession, your earnings can be impacted for 10, 15 years later.

And then there's this other big force that's happening out there in the job market that's really reinforcing all the things that young college grads are experiencing.

And that's the consolidation across a whole bunch of different industries in tech, in retail, healthcare.

We're seeing companies get bigger and bigger.

In a lot of cases, you see companies merging together.

One company buys another company that it competes with in some way.

If you think back to the early 2010s, for example, you have Facebook buying Instagram or WhatsApp.

Maybe that could be a good thing for consumers.

Maybe Facebook invests a lot of money in building out infrastructure and new features that consumers really like.

But for workers, that can really reduce the options that you have about where to work.

And it can actually also be really frustrating and alienating.

Like if you think of a computer programmer, maybe they were at a smaller startup and they felt like they had a real impact on the development of the product or even a role in the mission of the company.

But then suddenly they're working for this giant company.

It's much more bureaucratic.

It makes people feel like they just have a lot less agency in what they're doing.

That's right.

And one of the best places to see this is actually the healthcare industry, where consolidation really starts to ramp up in the 2010s.