Rachel Wolfe

I'm Rachel Wolf, an economics reporter focused on consumers and based in New Orleans.

Asymmetrical.

And young people in particular are having a tougher time in the job market.

We know that they've been priced out of homeownership.

And so we're seeing a lot of frustration, especially among people in their 20s and early 30s.

It feels a little bit like the boy who cried wolf.

I don't know if President Trump is the boy or economics reporters are the boy for saying it was going to be really bad.

And then it turned out not to be that bad.

Well, I think we also know that employers are blaming AI for a lot of layoffs that may or may not actually be due to AI.

There's just kind of been a growing distrust between employees and employers.

You see that in the fact that people just don't stay at their jobs for as long as they used to in previous generations.

We're also seeing young people are just approaching work really differently from past generations.

If they're not planning to have kids, they maybe feel like money takes on a different meaning if you're not worried about paying for a child's college education and so forth.

I think that we're seeing a really big shift in the labor market in general.

My colleague, Rachel Anson, had a story about kind of the age of anxiety for white-collar workers, for people just a little bit less certain that their job will be there tomorrow, even though unemployment rates are still relatively low.

There's just kind of been a breakdown in, I think, the idea of to what do we owe our employers and what do our employers owe us?

So it's a little bit of a vibes story.

Yeah.

So we know that one of the weakest spots in the job market is recent growth.

That while unemployment remains relatively low on the whole, it's really increased among the youngest workers.