Rogé Karma

And what they actually do in this analysis is they look at a different measure.

They look at the employment rate.

It's confusingly titled, I know.

But basically, this is just excluding students, just everybody, every young person, every 25-year-old or below in the labor force, what's happening to them.

What you find when you look at that rate is that young people without degrees have actually seen their employment prospects fall faster and steeper over the last few years than

young workers with degrees.

And again, this subverts a lot of the story we've been talking about, right?

The whole it is AI story is premised on the idea that it is college graduates, this group that is usually doing so much better than the rest of the labor force, all of a sudden they're the ones who've experienced the worst labor market deterioration, therefore it must be AI.

A lot of these young workers without degrees

They're working in fields like fast food and retail and construction.

These are not the professions that we think AI would disrupt.

And so the fact that they've actually experienced the brunt of this downturn, I think, casts a lot of doubt as to whether AI is the main driver here.

I think that is a totally fair recapitulation.

And I will actually go one step further, which is...

I would actually say that those who have stopped looking for work altogether because they're so discouraged are arguably even worse off than the people that are still looking for work.

Well, for sure, they have no more hope.

The fact that basically in the statistic we normally use to measure the health of a labor market, you are actually rewarded if people absolutely lose hope.

They give up, right.

It's such a bizarre anti-common sense thing

is such a bizarre reversal of how we normally think about the health of labor market or the health of young people that I think what it actually signals is that people in these fields that are probably the least exposed to AI, that are folks without college degrees, are actually experiencing a much more severe labor market.