Wednesday, March 17, 2004

The Chattering Classes

Max leads us to these pretty pictures which add one more explanation (there are many) for why there's greater concern about the current condition of the labor force than one would expect given the admittedly not-all-that-high unemployment rate - the number of unemployed college graduates without jobs is now exceeding the number of unemployed high school dropouts. Presumably the trends are partially driven by changing demographics - as a percentage of the population, the number of high school dropouts has been falling over time. But, the point is that college graduates who are less marginalized by society generally and bigger participants in the public discourse are feeling the hurt.