Our insane level of government debt coupled with too many young people having crushing amounts of student debt means, says Bryan Goldberg at Pandodaily, young people are basically screwed.
Unemployment for young people is about double the national average. Student debt is now the single largest contributor to the nation’s credit delinquencies. And it’s one of the few debts that you can never be expunged through bankruptcy. Stated differently”¦
You kids are so damn screwed.
Finally, young people need to understand how much their grandparents’ generation has ruined things for them.
His advice.
- Learn to make something
- Skip college
- Ignore advice from your elders who don’t understand the current world
- Hang out with winners
High schools killed off vocational training (AKA shop) years ago. It needs to come back. Being a car mechanic, carpenter, plumber, etc can pay well plus the work can be steady. Ditto for some white collar occupations. My wife became a CPA because she figured she’d always have work, and so far she has.
I bounced around at crappy jobs for a while when young, discovered computers at one of them, then got a two year degree in computer programming at Pierce College in Los Angeles in 1982. Their entire focus was to teach you enough to get your first job as a programmer. I got that job, and thank them for their approach. They didn’t teach theory, they taught me a trade. Back then Pierce College was free. It’s still quite inexpensive but the waiting lists for classes are endless which makes graduating in a timely manner problematic. By contrast, getting a 4 year degree at a university now could easily put you $50,000 in debt.
Get a niche. That would also be my advice. Find something you do better than others and which, if possible, there isn’t much competition for. Among other things, I specialize in dragging dinosaur DOS database applications into Windows. Lot of companies, some quite big, still run these legacy apps. Trust me, there’s not much competition for what I do.
Also, people need to have several occupations and things they do now, not just one. A young person today will not have one career, they will probably have several, and they may overlap.
Scarily, the only way out of the budget and debt crisis is by inflation, AKA the trillion dollar coin because the US won’t allow itself to default so it’ll just print money. The result of this will not be pretty…