Here's another finding from my census trawling. Here in Hong Kong, for everyone under forty, inflation-adjusted median wages haven't gone up at all in the last 20 years. In fact, they have gone down in the last 10 years. In the same period, the percentage of 20-29 year-olds with some kind of college, community college, or trade school education has gone from roughly 1/5 to more than 1/2. It has not helped them earn more. All that schooling, apparently for nothing. From what I've read, similar things are going on in the US and that's what fuelled a lot of the anger behind Occupy Wall Street.

There's a definite sense among my friends that unless you work for a major multinational bank, or are a doctor or a lawyer, you're going to struggle. I have friends with masters degrees who are scraping by on freelancing, bouncing around boring sales jobs, or driving delivery bikes, or tutoring English. I mean, we listened to our parents, we studied hard, we got into pretty good unis, and now we find ourselves pushing 30 and nowhere near as financially secure as our parents were at the same age.

What the heck is going on?

The future career question flowchart a friend of mine has developed. (i reverseengeenred it from his questiioning a couple of people)

What do you study? ---> Do you know computer programming? --yes-> I see you want to become a computer programmer.
--no--->I see you want to become a taxi driver.

Now I have a relativly well paying job as programmer, without even having finished my degree. I live comfortably from a part time salary, but then i don't have a family to support and i could work full time as well (the company has asked me to), i just decide not to, because i like my spare time.

Basically there is a couple of ways to get a good jobs:

You have a skill or talent that is rare. Either few people have a talent for programing, or many are scared away from it, by initial problems when learning it, so demand for computer programers is not fully met. If few people study and make degrees, thoose that do get good jobs. Any dishwasher to millionair scenario also needs either exceptional skill in seeing opportunities that others don't, or more stamina then your competition, or just plain luck.

Or you are connected. Your family or old boys network gives you a good job.

In the past only the children of the elite had good education and so that was a ticket to good jobs. Now that the yokels also get it, it's no longer worth anything.

I think the basic error* in strategies for getting good jobs, was the falacy that if in a game of musical chairs, if everyone runs fast enough, everyone can get a chair.

* or lie

It sounds like you have more supply of jobs than demand for jobs, Kea. In such a situation, you'd expect salaries to drift slowly downwards (except perhaps in fields where the supply is more limited). If there were half as many computer programmers in Hong Kong as there are, there would be more competition for those jobs and therefore higher salaries.

Having more businesses would reduce this problem; you could try to alleviate it on a small scale by starting a business yourself, or on a large scale by persuading the government (by whatever means are available; letters to politicians is one possibility) to encourage the starting of small businesses. With these mopping up parts of the employment pool, a certain amount of competition for the best employees would quickly lead to increased salaries (I think).

A business would need a product or service to proviede, for which there is a demand (both that someone wants it and that someone is ready to pay for it). And if you think about the effects on national ecconomy, rather then just about that business, it needs to be a service or product, that does not simply replace an other that is already on the market (or otherwise jobs gained here, will be jobs lost at the competitor on the long run).

Coming up with such a businessplan is not easy, and hoping that there are enough to make long term effects on national ecconomy seems not very realistic.

The examples of creating many jobs i know about fall under the following categories:
1) A war or natrual desaster has destroyed much infrastructure and it needs to be rebuilt.
2) Access to new technology has been gained, and to use it fully you need new infrastructure. (like for instance building railroads or highways, when there effectivly are none)
3) Access to new markets has been gained. Unless in the new market one of the other conditions exist, this mostly means transferring jobs from there to here though. Alternativly access to a supplier might be lost and thus local businesses might have to be created.
4) Investors believe one of the above conditions exist even if they don't. Thats called a bubble.

The only scenario that is desireable is 2) (or the scenario 3) that happens due to a remote scenario 2)) but there is little you can do to make it happen more often.

So i would conclude that efforts to increase the number of businesses is mostly an attempt at running faster in a musical chair game too.

I'd say we were screwed. That's directed at the US system, but perhaps there are parallels---China would want to head off the US-Sixties if they could.

I have a Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration and the only work I've been able to find so far is part time. A coke plant nearby that provided some 200 jobs was shutdown about a year ago, so the local job market is absolutely flooded with people looking for work. It certainly isn't helping that a lot of local soldiers are being forcibly discharged to cut back on costs and are also looking for work.

I believe the problem is a worldwide recession coupled with government financial insecurity. That's what's going on.

When it comes to pure earning power, yes, we're screwed. We're screwed like any generation that's come of age in a recession, especially one that came so close to becoming a depression. (Note: this is US specific, but I know the Euro market's having a tough time as well for the young).

As a group, we'll never have the earning potential our parents had. We'll also probably spend less, save more, and be less likely to invest, all things that can stunt economic growth. If we have humanities degrees, it may be years before we can start scraping by in our actual field, where our parents before us were scraping by right out of college. Applied science majors, you'll probably do fine -- if you're willing to move for work. Pure science majors, welcome to the club with the humanities (unless you get a grad degree -- and you'll probably still end up in an office job rather than researching).

But remember: it's STILL better to have a degree than not. People who graduated high school and went straight to work will have an even lower lifelong earning potential than the stunted earning potential of college graduates. And it's WAY lower than their parents' earning potential before them.

But. One thing graduating and not being able to find "legit" work in their field is that it tends to spark interesting reworkings of life plans in some people.
I have friends, urban friends, who decided screw it, they're starting a goat farm. They researched goats, and preparing goat milk products, and renting goats as grazers, and they're gonna do goats now. Two literary majors who were going to teach literary theory, and now they're looking into goats, a whole different kind of life.
Or a friend, a Tech Writing major like me, who decided that he's taking his love of cars to the next level and training to become a mechanic. Then he'll toss his resume to the wind and see where it takes him.
There's the guy who sells specialty craft swords and knives on ebay, and the girl who makes a small sum every month buying and reselling collectable 80s toys and handmade soaps. One is a business major, the other a bio major.
And finally, and I think this one's the most...interesting, I have a friend who did bio with an art minor who was unable to find a biology job and is now setting up a net store to sell commissioned porn for those with unusual and difficult to find interests due to a good response on deviant art.

All of us, even I who managed to snag a job right before the housing bust, will still earn less than our parents in our lifetimes. But man, it's gonna be an interesting lifetime...

This IS a depression. The only reason it doesn't appear to be one on paper is artificial wealth created at the very top levels of income by stock markets and other money trade shenanigans.

weatherwax, I agree with you that some of it has to do with the Great Recession, but I see it less as the felling blow, and more as the kick in the teeth while you're already lying down. From what I have heard, median incomes in the US have been pretty flat since the 1970s. The incomes of college grads have gone up very modestly, while those for high school graduates has probably fallen. The biggest gain in incomes has gone to the proverbial 1%.

In Hong Kong, we barely felt the effects of the Great Recession of 2008. Our real estate is booming (many would say bubble-inflated), and unemployment is only 3%. People are complaining that housing is so expensive, and starting salaries so low, the average college grad has no chance of even saving for a down payment. If she lived with her parents and saved every penny, then maybe, maybe she'd be able to afford to buy a tiny place by the time she was 38. Median real wages for people under 40 have been trending downwards since 2001. I think what happened is that we had a big recession back in 1997, followed by several years of deflation. Companies froze their wages for a long time. But now that we're back to an inflationary economy, wages for some reason have not caught up. I hear that one of the most promising and attractive career tracks for young (female) college grads these days is flight attendant - which is a bit depressing, really.

Look, let's be realistic about things. The Baby Boomer generation, and the Greatest Generation before them in post 1945 times, had it unusually good due to some basic factors post WWII.

The industrial base of Europe was in shattered ruins. The working male population had been decimated in the most historical sense of the word. Japan, and most of the Pacific Rim, was a post war wreck as well.

Who still had:
a) an intact industrial base
b) a mostly intact male population - the late entry into Big Oops 2 preserved a number of American lives at the cost of an awful lot of European and Chinese/Korean lives
c) an embarrassing bounty of untapped natural resources and underutilized land (Lebensraum, anyone?)

That's right, North America had all of that. Even though we Canucks got into WW2 in '39, we didn't lose nearly the percentage of healthy young males European nations did. The post-war era was great, if you survived the war.

So let's not get too bloody carried away feeling sorry for ourselves, Gen X and Y... We've still got it pretty decent, just not as well as Mom and Dad had it.

Except that I'm in China, which did get royally screwed over by World War II. Hong Kong's population fell by a third to a half during the Japanese occupation. We have nothing in the way of natural resources, and as for underutilized land, fuhgeddaboutit. But there was still a massive postwar economic boom that brought us from third world to first world income status within a the space of a generation or two. And while it's natural for economic growth to slow down once you've gotten to rich country status, I'm not so sure that it's normal to go twenty years and have young people see their inflation-adjusted incomes stay completely flat even though their educational standards have been rising the whole time. And actually falling in the last ten years. I mean, the economy is still growing. Why aren't young people seeing any of the gains?

I mean, Hong Kong boomed for different reasons than the United States in the postwar years. We had ridiculous numbers of mostly male refugees pouring in to escape Mao's madness up north, providing a source of cheap labour. Some of those who fled were Shanghai industrialists who brought their business know-how and capital. And we got side-swiped with the UN trade embargo against China during the Korean war, and since we couldn't trade anymore we had to start manufacturing things. Mostly garments. And it took off from there.

But I think we may be stagnating for some of the same reasons as the US today. We went through the same manufacturing decline - the jobs got outsourced to China proper. We have the same sort of heavily polarized economy, where people in finance and real estate (pre-bubble pop) make tonnes of money but everybody else really doesn't.

The economy's rate of growth has nothing to do with stagnating wages, the increasing necessity of a college degree in order to have a middle class life, or the increasing cost of college tuition--a situation that leads to generations of college grads in hock up to their eyeballs on student loans, going into debt to afford what we were told was the American Dream, a house, a car, a family. That's the systematic result of increasing wealth inequality and Baby Boomers climbing the government ladder to success and then pulling it up behind them.

I've heard the "pull up the ladder behind them" line, and while it makes a nice rhetorical flourish, I can't help but wonder how they pulled up the ladder. What did they do to make it harder for younger people to succeed? It's not like baby boomers collectively turned around and said "Hey you, squirt, you're not getting a raise EVER!"

They sort of did, actually. Median wages generally increase because the minimum wage does, and seniors largely support the Republicans, who are explicitly against any such increase.

(Unions are another source of rising wages, which Republicans are also incredibly opposed to.)

The work of mostly Republican legislatures have shifted education away from a public model and toward a private one. Specifically, having loan-based financial aid instead of grant-based financial aid shifts the responsibility for paying for education onto the student rather than the government while also helping to drive up tuition.

Republican administrations have provided half as much job creation in the last fifty years than Democratic administrations, and since Reagan, the jobs created during their administrations have been almost entirely government jobs. Government jobs are harder for young people to get because the civil service system is weighted in favor of incumbents and advanced degrees, which younger people are less likely to have.

Every time the Social Security Trust Fund has been raided to pay for something other than debt reduction, current seniors are basically stealing money from their children's piggy bank. And, for the record, paying for debt reduction has never been a reason those funds have been spent.