Feeling bad, feeling worse

I suppose that, as a man who currently has a job that he is getting paid to do, I shouldn't have immediately felt as shitty as I did when I read this, but still:

We often hear about people who are unlucky in love, but what of those who are unlucky in the business cycle? What is the impact of being born two decades before a significant economic downturn, such that you graduate from college and enter the labor force in the middle of a period of high unemployment?
As the class of 2009 is keenly aware, entering the labor market during a recession has immediate negative effects. Job offers are harder to find: according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, less than 20 percent of the class of 2009 graduated from college with a job offer in hand, compared to 25 percent in the class of 2008 and more than 50 percent in the class of 2007. Whereas year to year starting salaries on average tend to increase, with the tough competition in this year’s labor market, average starting offers for the class of 2009 are slightly down[...]

In examining the cohorts of college graduates that entered the labor market before, during, and after the recession of the early 1980s, Lisa Kahn of the Yale School of Management found that an increase in unemployment produces a significant and enduring negative wage effect.

The chart below illustrates this effect: a one percentage point increase in the national unemployment rate is associated with a 6 to 7 percent loss in initial wages. The annual wage loss declines over time, but is still statistically significant 15 years later. Comparing the wages earned by the class of 1982 (a peak unemployment year) with the wages of the class of 1988 (a peak employment year) over the first 20 years of a career, the wage difference resulted in a difference of nearly $100,000 in cumulative earnings in net present value.

So there you have it: not only are we, as a group of people, going to have (and have already had) significant problems finding a job, we're going to take a fat ass pay-cut for the next 15 years. Once again, my thanks to the various coke-snufflers and amoral Gordon Gekko-wannabes who took the global economy and kneed it in the groin. My guess is, the negative wage effect is probably the result of a number of factors: entering a rough labour market means we take worse jobs and lower pay than we probably should (or none, which is worse still), and this has a rolling effect on our resume and future ability or inclination to step up the pay scale. I mean, I'm sure all starting wages in all sectors for all peoples are down at the moment, which is dogshit to be sure, but the fact that the timing of our arrival on the real world stage is going to be a factor for the next 15 years of our lives in how we get paid or hired rather than should be paid or get hired is just a real peach.

However, all the ire I had worked up about my very own slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune was subsumed when I read this:

Over the past two years, government officials and experts have seen an increasing number of children leave home for life on the streets, including many under 13. Foreclosures, layoffs, rising food and fuel prices and inadequate supplies of low-cost housing have stretched families to the extreme, and those pressures have trickled down to teenagers and preteens.

Federal studies and experts in the field have estimated that at least 1.6 million juveniles run away or are thrown out of their homes annually. But most of those return home within a week, and the government does not conduct a comprehensive or current count.

Read the whole thing, for reals: it is incredibly depressing, and while it has the faint odor of a Pulitzer grab it's well-reported. After watching and tearing up through Wendy and Lucy a couple months ago, I realized that the story of the young migrant homeless in America is utterly alien to me, and I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say it's alien to all of us here at the blog. And as the article points out, they're getting it right in the teeth from the recession, way more than a degree-holder from a top Canadian university is, and for them it's life and death. I mean, the stimulus package is absolutely laden with Pell Grant funding and all kinds of post-secondary stuff, but there's only 1.5 billion for homelessness in there? That's 0.19% of a supposedly progressive bill to deal with the uncounted volumes of families and kids who're living under tarps and in laundromat bathrooms and hiding from the cops because the bank foreclosed on their homes. 0.19%. Fuck.