16 - The Future at Work: Labor-Market Realities and the Transition to Adulthood

Summary

Introduction

Young people making the transition from school to work in the twenty-first century in the United States and other developed economies can be expected to face a very different world of work than their parents' generation. Consider, for example, the U.S. economy in the 1970s. During that decade, the “pig in the python” baby-boom cohort was having its peak growth effect on the size of the labor force, while Richard Freeman chronicled “the over-educated American” and the falling returns to a college education (Freeman, 1976; Toossi, 2006). Stocks of computer equipment and peripherals had only recently appeared in data produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis and, by the end of the 1970s, would not even reach one percent of the level that would be attained by the turn of the century. The microprocessor, invented in 1971, would eventually lead to the information age but in the 1970s, the economy was still driven by technologies of the industrial age. To the extent that the U.S. economy was affected by trade, it was still below the level – as a share of the economy – reached on the eve of World War I (Karoly & Panis, 2004). Thus, globalization was not in the vocabulary of the typical American worker.

Fast-forward to the turn of the twenty-first century and the picture is substantially different. Again, using the example of the United States, the demographic reality of slower population growth and population aging means a workforce that will grow more slowly than in the past.