October 10, 2010
One of the striking pieces of data in the September employment report was the fact that the employment to population ratio for black teens plunged by 2.6 percentage points to 11.7 percent, a record low.
Black teens were already taking it on the chin in this downturn. The August employment rate was down by more than 10 percentage points from the pre-recession level. It was down by 20 percentage points from the peak employment rate for black teens during the boom in 2000.
Remarkably, this fact seems to have gotten virtually no attention in the media. While everyone noted the weakness of September data, none of the major outlets seems to have commented on the incredibly dismal job prospects for black teens.
No doubt this stems in part from a new political correctness where powerbrokers don’t note the devastation that their policies have inflicted on disadvantaged groups. Undoubtedly many of these people would attribute the low employment rates to inadequate motivation to work or a lack of the necessary skills.
These explanations run into the problem that black teens seem to have been plenty motivated to work just a few years ago. Just a decade ago, the percentage of black teens who had the motivation and skills to gain employment was almost three times as high as it is today.
We can believe that the necessary skills for employment changed at an incredibly rapid rate to produce this plunge in employment rates or we can we believe that a collapse in aggregate demand led to a sharp reduction in employment opportunities. The latter explanation seems far more likely, which puts the blame on the policymakers, not black teens.
In either case, the reporters covering the September employment report should have noticed.
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