Pod Insights Optimist Economy About That College Grad Who Can’t Find a Job… About this episode Newly minted college graduates are having a harder time landing that first job than in recent years. Is it AI? Is college useless? Is it a crisis? (No. No. And not yet.) College graduates under 27 still have much lower unemployment rates (5.8%) than their high-school-diploma peers (6.9%). What economist Kathryn Edwards finds worrying is that these new workers, who are typically a lagging economic indicator, may in this case be a bellwether of a weakening economy.
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Transcript 10,476 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Mitt Romney and Ted Kennedy were about as different as two politicians could be. The lanky businessman and the stout old senator, the conservative darling and the liberal icon. But did you know they once teamed up to tackle an elusive challenge? Universal healthcare.
0:18 Speaker 00 In season four of the Big Dig podcast, we tell the story of Romney Care and the odd couple alliance behind it. Find Mitt and Ted wherever you listen.
0:35 Speaker 01 Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine. I'm Robin. On this show, we believe the US economy can be better and we talk about how to get there, one problem and solution at a time.
0:52 Speaker 01 We'd like to start the show by asking you for money because we need some. And there's a lot of ways you can help us in this respect. You can go to Buy Me a Coffee, give us money directly at Optimist Economy for Buy Me a Coffee. You should go to optimist economy dot com where we have a newsletter where you can be a subscriber and hear lots from us, not just the show, or become a paying subscriber and support us. And of course, you can review us on Apple and Spotify. We need to shout out one review, which I saw on Apple Podcasts this past week. And I think our longtime listeners will know why I found this so delightful. It's a five star review. The review is, quote, "To give the listener a better idea of this podcast, I need to go
1:34 Speaker 01 back and talk about the Communications Act of 1934." Not only did I just giggle when I read that, I actually applauded a little in my own seat. So good. I think it's not just that y'all like the show, it's that you actually do hear us, or at least hear me going back to the 1930s and beyond to talk about AI. So I felt like the fact that you joke about it means that on some level you appreciate it. And so I very much appreciate it in return.
2:06 Robin Rauzi? Thanks, and it does help us a lot for you guys to review us both on Apple Podcasts, but also on Spotify on various episodes. Thanks for doing it.
2:15 Speaker 01 Thanks for doing it. So, retcon.
2:17 Robin Rauzi? Retcon. We got a lot of notes in the comments of social media stuff and then also actual letters about our, the way we described higher education in other countries.
2:30 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm. I think probably the most appropriate thing to say would be you can just delete from your memory what I said about higher education in other countries because we didn't have a single European or foreign listener who agreed with that.
2:43 Robin Rauzi? Or Canadian listener.
2:45 Speaker 01 Or Canadians. Nobody really agreed with our assessment that America is awesome and special. If they are not.
2:51 Robin Rauzi? Or at least it was, "It's not as bad here as you said."
2:54 Speaker 01 "It's not as bad here as you said. We're also special. We can do that and not cost quite as much money," which like, "Okay, brag about it."
3:02 Robin Rauzi? Okay.
3:03 Speaker 01 Okay. I bet you have healthcare too. Wow.
3:09 Speaker 01 Everything we said in the, kind of, the show about how we have this higher education system that does a lot of things that we really, really love, doesn't require me to make some kind of like...
3:22 Robin Rauzi? Value judgment.
3:22 Speaker 01 Value judgment about other countries. They can have a higher education system that they love and feel like I mischaracterized. So, that is our higher ed student loan retcon.
3:32 Robin Rauzi? Yep. Anything else?
3:34 Speaker 01 So, work requirements. I just want to do a really quick retcon, which is, you know, we spent a lot of time in post-production for that show going through, especially me wanting to make sure that I had gotten this economic...
3:46 Robin Rauzi? Income effect and substitution effect.
3:48 Speaker 01 Income effect and substitution effect.
3:49 Robin Rauzi? Because I was really confused.
3:51 Speaker 01 Yes. And so, the retcon is for you to know that if you still don't understand it, Robin doesn't either.
3:57 Robin Rauzi? I think I do now.
3:59 Speaker 01 Maybe.
3:59 Robin Rauzi? Maybe.
4:00 Speaker 01 But, but I also wanted you guys to know that one of the reasons why we, I was like combing through this episode and the transcript and post-production is because I can tell you with a total certainty what the income and substitution effects are, but I don't always get their name right. So I can tell you like, oh yeah, there's this effect that happens when you have a change to your income. What's it called? Like it doesn't, I had to like make sure and check every time because there's something very counterintuitive to me about what these effects are called, even if the intuition of the effects themselves are something I really understand. And so I had to go back and listen to the episode and be like, wait, is that, is that one income?
4:35 Robin Rauzi? Is that right?
4:35 Speaker 01 Is that, no, that's what, no, that one's not income.
4:37 Robin Rauzi? No, that's a substitution.
4:39 Speaker 01 And I'm reminded of PhD level econometrics class, which is econometrics is how economists describe our statistical methods. And the professor teaching the class, I mean, he was just like truly world-class, especially in econometrics. And he was like, you could not imagine a heavier hitter to be up there. And at one point, he's doing a relatively simple kind of effect and he's trying to, he's trying to show how it works. And he's like, oh, I had to teach this to myself every time. And he goes back and just basically has to derive the entire formula by hand on the board so he can say what it is. It's like, it would be like nonsensical if I told you what the words are. It was just this
5:21 Speaker 01 moment where I watched someone who was like so in their power, doing something as complicated as asymptotic theory of econometrics. And when it came down to some like truly 101 style stuff, he's like, you know, I never remember this. And he just starts to like derive it on the board. And I was like, thank God. And I don't think people.
5:38 Robin Rauzi? It's not just you.
5:39 Speaker 01 It's not just me. But I don't think people will tell you enough that there are some parts of like their everyday profession where it's like, oh, I have to look it up every time.
5:47 Robin Rauzi? Oh yeah. So many things I have to look up every time.
5:50 Speaker 01 Every time. Some economist is going to listen and be like, you did get it wrong at like minute 37. But that's okay. Understanding doesn't always come with perfection.
5:59 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
6:00 Speaker 01 And you can read, you can have to teach yourself things every time to remember it. So.
6:05 Robin Rauzi? Okay.
6:06 Speaker 01 Okay.
6:07 Robin Rauzi? Terms and conditions.
6:09 Speaker 01 What did you look up? Terms and conditions?
6:11 Robin Rauzi? Okay. So I sent out a little note on Substack yesterday using the phrase cottoned on. And I began to wonder where cottoned on comes from. So I pulled out, that's right.
6:24 Robin Rauzi? The actual print OED.
6:26 Speaker 01 You do yoga, right? Because I'm worried that you're going to throw out your back trying to get that.
6:29 Robin Rauzi? It's like, it is. This is a, this is just some of the Cs, from Cham to Creekey. Cotton, by the way, takes up two full pages.
6:37 Speaker 01 Can you say the context in which you used cotton on?
6:40 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, I think I said, the optimism around work requirements is that people have cottoned on to their fact that they're just paperwork requirements.
6:47 Speaker 01 Okay.
6:49 Robin Rauzi? Okay. So as we use cotton on, it means to, in American slang, in English, it means to absorb, to have understood, to have grasped. Often, sometimes that is maybe something that you didn't get at first, but you get it now, right? And you're like, what in the hell does that have to do with cotton? So some people have suggested that it's the, the fiber of cotton and, and the difficulty of, of attaching cotton fiber to bobbins in weaving. The OED, by the way, says, mm, no, I don't think so. The OED says, though it is uncertain where exactly the second meaning of cotton comes from, it predates the Industrial Revolution.
7:28 Robin Rauzi? And in England, not the American South, is where this, this, this usage starts out meaning basically to get on well or to come together, to become friendly with one another, to become in agreement with one another. And then it sort of shows up as to cotton on to, meaning to become attached to or to form a liking to, and then eventually to catch on to the idea of. And it shows up in the, in dictionaries in 1934 as a colloquialism.
7:57 Speaker 01 Hmm. Cotton on.
7:59 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, it does sound very southern.
8:02 Speaker 01 A phrase that I say all the time, that I realize now, I've, I've only ever heard like two other people in my life say, is I will say that I'm in tall cotton. When stuff's going well. Of like, oh, we're in tall cotton today, which is very much.
8:16 Robin Rauzi? It's better than being in the weeds.
8:17 Speaker 01 Yes, you have that. Sometimes I'm in the weeds and sometimes I'm in tall cotton. But tall cotton means like, I'm doing well.
8:22 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. I've never heard that.
8:25 Speaker 01 You've never heard Tall Cotton?
8:27 Robin Rauzi? No.
8:27 Speaker 01 There's some things I had, I did like a little bit of a self-correction of like, the third time you say it and people are like, where are you from? I'm like, I'm probably not going to say this. I don't really feel like explaining this anymore. But now that I'm back.
8:39 Robin Rauzi? Exactly.
8:40 Speaker 01 Cue the cowboy hat.
8:42 Robin Rauzi? Cue cowboy hat.
8:43 Speaker 01 Tall Cotton on, this is a show about bringing America to Tall Cotton. Hope you cotton on. Is that it, right? I actually, a friend of mine read a book that's the history of cotton. And he said it's like one of the more fascinating books he's ever read. Because it does explain a lot of big movements of economies and wars and societies over time.
9:02 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, isn't, maybe I should put that next to the other book I'm supposed to read, which is the one about sugar.
9:06 Speaker 01 Oh, I, yeah.
9:08 Robin Rauzi? The sugar book is supposed to be just great.
9:10 Speaker 01 I'm glad that we can turn this into a show of like, I just want you to know, I haven't read it. It's supposed to be good.
9:15 Robin Rauzi? It's supposed to be good. My wife read it.
9:18 Speaker 01 Oh, if a wife read it, that totally counts.
9:21 Robin Rauzi? It's practically in my brain.
9:26 Speaker 01 Our centerpiece today is about a set of people who are not in Tall Cotton.
9:32 Robin Rauzi? Yes.
9:33 Speaker 01 We wanted to talk about youth unemployment.
9:36 Robin Rauzi? If you've been in journalism for a while, you, you recognize the seasons of journalism. And, and this is graduation season. And so there's, there's a couple of stories that always like come out this time of year. And this year I saw like five of these. They were all like, how, what college graduates are up against? So like, you know, Vox has, the class of 2025 is graduating into a weird job market. Or the job market is getting tougher for college graduates, says the New York Times. CNN has the worst job market in grads for years. Bloomberg, new grads join worst entry level job market in years. So like, I mean, literally like, there was a dozen of these stories that came out between May and early June, right?
10:18 Speaker 01 You didn't even say the ones that really made me mad.
10:21 Robin Rauzi? Is it something alarming is happening to the job market in the Atlantic?
10:26 Speaker 01 There was, there was at least one New York Times piece and one Atlantic piece, and I think maybe also Fortune, that were like, AI is showing up and college graduates can tell you.
10:37 Robin Rauzi? I mean, those were certainly in the story, you know, well, I'll get into my journalism issues about some of these things later, but, but anyway, I said to Catherine, I was like, so, you know, what do you make of this? Is there something really happening here?
10:51 Speaker 01 And then I said, no, and the show's over.
10:54 Robin Rauzi? Show's over. See you next week.
10:59 Speaker 01 No, I wouldn't want to betray our listeners by not giving at least 30 years of backstory. But actually, if you look at the last 30 years, the answer is no, and we out.
11:11 Robin Rauzi? I know, I think one of these stories did say it was like the worst job market for college grads in like 30 some years. And I was like, so when I graduated from college?
11:20 Speaker 01 And also, that's wrong. I don't know who said that, but that one's wrong. Okay, but what were your, what were your questions, your concerns when you read these?
11:26 Robin Rauzi? Okay. Well, first of all, I mean, I looked at these numbers about unemployment. And while the numbers were slightly higher than general unemployment, they, they just didn't seem that much higher to me. But I guess it just depends on like if it's relative, you know, so like, and if unemployment is at four, 4.1%, and the unemployment for this kind of recent grad group was at 5.8%, part of me is like, so it's people who are just trying to get into the job market and their, their unemployment rate's 2% higher? I was like, I'm just kind of not, that doesn't make me write a headline that says the worst job market in years, you know? And I think the other thing that I found frustrating was the comparison between 2022 and 2025. 2022 was like such a crazy time, especially
12:11 Robin Rauzi? for technology jobs, that it just seemed like calling this year the outlier compared to 2022. And 2022 was clearly an outlier in our economy.
12:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, the issues I take with these articles, which you've probably read some version of, is there's some context and some comparison that's missing. So this crisis of college graduates, none of these pieces mention something that they all should, which is that The unemployment rate for college graduates, even if they're under 25, is categorically below the unemployment rate for high school graduates of the same age. So like, we're
12:50 Robin Rauzi? sitting here doing- So you're still doing better if you graduated-
12:53 Speaker 01 You're still doing better. And a couple of the articles actually made me upset because one of them, I think it was an article in The Fortune, they're like, "Jamie Dimon says not as many people need to go to college." And like, it looks like he's being proven right with this unemployment rate. And I was like, what, did he pay you to say that? Like, what? Like, the unemployment rate for high school graduates is unequivocally and always higher. And yet, you'll get these pieces that are like, "The labor market for college graduates is falling apart." So that, that, that was like, I don't really appreciate that we have this like, classist view of emergency-
13:25 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, for sure.
13:26 Speaker 01 That if a college graduate can't find a job, it's an emergency. But the fact that they're always doing better than high school graduates is like, oh, well, that doesn't, we don't need to mention that part.
13:35 Robin Rauzi? Would you, would you like my journalism take on this?
13:38 Speaker 01 Yes.
13:38 Robin Rauzi? Which is that, you know, it's all the editors who are my age, whose kids are coming out of college, saying, "I can't find a job, Mom." I think that there's definitely a bias, as the journalism profession professionalized and became full of people who all themselves went to college, that we pay way more attention to higher education and the travails of the professional class instead of the working class.
14:01 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, the other, the other piece of context that you would never hear in an article about, you know, you're talking about young kids who are under 25, who have a college degree, they're facing an unemployment rate of possibly 6%, which is also still lower than the black unemployment rate for the entire time we've kept track of it, which is since the 70s. And there was a couple of months in the Biden administration where the unemployment rate for black people in the United States, you know, actually fell to below 5%, which we would consider 5% marching towards recession if the economy was at 5%. But it is considered absolutely normal for the black unemployment rate to be higher than 5% or higher than 6%. And in fact, it averages at least twice the white unemployment
14:46 Speaker 01 rate at any given time. So, part of me was like, what if you all wrote 15 articles about the black unemployment rate-
14:53 Robin Rauzi? The black unemployment rate.
14:54 Speaker 01 Which is higher than the one that you're discussing. Or the high school unemployment rate, which is higher than the one that you're discussing. And so it felt very like alarmist of, "Oh, my God, what is happening to the labor market for young college graduates who are in a position of incredible privilege as far as the labor market goes?" That was like part one that was making me mad. The second problem was that a lot of these pieces casually referenced this is AI showing up.
15:18 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
15:19 Speaker 01 And none of them had a single data point to show for it. All they said was that many companies have discussed how they want to transition to AI. And in the aggregate, young college graduates are having a hard time finding a job. Like, ergo, the two are linked. And what made me really mad about it is that some of these companies that said, we're going to use AI, you could have at least asked them if they have hired fewer college graduates or analysts.
15:44 Robin Rauzi? This was my question, was like, there was this missing middle in all of these stories. They all start, I mean, really, you kind of wonder if AI wrote them. Like, they start with a, you know, a quote from somebody who graduated from a university with a name you've heard of, and who's been looking for a job for six months or nine months, and isn't getting a response and hasn't gotten an interview. And then they have some, frankly, people like Catherine, like, quote some economists from some university, and then some anecdotes from other news stories about, well, Microsoft has been laying people off. I bet Microsoft is also still hiring people. Like, just because companies are laying people off doesn't mean they're also not hiring.
16:22 Speaker 01 A million people are laid off every month in this economy.
16:24 Robin Rauzi? And then no one talked to any employers. There was no quotes from any single employer, you know, about what they're doing and why. And, I mean, could they really not get somebody from any employer to say, we're actually holding off because of the uncertainty in the economy around the tariffs? Or whatever, like, but nothing, it was.
16:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, it did such a disservice to people that read it. And it's not okay to quote a press release from six months ago about the use of AI, and then say, college graduates can't find jobs. There's not a single data point to point to that. A couple of articles did say, like, even if some, like, very tech-forward frontier companies are hiring fewer entry-level positions, that would not explain the unemployment rate. So I did appreciate that a couple of articles said that. But I think in this centerpiece discussion, I wanted to talk about young workers, not necessarily with a college degree, but just people who are in their first 10 years of the labor market. What do we know about them?
17:30 Speaker 01 What is their labor market experience like? And what is typical? I think the shame in.
17:38 Speaker 01 The shame and the frustration that a lot of young people feel is being ignored. And I think that a lot of the pointing to these like really false conclusions or unsupported conclusions, like it's AI taking your jobs. You don't need to embitter a 21 year old with that kind of information. You're not blaming the right thing. So I wanted to talk about kind of like, what is the youth labor market? And what do these stories not tell you that you need to know?
18:09 Robin Rauzi? Okay.
18:10 Speaker 01 Okay.
18:11 Robin Rauzi? Well, please do.
18:14 Speaker 01 Okay. And one and a two. And okay. So probably the two most instructive pieces of economic research and analysis that I think exist about young workers in the labor market are a pair of papers, one called Upskilling and one called Downskilling, that looks at a data set of a massive number of job postings. And they look at this data set and they look at the, basically the composition of job postings, education and experience requirements.
18:50 Robin Rauzi? Right, to get those jobs.
18:52 Speaker 01 The Upskilling paper goes from about 2007 to 2010, when the unemployment rate jumped from just under 5% to 10%.
19:01 Robin Rauzi? Right, so this is global financial crisis.
19:04 Speaker 01 This is global financial crisis, great recession. You, the truly.
19:07 Robin Rauzi? Huge numbers of unemployment.
19:08 Speaker 01 The class that had the hardest time in the labor market over the last 50 years are going to be the class of 2009 and the class of 2020. And nobody else can compare.
19:17 Robin Rauzi? Gets to complain.
19:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, they can, they can complain all they want. I would never want to take away from you the need to kvetch or just complain about something, but like, keep in mind, the classes of 08, 09, and 10, I mean, that, that was a truly brutal time to graduate. 2020 wasn't great, but of course, the economy recovered really quickly.
19:37 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
19:38 Speaker 01 The economy did not recover quickly from the recession. I mean, it took until really 2015 until we had a normalized labor market after the recession. So those kids were fighting the malaise of a bad labor market for the first five years of their work life. I mean, even the kids who graduated in 2020, I mean, we bounced back really quickly.
19:56 Robin Rauzi? When I was looking for one of these articles and I put in like college graduates unemployment as a search term because I knew I'd seen it. Anyway, there's this huge bunch of stories from 2014 when the job market had bounced back. Right? So you saw the like I was kept seeing the flip side of this at the end of that really horrible downturn that you're talking about. And it was all like college graduates in the best market of their lives in 2014.
20:21 Speaker 01 Yeah. With the upskilling paper, which looked at the bad time when unemployment rate was really high, found, and this is I'm just going to read directly from their their abstract, "The increase in unemployed workers during the Great Recession can account for 18 to 25% of the increase in skill requirements between 2007 and 2010." So this makes perfect sense. When there are a lot of unemployed people, the necessary education and experience required for a job goes up. And their companion paper, Downskilling, looks at basically as the unemployment rate is falling from 2010 to 2014, do we have kind of a similar, you
21:06 Speaker 01 know, now the education experience requirements go down and they do, a one percentage point reduction in the local unemployment rate is associated with roughly a 0.27 percentage point reduction in the fraction of jobs requiring at least a bachelor's degree and a roughly 0.23 percentage point reduction in the fraction requiring five or more years of experience. So when the economy is bad, employers can demand more from entry level.
21:30 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
21:30 Speaker 01 As the economy gets better, they have to demand less. And the the skills required for a job vary with how strong the economy is. And everything you need to know about what is happening to youth unemployment right now is that. They are unfortunately a bellwether of weakness in the economy because their relative competitiveness on the labor market, as someone who has, you know, almost zero experience in full-time employment, that that gets harder to sell to employers when you are competing with lots of people who have experience.
22:05 Robin Rauzi? Right, and you feel like these people are competing because the labor market is softening?
22:11 Speaker 01 Now, the part that's hard to piece together at this point is that the overall unemployment rate in the US is still low. It's still around 4%, but the hiring rate has absolutely fallen. And if you look at the rate of hiring in the economy, this number is going to mean nothing.
22:29 Robin Rauzi? Have we talked about this before?
22:31 Speaker 01 It's 3.5. So 3.5 hiring means nothing, but it hasn't been that low basically since 2013. And the hiring rates that we're seeing now are closer to the hiring rates we saw between 2010 and 2014 when the US was coming out of the recession. So it is, it is not normal in the US to have a break between the number of people who are looking for a job as a share of all workers and the number of people who are being hired as a share of all workers, but the hiring rate is the one that matters for how many jobs are being created, especially at the entry level, and that is at kind of like a recession level. I've talked about this on Marketplace where I said that there's two labor markets right now, one for people who have a job and one for people who want to, are looking for a
23:16 Speaker 01 job.
23:17 Robin Rauzi? Is there a difference between the numbers that we see reported that are called jobs created, you know, the economy created 149,000 jobs last month? And the hiring rate, are those based on something similar or are those totally different things?
23:32 Speaker 01 Well, they come from the same survey. They come from the, what we call the Establishment Survey, which is a survey of employers in the US, but they're asking different things. The payroll, the number of jobs in the economy is truly just the number of payroll positions that you have.
23:47 Robin Rauzi? So people, butts in seats, actually, humans in those jobs?
23:50 Speaker 01 Humans in those jobs. And the hiring rate is the number of positions that are filled relative to the number of jobs in the economy. So basically, the economy is slowly expanding, but we're not seeing a ton of movement. So if the hiring rate was at 5%, that means that you are seeing a ton of jobs switching because people are leaving jobs, they're taking new jobs, there are new jobs in the economy, we're filling those positions, people are switching employers, they're filling those positions. What you're seeing is this really incredible slowdown in hires. I mean, it's not at zero because we are creating jobs and people are changing, but it's not at like the clip we would expect for unemployment rate as low as it is. So yes, we have a hiring problem in the US.
24:34 Speaker 01 This is what uncertainty in the economy looks like.
24:37 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
24:38 Speaker 01 You're not seeing the effect of tariffs, you're not seeing the effect of inflation, you're not seeing the effect of deportation or federal government layoffs because all of those policies have been, you know, announced at a 10, pursued at a 3, walked back to a 1, gone back up to a 5, but then back to a 2 again. So the actual efficacy of those policies is really muted. What you are seeing that has been at a 10
25:03 Robin Rauzi? Throughout.
25:04 Speaker 01 Throughout this is uncertainty. Nobody knows what economic policy is going to be like in three months. They don't know what the interest rate will be, they don't know what prices will be, they don't know what deportation will be, they don't know what tariffs will be. And when you are uncertain, you just idle in place. So that is what we are seeing. It explains why there haven't been a ton of layoffs, but there haven't been a ton of hires. And as a result, you have fewer opportunities for workers coming outside of employment, especially new workers, trying to get hired. And when, and we know from looking at past recessions and looking at the types of education and experience required, that if you are not hiring at a rapid clip and you are not onboarding a lot of new people, those jobs are going to be harder to get for people
25:49 Speaker 01 who have the least amount of experience. And you're gonna, you're gonna ask a lot more for a position than you would have three years ago.
25:55 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, and I think that hiring managers and people in companies, they know it takes so much time to bring somebody on and onboard them and for them to really become productive that you can maybe, you know, first of all, I don't think employers want to do, they don't want to bring people on and then let them off. They don't want to do that. But the other thing is that if you can hire somebody with experience, that, that period of, of ramping up is much shorter. And I think both of those are going to work against college graduates in this environment.
26:21 Speaker 01 They're gonna work against people.
26:23 Robin Rauzi? Or anybody. And people trying to enter the job market.
26:25 Speaker 01 Uh huh. They're gonna work against people who are trying to enter the job market. And new college graduates are a very easily identifiable group of people within people trying to enter the job market. But you, if we had incredible data on women coming back to work after taking off a couple of years to raise kids, it would look, you'd have similar problems.
26:44 Robin Rauzi? Probably worse, yeah.
26:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, people who are returned citizens coming out of incarceration, they always have terrible looking numbers, but like, they would be worse. And same thing with high school graduates, right? People who are graduating high school and not going to college, they would also be having a hard time finding a job because the relative experience and education that they bring versus what someone can buy at the same rate, but with more education and experience, it just, it makes them one of the harder to find jobs. Now, what I think is happening in the economy right now that's really fascinating, from a labor park market point of view, in which all of you are worker bots and I don't have a heart or blood pumping through my veins, is that most of the time, what we see happening to young workers is a lagging effect.
27:28 Speaker 01 Like, 2008 and 2009 were terrible years for the economy, and like, the effect on graduates persisted for three to four years afterwards.
27:36 Robin Rauzi? So they felt it in 2008 and 2009, but then they continued to feel it.
27:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, like, it took a really long time for the labor market for them to clear and to recover and for these skill requirements of job postings to fall enough for them to be competitive again. So this is a really long effect that persisted afterward. This is happening before, and it is basically a leading indicator of labor market weakness as opposed to kind of a lagging indicator of persistent weakness after a recession. And we don't normally think of the labor market for college graduates as being a classic predictor of recessions, but this is a special economy. We've never had this-
28:12 Robin Rauzi? Special in quotes.
28:13 Speaker 01 Special, special not good. We've never had this much policy uncertainty, and so I think we're, we're basically seeing the brunt of this uncertainty being borne by people who don't currently have a job, and of which college graduates would be the poster children.
28:27 Robin Rauzi? There was this data point that said that the number of entry level jobs, and again, I don't know exactly when a job is considered entry level versus some other thing, but that the number of entry level jobs or the percentage of jobs that are considered entry level has been dropping for 13 years, some number of years. Have you come across that? Am I making that up?
28:50 Speaker 01 I don't think you're making it up. I haven't come across it. It wouldn't necessarily surprise me, but it also wouldn't explain the unemployment rate right now. So the monthly measures of unemployment, so if I wanted to look at 20 to 24 year olds, and I'm looking at people who have a high school degree, people who have a college degree, and people who have some kind of a mix of both of like, they either went to community college, or they were at school for a couple of years and then left. It's a really bumpy number, because it's not what we call seasonally adjusted. And a seasonally adjusted number is one that is kind of weighted relative to an average of what is typical in a given month, like unemployment rates would always be crazy high in June, because that's when a lot of new graduates enter the labor market. We like smooth out the reported numbers to
29:35 Speaker 01 make them reflective of what's going on in the economy, and not necessarily a single month. Well, these numbers aren't seasonally adjusted when they're produced. So a lot of the reportings of like spiking unemployment rate numbers, like it's a really jumping number. Like if you look at the graph, like it bounces up and down.
29:52 Robin Rauzi? It looks like a sewing machine stitching zigzag.
29:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's like a sewing machine or like a heartbeat, like it's just, it's moving up and down. And so like you pick a little peak. If you look at more kind of smoothed data and average figures, these numbers are going up. So for the last, I would say, five months, the unemployment rate for college graduates who are under 25 years old has been around 6.5%. For high school graduates, it's been at nine.
30:23 Speaker 01 But to give you a comparison, the unemployment rate for college graduates who were younger than 25 was above 6% for all of 2009 through the end of 2015.
30:41 Robin Rauzi? So for six years?
30:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, for six years in the Great Recession, this was an elevated number. So it has been above 6% for about a year. But it's, I think what's different now is that like that's, that higher rate started after the recession last time and this one it's happening almost like leading into one. Because if something, if nothing changes about our economy, we are going to enter a recession. We are just heading there in the slowest way possible. So I don't know if that would make-
31:10 Robin Rauzi? Is that good? Is it good to go slow?
31:12 Speaker 01 Is it good to go slow?
31:13 Robin Rauzi? I mean, it is if you turn the ship around, I guess. I mean, that's the-
31:17 Speaker 01 I mean, you want to have daylight between things like this happening and data like this showing up versus a recession being declared so that you have a chance for policy to make a difference.
31:27 Robin Rauzi? Right.
31:28 Speaker 01 And we don't jump the gun on declaring a recession, even when people are having a miserable time in the economy, like a lot of graduates are right now, because we want to give it a chance. Because, I mean, trust me, like, it's not great that hiring has slowed and young college graduates are having a hard time, but it would be catastrophic if the unemployment rate were 8% instead of 4.
31:46 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
31:47 Speaker 01 And as hard of a time as they're having at the moment, like, there is nothing beneficial to come from the economy getting worse. So being a leading indicator at the moment sucks. But hopefully, it's telegraphing to enough members of Congress and to policymakers that, like, this is not good, like, we are gambling with a lot. I don't know if-
32:09 Robin Rauzi? Do you think they see it as a leading indicator? I mean-
32:12 Speaker 01 I think the Fed does.
32:13 Robin Rauzi? Could they be leading and lagging? I mean, this could be something that could persist for college graduates for years?
32:18 Speaker 01 I mean, Powell has said in press conferences after the Fed meets to discuss interest rate policy, he has brought up the hiring rate multiple times. And they haven't talked about young college graduates, probably for the reason which I like, looked at those articles and was like, "Come on." Because young college graduates, I think, are just a really easy to talk about group in a sympathetic way for newspaper articles, but they're part of like a broader economic symptom, which is the lack of hiring or the slowdown in hiring. And they're they're an identifiable group that people sympathize with, but they're not necessarily having a very special experience in the economy. That sounds so mean. Again, I don't want to make it sound like they're not having a hard time.
32:58 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
32:58 Speaker 01 I just, I don't want their hard time to be interpreted as because AI has taken all their jobs, or because college is no longer worth it, or like they're being punished for some reason, or the all the like, I do feel like these Gen Z'ers are getting a real light touch compared to us millennials, given that like millennials were just like perpetually lazy and immature and like, we didn't know.
33:22 Robin Rauzi? Every generation is. I mean, come on, what do you think, you know, Gen Xers? We were like Generation Slacker.
33:28 Speaker 01 Which I appreciate, but I just, I feel like if I'm gonna have a cultural assignation because of my birth year, I want it to be about something as stupid as my haircut or my music. So I'm like, I'm like, you know, Gen Z, this is gonna be really cold comfort, but at least they're not using this to talk about how lazy you are. Or maybe they are, and I'm just not seeing it because I've learned to turn those articles off.
33:47 Robin Rauzi? No, I don't think they are. I think it's like, oh, it's really hard out there for them.
33:50 Speaker 01 Good. This is good. I mean, good. Let's dislike them for wearing far too baggy clothes.
33:57 Speaker 01 I bought a pair of wide leg jeans because I wanted to fit in. I did this like a year ago. And I was like, I can wear wide leg jeans again. I did this with Jinkos when I was in junior high. Man, did I nearly eat shit on the metro when I nearly tripped on the edge of my wide leg pant. And I was like, what the hell? How are these people alive? Like, is it my lack of agility that I can't wear these clothes? Anyway, you see my point about what's the right, the right and wrong way to attack young people?
34:25 Speaker 01 Sartorial choices aside.
34:27 Robin Rauzi? Yes.
34:28 Speaker 01 A lot of Gen Z'ers made really good choices and really good investments and they're having a hard time with it. And the one silver lining of all these articles is that at least it was taken with so much more sympathy than we've greeted unemployed young people in the past.
34:43 Robin Rauzi? The other thing that I thought was interesting was that one, they, a lot of them talked about this New York Fed report and, and a lot of it had to do with comparing the unemployment rate between these two groups of people who are more or less 10 years apart, the people in their 20s and the people in their 30s. I was curious what you thought about if that was actually telling to say, you know, people who are 10 years into their career are less likely to be unemployed and we're concerned about the gap between and whether that gap is getting wider or not.
35:12 Speaker 01 The New York Fed, so if you're not familiar with the Federal Reserve system, there's the Big Fed in DC, which is called the Board, the Board of Governors. And then there are regional Federal Reserves throughout the country that also have their own kind of like research focus, both in their regional economies and then some kind of like subset of economic issues. They're not like assigned to them, but they take on. And so the, the New York Fed has done a lot of research where the economists there who are looking at the general state of the economy, they've done a ton of stuff on young workers, the returns to college and some special labor market data.
35:52 Speaker 01 So they sounded the alarm about the deteriorating situation in the labor market for young workers with a college degree. And some of these statistics are somewhat alarming if you look at their current level. So one of the figures that I think got people's attention was that if you look at the unemployment rate for all workers and the unemployment rate for all college graduates, young college graduates were typically in between. Unemployment trends perfectly with your educational attainment. So people without a high school degree have the highest unemployment. People with a postgraduate degree will have the lowest unemployment and they just kind of stack perfectly in between.
36:33 Speaker 01 Starting in 2022, young college graduates started to do worse off relative to all workers. And they've been looking at this data, you know, since 1990.
36:46 Robin Rauzi? Less, less better off.
36:48 Speaker 01 Less better off.
36:50 Speaker 01 Even a 22-year-old with a college degree would have a better unemployment rate than the overall unemployment rate up until around three years ago. And so they thought that that was kind of an interesting development that they would recently call a deteriorating situation. The reason why, I suspect, I haven't asked them, but the reason why I think they waited this long is that some unemployment amongst young people, most economists would regard as a really, really good thing. And that younger workers having a higher unemployment rate is a signal of a really good functioning labor market doing what it's supposed to do for young workers.
37:27 Robin Rauzi? Right, where they're trying on different jobs and changing careers and also maybe even taking time between, between jobs to do something else.
37:37 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly. You want people to find the job and career that's best for them, and it is wildly unreasonable to assume they'll find it at 19 or 22.
37:49 Speaker 01 When they enter the labor market, or even 27 if they got graduate degrees, or like 31 in my case.
37:56 Speaker 01 Because I stayed in school till like the 21st grade. We, we don't expect people to, first job to be the best job, but what's best for the economy is when you are thriving. Like when you find the thing that you are supposed to do, the job, the industry, the career, the role, that is when you contribute most to the economy and we need you to get there. And we have no reasonable expectation that you'll start there. And the way that you get there is by trying on a lot of jobs and by learning things about yourself of what you're good at. And that's associated with a ton of job switching.
38:28 Robin Rauzi? Right.
38:29 Speaker 01 But if you switch jobs, you naturally have a higher unemployment rate. But that's okay. Like, we want you to go out there and switch. And in fact, some of the most damaging parts of a recession on young workers is that they don't have as much movement during really critical years.
38:45 Robin Rauzi? They don't switch jobs.
38:46 Speaker 01 Of college graduates who are 20 to 24, their unemployment rate is 6.5%. I mean, that's still really low. That's a fraction of the total group that is directly and adversely affected.
38:57 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
38:57 Speaker 01 You know, through this higher unemployment rate.
38:59 Robin Rauzi? It does mean that 94% of them who supposedly want a job have found it.
39:02 Speaker 01 Yes, but what kind of hurts young workers at this time period is those 94% will also have a hard time switching jobs and they won't learn as fast, they won't experiment as much. And in each job switch, especially in their first 10 years of your career, are associated with wage bumps.
39:19 Robin Rauzi? Income gains, yeah.
39:20 Speaker 01 You like trying a bunch of stuff and you jump to different jobs and you you tend to make more money at every jump, not necessarily, but you you get something from every jump for the most part. And this is also why you'll see a small peak in like postgraduate degrees closer to like age 30.
39:39 Robin Rauzi? Oh, they've been out working and they're like, okay, you know what, I do want to go get a go get a degree in economics or whatever.
39:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:44 Robin Rauzi? Right.
39:45 Speaker 01 I had been out for four years when I decided to go get a PhD. And I didn't, that was not anything I had possibly envisioned for myself while in college. But then afterwards, I was like, I think I'm gonna go get a PhD in economics. My dad was like, okay.
40:01 Robin Rauzi? Really?
40:03 Speaker 01 You know, you should be a lawyer, right? And I'm like, we'll get there, maybe. Both my parents are lawyers.
40:09 Robin Rauzi? You could be in a courtroom arguing. Instead, you're just here.
40:11 Speaker 01 I'm just here talking into a microphone in an empty room.
40:15 Robin Rauzi? Arguing with me.
40:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:16 Robin Rauzi? But I mostly agree with you, so, you know.
40:18 Speaker 01 This podcast is adjourned.
40:23 Robin Rauzi? You know, for a long time, I I worked as an editor for a consulting company and they worked specifically in talent management and headhunting. And they would say that really the most successful career path was to change jobs every three years. You learned what you were gonna learn and then you moved on to the to the next thing. And if you really wanted, especially if you, you know, they're talking about climbing the corporate ladder and also making more money and all those things, but every change every three years.
40:49 Speaker 01 I have a family member who is an incredibly successful businessman. And I remember while I was in college, he came and he took me out to dinner. And I was like, I guess you're going to tell me that I need to like go and get a business degree. And he was like, no, actually, I've interacted a lot with young people and office workers. And I encourage people to hire English majors because they know how to write. And it's something that we can't teach at the corporate level. And that blew my mind when he said that. And he's like, I'd take English majors with a business inclination more than I would take, you know, necessarily business majors. It stuck with me for a long time because the other thing that happened in the Great Recession for young workers is that we all picked the wrong major.
41:34 Speaker 01 And not only were we like feckless, working at Starbucks because we felt like it and living with our parents, but we had all picked the wrong major. And this came up a ton of like, why aren't we all just engineers?
41:45 Robin Rauzi? And I wouldn't be surprised if we're seeing a little bit of that here in this data too. Right? We have, we've had this huge push for everybody to go become engineers. And I'm not saying that we have oversaturated that market, but we probably have a larger portion of these graduates coming out into this market right now. You know, when I graduated, there was a lot of people who'd been film majors, you know, and Hollywood was not going to be able to absorb all of you. It turned out.
42:08 Speaker 01 Turned out.
42:08 Robin Rauzi? And I think the tech companies are kind of the same.
42:12 Speaker 01 Well, and we've been hearing for 20 years that we don't have enough people in STEM. And I'm sure a lot of college students and graduates can tell you that the pressure to do something STEM-y is so high.
42:23 Robin Rauzi? But also, you know, like we stand like, in fact, STEM jobs sometimes do translate, but it doesn't make it easy to translate those skills into move from job to job as your first job.
42:35 Speaker 01 The optimist part of this, which is going to be a little bit tough because.
42:40 Robin Rauzi? A little strained.
42:42 Speaker 01 A little strained because we're talking about a group that might be a leading indicator of a worsening economic situation unfolding slowly in front of our eyes. Yeah, there's not a ton to celebrate there.
42:56 Speaker 01 So why don't we just huddle for a couple of minutes and think of the bright side?
43:02 Speaker 01 I mean, okay, here's, here's, here's a couple of bright points as I have seen it. You know, one, I, there are a lot fewer character assassinations on young people for just being young and lazy and because they wear just dangerous clothes, like really wide leg pants, that's why they don't have jobs. I think that people are starting to see these workers, you know, for representing broader bad trends in the economy as them being kind of bearing the brunt in a frontline way.
43:35 Robin Rauzi? Being more bellwethers than...
43:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, like, even the stories that I thought were just like, and here's the first evidence of AI. Like, at least they weren't blaming the kids for being lazy, right? I mean, they might have gotten the AI part right, but they didn't get the kid part wrong. And so I think there is a general view that something bad is happening in our economy and these are the kids that are suffering from it first, which might not sound like a really positive upshot, but in a lot of ways it is.
44:03 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
44:03 Speaker 01 Because I think America lacks, deeply lacks, any type of sympathy for unemployed people in general.
44:08 Robin Rauzi? Oh, yeah.
44:09 Speaker 01 And showing sympathy for unemployed people, even if it is like the ones...
44:13 Robin Rauzi? You can start with the privileged college graduates.
44:15 Speaker 01 I mean, we're starting with privileged college graduates who are still better off than their high school counterparts or like most black people. We have got to start somewhere. So the fact that we have articles about sympathy for the unemployed, for me, who have studied unemployed people for so long, like, this is a milestone that I wouldn't necessarily celebrate, but I would absolutely welcome.
44:36 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
44:37 Speaker 01 That's one, that's one thing.
44:38 Robin Rauzi? You know, that's good. The journalists have cottoned on to the fact that they are not just lazy 20-souptings.
44:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's good. I, the other thing I would say is the bright spot here is that... None of what is happening to young workers, particularly those with a college degree, is necessarily reflective of their own capabilities or future success. Like, they are bearing the brunt of an economy that is slowing down, but that does not mean that their college degree won't be worth it, or that they didn't learn something that will ultimately be... I mean, even their unemployment rate now is still lower than their same-aged peers with just a high school degree. So, you can't exactly point to this and say, "Oh, see, they shouldn't have gone to college," because they are already still protected from the worst of the labor market, even for young workers, by having a college degree.
45:27 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
45:28 Speaker 01 And that... that's awesome for them, because they probably spent a lot of money on it, and it's good for us...
45:32 Robin Rauzi? They've got some student loans to pay back.
45:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, and it's good for us, because us as actors in the economy, because we don't want to have this really important human capital investment jeopardized.
45:41 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
45:42 Speaker 01 And just to make this really quick callback to Redcon, a human capital investment that is just as awesome in other countries.
45:46 Robin Rauzi? [laughing]
45:47 Speaker 01 And college is great everywhere, and I'm sorry. I'm sorry I said in particular they don't make movies about college in France. Like, I don't... [laughing] Oh, man. Um, okay.
45:57 Robin Rauzi? Okay. It's time for executive orders.
46:02 Speaker 01 Executive orders.
46:03 Robin Rauzi? Catherine, I think you have an executive order.
46:05 Speaker 01 I do. I do.
46:07 Robin Rauzi? Would you like to tell us about your...
46:09 Speaker 01 I need to take deep breaths and think about calming techniques. I went on a work trip this week in which I had to fly and make a connection, so I took four flights, two on the way there, two on the way back. Three of my flights were delayed, one of them overnight, one of them pushed me from arriving home before 10 o'clock to after midnight. None of the delays were related to weather, and I was seething at some points of just how miserable this makes the entire trip when something like this happens.
46:44 Robin Rauzi? You weren't even going that far. You didn't even change time zones.
46:47 Speaker 01 I didn't change time zones. I'm just going straight north, just going Houston to Madison. Just, up we go. So, my executive order is that all airlines are required to make an individual performance dashboard of how often they have gotten where you have paid to go on time. You can find some data of like how often flight paths are on time, but I think the airlines have it. You just merge, we do a one-to-one merge here and you can, you can merge on to individual, especially if you have a frequent flyer number data of how often you get a person somewhere on time and you should have to publish that for the person and provide them with a personal dashboard of how well you perform for them.
47:28 Robin Rauzi? A personal dashboard?
47:29 Speaker 01 A personal dashboard of airline performance.
47:32 Robin Rauzi? Oh, not on, I thought you were suggesting flight, like the, like an individual flight. Like, how often does American Airlines get you from Houston to, you know, whether, no, you, how often have they gotten Catherine somewhere on time?
47:45 Speaker 01 How often has American Airlines left me cursing under my breath, cursing over my breath, just yelling?
47:52 Robin Rauzi? Just cursing out loud?
47:53 Speaker 01 Just cursing out loud. And I think you should come up with like several, I mean, you could get really creative like this with like, like minutes of delay, minutes of delay relative to flight time. I mean, if you're taking a 43-minute flight from Houston to Dallas and your flight is delayed.
48:08 Robin Rauzi? And it's three hours late.
48:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, your flight is delayed three times the length of the flight time. Like, that is devastating. Connections that are missed because of flight time. So I, I would say twice in the last two months, I've had to sleep at an airport hotel because of flight delays. And I don't know if it's just like I curse airline on-time performance, or if I'm dramatic and feel like this only happens to me, but I think we should have an individual dashboard. And obviously, I had a lot of time to think about this for my three hours at DFW. Subpart B, if you're in the bottom 5%, they have to give you money at the end of the year. Like you, like we truly, you are, we are worst performing for you. There might have to be some requirements, because like if you only flew an airline once and the flight was late, you'd be like 100%. So you'd have to come up with some kind of
48:53 Speaker 01 like minimum flights, but regardless.
48:57 Speaker 01 Okay, the twin executive order for this is I do think that we need to start having citizens awards for people who are kind and reasonable during transit.
49:08 Robin Rauzi? Which is not you.
49:09 Speaker 01 Which, I'm not unkind or unreasonable to, I'm mad at the airlines, but I'm not like yelling at the flight attendant.
49:16 Robin Rauzi? Okay.
49:16 Speaker 01 Or like up there in the gate agent's face, being like, I'm the first person in the history of the world that's ever missed a flight. Like, I'm not, I'm not like that. I just, I do get mad at the airlines, but I don't take it out of the
49:26 Robin Rauzi? So who gets these, who gets these awards?
49:28 Speaker 01 Well, we were getting on a flight that was pretty delayed, and the woman in front of me had a roller bag, and the gate agent said, you just need to check in the little bin. I don't know anybody who's calm about this, but this woman was like, oh, let me see. You know what? It's not going to fit at all. Why don't you guys take it? Cheers. And I was like, where did you come from?
49:49 Speaker 01 You're the most reasonable person that's flying in North America right now. Every other person would be on the ground, rolling in agony at having to gate check their bag. And she's like, you know what, fam? You're right. Thanks. I hate, she's like, I hate having to struggle to get it up there. And I just looked at her and I was like, you deserve some kind of medal for just being, for just being told to do some
50:09 Robin Rauzi? She just saved 50 bucks at not having to check that bag. They checked that and it was free. She's like, I won.
50:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, I definitely also see people do that, and I'm okay with it. But I, I, I just thought like, man, there are not enough people who are just even decent or reasonable in any type of interaction, once they get inside an airport. So
50:26 Robin Rauzi? Sure, you lose your mind a little.
50:27 Speaker 01 Everybody loses their mind. So that, those are a lot of travel ones. I could keep going. I should probably stop. So we keep the show under three hours?
50:33 Robin Rauzi? I have a travel related executive order, too. It's actually from Brigitte Desarnay, who's from Montreal, Canada, and sent this to us. And she says, car companies should have to make models that accommodate three car seats in the back row. Want three kids? You have to buy a minivan or get a three-row SUV, which is essentially a $65,000 surcharge on your third child. Fertility rates are falling. Big cars are more likely to cause harm than small ones. They generate more CO2 emissions, and they're expensive. And yet, nothing even exists to ensure that you can put enough child seats on every seat.
51:09 Speaker 01 In fact, there has been an economic research paper that studied the introduction of car seats in laws and found that they did lead to a reduction in third kid. Because so many people have to get a third, because so many people, the third kid is a new car.
51:24 Robin Rauzi? I mean, she said that they had to buy a minivan because they're expecting their third child.
51:28 Speaker 01 Even a lot of people will tell you, an SUV wouldn't fit three car seats in the back. And so, the third kid is a-
51:34 Robin Rauzi? I couldn't fit four cat carriers in my car.
51:39 Speaker 01 It's tough.
51:39 Robin Rauzi? It was not, it was, it would not, if they were children, I would have gotten pulled over for sure. What I did to get those cats in that car.
51:46 Speaker 01 Your colony?
51:47 Robin Rauzi? My cat colony.
51:48 Speaker 01 Your cat colony. Yeah, so Brigitte, I'm with you. Economics research is on your side. This is costing countries their potential third kid of many families because they don't want to have to buy a car at the same time, but would be faced with that prospect simply to meet car seat safety law requirements.
52:07 Robin Rauzi? So, we're thumbs up on this executive order.
52:09 Speaker 01 Yes, Brigitte, we are, we are fully endorsed and are with you.
52:12 Robin Rauzi? Fully endorse. All right, it's time for spiritual sponsors. Because we still don't have financial sponsors on this show, we may never have financial sponsors on this show. Catherine, who's your spiritual sponsor this week?
52:24 Speaker 01 My spiritual sponsor this week is positive reinforcement in professional settings.
52:31 Robin Rauzi? Nice.
52:32 Speaker 01 I think it's not done enough, maybe in the world that I come from in academia, but just someone saying, like, that's a good job. Damn, if it doesn't make my day. I respond horribly to negative reinforcement, but I respond, like, so well to positive reinforcement. And I don't think people give it genuinely enough. It's usually normally used to couch criticism. Like, I'm going to say something nice-
52:58 Robin Rauzi? Like a sandwich, yeah.
52:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, the sandwich, which was a really funny SNL skit. But I think just a genuine, like, building positive reinforcement into the workplace or into school, it's just, it's such a nice way to go about life. And so, random acts of positive reinforcement- Endorsed, that is my spiritual sponsor this week.
53:19 Robin Rauzi? The spiritual sponsor for the show this week is Brady Cork Garvin of North Charleston, South Carolina. He became a spiritual sponsor for us on Substack, and thank you, Brady. We appreciate it so much.
53:30 Speaker 01 Thank you, Brady.
53:32 Robin Rauzi? I have two spiritual sponsors this week. So the first one is jacaranda trees. I don't know if you guys have jacaranda trees in Houston, and in May, they bloom into these, like, they're not small trees, and they bloom into these lavender flowers that are just spectacular. And I kind of forgot about them. They bloomed a little late this year, but they just make spring here so wonderful, and I love them so much. My other spiritual sponsor this week is Bishop Gretchen Rayberg of the Episcopal Diocese of Spokane. So for Spokane Pride Parade and Pride Festival, they lost a bunch of their corporate sponsors, and the bishop wrote them a $10,000 check to make up for the departure of some of their sponsors. And then she went
54:14 Robin Rauzi? to the Pride, they have a big festival in Riverfront Park, and she said, "I am here because I believe God is here, because I believe God dances at drag shows, Jesus blesses chosen families, and I believe that the Spirit assists in transitions. And we, you and I, are divinely and fabulously made, and we reflect Clyde's image." Bishop Gretchen, you're the best.
54:37 Speaker 01 It looks like we really are ending the show by crying. This is becoming a trend.
54:43 Robin Rauzi? No, this cannot become a trend.
54:44 Speaker 01 Oh, God. I think the theme here is just kindness is very underrated, and we are going to snap out Bishop Gretchen in a world where it's so much easier to judge. And then, of course, snap out our two producers, Andy and Sophie. Thank you so much. We hope you enjoyed listening to Optimistic Economy. Tell your friends, give us money.
55:17 Robin Rauzi? We don't always cry.
55:18 Speaker 01 We don't always cry. And definitely go back and leave all those positive affirmations and positive reinforcement from the...
55:25 Robin Rauzi? Because apparently we need it.
55:26 Speaker 01 Because apparently we need it. And that's a wrap.
55:32 Robin Rauzi? That's a wrap.
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