ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors explore three of the more important aspects of the youth unemployment problem in the United States, the first being the economic logic of youth unemployment through the lens of basic economic theory. Second, young workers are inadvertently harmed by economic policies that make it harder for them to get and keep jobs because governments ultimately cater to the economic needs of older labor over the needs of younger labor. Third, youth unemployment is, to some extent, a feature of democratic market economies that display weak forms of social solidarity across generational and racial/ethnic lines. The economic and social costs of unemployment, as well as the usual and destructive intergenerational transmission of class disabilities from one generation, are logically identical to other sorts of "negative externalities"—the spill over costs of economic transactions that damage the wellbeing of third parties.
