Remember the old joke about The New York Times ultimate headline? World Ends, Women and Minorities Suffer Most? V. Dione Hayes of The Washington Post ran that story today only it was about unemployment among young black people.
I don't deny the news value of a 34.5% unemployment rate among black men ages 16-24 (it's 15.4% among women), which is much higher than the 10.2% we face nationally and of course relevant to Washington's demographics.
The result, however, is a rehash of bad things that can happen to you if you lack education and a job to help develop a work ethic or have a criminal record. None of this is news. In addition, Haynes points out that these problems are experienced to some degree by everyone in those situations, white or black, which undercuts the point of the story.
Unemployment among young people is particularly troubling, economists say, because the consequences can be long-lasting. This might be the first generation that does not keep up with its parents' standard of living. Jobless teens are more likely to be jobless twenty-somethings. Once forced onto the sidelines, they likely will not catch up financially for many years. That is the case even for young people of all ethnic groups who graduate from college.
News stories of this length should tell us something we don't already know, otherwise they are just sensationalizing the problem.
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