Re: Weaving the Strands: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 2.0
I must have been impressionable...I had jobs outside the home for pay starting around age 12 because that is what people did. I didn't really "need" the money. Getting a job was merely a standard part of life. You didn't really think about it, you just did it.
I still have a copy of my first paycheck: $7.06, from delivering newspapers door to door one day a week. I worked through high school (when minimum wage was $1.60 / hour, although gasoline was $0.35 per gallon at that time as well), was an usher, a part-time janitor, among other things. In college I was part of "dorm crew" in which poor students cleaned rich students' bathrooms.
Part of the change, it seems to me, is that parents now perceive the world to be a much more dangerous place (I'm sure in reality it isn't that much more dangerous, it's just that we now have broader news coverage of crimes that previously had only been reported locally).
I had a bicycle in my middle school years and went everywhere on it. Once I was riding home from baseball practice and a hailstorm struck. A stranger in a station wagon offered me a ride home and I accepted. It was routine and matter-of-fact. Today, such things are completely unheard of. what parent today would let a middle-school kid ride their bicycle all over the place on their own without supervision??
Another element that might well be in play: I recall reading an anthropological study somewhere about the duration of adolescence and how there was a correlation between how long adolescence lasted and the overall demand for unskilled labor in the job market (you alluded to a similar concept). Lots of teenagers just a few years older than me were drafted to serve in Vietnam war, and so there were more job openings then, and "kids grew up faster" in the sense that many people went right from high school into work and it was not all that typical that "everyone" went on to college.
Then baby boomers started having kids and now those kids, having grown up, are clogging the job market opportunities for today's teens, and as a result, adolescence now lasts into early 20s for lots of young people.
I must have been impressionable...I had jobs outside the home for pay starting around age 12 because that is what people did. I didn't really "need" the money. Getting a job was merely a standard part of life. You didn't really think about it, you just did it.
I still have a copy of my first paycheck: $7.06, from delivering newspapers door to door one day a week. I worked through high school (when minimum wage was $1.60 / hour, although gasoline was $0.35 per gallon at that time as well), was an usher, a part-time janitor, among other things. In college I was part of "dorm crew" in which poor students cleaned rich students' bathrooms.
Part of the change, it seems to me, is that parents now perceive the world to be a much more dangerous place (I'm sure in reality it isn't that much more dangerous, it's just that we now have broader news coverage of crimes that previously had only been reported locally).
I had a bicycle in my middle school years and went everywhere on it. Once I was riding home from baseball practice and a hailstorm struck. A stranger in a station wagon offered me a ride home and I accepted. It was routine and matter-of-fact. Today, such things are completely unheard of. what parent today would let a middle-school kid ride their bicycle all over the place on their own without supervision??
Another element that might well be in play: I recall reading an anthropological study somewhere about the duration of adolescence and how there was a correlation between how long adolescence lasted and the overall demand for unskilled labor in the job market (you alluded to a similar concept). Lots of teenagers just a few years older than me were drafted to serve in Vietnam war, and so there were more job openings then, and "kids grew up faster" in the sense that many people went right from high school into work and it was not all that typical that "everyone" went on to college.
Then baby boomers started having kids and now those kids, having grown up, are clogging the job market opportunities for today's teens, and as a result, adolescence now lasts into early 20s for lots of young people.
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