Between Hell and High Water

Deflating the Future

By Mike Koetting February 3, 2026

This is the third, and for the moment, final post in my series on how we are failing to prepare the next generation for a fulfilling life. The first two posts focused on broad, but tangible issues, the economy facing young people and the confusion of post-secondary education. Today’s post is about something more diffuse but arguably more important—failing to create a sense of a robust future in young people.

Brief History of the Future

The idea of “the future” is a relatively new idea in history. All the ancient religions had some sense of the magic and mystical beyond day to day, mundane life. And all had a broad notion that fate served some people better than others. To create some degree of protection against the fickle fingers of fate, they conjured rituals and rules. But this was not “future” as we think of it; it was simply the awareness of the random distribution of events from a relatively limited set of possibilities.

There were always various ways for young people to “seek their fortune”. But this notion didn’t require any expansive idea of what the future might look like, merely a sense that you would get more of what was there.

The idea of the future begins to take on the coloration by which we know it at the time of the Enlightenment. At first it was a more philosophical idea of an evolving sense of moral progress. Some of the early immigrants to America, for instance, had a sense of seeking freedom—although most were simply seeking to improve their material conditions.

Only in the 19^th century do people start to see technological and scientific innovations changing the ground rules of life with the idea that the overall situation of humans might be materially better over time. The magnitude of this change is hard for us to fully appreciate.

As pointed out by Stephen Ambrose in Undaunted Courage, at the time Thomas Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase, the fastest way to get around was a horse. It hadn’t changed in millennia after millennia. There was no reason to assume it would ever change. But within one century, railroads crisscrossed the United States, cars were puttering around in cities and the Wright Brothers had taken their first flight.

Since then, change has been a constant. And with it, the assumption that life in the future would somehow be better. By and large, it has been. On most dimensions of human life, things are simply better. All the usual caveats apply, but it is hard to deny the general trend.

It feels like that trend is under threat, and, I believe, it feels particularly so to young people.

It’s Not Just the Material Things

It is not unreasonable to focus on material things. Industrialization has made life much easier, life spans are up, and creature comforts have expanded beyond the wildest imagination of previous generations. In many ways, the average person in the developed word enjoys a more luxurious life than the nobles of the Middle Ages…or probably even than the Roman emperors.

The rub is that how those get evaluated is not unrelated to the social context. Two elements in particular are crucial—fair opportunities and protections. This gets complicated because these two exist in tension with each other. People value the opportunity to get more than average, even much more. But at the same time, they expect some degree of protection to keep them from falling too far below the average, an average they assume will continue to improve as it has over the past two hundred years.

Judging from that time period, it appears this mix creates a degree of dynamic stability which is a great environment for innovation and economic growth. The expectation of improvements, the sense of rewards, the rule of law to make sure rewards from innovation are shared, and the bedrock assumption that the rules will stay more or less the same make the whole machine work remarkably well. Not just here in America, but in large parts of the developed world. And, conversely, when these contextual elements are missing, countries don’t develop.

What’s currently happening in America is shredding that framework. On the one hand, there remains the promise of great opportunity. But it feels much more predetermined. The idea that everyone can rise has been replaced by the idea that winners get wildly rewarded and the rest are on their own. For most people, by their mid-20’s it’s pretty clear whether they have won or lost. A few will successfully buck that trend and some will be deluded to ignore the signs, but the vast majority will know whether they are on the elevated track or left behind.

When this happens, the whole idea of “the future” collapses. Maybe there will be neat things in the future, but those will be available mostly to the top tier in the society. And maybe, after a few election-cycles, the country will decide it’s a good idea to put more props under the bottom rungs of society as a means of maintaining order. But the idea of “the future” as a societally shared possibility will wane because the focus will have shifted from creating opportunity in a shared framework of fairness to making it possible for winners to take all.

Ominous Portends

There are plenty of signs that this is impacting young people in a very unfavorable way.

A relatively small, but culturally significant example. There is substantial skepticism about the future of Social Security. One study found that about 45% of Gen Z and 39% of millennials believe they will not get a dime of the Social Security benefits they have earned. In another study, 76% of Gen Z and 76% of millennials anticipate they will need to continue working in retirement because Social Security will not pay enough. The erosion of confidence about Social Security reflects a suspicion that this is a society they cannot trust.

Environmental concerns represent a special case for young people: they will have to live with the consequences in a way us oldsters won’t. Contrary to my initial expectations, there is not much difference among age groups about the importance of addressing climate change. A substantial majority of all age groups believe it is a problem, but in all age cohorts there is a material number of people who believe it will have more positive impacts and, a smaller number, who doubt it is happening.

What does seem to be different is that younger people are more resigned to the impact. One third believe that it will be difficult to continue to live where they currently do and almost 40% of them believe it is too late to do anything about climate change.

Given their relative resignation about key issues, it is hardly surprising there is lack of enthusiasm for the entire idea of democracy, a governing approach I believe is essential for maintaining the kind of future I hope for. A 2023 survey by the American Public Media Research Lab found that only 27% of Americans aged 18 to 25 strongly agreed that democracy is the best system of government. A subsequent study of young people found that, although there was still support for idea of democracy, belief in the efficacy in the current working of government is anemic, as is their support for any political party.

All of this is creating an inhospitable future for young people. A national poll from the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School reveals a generation under profound strain, as young Americans report deep economic insecurity, eroding trust in democratic institutions, and growing social fragmentation. For many 18- to 29-year-olds, instability — financial, political, and interpersonal — has become a defining feature of daily life, shaping their outlook on the country and their own futures. Almost 60% of young adults report a lack of meaning, purpose or direction.

The mid-twentieth century was an unusual time because it was a period when society made a deliberate set of choices to make the availability of a good life more equitable. Rules were enforced. Markets were competitive rather than extractive. Wealth accumulation faced real limits. Excessive concentration of wealth was treated as a democratic threat. This was not the result of some inevitable political or cultural evolution. It was a result of political decisions that were supported because they delivered for such a large sector of the population. The owners of capital never believed this was a settled matter. They understood this for exactly what it was: a system designed to restrain them.

And now that system is in danger of coming apart entirely. This is the key question: will the U.S. be a place with strong economic guardrails or will it succumb to the will of extreme capital? Allowing unlimited futures of a small segment of the population, dampens the future for much of the population. The sense that life gets better, that the fruits of science, technology and innovation will be shared, seems more uncertain to younger people—and with it their view of the future has much closer horizons.

We’ve Muffed Post-Secondary Education

By Mike Koetting January 18, 2026

This is the second in a series of posts on how we are bungling the preparation of young people for their lives. Today’s post considers post-secondary education. As noted in the previous post, college student debt is one of the most salient features of young adult society in 2026 America. While this is fueled by the precipitous rise in the cost of college, the bigger problem is that as a society we have misunderstood the economic relationship between college and a good life. This is part of a much bigger problem—what gets taught in college and how—but those are for a different day.

How We Got Here

The problem starts with the fact that historically there was a significant “wage premium” (to use economic jargon) for graduating from college. In the great economic expansion following WWII college graduates did much better economically…and were less likely to wind up in Vietnam.

At the same time, the official US, locked in a geopolitical struggle with Russia, began to worry about the efficacy of American scientific and technical training and engaged in many programs to increase the number of people going to college. It was also a period of starting to address historical divisions in society and one of the politically safest ways to do something was to promote increased educational opportunities as a way of equalizing major income discrepancies.

Then, starting during the Reagan administration, income differentials in the US started to take off. This was due to a series of policy decisions that facilitated exactly such differentials. These policies followed from a set of assumptions about the primacy of capital over labor that led to a significant reconceptualization of how corporations should behave in our society. There should have been a much greater fight over the resulting policy changes since they did not necessarily speak to the well-being of the whole society. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party, the logical–indeed only–group capable of forcing such a reconsideration, itself flirted so heavily with that ideology that no effective opposition was raised.

In light of these, it is hardly surprising that so many people concluded that the best thing for their children was to use college to pole vault into this top tier. By 2010, 94% of all parents of someone younger than 17 said they expected their children to go to college. While that sentiment has cooled a bit, it is still prevalent. It is also the case that with expectations at this level, “not going to college” had a high risk of branding a young person as already a failure.

College enrollments exploded. And, indeed, continues to grow despite increasing levels of skepticism as to its economic worth. I suspect there are a large number of young people (and their parents) who are not at all sure of the returns, but, looking at an otherwise baren landscape, college feels like their only hope.

The increasing demand increased prices. There is no shortage of specific explanations for why college prices have increased so much but, for all those reasons, college prices (adjusted for inflation) essentially doubled, even at state schools. (The rate of increase has slowed down quite a bit in the last several years, even shrunk in some cases. But it still imposes very significant burdens on many students.)

College Does Not Guarantee Income

As it turns out, the wage premium for college is by no means guaranteed. Indeed, while statistically there is still a material wage premium associated with college, that measure can be misleading.

In the first place, that statistic applies only to college graduates. Depending on the measure, between 30% and 50% of students who start college never graduate. Which, unfortunately, does not insulate them from debt for money they borrowed to attend what college they did. Graduation rates are strongly correlated with race, gender and income. Hence, the odds of financial betterment through college drop for poor, non-white and part-time students.

Second, the overall average wage-premium is significantly impacted by the inclusion of outliers in the top income tier. Across the whole spectrum, the results can be very different by person. A study from the HEA Group of nearly 3,900 college graduates found that for 40% of college students, the wage benefits were either a wash or actually negative once the cost of attending college is taken into consideration. Thus, for some, particularly for kids who started off economically disadvantaged, college made them poorer.

This outcome was predictable. A while back, college degrees were valuable in part because they signified a rare degree of accomplishment, sometimes specialized knowledge. But a decades-long surge of college graduates has oversaturated the market, diluting the value of the degrees and turning what was once an advantage into table stakes. As many as half of all college graduates wind up in jobs that do not require a college degree, many of which do not pay that well.

Moreover, to the extent that the nature of income has slanted from labor to capital, college adds large benefits primarily to the extent it increases access to capital. This does happen. People get training or ideas are sparked that lead to entrepreneurship or some other specialized niche that gives rise to the rewards of capital. But that is hardly typical. In too many cases, college consolidates privilege rather than creating paths into prosperity.

All of this has psychic costs as well. Good high school students worry endlessly about whether they will get into one of the “magic ticket” colleges. High school students with mediocre academic aptitude worry about what will happen to them—and wonder whether their life-chances have been diminished before they are 18. And some kids simply don’t want to go to college, but how do they exercise that impulse without being made to feel like a loser? And how does it feel if you are one of the many college graduates to be underemployed, having spent time and money (some of which still has to be repaid)? And all of this with a patina that implies whatever happens to you is somehow a real measure of your worth to society.

The Other Side of the Coin

At the same time as we have put a too large portion of the population on an expensive escalator to nowhere, we have neglected support for other kinds of jobs that used to provide good lives and in many cases still do. There are skilled trade positions which are both in high demand and provide greater income than many college graduates are able to earn. Estimates of how many jobs require training beyond high school but not a college degree—so-called “middle skilled” workers– vary by source, but it could be as high as half of all jobs. This measure is also confounded by “degree inflation” because employers are requiring college degrees for positions that did not previously require them.

However measured, in many middle-skill categories, job openings outnumber appropriate applicants. McKinsey analyzed 12 types of trade job categories, including maintenance technicians, welders, and carpenters, and predicted an estimated imbalance of 20 job openings for every one net new employee from 2022 to 2032. Walmart has been so stymied its quest to fill middle-skill positions, it has launched its own training program.

One other interesting note. Skilled tradespeople report themselves as on balance happier than the average worker.

Where Does This Leave Us?

As usual, easier to see problems than feel good about solutions, even when it’s rather obvious what needs to be done. For instance, one of the more obvious is to rearrange our economic structure so that young people (and, importantly, their parents) don’t feel their only hope for a good life is to go to college. While it seems to me that appetite for changes of this magnitude is growing, I don’t see it happening quickly.

Related, I don’t see the cultural “over valuing” of college changing quickly. I am not knocking college. Indeed, I can make a compelling case why college for all, properly structured, is a good national policy. But not the way we do it now. There needs to be real cultural acceptance of the idea that there are many routes to happiness, and some of them are through trade schools and other training.

I frequently see postings on Facebook very much like this one.

What really strikes me about this post is that it starts out so defensively. I suspect that support for this position goes a whole lot deeper than the authors of this post assume. The consciousness that we have pretty much made a hash out of the postsecondary needs of our young people is growing.

That said, this general level of support needs to be translated into specific policies. The Biden administration was able to increase support for technical training and there were some modest new supports in the budget bill. But there have also been some backslides and random shorts. Thoughts about how support could be more robust might better target money and accelerate the culture conversation about the value of various career routes.

We also need to completely rethink how we want to fund post-secondary education, from the perspective of both the colleges and the students—and other needs of society. That, however, will be a huge lift in a culturally littered battlefield. There are also whole ranges of problems with colleges and college education that I didn’t even touch on in this post.

Two small things that might help, although they are kind of band-aids to the inadequacy of the current situation. We should improve financial literacy training at all levels so that kids might have a better idea of what they are getting into when they decide to go to college. (It will be hard to make this effective unless their parents are being exposed to the same information, but communities can do what they can.) Second, we need to make sure that high school guidance counselors understand the issues about college choices and actually can convey these to students (and, again, hopefully their parents).

Given the current situation, mostly what I have to say to the kids now in high school is “Good luck dealing with the mess we made.”

The Economy for Young People

By Mike Koetting January 6, 2026

The question of what one generation owes to the next is a complicated one, but I am struggling to find any register on which American society is doing a good job of giving young people what they need to have good and fulfilling lives.

This and subsequent posts will look at three important areas where as a society we seem to be doing a particularly poor job facilitating the next generation’s route to good lives. Today’s post will focus on young people in the economy. The next two will consider how we are treating post-secondary education, and, finally but more broadly, what view of the future we are giving to the people who will live it.

Widespread Problems Have Disparate Impacts

Many—perhaps most—of the problems in our economy apply to many age groups, not just young people. But, as I will try to show, the damage to young people is particular, mostly because of the way it shapes their outlooks and their life-long trajectories.

The core problem of the American economy is that the benefits of the economy are going disproportionately to capital rather than labor. We’ve all seen the graphs.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Which, of course, has led to a serious divergence in income growth among various cohorts of the economy, with after-inflation growth of the top tiers seriously outpacing the rest of society.

Again, while this impacts everyone in the bottom 80% of the income distribution, the impacts on young are magnified. They have no resources on which to fall back. They are seeking for the first time many of the things all adults want to have–their own car, have their own place, be able to imagine starting a family.

One consequence of these immediate difficulties is that a great number of young people can’t understand how they are going to make their way in life. This is a major change in the social framework of our society. From the end of World War II until, somewhat arbitrarily, the 2008 recession, there seemed to be multiple life paths. Not that they were equal and their real-life availability varied across the population. And cracks started showing well before 2008. Still, most people coming of age over that period could readily imagine a track to a good life—professional, white collar, gray collar, or blue collar. All of these tracks, in varying degrees, promised employment at a wage that afforded a house, a car, and a vacation. It was simply assumed that these jobs would offer health insurance and pension. In that context, marriage and kids made sense. The gradual accretion of women into the labor force helped ice the economic cake, even if it created other issues

By contrast, most of today’s young people are deeply skeptical these pathways will be available to them. For many, they are already facing serious headwinds. In a poll of young people by the Harvard Institute of Politics 43% of people in their sample reported struggling or getting by with limited financial security— and this strain is especially pronounced among Black and Hispanic young people and those without a college degree. In another study of young people, nearly 40 percent of survey participants said they were taking on additional jobs to make ends meet.

Bad Job Market

One of the biggest problems for young people is that the job market is inhospitable. Even those who have graduated from college can find the sledding difficult.

The three-month moving average unemployment rate for recent U.S. grads sits around 5.3% versus 4.2% for the overall workforce; on some measures for degree-holders it pushes ~6–7%. This is being driven by a number of factors. In some cases, it is in fact AI, or, more likely, the expectation of AI. It also reflects the economy of not hiring people who will take a while to ramp up their skills. Both of these have become problematic for today’s cohort because it is looking increasingly likely that during the economic “bounce back” from the pandemic many companies over hired on the assumption their growth would continue at that pace. It hasn’t. With insufficient demand, companies would have to lay off workers to make new hires. They don’t want to. And the problem is amplified because consumer confidence is in the toilet and people are unwilling to leave the jobs they already have. When there are fewer voluntary movers, the number of job openings decreases. All of this generates a longer-term problem because when young people don’t get starting jobs, they are blocked from the opportunity of on-the-job learning and run the risk of permanently lower income and skill levels.

The problems for those who would otherwise head into blue collar jobs are different in particulars, but similar in outcome. On balance, manufacturing jobs in the US have declined as a part of the workforce. This has been going on for years but has recently accelerated dramatically, falling by almost 25% since 2020. This is driven by both automation and trade policies. When total jobs in a field disappear, there are inevitably fewer job openings, which of course is disproportionately felt by young people, setting in motion a chain of problems that stretch over a lifetime.

Student Debt

I have heard many adults dismiss the issue of student debt as some version of “entitled young people”. I am not sure they understand the magnitude of the issue. One in four adults under the age of 40 have student loan debt. This totals to about $1.8 trillion held by 42 million different people, most of them between the ages of 20 and 40. In 2025, the average amount of the loan debt is $50,000, And while there are some people in this mix for whom the student loan was the ticket to a very well-off life style, there are many more for whom this was a marginal investment, or, worse yet, yielded no tangible economic advantage.

To be sure, what’s going on with student debt is intractably related to the cost of college and, further, its role in our society. I will return to these in the next post, but here I am simply pointing out that student debt is a major economic fact in the lives of young people. There is evidence that by itself it reduces home ownership and negatively impacts family formation. It can materially impair credit scores, which leads to higher rates for everything from credit cards to mortgages.

It is hard to put these policies into a global perspective because so many aspects of American post-secondary education are unique. But other countries have chosen different approaches that result in little to none of the anxiety that we have created in America. For all the heat the discussion has attracted, neither party has put forth an agenda remotely commensurate with the problem. Impact of recent changes as part of the Trump administration is still being sorted out—and may include some very modestly useful reforms. But the decision to renew garnishing salaries for delinquent student loans will certainly cause some real hardships.

Housing

The increase in housing costs is well discussed as a problem afflicting all portions of the population. Inflation-adjusted housing costs, rent and purchase, have increased almost 25% more than median wages in the last five years. The result is that the entire bottom range of the income distribution is facing increasing difficulties in affording housing.

But, again, the impact on young people is particularly stark. Median age of first time home ownership, for instance, reached 40 this year, an all-time high according to the National Association of Realtors. The following chart is a poster for the problem.

U.S. Census Bureau

In Short

Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, said “Hope is the oxygen of democracy.” But it’s not at all clear that the current economic situation is generating hope in young people. Rather, it is raising concerns as to whether they will find jobs that pay enough for a comfortable life, be able to own their own home, be confident they will have health insurance, be able to afford children or retire at a reasonable age. And while all young people have some degree of apprehension, it would be inexcusable to overlook the greater pessimism about having a good life among those who start out with few advantages. It is no wonder so many feel the game is rigged.

Rather than generating hope, then, I am worried the current situation is generating fear in young people. That is a very bad thing. As Yoda says: “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate.”

And hate, as we have seen, is a threat to democracy.

Progress on Reducing Violence in Chicago

By Mike Koetting November 25, 2025

Today’s post focuses on fighting gun violence in Chicago, although the issues have national resonance.

The good news is that Chicago gun homicides have decreased significantly since their recent peak in 2021. This is true in most of the nation, but Chicago’s rate of decline was greater than the national average. This is not, of course, due to Operation Midway Blitz, as the Trump administration has ridiculously claimed. It was under way well before then and links in part to specific actions taken in the city and state.

It is still too high. The loss of life and disruption to the community is, and should be, unacceptable. It is also a political problem because ”crime” is a major issue for many voters, even if they aren’t keen on the Trump approach

The Reality of a Progressive-Populist Alliance

By Mike Koetting November 11, 2025

In my last post, I suggested that at least one way forward is some kind of populist-progressive alliance. Although more thinking about such an alliance raises some concerns, as last week’s election results illustrate, this is probably the way forward.

Obvious Convergence on Economic Issues

The primary basis for such an alliance is the concern over economic issues. We are currently in an anomalous situation where the stock market continues to boom. And while numerous other macroeconomic indicators are not plunging, the underlying realities are increasingly wobbly and the stress for many individuals and families acute.

The Unnecessary Scarcity We Tolerate Is Tearing Up the Country

By Mike Koetting October 28, 2025

I’ve been thinking that Abundance, the Ezra Klein-Derek Thompson book, has the right idea but the focus is too narrow.

The Klein-Thompson book starts with the observation that scarcity is a choice. It then proceeds to assume that the way out of the scarcity trap is to make it easier to create more stuff so that all may experience the abundance of what our technology can produce. This clearly has an element of truth. They correctly identify bottlenecks in our current production of social goods and they are right that there is no political appetite for “degrowth.” So power to their suggestions.

That said, however, they miss the urgency of the situation. A large chunk of the population is furious. Trying to remove obstacles to creating greater supply of desired goods, while laudable, is simply not a solution commensurate with the degree of anger in the body politic. I think Michael Hirschorn, in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, has a better handle on where we are: “Trumpism is more than politics. It’s an emotional gas-main explosion, from people who felt unheard, patronized, left behind.”

The Moment of Truth

By Mike Koetting October 14, 2025

I believe we are approaching a “make-or-break” point for Trump’s authoritarian impulses.

It’s not a question of what he wants to do. That’s clear. In the last several weeks, he has replaced Federal Attorneys until he found one who would pursue an embarrassingly flimsy indictment against one of his enemies, he signed an executive order that raised the possibility almost any kind of dissent could be treated as “treason,” he posted on Truth Social that Democrats are “THE PARTY OF HATE, EVIL, AND SATAN,” and he lectured the leaders of the Armed Services that their mission included fighting the “enemies within”.

His approach to controlling immigration is increasingly inhumane. His masked marauders have grabbed people off the streets with little regard for their situations or actual legal status. Here in Chicago, along with the wanton cruelty and indifference to legality, there has been a major performance element designed to intimidate: armed border guards patrolling the Chicago River, military marches down Michigan Avenue on a Sunday afternoon and ICE agents rappelling from Blackhawk helicopters into apartments filled with sleeping families—separating children from parents and causing total pandemonium. Now Trump is calling for Governor Pritzker and Mayor Johnson to be jailed.

Government Statistics for Policy

Curated by Mike Koetting September 30, 2025

I’ve been on vacation the last two weeks, so I don’t have a new post. But to fill the vacuum that would otherwise be created in the universe, I am posting this collection of relevant quotes on the above topic.

Attacking Medical Science

By Mike Koetting September 15, 2025

Every once and a while, you’ll run across an article about a bunch of teens absolutely trashing a local school. You’ll shake your head and wonder, “What the hell is this about? Okay, they don’t like school. But this doesn’t make any sense.”

What Trump and his Republican enablers are doing to the American scientific enterprise is remarkably similar, except with results that are going to be a lot worse. It’s a bit hard to tell exactly how great the damage will be given the uncertainty of what actions will withstand court challenges, what administrative actions will be taken to circumvent courts or where the juvenile in charge will change his mind. But working on this essay made it clear to me it is even worse than you probably imagined. Media covers it one event at a time, without stepping back to see the whole catalogue of damage. Likewise, the more you look at it, not only do you realize it’s more dangerous, but you also realize it is even more senseless than appears.

Old Political Order Fading; Future Is Scary

By Mike Koetting September 3, 2025

David Brooks, taking anguished stock of the depredations of Trump and the Republicans, on PBS NewsHour, wondered why there aren’t more people in the streets. This is a question I have often asked myself. And am not the only one. What Trump and the Republicans are doing is so destructive of the spirit of democracy as to demand vigorous response.

But if the attack on the ideals of America is so fundamental, why aren’t there more people in the streets?