Boom-Towns & Baby-Booms vs. Immigration

People do not think a baby boom is as worrisome as immigration.  Nor intranational migration. Yglesias:

When people hear about a town that's attracting many new residents, they say it's "booming" not that the newcomers are poaching a fixed supply of jobs. Nobody in Texas seems to have proposed trying to close the state to migrants from the Northeast and Midwest; rather, they see the state's attraction to migrants as one of its strengths. The "foreign-ness" of newcomers from other countries distracts people from fundamental dynamics that they understand in other contexts.

Mandel:

I started writing about tough times for young college grads in 2006, when I was at BusinessWeek. Seems like a different day and age, doesn’t it?  Since then things have only gotten much much worse.  By my latest calculations:

• Real earnings for young male college grads are down 19% since their peak in 2000.
• Real earnings for young female college grads are down 16% since their peak in 2003.

These figures are for full-time workers, ages 25-34, with a bachelor’s degree only. See the charts below.
I want to ask an economic question, a political question, and a policy question.  First, no one has given me a good explanation yet of why young American college grads should have been hit so hard. Is there increased competition with young college grads around the world?  Are new college grads lower quality than their predecessors? Has information technology reduced the need for young grads? I really would like to know.
Politically, Obama captured the imagination of this group in 2008. Are young college graduates going to sit out the next presidential election in disgust?  Is there any candidate that can excite them?
Finally, if  we were going to design some economic policies to help young college grads, what would they be?

Nutty PhD in Humanities?

Author Louis Menand On Reforming U.S. Universities : NPR:

an enormous number of new campuses opened up in the 1950s and 1960s. ...Then after 1970, the system started to slow down and even go backwards, and you ended up with an enormous number of PhDs for a declining number of slots.
...the number of PhDs awarded has been going up pretty steadily since the 1970s, and the number of job openings has more or less been going down.
...the time it takes to get the PhD has been increasing steadily since the 1970s so that the median time to get a PhD in a humanities discipline, like philosophy, English, art history, is nine years.
...Now, if you think that you can get a law degree and argue a case before the Supreme Court in three years, get a medical degree and cut somebody open in four years, why should it take nine years to teach poetry to college freshmen?
...only about half the people who enroll in graduate programs in English actually get the PhD - only five percent of those ended up teaching in research universities, which is really what we're training our students to do.

A century of labor leisure tradeoff

Licensure

Medical licensing only became important 100 years ago with the publishing of the Flexner Report.  Other occupations have been catching up since then.  Due to licensing requirements in Illinois, it took longer to "become a master plumber than for a newly graduated physician to become a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons." Alan Kreuger says licensing is growing in many sectors of the economy:

Morris M. Kleiner, ...questions whether occupational licensing has gone too far. He provides much evidence that the balance of occupational licensing has shifted away from protecting consumers and toward limiting the supply of workers in various professions. A result is that services provided by licensed workers are more expensive than necessary and that quality is not noticeably affected.... Professor Kleiner conservatively estimates that 20 percent of workers in 2000 were in an occupation that was covered by a state licensing requirement, up from 5 percent in the 1950's.
He said that licensing has mushroomed because the service sector, where licensing is more prevalent, has grown rapidly and because more occupations have started requiring licenses.
...A state-by-state list of the occupations covered by licensing requirements is available from www.acinet.org/acinet/licensedoccupations.... Perhaps as many as 3 of every 10 workers nationwide are required to obtain a license to do their job.... Kleiner and a colleague, Robert T. Kudrle, found that stricter state licensing requirements for dentists did not noticeably affect the dental health of 464 Air Force recruits. Other studies have found at best weak evidence that students in classes taught by licensed teachers performed better than those taught by unlicensed teachers.
Summarizing the literature, Professor Kleiner concludes, "there is little to show that occupational regulation has a major effect on the quality of service received by consumers."
At the same time, the hurdles imposed by occupational licensing reduce the supply of workers in many regulated professions, which drives up wages in those jobs and the price of services. Dentists, for example, were found to earn and charge 11 percent more in states with the most restrictive licensing requirements. While tough licensing standards may help higher-income consumers avoid low-quality providers, it also appears to prevent lower-income consumers from gaining access to some services.
Professor Kleiner said that a frequent pattern was for workers who have common interests and provide a homogeneous service to form an association. That association then seeks regulation to restrict the number of people who can work in the occupation. The state legislature and governor have little incentive to resist this pressure because the state gains revenue from license fees.
The most notable opposition to licensing comes from large buyers like hospitals, which object to the monopolization of their suppliers. In most cases, however, consumers are diffuse and have little individual incentive to oppose licensing.
Another factor driving the growth of occupational licensing is the decline of labor unions. Apparently, the labor market abhors a vacuum; it needs some institutions and rules to function. Occupational licensing has replaced unions as the main labor market institution. There are now more than twice as many workers covered by occupational licensing provisions as are covered by a labor union contract.
"There is a lot more flexibility with unions than occupational licensing," Professor Kleiner said. Unions, he pointed out, negotiate at the company level and can be decertified, whereas occupational license requirements are typically statewide and rarely repealed.

Women Earned The Majority of Doctorates In 2009

Chronicle

Impact of Recessions on Earnings

People who get laid off during a recession lose their skills because they cannot get another job quickly and skills depreciate.  Plus, employers discriminate against people who have been unemployed (or underemployed) for an extended time.  These factors and others like the depression that often haunts the unemployed have long-lasting effects.  Kevin Drum:

Here's a gloomy chart from a new Brookings paper. It shows the average wages of men under 50 who lose their jobs in a "mass layoff" event.

• The red line is for men who are laid off during good economic times. On average, these men have steeply rising earnings in the five years before the layoff and then experience a big earnings plunge. They eventually get back to their old earnings level, but that's it. Their earnings never again get above that.
• The blue line is for men who are laid off during recessions. They also have steeply rising earnings in the five years before the layoff and then experience a big earnings plunge. However, they never even come close to their old earnings level. They max out at about $36,000 compared to peak earnings before the layoff of $45,000.

The steeply rising earnings before the layoff are a little perplexing to me, and I wonder if this is related in any way to the probability of being laid off in the first place. The main takeaway, though, is that if you lose your job during a recession, you are probably screwed for the rest of your life. Even ten years later you'll earn about 20% less than you did before. This price has been paid needlessly by hundreds of thousands of workers because our political leaders have never had the courage to take action strong enough to get our economy moving again.