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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18601 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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American Compass has a new article complaining about the decline of the Summer job:

The teen summer job is an American tradition that has been in decline since the turn of the century. From the 1950s through the 1990s, between 50% and 60% of Americans aged 16 to 19 had summer jobs. That started to decline in 2000, and during the Great Recession, it plummeted to less than 30%. It has barely rebounded since then, hitting 36% in 2019 before dropping back to 31% during the pandemic. This year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the share of 16- to 19-year-olds working or looking for work at 35%.

The article notes one reason why:

One curious fact about teen summer employment rates is that Asian teens are least likely to have a job. Only 20% of Asians aged 16 to 19 have one, compared to 40% of whites and approximately 30% of blacks and Hispanics. For adults it is the opposite, with Asians having the highest labor force participation rate.

Why are Asians half as likely to have summer jobs as white teenagers? In part, because they are busy studying. Tiger Moms think working as a lifeguard will not help anyone get into college, but test prep or math camp will.

The college admissions arms race puts pressure on parents who might otherwise prefer to let their teens spend their summer lifeguarding. Moms and dads worried about the intense competition decide to make their teens spend their summers on something that will boost their test scores or burnish their resumes. It is a vicious circle.

This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?

Doing so will help shape a happier generation of young people. A Harvard study that ran from the 1930s to the 1970s tracked the lives of more than a thousand teenage boys in the Boston area. It found that "industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor."

This is the same kind of error Leftists make when they see that kids whose parents took them to art museums have higher incomes than kids whose parents didn't and conclude that it means we need to subsidize art museums. In both cases, genetic confounding is ignored. But while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture, the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools.

None of this is to say that summer jobs are necessarily bad. If your teen is rotting his brain with electronics 16 hours a day, kicking him out and telling him to get a McJob is probably gonna be good for him. But if he's well adjusted, does well in school, and has lots of friends, there's no reason to make him work manual labor because someone conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway." It isn't, by the way. John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."

I've been trying to nail down what I find so off-putting and alienating about the way you express your opinion.

It brings to mind the social structure of the Qing dynasty, who puts the working class - the peasantry, workers and artisans, and merchants - above entertainers, soldiers, low-level bureaucrats. For an orderly and stable society to function, the scholar-gentry of the Empire had to give a level of respect to the masses who fed and clothed everyone. That someone has to do the hard work so that you can spend all day doing intellectual and creative things is a basic fact that is the root of nobless oblige.

Every elite class that has ever existed recognizes the need to respect their lessers for doing this.

But you don't.

The fact that your contempt is so nakedly obvious, and that you're either foolish or conceited enough to not have the grace to keep it to yourself. You are not a wise man. You are not an intellectual sticking it to the hidebound hicks who don't recognize your genius.

You are Grima Wormtongue.

I don't disagree but you're probably going to want to delete this before you catch a (justified) ban.

Meh. Alex posts a ton of top-levels, and they all have a "working out personal psychodramas" taste to them. At some point meta discussion about those dramas becomes justifiable.

No doubt, and I'll be first in line to complain about him, but this place still maintains a standard when it comes to outright name-calling.

There shouldn’t be a specific taboo on psychologically analyzing another poster’s motivations, or making meta observations about their style of argument or topics of interest, as long as the comment otherwise meets the normal standards of cordiality. Such observations are often extremely germane to the discussion.

(Never watched GoT and I have no idea who “Grima Wormtongue” is but that seems pretty anodyne as far as name calling goes.)

(Never watched GoT and I have no idea who “Grima Wormtongue” is but that seems pretty anodyne as far as name calling goes.)

I did not expect someone to miss a LOTR reference on TheMotte. Ever.

Truly, the youth of today are uncivilized barbarians.

No LotR experience either! Outside of half paying attention to the movies when friends/family were watching them when they first came out.

Now if you referenced Japanese pop culture I’d have a much better chance of picking that up…

Grima Wormtongue

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