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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30500 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."

Interesting post! I agree that all things being equal, a summer job is a great way to spend time. I did a couple summer jobs, but also spent a few summers just playing video games nonstop from sunrise to well past sundown. Personally I think if I was forced to get a summer job every summer, I would've developed a lot more virtue overall.

I'm curious overall - do you not see a benefit to being in touch with the working class whatsoever? To understanding how the other half lives, so to speak?

Or are you just saying that being in touch with the working class isn't good strictly in the sense of getting into an Ivy League school?

I'm curious overall - do you not see a benefit to being in touch with the working class whatsoever?

To a small extent, sure.

The issue I see here is that conservatism is increasingly the ideology of uneducated people and those who went to third-rate universities. Instead of thinking about how to acquire power, or attract EHC who have power, they're smoking copium about how noble manual labor is.

  • -12

This is at least the second time you recently dropped a "3rd rate university" put down against those lowly conservatives. I think our society is far too credentialist and we should not look down on people who go to their state school. Almost no one gets into the purposefully restrictive self-described-"elite" universities. That does not put a stink on the other supermajority who went to regular colleges.

Your "3rd rate university" sneer says much more about you than about a conservative with a degree.

I agree our society is too credentialist. The issue is not "they're bad because they went to a third-rate university" so much as "they're bad because they have an inferiority complex around having went to third rate university, and that's where the fetishization of manual labor comes from."

Lol you don't have any theory of mind for conservatives as we actually exist, do you? Conservatives are not embarrassed by going to less prestigious universities. We don't care. University prestige might occasionally matter on non-academic factors(ROTC or the football team are bragging rights) but we just assume undergrad classes are pretty much all the same. Actually someone who went to community college and worked their way through a transfer to podunk state school of commuting would be seen as a hard working self starter, not pathetic for being unable to get into harvard.

There's a red tribe joke- a very bright student from the rural south is visiting harvard. He stops a passing student, asks 'Where's the bathroom at?'. The student answers, clearly disdainful of his accent 'At Harvard, we are taught not to end our sentences with a preposition.' And the visitor responds 'Well then where's the bathroom at asshole?'. This is... reflective of real attitudes towards worrying about highly selective college admissions.

Well then where's the bathroom at asshole?'

To which the appropriate response is: "Your lack of a comma after 'at' clearly shows the difference between a rural south education to one delivered in the rarefied halls here; thank you for proving my point." (and no, adding the comma in doesn't fix the problem, it just goes back to the whole "don't end clauses with a preposition" problem).

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