I've been following Kyla Scanlon a lot recently. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but Kyla Scanlon is amazing. She's an Internet-based author and commentator with an enormous reach. She's written a well-received book. She has an extremely good newsletter (that's how I generally get her writing). And she's only 28 years old!!
Her latest issue of her newsletter talks about the age-old economics topic of zero-sum thinking: Zero-Sum Thinking and the Labor Market.
Her essay starts and ends with the big picture, but for me the most compelling part was the mid-section, where she digs deep into the much-reported observation that "Since 2018, the unemployment rate of recent college graduates has generally been higher than the rest of the labor force."
Dissecting the details, Scanlon notes:
We've turned job hunting into a lottery where you buy as many tickets as possible and pray one hits and it is destroying our belief in meritocracy itself. When getting a job feels like winning the lottery, what happens to the 'hard work pays off' narrative that held American society together? It creates the kind of thinking that feeds zero-sum thinking: “if I can only win by gaming a rigged system, then the system itself must be fundamentally unjust.”
Read the whole thing. Read everything Scanlon writes. You'll be better off for incorporating her perspectives and analyses into your life.
Well said. I think we’re headed into an unknown time in the job market with a lot of decisions being made by c-suite execs with only immediate gains in mind and long term impacts looming over. I keep wondering whether we will see unions form in the tech industry - but only time will tell.
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