Is Gen Z Doomed?

This week, I started a firestorm on social media with a very innocent post about the unemployment rates and the prevailing wage at companies like Panda Express, Chipotle, and UPS. It turned into a wide-ranging debate about the general prospects for Gen Z, or the Zoomer generation, and seemingly intractable problems such as migration, inflation, and DEI. In this week’s podcast, I’ll go into exactly what this debate means. I’ll separate fact from fiction and set the record straight on what the prospects for Gen Z might be and how they can forge the best path forward.

Plus, I’ll be talking about why the Right must retake California, why Texas A&M scrapped its segregated diversity conference, and what Trump will do on Day One. All that and more, stay tuned.

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The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity:

If you’ve spent any time on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, you’ve probably seen this phenomenon where some account or person on the platform becomes the main character for the day, a symbol of a wider debate that is a springboard for some heated argument within the discourse. Sometimes this is intentional. People can be provocative. They can solicit a reaction or bait their opponents in a debate into an overreaction. But other times, it is unintentional. Someone writes a post, and then it spins out of control and turns into something that it wasn’t at the beginning.

This week, I am the main character in a wide-ranging debate about Gen Z, Panda Express, migration, and DEI, that started unintentionally from a very simple reply that I had written to another Twitter user about the state of the economy. Let’s review exactly what happened, walk through this debate, and try to parse fact from fiction, good from bad.

The genesis of this was part of this week-long debate among various factions on the political Right about the economic fortunes of Gen Z: what they should be doing, how they should be structuring their lives, where they should be living, and what career paths they should be following. There was this idea presented that despite difficulties related to migration, housing costs, or DEI, the best course of action for Gen Z is to figure out a place where they can afford to live and start to build a career from the ground up. The debate got centered symbolically on St. Louis. Some people feel that they are above having to live in St. Louis or the surrounding suburbs, and other people argue, quite sensibly, that you can have a good life in the St. Louis metro area. Even if you want to live in Malibu, Brooklyn, or the Mission District of San Francisco, you may not be able to afford to do so, and you should look for feasible alternatives in places further out of the major tier-one cities or even, God forbid, in the American heartland.

In this debate, someone had commented that they were hearing all these horror stories about mass layoffs and a terrible labor market. I replied, quite factually and quite truthfully, that the news doesn’t report hiring sprees as much as it reports mass layoffs. This is a facet or inevitability of how news works; bad news travels much faster than good news. But if you actually look at the statistics, they suggest at least a reasonably robust labor market. The unemployment rate generally is four percent. For college grads, it’s three-and-a-half percent. And for recent college grads, it’s five percent, all within that tight range, which suggests that out of people getting out of college or those with a bit more work experience, approximately ninety-five percent of those looking for work are able to find work—maybe not their ideal job at their ideal salary, but by their behavior, accepting the job and working at the job, they’re signaling to the market that there is a fit between supply and demand.

Economists call this full employment. There is considered to be a natural unemployment rate of around four percent because people are switching jobs, quitting jobs, and taking jobs in between jobs. But they say that in a healthy labor market, four percent unemployment means that the economy is functioning quite well. I also pointed out that for non-college, non-trade workers—workers in the service sector—there’s evidence of robust wages, at least in comparison to what you might think for service jobs. I pointed out that even the Panda Express down the street from here has an advertisement for an assistant manager at $70,000 a year plus benefits. I also pointed out that Chipotle is offering a management track position that you can enter with no experience and work your way up to with a $100,000 salary, plus full benefits, retirement, and a free college degree that you can take online in your off hours. Finally, UPS—the Teamsters Union, which represents the majority of UPS drivers, has negotiated a salary that is equivalent to a $145,000 total compensation that will go up to $170,000 total compensation for its delivery drivers.