People like to go to work. They like to interact with humans. Many workers are older and have grown used to certain ways of doing business. That won’t all go away just because Claude is standing outside your office waiting for word to kick you out.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
:::
Although young college graduates still experience relatively low unemployment and make decent wages, they have clear and sound reasons to feel more financially precarious than one might expect. The most obvious and long-standing reason is housing: many young people measure their economic maturity through homeownership, and buying a house is becoming nearly impossible in many major metropolitan areas.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
:::
Life experienced on phones and through social media leaves us lonely and alienated from one another; this has led to an existence that’s somehow at once both intensely individual and intensely tribal.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
:::
Artificial Intelligence does not yet account for much job loss, but its arrival has magnified negative sentiments and has helped to create a collective despair, especially among the young and educated.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
:::
Artificial Intelligence won’t replace all entry-level white-collar jobs, but it will cause an extended period of pain, during which an increasing number of employers, wowed by new advances in technology, decide to quietly stop hiring many recent college graduates. This will accelerate the already widening unemployment gap between young, college-educated people and everyone else.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
:::
Youth sentiment is a notoriously hard thing to track. Polling is a fraught enough enterprise without having to deal with flaky kids, occasionally impenetrable survey questions, and the real possibility that words such as “confidence” or “satisfied” might not mean the same thing from one generation to the next.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
:::
The institutions that are fostering supposedly egalitarian politics limit upward mobility as much as they facilitate it. This has encouraged a type of blinkered and oftentimes unambitious style of activism among young people, which asks for many changes but does not challenge the system that provides them with their own lofty status.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
:::
As long as the university is mostly a vehicle for class reproduction, the morality that it produces will be tailored for an audience of fellow college graduates. Is it any wonder that years of liberal theorizing on how to reach non-college-educated voters have failed?
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
:::
In the past thirty or so years, the academy has replaced the church as the center of the liberal moral imagination, providing the sense of a community bound by ethics, a firmament of texts and knowledge that should inform action, and a meeting space for like-minded people.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
:::
As progressive Americans have become more secular, the academy has become their primary moral training ground. The results have not been good.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
:::