On the Decline of Summer Jobs

A couple of weeks ago, Danielle Kurtzleben wrote an interesting, short piece over at Vox today about the disappearance of teenager summer jobs. It was a good piece, but I don't think it quite gets at the most important stuff. I want to sketch out two stories, of Jill and Karen.

In 2000, Jill and Karen enter high school. Jill comes from a family of means; her parents both work and make $150,000 per year combined, and she has only one sibling. Jill is smart and has very good grades. Karen enters high school and has very good grades as well. But Karen's father left when she was 3 and her younger sister was an infant. Her mom works 50 hours a week and pulls in $40,000 a year. So they're doing OK, but it's a tough go of it.

As first year high school students, Jill and Karen both excel. Jill goes to a two-week summer camp that specializes in piano. Karen stays home around the house for much of the summer.

Jill and Karen both do very well as sophomores. The following summer, Karen nabs a job at a snack bar at a local public pool. Jill spends three weeks volunteering in another Western Hemisphere country.

Karen wants more money, so she works 15 hours per week at a local McDonalds starting in her junior year. She ups her hours for the summer to 40 hours per week. Jill, on the other hand, takes a SAT prep course to get ready for her SATs.

They're both smart, so they both do well on their SATs. Karen gets a solid 1400. Jill gets a 1440, with the help of that course.

Skip ahead a bit, college rolls around. Karen gets a substantial financial aid package and leverages it to go to a Northeastern liberal arts school, Haverford. Using her experience in the Dominican Republic as the foundation of her essay, Jill gets into Harvard. Both fell in love with All the Presidents' Men and want to be political journalists.

Both continue to excel freshman year as political science majors. Karen comes home to work at McDonalds for the summer, because her savings account is entirely depleted from some of the expenses that emerged while she was in college. (Traveling home, school supplies, eating out with friends a few times). Jill, meanwhile, takes an unpaid internship for a media company in Washington, DC. Her room and board is subsidized by her parents.

Karen decides that she isn't really interested in journalism at this stage, having caught up with her friend Jill and heard about the cutthroat environment in DC. She decides that she'd rather transition into a more practical field. She drops polisci and picks up biology, with the ambition to work for a biological research firm.

Their college careers play out in a similar way; both get good grades (though Jill's are stronger, because political science is easier than biology). Karen grows more comfortable in her bio classes and finishes with a strong 3.75. Jill gets the vaunted 4.0 and is offered a junior position with the Atlantic in Washington. Karen takes a position with a pharmaceutical company as a lab worker.

Both successes, right?

I would say "absolutely, yes." But a big part of that success for Karen was the $15,000-$20,000 or so that she pulled in over the 4-5 years she was working at McDonalds and at that pool snack bar. Those experiences were really important to her development for a few reasons. At the most basic level, the spending money itself represented a vast improvement in her quality of life. She could afford to go to the movies periodically, or to see her favorite bands play, or to meet up with friends for late night half price appetizers, or whatever it is that young adults like to do. But more importantly, they also taught her the importance of work and the need to be realistic about her career goals.

We read this story and say that Jill was lucky to have the advantages she had growing up, and that's certainly a piece of it. But Karen is very lucky too, because she was able to leverage her talent into a potentially productive career. Karen shouldn't have any resentment about the way things turned out.

But in a world without those part time jobs, things are pretty different for Karen:

- Karen is short $15,000 over several years, which translates from "enough money to buy things sometimes" to "basically no money at all."
- Karen probably gets less useful life experience.
- Karen might get depressed by not being able to participate in things.
- Karen might wallow in self-pity and lose her initiative and spark.

Now all of a sudden we have a very different person in Karen.

My point is: when you have these discussions about low-wage jobs for young people, it's Karen's story that matters. Jill doesn't need that job; she'll be successful by taking the unpaid internship path. My fear is that, for all of their inclusive liberalism, most of the journalists we have that take interest in these stories are a lot like Jill, who got into the field because they had the necessary scaffolding from family and relatives along the way. But not everyone does. And those are the people who need these part time jobs.

Full disclosure: I identify more with Karen than Jill here, though I didn't switch to biology. And I don't resent that, even a little. But I sure as heck would be a lot worse off if not for the supermarket jobs I carried through most of my college breaks. (I was working as a cashier during my winter break even as a college senior.)

** I used women here because I try to avoid gender bias in my writing. But part-time jobs may even be more important for men than women, many of whom face a persistent social expectation of paying for dates.

Deconstructing Pro-Life and Pro-Choice

For exceedingly good reasons, it is difficult for men to write about abortion. We should have to be careful what we say; after all, we are not the ones who are ultimately responsible for taking on the biological risks of both pregnancy and its termination. I had some thoughts about the abortion debate, though, and I thought it would be good to get them into a post. Two disclaimers, though:

1. I am trying to write this as an impartial observer, rather than with a preset opinion on the issue. Basically, I want to deconstruct what it is we actually talk about when we talk about and argue about abortion, rather than offering an opinion of my own.

2. I'm not a huge fan of "pro-life" and "pro-choice" as labels, but I will use them here because that is the commonly used term. To change one term would require changing both, for purposes of fairness, and I'm not that interested in getting into a long discussion about language (today).

At its core, I see the abortion debate as being about sanitization and normalization. In other words, pro-choice activists want to remove the problems that could befall someone who chose to have an abortion, while pro-life activists want the decision to be as painful as possible. I see four areas where this is the goal:

- Legal sanitization: Women should not risk prosecution for simply seeking out this medical procedure. They should face no legal sanctions at all for the decision.
- Medical sanitization: Kermit Gosnell and his ilk aside, no pro-choice activist would tell you that they want abortions to be unsafe. I think it is actually fairly safe to say that if there were a broad consensus in favor of abortion, activists would be deeply concerned with the safety conditions of medical facilities. As it is now, this is a secondary priority to access.
- Economic sanitization: No woman should be prevented from getting an abortion simply because she is not economically well off. Costs should not be borne by the poor on this issue.
- Emotional sanitization: Women should not feel emotional guilt over getting abortions; it should just be a medical procedure like any other.

Meanwhile, on the pro-life side, you see varying degrees of resistance to each of these forms of sanitization:

- Legal sanitization: At their most ardent, pro-lifers want to criminalize abortions. They want to prosecute practitioners, and they want to prosecute the women who get abortions. They see this as the only way to ensure that innocent human lives aren't ended.
- Medical sanitization: This is less of an issue on the pro-life side, but some pro-lifers would affirmatively argue that they would rather abortions be phyisically risky, in a sort of Machiavellian, "ends-justify-the-means" position. If abortions are risky, perhaps that will dissuade women from seeking them out.
- Economic sanitization: The pro-life right makes common cause with the libertarian movement here, as both are strongly opposed to taxpayer funding of abortions, either via direct subsidy or via cost-shifting. Because they are bolstered by libertarians and business conservatives, this is the most fertile ground for the pro-lifers.
- Emotional sanitization: To the pro-life right, abortions should be difficult for the women who choose to get them. They should have to feel the guilt of terminating life. With luck, it will deter them from having the abortion at all.

Buffer zones are part of the normalization process. We don't, after all, see people getting harassed as they walk into the hospital for surgery to remove an appendix or a gallbladder. But we do often see it for women getting an abortion. So, how would we make an abortion more like an appendectomy? Well, for one, we have to simulate the conditions of the former, in terms of the lead-up to the operation. This means that we don't want our patients getting harassed by activists. But activists want to harass. So one way to prevent that is to grant the clinics an exemption, of sorts, from activists, via a buffer zone. The law will then assist abortion in the long road to normalization or sanitization.

The larger the buffer zone, the harder it is for activists to make the decision uncomfortable. 

It is really emotional sanitization where the rubber meets the road on this issue. Pro-lifers feel this one intensely: if society ever gets to a point where people no longer have emotional guilt over the procedure, then the pro-life cause will have lost. Sure, they can put up roadblocks in other ways, but once the average person stops worrying about the moral consequences of the decision, the other sanitizations happen sort of happen automatically, over time:

- If it's just another medical procedure, how can we tolerate unsafe medical conditions?
- If it's just another medical procedure, how can we possibly prosecute someone for it?
- If it's just another medical procedure, why wouldn't Medicaid or the ACA have to cover it?

So one can see why the pro-life cause takes the buffer zone issue so seriously. The emotional distress caused by abortions is the absolute center of gravity of this issue for the pro-life cause; it is the source from which the cause draws its strength. And pro-choicers, in classic Clausewitzian fashion, are smart to attack it.