Dream Job or Bust

The incentive structure of middle class NEETs

As a classical musician and an armchair econ nerd, I’ve come to look at a lot of the world through the lens of labor markets, especially particularly competitive labor markets, for the kinds of fields that might get called “dream jobs.” From about the age of 15, my life has been shaped by my desire to enter into a particular labor market where the supply of labor is much higher than the demand for that labor. There is simply not enough money in the market for French horn players to employ everyone who wants to do it, and so the only way to make a living at it is to be much better than the competition.¹

The donors who fund the best orchestras in the world really care about their orchestra being more elite than other orchestras, so they will donate lots of money to make sure their orchestra can offer a big salary that will attract the most talented musicians available. The top orchestra pay very good money, but most orchestras don’t. While these gradations of income and status are very opaque to normal people outside the industry, within our little bubble, there are gossip forums and tabloid-esque blogs so everyone can keep updated on the status game.

I think this perspective makes me a little more prone to silly parasocial feelings towards academics and writers and pundits—those fields are very similarly defined by intense competition for few jobs, with disproportionate reward at the very top. In these highly competitive “dream job” fields, there’s even intense competition at the bottom, driven by the feeling that “making it,” even just barely, will set you apart as a special, elite, or more interesting person. This is a bit delusional, of course, but the mythology of the “dream job” is powerful.

What really spurred me to write today was listening to this excellent episode of the Ezra Klein Show with

Matthew Yglesias

, which has me thinking about immigration, population decline, elite-overproduction, NEETs, the vibecession, and the ever-important question of “what’s wrong with men these days?” I’ll quote at length here:

MATT YGLESIAS: I think the Biden administration has struggled to talk about the impact of full employment on labor intensive services. You hear people complaining about how much a Big Mac costs under Biden. And it’s true that the price of fast food has gone up a lot, and that’s a contributor to inflation. It’s something that’s salient to people.

But that’s a consequence of the strength of the economy. When you have a strong labor market, the relative price of labor intensive services goes up. People aren’t always happy with that. I like to say, as a globalist cosmopolitan, this shows that immigration could be win win, that we could bring more people to do work that is low paid by American standards but high paid by the standards of Guatemala or Venezuela or Haiti. And everybody benefits.

That’s a tough sell to the public, which has various concerns. But Trump wants to roll it back in the opposite direction, and there may be some benefits to that. You won’t have the same number maybe of like buskers on the subway or other things that are bothering people. But the material economic cost of that will be large.

EZRA KLEIN: Well, there’s an answer from immigration restrictionists on the economics here, and it’s that we will pay American-born or at least legal resident workers more and that, look, there is a price at which Americans will pick strawberries, a price at which they currently — and more of them would — paint or lay roofs or whatever it might be. And this is a very straightforward policy to raise the wages of Americans and that labor force participation is up but it’s not at 100 percent of prime-age workers. And it could go higher than it is now.

And so the conversation you and I are having here reflects a lack of faith. It’s a buying into tenets of neoliberalism, which is to say that people only do these jobs at low wages. But no, the wages will go up. More people will do the jobs. And it would be fine, and we would have a healthier native-born and legally resident work force.

MATT YGLESIAS: Yeah, if you think about just one sector of the economy, that’s clearly true. If we like kicked out all the British political pundits from America, that’s maybe just more opportunities for native-born takesters like me.

If you do it across the board, though, the question is like, yeah, like the nominal wages for everybody can go up.

But the actual human beings have to come from somewhere. So is the idea that women are going to have fewer kids and so nobody will need to be out on maternity leave? Is the idea that people aren’t going to retire and they’re going to do the work?

Because that’s certainly possible.

If you were talking about a traditional Republican administration, you might say, look, we’re going to get rid of immigrants. We’re going to cut taxes. We’re going to cut social security. We’re going to cut Medicare. And we’re going to have the labor force participation for people over 60 going way up.

And that’s how Japan, for example, has dealt with the shrinkage of its work force is that people are working longer and longer into their twilight years. And that works mathematically. Japan is both a lot poorer than the United States, and also people can’t retire as young as they’re able to in the United States. That sounds worse to me, but it functions.

If you want to make that pitch, that’s fine. I’d like to hear it, and I’d like to debate it. But a lot of this stems from kind of myths. So, when the last jobs report came out, it showed that 200,000-something new jobs had been created. And so Biden and the Democrats were like, this is great. The Biden economy is splendid. It’s amazing.

And then conservatives came up with these counter charts. And they were like, ah, but the number of native-born Americans employed has gone down, and the number of foreign-born people has gone up. And so it’s like the immigrants are taking all your jobs.

But then you look at it mathematically, and it’s, well, what’s happened is, is that the number of working-aged native-born Americans getting jobs has gone up, but more and more Americans are retired. And I think that that would have to be the source of the additional labor.

And it’s not that I lack faith in the ability of the American people to delay retirement and keep swinging hammers to bear the load of this new, poorer America that Donald Trump is building. It’s that I don’t think that that’s desirable. I don’t think that that’s the vision that is being pitched to us by Trump and by Republicans.

They are making it out to be that there’s some huge group of secret unemployed people somewhere. But there’s a lot of people who work part time, and so you sometimes see people working at that. But well, all these jobs, they’re part-time jobs. But you can disaggregate that into who are the people who say they’re part time for economic reasons, meaning they want to work full-time hours, versus who are the people who are part time because maybe they’ve got kids in school. And so they like having a part-time job, and then they pick their kids up.

And it’s mostly the latter. It’s people who say they prefer a part-time job. Now, you can create the economic circumstances in which they can’t have the life that they want. They have to work full-time hours. They can’t go to school. They can’t retire.

But that sounds like a lot worse to me. But at least it would be a sort of a healthy, honest debate rather than this slightly fantastical one.

So much of the populist wing of both parties is bought into this idea that the economy sucks right now, and that any news or statistics saying otherwise is fake, because economics is a fake discipline made up by the elites, and economists are a bunch of lying liars. A lot of ink has been spilled about various explanations for why people just refuse to accept that the economy is actually quite good right now. I’m partial to the “housing theory of everything.” There’s an obvious partisan bias of Republicans being electorally incentivized to not admit when economic conditions improve under a Democratic administration. There’s the problem of social media algorithms and short attention spans exacerbating publications’ incentive to use negative headlines to draw clicks.

Those three explanations probably account for the lions’ share of the vibecession, but I’d like to put forth one more story of explanation that I think counts for something, and feels very personal to me.

I grew up in what can be described in shorthand as a generically middle-class-to-upper-middle-class “good schools” suburb. The kind of place that people move to make sure that their kids turn out alright. And yet when I look around at some of my old friends, or when I catch a stray update here and there from my Mom about how the neighbor’s kid is doing these days, a lot of these kids are not turning out alright. To be more precise: middle class boys are disproportionately not turning out alright.

This piece by

Prester John's Revenge

discusses the issue of NEETs and people dropping out of society in a deeply personal way:

For those unaware of the term “bugman,” it’s akin to Nietzsche’s “Untermensch” or “last man”- someone who is content in their mediocrity. Someone who sees the success of others as an existential threat, someone who would rather tear down idols than strive for what they represent. Someone who has given up. Someone who merely exists to consume- like a black hole that absorbs Funko Pops and Marvel movies instead of light. My partner has wisely parsed out in my rants about this man- or those like him- that there is some kind of Jungian shadow self thing going on here. What we hate about others is often what we hate about ourselves and all that. I think she’s right, but more so because people like him are what I fear to become. However, I despise him not because I don’t understand him, but because I do. In some ways, to become like him is my greatest desire.

More and more, the siren song that calls to me is not cheating on my partner or living a double life as previous generations may have felt as success came, but that of dropping out of society all together. Almost daily, I fantasize about quitting my job and getting a studio apartment somewhere with a low cost of living. I would work just enough to survive- either some low-level remote job or a gas station. I would spend my days reading, watching movies, smoking weed, eating junk food, playing video games, and drinking cheap whiskey. I would spend my days watching DVDs of old movies and TV shows or playing old video games from my youth so I could just immerse myself in the comfort of the past…

This hit me not only in seeing some sliver of my own “shadow self,” but in seeing versions of this person in old friends, in my family, and in these little updates about the boys from down the street.

I have seen the idea here and there that men these days are only incentivized to work for disproportionate reward. A man will work hard to get rich or famous. If he doesn’t see a path to wealth and glory, though, he’s likely to drop out. In America in 2024, video games, the internet, booze, weed, and delicious food are cheap. It takes very little income for a man to live a life that is full of entertainment and sensory pleasures. If his options in the labor market aren’t lucrative and high status, then work becomes an indignity to be minimized.

Seeing the “dream job” path into classical music may have been exactly the disproportionate reward that bent the curve of my whole life towards not being this guy. As a teenager, the idea of spending my life working 40 hours a week in an office horrified me, and I’m sure that same feeling is driving many other men when they drop out of society. The mythology of the “dream job” was the disproportionate reward carrot on the end of the stick, motivating me to work hard instead of drop out like so many of my generational peers.

So when Matt Yglesias says that people “are making it out to be that there’s some huge group of secret unemployed people somewhere,” I think I know who those people are thinking about. They’re thinking of their son, their brother, their nephew, the neighbor kid from down the street, and they’re saying, “this guy came from a respectable middle class family, he went to a good school, and now he’s spending most of his days sitting at home playing video games. A man from a family like that should have a decent respectable job.” A lot of the vibecession is that middle class suburbanites don’t like seeing their boys squander the opportunity they worked hard to provide for them.

The cultural phenomenon of NEETs needs to be distinguished somewhat from the idea that they’re literally unemployed or will show up in unemployment statistics. For about a year after I finished grad school, I moved back in with my parents. On paper, I was technically “self-employed,” picking up gigs here and there, but my income was negligible. One of my brothers similarly spent over a year of his early 20s picking up some contract work here and there, but mostly not working.

Instead of getting a low-status job so I could afford to move out on my own, in typical over-educated loser NEET fashion, I “laid flat” off the generosity of my family. I flew around the country for auditions and mediocre-paying gigs, banking on a hypothetical future of disproportionate reward. I think it’s fair to say a lot of other NEETs also turn down less dignified work because they’re comparing it to an idealistic hypothetical “dream job” in their head. Thankfully that gamble worked out for me, but for many it doesn’t. “There but for the grace of God go I,” indeed.

Taken on a leisurely walk around the neighborhood during my NEET days

As Ezra said, “there is a price at which Americans will pick strawberries.” I could have gotten a part-time job slinging lattes or bagging groceries, but my price, as a self-respecting over-educated middle class American, was too high. This was right around the time when entry-level unskilled wages were skyrocketing and fast food joints were offering $20/hour even in states and localities with much lower minimum wages. $20/hour was not the disproportionate reward I was looking for.

The price at which Americans will pick strawberries is astronomically high, because vast swaths of Americans who can’t get “dream jobs” prefer to work as little as possible so they can spend as much of their day as possible staring at dopamine traps on their screens.

We have acute price problems in housing, healthcare, and childcare; but if one lives with roommates (or family), is in relatively good health, and doesn’t have kids, then dropping out is actually very affordable. People may complain that they can’t afford to live alone or have kids, but then if you watch their actual behavior, they’re not doing much to try to earn more money. This is the basic dilemma of stated preferences vs revealed preferences. There are plenty of ways to get ahead in this economy—skilled immigrants are coming to the land of opportunity every day and proving this is true. The revealed preference of many native-born Americans, however, is that they prefer to live with roommates or not have kids so that they can afford more consumer goods and vapid entertainments without needing to put in the effort to apply for a new job or develop more valuable skills.

Unskilled immigration is key to making the NEET lifestyle affordable. Cheap labor is not some top-down elite imposition on the common man. This is just democracy in action. The common man wants cheap prices more than he wants to be paid marginally more for labor he considers undignified anyway. If the unskilled laborer got paid more, but prices went up because all the other unskilled laborers also got paid more, he might work slightly more because the marginal benefit of additional hours worked would be more valuable. But he’d rather work less, so he elects politicians who keep prices down.

Then, some day, he says, he’ll start that YouTube channel, or make it big on Twitch, or his Substack will totally blow up². The “dream job” will save him from doing that labor which is beneath his dignity, and then he’ll really benefit from those cheap prices. Or not. In which case he’ll descend further into a conspiratorial rabbit-hole to rationalize how the whole game was rigged. The “dream job” is really inextricable from this whole dilemma.

Cal Newport has been hammering home the advice “do not follow your passion” since 2012, claiming that, particularly starting with Millennials, kids have been sold a false promise about career fulfillment. Career fulfillment comes mostly from being good at what you do, having autonomy, having social connection at work, and making a positive impact; not “matching the content of your work to a pre-existing interest.” It doesn’t matter if your work is really cool or exciting or high status. Cal has explored this idea from the perspective of individualized career advice, but it actually has broader implications for our cultural malaise. An entire generation sold on this marketing pitch for work is pretty susceptible to thinking that labor (outside of the culturally determined dream fields) is exploitation, and so working hard and acquiring valuable skills is for suckers.³

This tradeoff between dream jobs and practicality is particularly fraught for many immigrant families, where parents push their children to pursue lucrative and “safe” careers in medicine or engineering. Those parents came to the land of opportunity for a reason, but their kids take America for granted, and acquire the dream job mythology by osmosis. Perhaps these immigrant parents see the softness of America, and temptations of this land of wealth and abundance, a little more clearly than the rest of us do.

1. As Steve Martin advised about “making it” in show business: “be so good they can’t ignore you.”

2. Some people see the blessings of the algorithm as a lottery ticket to the good life, instead of seeing content creation as a highly competitive labor market where your content will only be promoted by the algorithm if you develop the skill to make content of very high quality, and then point those skills towards creating the kind of content that audiences latch onto. As in most “dream jobs,” there’s a big gap between the fantasy of artistic fulfillment, and actually following the money.

3. But hey, even if you think labor is exploitation, work is for suckers, and you really want to spend as much of your life as possible staring at dopamine traps, the optimal solution in the long run is to advance your career to make more money so you can invest it in low-cost stock index funds and retire early.