u/hkmsh

According to Fortune, there’s a new rust belt - the “wired belt”, which are the locations where unemployment will be concentrated in a post AI world. The American AI Jobs Risk Index - an analysis mapping the economic and geographic impact of AI job risk across 784 occupations - shows exactly where the white-collar workers most threatened by AI displacement live. 

The research identifies several primary clusters with a high concentration of knowledge-driven work, including metros like San Jose, Seattle, Boston, and New York. These areas face 3.5 times the job loss and over five times the income loss compared to traditional manufacturing regions. But this isn’t just about unemployment, it’s about political power. According to the lead researcher, these workers who lose their job will become a political force unlike any the US has seen in decades.  This is because the “Wired Belt” includes the suburban rings surrounding America’s biggest metros, many of which exist in swing states. (Think: specifically around Philadelphia, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Detroit.) He argues it could be these groups who determine the 2028 election.

But yeah, according to this - in the past the figure that characterized unemployment was a laid-off factory worker in somewhere like Ohio. Soon? He’ll be a jobless financial professional from the suburbs in Philadelphia.

Fascinating Guardian piece about Zoomers with no family background in trades going into it:

• Cale Mouser, 23 years old and already on six figures for repairing diesel engines. Started working with medium- and heavy-duty trucks five years ago, which led to a diesel tech degree at North Dakota State College of Science - and then his teaching diesel tech at the same school (alongside still working repairing engines).
• Eva Carroll, hoping to become a construction manager or estimator - would earn above $90K to start with.
• Aydrie Ruff, who was asked by a teacher if she’d like to compete as part of a crime scene team through SkillsUSA, where they were presented with the staged aftermath of a violent crime and had to decide next steps. Made it to nationals on her first try, going to study forensics.

 

All of these jobs over-index on human expertise, which one academic defines as applying learned proficiency to problem solving and making one-off high stakes decisions. They’re also all jobs poised to benefit in the best possible version of a robotics and AI-entwined economy. Are trades the future?

The underemployment rate has hit 42.5% - its highest level since 2020. As one student put it: ““Every weekend, I dedicate over two hours to job applications. As of today, I’ve applied to over 90 jobs. I’ve been ghosted by nearly 25% of them and rejected automatically from around 55%,” she said.”

Source: The Guardian.

From a study done in Nov 2025 so maybe there’s some shifts here? But “only five metros were cost-effective enough for households made up of two adults earning minimum wage to afford the median-priced rental unit without having to work overtime. Those include Buffalo, NY; Rochester, NY; St. Louis; Phoenix; and Kansas City, MO, according to the November 2025 Rental Report from Realtor.com.”

This is crazy. When will this country be structured in a way that’s affordable for even people on lower wages.

Found this article from over a decade ago and thought it was pretty shocking - back then, the average raise an employee could expect each year was 3% (this works out as approximately the same as now : https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/benefits-compensation/employers-2025-annual-pay-raises-lower-than-expected). But that doesn’t account for inflation, which back then was 2.1% (currently forecast for 2.7% this year). So the average person was getting a raise of a little less than 1%.

Compare that to the average raise a person received in 2014 for quitting and finding a new job - between 10-20%. I wonder if this is still the case. And if so, if leaving your job - even in the worst economic market in years - might make sense??

If you read virtually anything online, you’ll probably be under the impression that Gen Z is the poorest generation in some time. Read an interesting article rebuking some of this.

• “While the entry-level job market remained stagnant for recent graduates in 2025, Gen Z adults have overall been more employed than their Gen X parents were at the same age, and receive higher inflation-adjusted wages.”
• “The unemployment rate peaked at 4.6 percent in 2025, whereas it reached 8 percent in 1984.”
• “The growth of the world’s population, combined with the expansion of the rule of law, property rights, and economic freedom, has ushered in a superabundant age of prosperity and lower prices. Zoomers have enjoyed the fruits of this economic miracle and are forecast to become the richest generation in history”

The article does however stop short of suggesting Zoomers are lucky - their real problem, it argues, is profound loneliness caused by society’s institutions coming apart.

I’m listening !!

Lifestyle inspiration from:

• 37 year old who decided to just live in Prague for the foreseeable (hasn’t made a payment in 7 years, her student loan defaults after 20)
• Guy who got into Princeton on a scholarship but the money was taxable - got a loan from Princeton to cover it and felt overwhelmed after graduating, so has peaced out to China

Heartwarming stuff :)

Interesting! I’m not in high school, but thinking about this kind of thing.

Here’s the list:

The 10 college majors with the lowest unemployment rates

1. Special Education: 0.7 percent
2. Miscellaneous Education: 1.1 percent
3. Elementary Education: 1.2 percent
4. Agriculture: 1.4 percent
5. Foreign Language: 1.6 percent
6. Geography: 1.6 percent
7. Engineering Technologies: 1.7 percent
8. Social Services: 1.9 percent
9. Secondary Education: 2.1 percent
10. Nursing: 2.1 percent

Wild to me that studying a foreign language (which parents keep telling me is redundant because there’ll be AI apps built into ear plugs that you’ll eventually be able to use to communicate outside of English) is actually one of the best majors for avoiding unemployment.

Education of all stripes makes sense to me because people will always need teachers, same for social services. But geography also feels kind of surprising..

From Time: “The economy’s productivity grew by around 73% between 1979 and 2019, but wages in the middle rose only about 23%.  Here is what this means in concrete terms.  A retail worker in 1979 earned about $14.60 in today’s dollars. By 2019, that pay had risen to $17.40: only a 19% gain in an economy that nearly doubled in size. At the same time, earnings for the top 1% soared 169%.”

According to a recent study, a survey of 1,500 class of 2025 graduates and 1,500 soon-to-be class of 2026 graduates - nearly 38% are considering starting their own business, 32.5% are looking at gig work, 28% are exploring freelance work, and 11% are pursuing the skilled trades.

This feels like a reflection of America as a whole! According to Upwork, roughly 70 million Americans are already freelancing - that’s 36% of the workforce.

The number of full time independent workers in the US more than doubled between 2020 and 2024, from 13.6 million to 27.7 million. Statista projects that freelancers will make up the majority of the workforce by 2027.

So if you’re not freelancing yet, why not?