Why Young People Can't Find Jobs? (Spoiler: It's Not AI's Fault)

The dominant narrative these days is simple and captivating: AI is devouring jobs, robots are taking over, end of story. Convenient, right? But Allison Schrager, Bloomberg Opinion columnist and economist, dismantles this theory with hard data. The problem isn't that intelligent machines have decided to steal jobs from twenty-somethings — it's something more mundane and simultaneously more complex.

To understand it, you need to look at factors that have nothing to do with AI: the housing crisis, wages that don't keep pace with inflation, saturation of entry-level positions, the disappearance of paid internships. Young people can't find jobs because the market is contracted, competition is fierce, and companies — without unemployment pressure — have no urgency to hire inexperienced workers. Artificial intelligence? It's too seductive an excuse to admit that the situation is more "boring economic policy failure" than "dystopian science fiction."

Schrager particularly points to the rigidity of modern labor markets. Once upon a time, even with just a high school diploma, you could join a company and learn the trade on the job. Today? They ask for three years of experience for a junior position, as if that experience should materialize from nowhere. Internships have vanished or don't pay. Companies would rather automate simple tasks than invest in training young people who might leave later.

And here's the paradox: yes, AI is changing how we work, but not the way everyone thinks. It's not eliminating jobs — it's raising the requirements to access them. If a diploma and willingness to learn once sufficed, now you need a diploma, experience, specialized knowledge, and maybe a solid network too. The real problem isn't technology — it's that the gateway to the job market has become more rigid and elitist precisely when technology should have made it more fluid.

Schrager's conclusion is sharp: stop blaming AI and start looking at the real culprits — from lack of housing mobility to the erosion of corporate training programs. Young people don't need fear of robots: they need policies that make that first job actually accessible. But that's less catchy as a newspaper headline, isn't it?