For anyone who did not experience it first hand, I cannot begin to describe how monumentally worse an 8% unemployment rate is than an 8% inflation rate.
If you're ever wondering why every elder Millennial is either a communist or a grindset hustler small business capitalist, just look up the unemployment rate in 2009.
Like im not joking it was not unusual to know people with white collar degrees who illegally lived in squats and cooked mostly rice and dry beans to survive
Many didn't! Lots of suicide and self harm! It was not great!
But the effects weren't felt equally, plenty of people just kept trucking deep in their careers. 8% unemployment meant like 85% unemployment in graduating classes those years
I still have to fight the urge not to request leave from work (even earned leave) because every Forbes article the year I graduated college insisted that taking leave would make you the first to be laid off
We had PhD applicants for 31k a year positions. People qualified to run our company interviewing for part time entry level. It was bleak! Never want to go back to that
My first job after college was an entry-level white collar gig. It paid $10/hr with no benefits at all and was a 45-minute commute each way. I felt like the luckiest person in the world
I can always pick the managers who came of age during the slump. I know they lay awake at night dreaming of the desperation and fear their workers brought to work with them then. No task too great, no reward too piddling, and every worker replaceable in hours - not months. Truly awful period.
The company I was working for went out of business early that year. I was unemployed for six months and when I finally landed a job, it was a 45% pay cut from what I had been making.
