The paper of record for New York’s young and ambitious has a piece about the legions of twenty-somethings that are losing their jobs and maybe their shirts in the financial debacle. Here are a couple paragraphs and my quote in the piece:
The 90,000 laid-off office workers that the city anticipates by the end of 2009 will include many of these younger New Yorkers. A lot will hail from the city’s more lucrative fields, including finance, advertising and law.
The city could, then, soon experience a glut of the young, the talented—and the idle; and it may not be so easy to unclog before there are serious repercussions, particularly for real estate and the very real fabric of certain neighborhoods.
“People in their 20s, I feel for them, I really do,” said Lisa Chamberlain, 39, author of Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction.
“It’s not like this is cyclical job loss,” she said of the financial implosion, which reminds her of the dot-com bust and the accompanying loss of jobs. “It’s not like these jobs are going to come back when the economy recovers. A lot of these jobs are going to be permanently gone; and that was true with the dot-com thing. … I mean, I don’t know who’s going to be selling derivatives in five years.”