ZERO-SUM THINKING AND THE LABOR MARKET

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

College graduates now have higher unemployment rates than the overall workforce for the first time since 2018 - the opposite of how this is supposed to work. Young men are struggling most, with 50,000 healthcare jobs going to women graduates while men gained far fewer positions across all sectors. People are applying to 1,000 jobs and getting rejected by algorithms in what's become a casino economy where getting hired feels like winning the lottery. This broken system feeds zero-sum thinking - the belief that my success requires your failure - which has replaced the Sputnik generation's positive-sum worldview where everyone could grow together.