Why are so many of the protesters on Wall Street college-age kids? Because their futures are at stake.

This Occupy Wall Street sign is my favorite:

The sign has a clever double meaning. The young have the most to lose by standing idle and not having their voices heard in the political process, and they have the most to lose by actually being idle -- or unemployed.

The media hasn't learned the lessons from the 1960s, as there is still a tendency to dismiss young people protesting because they are young. You can see this phenomenon in the original New York Times coverage, and it appears in much of the rest. But at the heart of dismissals of young college kids in the 1960s was the idea that they had a very bright future ahead of them that they were taking for granted. For instance, here's President Nixon in the New York Times, May 1970:

You know, you see these bums, you know, blowin' up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are, burnin' up the books, I mean, stormin' around about this issue, I mean you name it -- get rid of the war, there'll be another one.

Can it be argued that young people, college educated or not, are particularly lucky in this recession? Every category of worker is doing terribly in the Lesser Depression. My former editor Derek Thompson has a must-read article, "Who's Had the Worst Recession: Boomers, Millennials, or Gen-Xers?," which compares the three age categories across employment, income and wealth, and finds that everyone is suffering across the board.

But let's focus on the young. The issue of debt, especially student debt, hovers over the protests. How is the employment ratio looking for young people with a college degree? Here's data from last year:

And that doesn't factor in the fact that many college educated workers are working jobs that don't require college degrees. They are essentially using their degrees to crowd out those with a high school diploma or some college education from the jobs they would normally take. And no matter what jobs they are able to get, student debt hangs around their necks like an albatross.

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This impacts everyone who is young. Here's a summary of the recent 2010 Census' American Community Survey by PBS:

• Employment among young adults between the ages of 16 to 29 was at its lowest level since the end of World War II. Just 55 percent were employed, compared with 67 percent in 2000.
• Nearly 6 million Americans between the ages of 25 to 34 lived in their parents' homes last year.
• Young men are nearly twice as likely as women to live with their parents.
• Marriages among young adults hit a new low. Just 44 percent of Americans in that age group were married last year.
• Other trends were also headed in the wrong direction. In 43 of the 50 largest metro areas -- often a magnet for 20-and-30-somethings -- employment declined.

In our desperate bid to replicate Japan, we are also replicating the poverty and joblessness among Japanese youths. This 2010 AOL article, "Japan's Economic Stagnation Is Creating a Nation of Lost Youths," can give you a sense of our trajectory.

Will we get our own version of the hikikomori? Young people are doubling up and not moving out of their parents' houses in this recession. If we looked at solely their own income, their poverty rates would be astounding. From the Census Bureau:

These “doubled-up” households are defined as those that include at least one “additional” adult -- in other words, a person 18 or older who is not enrolled in school and is not the householder, spouse or cohabiting partner of the householder...

In spring 2007, there were 19.7 million doubled-up households, amounting to 17.0 percent of all households. Four years later, in spring 2011, the number of such households had climbed to 21.8 million, or 18.3 percent...

Young adults were especially hard-hit, with 5.9 million people ages 25 to 34 living in their parents’ household in 2011, up from 4.7 million before the recession. That left 14.2 percent of young adults living in their parents’ households in March 2011, up more than two percentage points over the period.

These young adults who lived with their parents had an official poverty rate of only 8.4 percent, since the income of their entire family is compared with the poverty threshold. If their poverty status were determined by their own income, 45.3 percent would have had income falling below the poverty threshold for a single person under age 65.

Even if we can ever move out of the short-term recession, it will impact young people for years to come. Looking at a research summary compiled previously by Roosevelt Institute super-intern Charlie Eisenhood, Beaudry and DiNardo (1991) found “that every percentage increase in the [national] unemployment rate is associated with a 3-7 percent drop in entry-level contract wages.” Kahn (2009) found an estimate on the high end of that spectrum, discovering an “initial wage loss of 6 to 7% for a 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate measure.”

Unfortunately, the recession’s effect is not limited just to the initial job search and wages. The negative impact persists far beyond that. Kahn found that the effect “falls in magnitude by approximately a quarter of a percentage point each year after college graduation. However, even 15 years after college graduation, the wage loss is 2.5% and is still statistically significant.”

Job mobility is also affected. Kahn found a “negative correlation between the national unemployment rate and occupational attainment (measured by a prestige score) and a slight positive correlation between the national rate and tenure.” She concludes that “workers who graduate in bad economies are unable to fully shift into better jobs after the economy picks up.” Worse, Oreopoulos found permanent wage effects on workers with low expected earnings (based on occupational prestige).

So yes, young people have an important stake in what happens going forward. Do we continue policies that benefit Wall Street and the top 1 percent? Do we tax the rich to rebuild America? Do we reform a financial sector that dominates the economy? The list of choices in front of us goes on and on. Their whole future, indeed all of ours, depends on it. It's no wonder that they've taken to the streets.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

A literal take on the ideological bubbles that have formed in our economic debate.

For the next few posts, I will allude to an ongoing battle of ideas about what is troubling our economy and what solutions are available to fix it. So it might be a good idea to create a sort of topological map of the clusters of ideas and policies that constitute these arguments, as well as the overlap among them. This is a preliminary version of this map; I’d really appreciate your input about what is missing and how to make it better.

From those who think that the problem is related to demand and Keynesian theories, there tends to be three areas of focus: fiscal policy, monetary policy, and the debt hangover in the broken housing market. One can think all three are important -- I certainly do -- but most think one has priority over the others. Many will think one of the three isn’t in play or particularly useful as a focus of policy and energy. Here’s a rough map of all three. Quotations are ideas, non-quotes are policies, and parentheses are people associated with each:

(Click for larger image.)

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The flip-side to a demand crisis is a supply crisis, and there’s been a large effort to explain our high unemployment and below-trend growth as the result of supply-side factors. Having surveyed the arguments, I’ve split them into two categories. There are those who think that the government has created an increase in uncertainty. This results from a combination of deficits that scare bond vigilantes/job creators, new regulations that have killed all the potential new jobs, government-created disincentives to work. The second area of focus is on the productivity of the labor force, with special emphasis on a skills mismatch, the characteristics of the long-term unemployed, and the idea that something has fundamentally changed in our economy that will keep so many unemployed for the foreseeable future.

(Click for larger image.)

I’m making the productivity circle conceptually expansive enough to include “recalculation” stories, though I tend not to find these arguments convincing. I suppose I could add a third circle in the next version.

So what did I miss?  What should go in the next version of this chart?

Mike Konczal is a Research Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

Housing policy is central to our economy and the Great Recession, and Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Joseph Stiglitz made that abundantly clear in his remarks at a recent event, "The Government's Role in Housing." Americans spend so much of their income on housing that "when we're talking about housing, we're talking about standards of living," he said. Meanwhile, "How we solve our housing market problems will have a lot to do with the recovery." But while hardline Republicans think there is no role for government in practically anything, Stiglitz contended, "If the government now just walked out of [housing], the market would collapse and our economic downturn would be worse."

The government got involved in the mortgage market in the first place because it wasn't working. "We didn't have a good mortgage market... we had discrimination," Stiglitz pointed out. Plus it had to address "continuing market failures." As a country, we used to understand that markets aren't perfect and that there is a role for government. "There was in the past a view that yes, we understand that markets sometime behave badly, they make shoddy products, they don't live up to what they're supposed to do," he said. "That's why we have regulation."

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No time like the present, and no place like the housing market. "The market failures in this market are pervasive," Stiglitz said. "There will need to be government intervention in one form or another." So what should it look like? He outlined seven key areas that need to be addressed:

1. Reform the bankruptcy code: We've made it more difficult for borrowers to discharge debts, but "we have to solve the problems of the past," he said, including the heaping pile of underwater mortgages.

2. Make financial markets more competitive, including the payments mechanism.

3. Deal with TBTF institutions: It's not just banks that are too large, but even without government involved, Fannie Mae as an institution "was too big to fail," he said.

4. Re-focus the banking system: Get it "back to doing what it should be doing, and that is lending," not speculating or pushing paper around to make a profit.

5. "We need strong consumer protection." End of story.

6. Deal with the structure of the mortgage market: "We have a whole system of conflicts of interest and an intstiontal structure of the market is one that makes it not work in the way that it should," he said.

7. Understand the fundamental flaws of securitization: "The benefits have been overestimated and the cost underestimated."

Just a few small suggestions, right? But without addressing these issues, we'll continue to have a housing market that fails the American people and creates a huge drag on our stagnant recovery.

President Obama is set to give a much-anticipated speech on how he plans to combat our unemployment crisis and jumpstart the economy. What policies should he lay out? Can one speech make any difference? We at the Roosevelt Institute weigh in.

We all know that Barack Obama is no Franklin Roosevelt. The question now is whether he's Herbert Hoover. The U.S. economy is dead in the water. Three years into his term, unemployment is frozen at over nine percent. In a scenario reminiscent of the Night of the Living Dead, his administration's bungling and temporizing has revived all the old pre-2008, free market fundamentalist stereotypes about the impossibility of effective government action. An infrastructure bank and a few minor tax cuts would be nice, but this is a moment that calls for massive government action based on the model of the New Deal: A contemporary equivalent of the WPA, mortgage relief along the lines of the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, aid to the states, and real efforts to make banks use their money to make loans of instead of buying back their stock and paying bonuses. With Europe going into recession and on the brink of another giant financial crisis that may well produce a "Lehman in reverse," there is not a moment to be lost. And if Republicans obstruct, then it's time to campaign against them instead of agreeing in advance to all their principal demands. - Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow & University of Massachusetts, Boston Professor Tom Ferguson

As a Millennial and someone who has recently graduated from college, I believe it is critical for President Obama to address how young people can graduate and find a job. It is now a certain fear for college seniors and recent graduates that they won't be able obtain a job that uses the degree they've just earned and allows them to begin paying back sky-rocketing students loans without a steady income. Similarly to the rest of the country, many of my friends who are recent graduates are struggling to find a job, being a year out of school, and are working at establishments where a college degree is not required in order to start paying back their student loans. We need to hear President Obama speak about a plan to ensure that young people coming out of college can enter the workforce, earn a steady income from their intended career, and pay back their college debt. - Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network Chapter Services Coordinator Dante Barry

The policy framework of the U.S. government has been clear and unchanged since the passage of TARP. This speech, like every other set of administration policy proposals, will be irrelevant. Citizens should not pay attention to it. To the extent that there is an idea that could help Americans, it would be the restoration of the rule of law in the financial sector combined with mass principal write-downs for home mortgages. - Roosevelt Institute Fellow Matt Stoller

It's time for an America that works for all of us -- starting with good jobs for everyone. Jobs with good pay and benefits so that families can educate their children, live and retire with security, and pursue their dreams.

We built a strong America by building a strong middle class. But today the rich are richer than ever while the middle class is being crushed and totally closed off. CEO campaign contributors buy tax breaks from Congress to ship our jobs overseas, while their corporations cut our wages and benefits at home.

We can create good jobs for everyone in America. There is more than enough vital work to be done and Americans stand ready and eager to do it. We can create:

• Good Jobs. We can assure that every job -- private and public -- pays enough to support a family with decent wages, health and retirement benefits, and family-friendly leave policies.
• Jobs for Everyone. We can create tens of millions of jobs for our future. Jobs for a green economy of energy independence, jobs to rebuild our infrastructure and create a new infrastructure for the information age. Jobs to educate our children and take care of our seniors.
• Good Jobs in America. We can create good jobs in America with fair trade and currency policies, government purchasing American-made goods, and the end to tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.

The question before Congress today, the question that every American is asking us, is not whether Americans want to work or whether there's plenty of work to be done. It is whether Congress can stand up to the lobbyists for the most wealthy and powerful and put the lives and livelihoods of everyday Americans first. - Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Richard Kirsch