No Safe Bet

In 2019 the Harris Poll asked American and British kids aged 8 to 12 what they wanted to be when they grew up. 29% said YouTuber. 11% said astronaut. The result went around the internet as a joke about the generation. Nobody asked the kids to show their math.

Some of those kids wanted fame, as kids always did. The rest were reading the economy they were about to enter. Two forces reshaped it. AI took the entry level in the careers adults called safe. Monopolies moved the gains of the economy to the people who already owned it. Together they push a generation from the safe end of the labor market to the risky one.

The respectable answer used to be engineering. Learn something hard, and a company pays you well for it for forty years. In the New York Fed’s latest data, computer engineering graduates aged 22 to 27 carry 7.8% unemployment, the second highest of 73 majors. Computer science graduates sit at 7.0%. Marketing graduates sit at 4.4%, communications at 3.9%. The majors we told kids to avoid now find work faster than the one we told them to pick.

The squeeze sits at the entry level. Stanford’s payroll data, covering millions of workers a month, puts 22-to-25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed jobs 19% below where they would be if they kept pace with less-exposed peers. Employment for software developers that age fell nearly 20% from its late-2022 peak. Indeed’s index of software job postings stands 23% below its pre-pandemic level, while postings overall sit above theirs. Students read the same numbers: new computer science majors fell 13% last year.

The money the economy does make goes to owners. After-tax corporate profits reached 13.2% of GDP in the second quarter of 2026, the highest since records began in 1947 and double the 1947 to 1999 average. Labor’s share of business income sits at its lowest on record. Average markups over cost rose from 21% in 1980 to 61% in 2016, and the economists who measured them trace the rise to market power. That is the monopoly dividend from Part 1 of this series, and it lands in stock portfolios. The top 10% of households own 88% of American stocks. The bottom half owns 0.6%.

Pay for everyone else barely moves. Posted wages for software developers grew 0.7% in 2024, below inflation. From 1979 to mid-2026, output per hour in the American economy rose about 94%, and pay for the typical worker rose about 33%.

Wealth now sorts by age as much as by class. Households under 40 held 12.0% of American wealth in 1989 and hold 6.5% today. Baby boomers held about a fifth of the country’s wealth in 1990, when they were 26 to 44. Millennials, now 30 to 45, hold 11.2%. Over the same years the top 1% went from 22.8% to 32.5%. The median first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old, a record, and first-time buyers made up 21% of purchases in 2025, the lowest share the National Association of Realtors ever recorded.

The safe path promised ownership on a schedule: a salary, then a house, then a retirement account that grows. When the house arrives at 40 and the stock gains go to households that already own stocks, a salary buys a smaller stake each year. Young people respond the way the math suggests. The economists Seung Hyeong Lee and Younggeun Yoo found that as homeownership slips out of reach, households spend more, work less and take riskier bets. In FINRA’s survey, 62% of investors under 35 said they need to take big risks to reach their goals. Pew found that 36% of men under 30 bet on sports in the past year. Only 22% of Americans aged 18 to 29 told WSJ and NORC that the American Dream still holds true.

Then comes the layoff. Tech companies cut 165,000 people in 2022, 266,000 in 2023, 153,000 in 2024, and 130,000 so far this year, already more than in all of 2025. Workers aged 25 to 34 stay with an employer a median 2.7 years. A young engineer should expect to leave three or four times before turning forty, by choice or not.

An engineer who leaves takes the general skill and little else. Knowledge of one codebase, the trust of one manager, a reputation built inside a chat workspace that locks you out the morning of the layoff: the company keeps all of it, along with every line of code you wrote. And the skill you do carry is worth less each year, because a language model now gives the junior engineer much of the senior engineer’s answer. You rent your ability to one buyer at a time, and the buyer writes the lease.

A creator who leaves a sponsor, a network or a partnership takes the audience along. Every video stays up and keeps earning. The followers belong to the name, not to an employer, and nobody can revoke the login. One path builds equity in a company you do not own. The other builds equity in yourself.

AI tilts the math further. Building got cheap. Worldwide app releases rose 60% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, and Appfigures, which tracks them, credits AI coding tools for the jump. When anyone can ship the product, the product stops being scarce. Attention got more expensive instead: Meta’s average price per ad rose 10% in 2024 and another 9% in 2025. A founder with a good app and no audience pays an ad platform for every customer. A founder with an audience pays much less.

The largest creators already run their businesses this way. MrBeast’s media company lost about $80 million in 2024, according to investor documents reported by Fortune, while his chocolate brand, Feastables, made about $20 million in profit on $250 million in revenue. The videos are the marketing budget, and the candy bar is the business. Skims, the shapewear brand Kim Kardashian co-founded, raised money in 2025 at a $5 billion valuation. Each founder arrived with the customers already watching.

The old celebrity machine shrinks at the same time. North American theaters sold $11.4 billion in tickets in 2019 and $8.7 billion in 2025, a quarter less. On-location shoot days in Los Angeles fell another 16% in 2025, after a 2024 that FilmLA called the second least productive year it ever recorded. Roughly half of Gen Z and millennials tell Deloitte they feel a stronger personal connection to online creators than to actors or TV personalities. In July, YouTube took 14.2% of all American TV viewing, more than NBCUniversal, Disney or Netflix.

Media is the rare industry where the monopoly story ran backward. For most of the last century, fame ran through a few studios, three broadcast networks and a few record labels. They chose who got seen, and the people they chose got rich. The internet took away their veto. More than 20 million videos go up on YouTube every day with nobody’s approval. The three major labels still hold 70% of recorded music, yet 13,800 artists earned at least $100,000 on Spotify in 2025, and more than a third of artists earning $10,000 or more release their music themselves.

The studios respond the way protected incumbents do: they merge. Skydance bought Paramount in 2025, and in February Paramount Skydance agreed to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. The creator market works the other way. In the terms of Part 1, it is a market you can enter and cannot hold, where a newcomer takes share from an incumbent every week. For someone with nothing to protect, that trade is the right one.

The fields young people move toward share a shape: the lowest barrier to entry, the highest churn, and rules that reset every few years. TikTok launched in the United States in 2018 and passed a billion monthly users in 2021. Every marketer with a decade of Facebook expertise started on the new platform the same day as a sixteen-year-old, and the sixteen-year-old understood it first. When the market uproots years of experience on a schedule, a newcomer’s lack of experience stops counting against them. Engineering runs the other way. Its knowledge compounds, and AI took the junior work that let a beginner get in line at all.

So the shift runs deeper than fame. When hiring dries up in the fields adults promised were safe, and the slow road to owning something stalls, the safe choice loses its only advantage. People move to the high-risk, high-reward end of the economy: the channel, the startup, the options account, the parlay. Of those, the channel is the one that builds an asset nobody can take back. 60% of 13-to-24-year-olds told YPulse they would like to be an online celebrity, and money topped their reasons.

The odds are terrible, and the kids should hear that plainly. Goldman Sachs counts 50 million creators worldwide and estimates that only about 4% earn more than $100,000 a year. But compare the shape of each bet, not only the typical outcome. Engineering offers a higher floor and a lower ceiling, and the floor keeps dropping. Content offers a floor near zero and no ceiling, and whatever you build stays yours.

The rest of us pay for that choice. A country needs people who spend a decade learning how bridges fail and why compilers break. An economy where the best move for a bright teenager is a long shot will get more ads, more parlays and fewer engineers. None of this is a flaw in the kids, and no amount of individual grit fixes it. The fix is the one from earlier in this series: markets open enough that profits get competed down into wages and prices, instead of piling up with whoever owns the incumbent.

When the safe path stops leading to ownership, the risky one stops looking reckless.