So maybe you, rich old white man, should avoid contributing irrelevant noise to this discussion?

The problem is statistical. There just aren't enough jobs, an irreconcilable jobs gap. While it's nice that you had the incredible luck to pivot into a completely different field, that just doesn't matter here. You can't base an economy on every worker flipping heads ten times in a row.

And I still disagree with you here. It's not about me and my personal employment situation; specifically, because my situation can always be improved via a purely relative advancement that would have no net benefit if everyone did it (see: "Darwin the Market Whiz"). Also, generally, because I personally am doing decently right now: I damn well wanted to go back to academia and get a research degree, and I've lucked out to get into a damn fine research institution. I've had to turn down 1 offer to convert a a good contract gig to full-time and turn away four recruiters pursue that (not to mention previous interviews where I was told I was turned down because they saw that I truly fit in grad-school more than I fit in their team right this month). I'm also continuing my open-source/research project and working on a side-business idea in the meanwhile. But just because I'm ok doesn't mean everyone else is ok, once we dispose of the false assumption that I'm average.

The real problem here is that you have half a generation 18-22 year-olds coming of age, trying to leave their parents' care, and finding that there's basically no demand for their labor.

Millions of people can't all have more hustle, moxie, initiative, mojo, or whatever other nigh-meaningless abstract term we've chosen to convey "the capitalistic equivalent of sex-appeal", than each other. There has to be actual demand for labor to hire these people.

Conversely, even though I'm not average, an overall bad labor market affects me. The tech sector is "recession-proof", but nothing is Great Depression proof. An ultra-capitalist economy geared towards maximizing debts and rents for bankers, lobbyists and lawyers does, in fact, ripple out to the tech sector and affect hiring. For instance, it means that there are very few R&D labs in computing right now (though a friend of mine has been interviewing with R&D teams at Oracle and I'll be happy to have the connection!), lots of VC-funded start-ups, and much of the world's top technical and scientific talent ends up writing financial algorithms. Someone who wants to actually do hard-core technology like me finds himself really curiously starved for places to work, given how well the tech-sector is supposedly doing. Oh, and everyone is wondering when this latest start-up bubble will pop, especially after GroupOn, Facebook, and Zynga IPOs.