Feb 27, 2020
Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with @Anne_S_Kim about those millions of young people Kim considers 'Abandoned'.
Anne Kim is a writer based in northern Virginia and the author of Abandoned: America’s Lost Youth and the Crisis of Disconnection. She was special projects editor at the Washington Monthly in 2013 and senior writer from 2015 to 2018.
Americans under the age of 25 grab headlines when they launch flashy startups or become activists for social change. However, as Washington Monthly Anne Kim shows, both in this discussion and her book, the success of such leaders masks an alarming reality ill-served by current public policy: “In 2017, as many as 4.5 million young people” ages 16-24 were neither in school nor working. Social scientists call them “disconnected youth” (or, in Europe, NEETs, for “not in employment, education, or training”), and many of them have aged out of foster care or spent time in prison and lack the support of trusted adults.
A vice president of the Progressive Policy Institute, Kim shows clearly how their plight tends to result from years of systemic failures.