The End of the Summer Job

This summer, who’s been scooping your ice cream? Who’s blown the whistle when you've swum too far from shore? Sasha Obama may be serving seafood on Martha’s Vineyard, but the percentage of American teens working summer jobs is down — a lot.

While teen unemployment has decreased since 2008 (hovering around 16 percent this year) fewer than a third of the country’s teens are working summer gigs. That’s half of what the country saw in the 1980s, according to a recent study by the firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas

This week on Money Talking, host Ilya Marritz discusses the shrinking numbers and what they mean for the economy with Ben Casselman of FiveThirtyEight and Lazar Treschan of the Community Service Society of New York.