The job market for gentry / intellectuals has changed, it used to be a normal distribution: low skill jobs would get thousands of applicants willing to mop the floors and clean toilets for peanuts, high skill jobs paying in the hundred of thousands to millions per year would get hundreds of shockingly qualified candidates, like every one of them was a Rambo of programming and skill, guaranteed. Used to be "if you don't like to work hard, you'll clean toilets". If you train and push yourself to become the most hard ass bastard this planet has ever seen, you'll just end up in a WW1 trench warfare stalemate fighting the worst this planet has ever seen (high end jobs attracted almost the same amount of high end desperate PhDs who won at least a silver at the international math olympics). And regular jobs would get 10-20-30 ... a normal amount of normal people. Now, everything's an uniform distribution. From shit cleaning to Mars landing, LinkedIn has given up on showing how bad things got and only shows "over 100 candidates already applied to this strawberry picking job on Mars after Terraforming".
Producing too many intellectuals because of student loans. Employers became efficient and over centralized. AI is not your friend. The lack of economic growth is like a lid on a pressure cooker. Trump is that little steam vent whistling me me me.
The problem is we have a surplus of people and not enough slots to put them into. Back in the olden times pre Vietnam this was not a problem there was enough wars,disease etc.. to cull the surplus populace. In addition the productive machinery of capitalism was nowhere as efficient as today in terms of work unit output per person. back then you needed 10 people to do the job 1 person could do now. Now with modern tech you can outsource knowledge work to a guy in Calcutta that lives in a hut and shits in the Ganges river because there is no modern sewage system. then AI looming which means more Job cuts. We will have a huge surplus of people that will be idle with no job.