Oh, I contest that. It depends heavily on how you employ the bored teenager. Employ him at flipping burgers and he's obviously "unproductive" as ever was in 1993. Employ him at data-entry and he's the human component in an immensely valuable computation. What he still lacks in the latter case is bargaining power: the ability to walk out of his job and bring the vast computation to a quick halt.

(Which is why unionization of a lot of low-level white-collar workers would really help, and would probably save us a lot of stupid talk on the subject of "My oh my, whatever should the government do!" Strong organized labor is how you keep government out of the labor market, at least if you don't want the working class to starve.)

Strong organized labor is a de facto part of the Democratic party. The Democratic party really has become synonymous with the Federal Government itself, as their purposes of building power at the expense of individual sovereignty appear to be fairly close in alignment.

What will get us somewhere is allowing people to realize that each of us is responsible for his or her own advancement in life. Sitting on the couch watching sports and reality TV every afternoon and evening has consequences. Majoring in bullshit ethnic and cultural studies in college has consequences.

Measures like the minimum wage, welfare, the Community Reinvestment Act, and food stamps mask the relationship between real world actions and their economic consequences. This misalignment causes markets to warp more and more over time. To compensate, new mastermind policies are created to mask those effects. Eventually the economic dislocation becomes so bad that the system fails. This is what happened to Greece. This is what's happening in the US wrt the Debt.