Name: Men Without Work
ISBN: 9781599474694

Men Without Work

By one reading, things look pretty good for Americans today: the country is richer than ever before and the unemployment rate is down by half since the Great Recession—lower today, in fact, than for most of the postwar era. But a closer look shows that something is going seriously wrong. This is the collapse of work—most especially among America’s men. Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist who holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, shows that while “unemployment” has gone down, America’s work rate is also lower today than a generation ago—and that the work rate for US men has been spiraling downward for half a century. Astonishingly, the work rate for American males aged twenty-five to fifty-four—or “men of prime working age”—was actually slightly lower in 2015 than it had been in 1940: before the War, and at the tail end of the Great Depression. Today, nearly one in six prime working age men has no paid work at all—and nearly one in eight is out of the labor force entirely, neither working nor even looking for work. This new normal of “men without work,” argues Eberstadt, is “America’s invisible crisis.” So who are these men? How did they get there? What are they doing with their time? And what are the implications of this exit from work for American society? Nicholas Eberstadt lays out the issue and Jared Bernstein from the left and Henry Olsen from the right offer their responses to this national crisis.

What Hacker News says

Minor49erOct 2020

The book "Men Without Work: America's Invisible Crisis" by Nicholas Eberstadt also points to this too. Even though it's four years old, it uses BLS data to show the labor force participation rate and how it has been gradually declining for decades. There also isn't a clear solution since there are so many different causes that contribute to the high number.

The Axios article is highlighting the problem, but is going about it in the wrong way by conflating terms and not offering any further insight into the issue. If they mentioned the participation rate or the types of measurement that you noted, it would be a much stronger piece. But I want to underline your point that the data is available and anyone curious should look at it to see the trends for themselves.

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krrrhOct 2018

Actually the numbers including women don't look too bad. With the recent recovery in employment it actually looks like labour participation has been relatively flat since the mid-eighties.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=lxWv

One does have to wonder how the statistics are affected by millions of working adult residents participating in the economy as illegal aliens and therefore not counted. The reduction in male labor participation also brings to mind what is clearly now one of the biggest splits in American conservatism: between people like Kevin D. Williamson[1] and Nicholas Eberstadt[2] who focus on a moral and cultural downward spiral, vs Steve Bannon [3] who credits the decline to free trade, and both legal (H1B) and illegal immigration.

[1] Read the last few paragraphs: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2016/03/28/father-f-... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Men-Without-Work-Americas-Invisible/d... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAfm5L_DOLM

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