Posted on 10/06/2016 4:00:53 AM PDT by expat_panama
The "quiet catastrophe" is particularly dismaying because it is so quiet, without social turmoil or even debate. It is this: After 88 consecutive months of the economic expansion that began in June 2009, a smaller percentage of American males in the prime working years (ages 25 to 54) are working than were working near the end of the Great Depression in 1940, when the unemployment rate was above 14%.
If the labor force participation rate were as high today as it was as recently as 2000, nearly 10 million more Americans would have jobs.
The work rate for adult men has plunged 13 percentage points in a half-century. This "work deficit" of "Great Depression-scale underutilization" of male potential workers is the subject of Nicholas Eberstadt's new monograph "Men Without Work: America's Invisible Crisis," which explores the economic and moral causes and consequences of this:
Since 1948, the proportion of men 20 and older without paid work has more than doubled, to almost 32%. This "eerie and radical transformation" -- men creating an "alternative lifestyle to the age-old male quest for a paying job" -- is largely voluntary.
Men who have chosen to not seek work are two and a half times more numerous than men that government statistics count as unemployed because they...
...Only about 15% of men 25 to 54 who worked not at all in 2014 said they were unemployed because they could not find work.
For 50 years, the number of men in that age cohort who are neither working nor looking for work has grown nearly four times faster than the number who are working...
...The "economically inactive" have eclipsed the unemployed...
...Eberstadt does not say that government assistance causes this...
...America ranks 22nd, ahead of only Italy, in 25 to 54 male labor force participation...
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
I’m not questioning your choice. I am only suggesting that it is illustrative IMO of how we’ve lost so many working-age men. (It sounds like you are beyond traditional working age, however.)
It hasn't won as long as individuals still have the freedom to contradict the errors of the fallible and uninspired who would assume dominion over us.
This is what it looks like when their definition has really "won" historically:
[Chekist Чекист '1992' Russian film 'Eng-Subs' (full)]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RQVSHfuPCQ
Check out George Gilder’s other works; “Naked Nomads: Unmarried Men in America” (1974). Made the `swinging single’ lifestyle out to be anything but; “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, & short” was more like it.
Also “The Professor Game” (1977). Political correctness & quotas infested academia even then. Coeds trading sex for `A’s, too.
I appreciate the Yuri Bezminov quote, but we are way beyond the “demoralization” stage, and have progressed well into the “destabilization” stage, and we are about to enter the “crisis” stage,,, which will justify the final stage of “normalization”, where our system is replaced by something akin to Stalin’s USSR or Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or China’s “Great Leap Forward”,,,
We shoot back!
Well, true!
I am so glad I’m not living in a major metro area. It’s going to be a bloodbath when this Ponzi scheme finally collapses.
Yep.
I agree with most of your comments. My sons have figured out the same thing on their own.
I have told them that I wouldn’t get married unless their prospective wife was a devout Christian. My wife tells them the same thing.
However, my wife doesn’t see the workplace and legal discrimination against men. My sons and their friends certainly do.
They have to make their own decisions about how they want to live their lives. They are not living in the 40’s or 50’s.
>>That’s past, for the most part anyway.
There is nothing new under the Sun.
The world’s first city developed around its temples, and only later did palaces play a role. Its view of the world was conditioned, as in all ancient societies, by totalitarian religious belief. So the picture that comes into focus is that of a theocratic command economy, hierarchically organized, centrally directed, and regulated according to an ideology propagated by a priesthood, playing the role that, 5,000 years later, Soviet Marxists would call ‘the engineers of human souls’. Such was temple rule.
Kriwaczek, Paul. Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization (p. 53). St. Martin's Press. Kindle Edition.
"And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free."
“I am just pointing out how silly of a point it is to say that men should not marry because women are evil and tie men down to a life of a wage slave to support the evil female objectives.”
Sorry, but the men who are being tied down to slave for the women don’t find it a silly point, and that’s really all that matters. You can either address their concerns, and the situation might improve, or you can ignore them, in which case the situation will continue to degenerate.
“If we followed God’s plan for marital bliss and family life there would be no problem.”
That’s a nice thought, but marriage is a legal fiction in this country nowadays, so this isn’t really a feasible solution, and nobody on either side of the political aisle is concerned about fixing the problems with marriage. That is why young men have decided to protest the situation by direct action, since they have no real recourse to address the issue any other way.
“Tell us how dying in the process of conserving American principles isn’t relevant to the current discussion, smart ass.”
Dying for your country is much different than volunteering to become a slave so some woman can sit on her lazy ass. Sorry if you can’t comprehend the difference.
It’s a state of mind, not so much a location.
“Conservatism means trying to conserve what the process of demoralization was intended to destroy”
Then why don’t you start trying that instead of blaming men who are resisting the fate that LIBERAL society is trying to consign them to? These men are not your enemy, but you seem dead set on making them into one.
“The growth in disability has not been driven by retirement or veterans.”
I never said that. The “42%” figure is not the number of people on disability.
“I don’t think God really worries about some guy getting married.”
All these Christians trying to guilt men into marriage seem to forget that Paul advised marriage only as a last recourse if you couldn’t control your own sexual lusts. Chastity was the preferable choice according to the him.
That's just your ignorance of altruism on display.
>>volunteering to become a slave so some woman can sit on her lazy ass.
Maybe that describes the female role models in your family but it doesn't describe the women in mine.
Essentially what you're describing, and rationalizing, is multi-generational strategic failure of basic social structure.
Whose fault is that?
Not yet. 55. Got about 12 years to go.
So it sounds like you are the poster boy for this phenomenon!
Stop whining like a poodle.
Real men support their wives and families as directed by Jesus Christ.
YMMV.
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