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 ...
“It’s Jesus’ description of the natural relationship between a man and woman...”
Good, then you concede it’s not a commandment to marry. Glad you decided to drop that pretense.
Certainly I did. I am not married, and I don’t fornicate either, by choice.
“You could’ve chosen to be a eunuch instead of being a “slave” to a wife and children”
Exactly what many men are doing, and what you are apparently railing against.
It’s feminism.
A man has no need to maximize earning potential if there is no family to provide for.
I retired at 56, house paid off, owe no $$$ to anyone, modest pension with plenty of savings for toys & travel.
No need to kill yourself working if you choose to remain single.
>>Exactly what many men are doing,
The sort of Eunuch Jesus described was celibate - not the kind facilitated by birth-control and celebrated in Generation XBox’s “culture” of metrosexualized poodles — for which a plethora of due penalties has been documented by the CDC.
I think a peacetime draft would help cure that —let them learn some discipline and skills. I’m still on the fence about drafting females —but in peacetime, why not? When you see those out of control fistfights at Chuck E Cheese and Burger King, they could use with a dose of discipline and self control the military brings....
>>Glad you decided to drop that pretense.
The relationship between man and woman articulated by Jesus is not slavery.
That pretense was yours.
>>Certainly I did. I am not married, and I don’t fornicate either, by choice.
And yet, in your self-proclaimed ignorance, you assert that being married to a woman is “slavery”.
An acquaintance that worked construction in NYC described a similar situation where blacks would show up knowing that 51% of the workforce had to be “preferred minorities” (blacks, Hispanics, women). They wouldn’t work, and by the end of the job most would already be gone/fired. I guess the contractors just built it into the cost of the job (that approximately 25% of the “workers” were just dead weight).
I see this increasingly throughout office jobs; a large number of “preferred minorities” with no clearly defined responsibilities that seem to have all the time in the world to BS.
They wish; I’ve shifted my workday so far forward I drink half the first pot of coffee before anyone else even arrives.
(Shortly after “they” show up the sugar packets disappear...)
“volunteering to become a slave so some woman can sit on her lazy ass.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3477249/posts?page=111#111
Either you were married or not - which is it?
“However, my wife doesn’t see the workplace and legal discrimination against men. My sons and their friends certainly do.”
The women never see it, but I know millions of men aren’t all wrong. My wife thinks I nitpick with the goofy commercials making white guys look like fools while women are brainy; it is simply bizarre world, and completely detached from the reality around us.
That’s a very practical way of looking at it and I’m sure many of them view it in just that way. It’s better than graduating with a six figure student loan amount.
Spot on message from a lousy messenger: https://hwalibrarycom.wordpress.com/2014/07/23/the-modern-romans-part-i-garner-ted-armstrong-gene-h-hogberg-plain-truth-magazine/
There’s nothing in that comment where I claimed to be married. Apparently you just want to read things into my comments so you can argue with some straw men of your own construction.
“And yet, in your self-proclaimed ignorance, you assert that being married to a woman is “slavery”.”
I did not say that either. Stop making stuff up.
If you would bother to ask me what I’m referring to as “slavery”, I would be happy to explain it to you, but you seem to prefer to box at shadows.
“That pretense was yours.”
No it was not. You never bothered to ask me what I was referring to as “slavery” and instead decided to substitute your own imaginings for what my answer might have been.
“The sort of Eunuch Jesus described was celibate”
I am celibate, and many of the men you are reflexively (and not very “Christianly”) bashing are celibate also. Not all men who are not marrying are celibate, for sure, but those men are not Christian, and your venomous attitude towards them certainly isn’t likely to attract them to the Christian viewpoint.
In a Speech last week, Hillary said that People who “want to work” should earn more Money. (so much for the Obama economy)
What about those people who DON’T want to work? Are the People who DO want to work supporting their choice?
If you are able bodied, you don’t work, you don’t eat unless Hillary is President.
>>There’s nothing in that comment where I claimed to be married
“volunteering to become a slave so some woman can sit on her lazy ass.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3477249/posts?page=111#111
Oh, so siting “on her lazy ass” was just an uninformed opinion you pulled out of yours.
Thanks for clearing that up.
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