See:
Written in 1986.
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 ...
>>So men are better off single and not working than married, with a family, and working?
Possibly. But the trend is showing that a growing number of men are thinking that way. The situation for a young man today is not what it was 35 years ago when I chose marriage and a career. We can’t compare our 20s to their 20s. Totally different world.
I’m automatically skeptical of studies and statistics, and especially studies employing statistics.
When American men realized were indoctrinated to be metrosexualized pink-shirt-wearing poodles who believe that marriage and children are a sucker bet
There. Fixed it for ya.
>>One silver lining to all this is that I’ve been able to slow down at work to a woman’s pace; it is like working a part-time job after the years I spent busting my hump working unpaid overtime...
Yep. Same here. Someone pointed out to me that I used to work a lot more overtime. My response was, “Yep. I wised up. My life is more valuable than your overtime pay.”
Everything is working as planed. Remove men as providers for wife and children while making them dependent of government and thus reliable Democrat votes.
I don’t take that as blame.
>>When American men realized were indoctrinated to be metrosexualized pink-shirt-wearing poodles who believe that marriage and children are a sucker bet
You think you fixed it. But what is the advantage to working your life away to pay for a house full of luxuries for a woman and children? They claim that a single man doesn’t live as long as a married man. But how many young men today have a shot at having a 50 year wedding anniversary? Better to live for 70 years than to be a slave for 72.
Yeah. It’s fairly common for people to note that America doesn’t actually have “poor” people. Our poor people have cell phones, cable TV and Facebook accounts.
If we want people to work, we should probably strive to make poverty less desirable. I don’t like EBT cards. I like bags of rice, bags of beans and boxes of cheese distributed once a month. Somebody wants “stuff”? They should get a job.
>>and especially studies employing statistics....
...with government grant money.
Hey, I just replied to your comment by accident. My comment really has no connection to your comment (with which I agree).
People, when I was growing up in the late 50s and early 60s, thousand of men worked in refineries and auto plants....the economy was booming...a factory floor labor could afford a house and family....today it is gone....if you have a trade, yes, you can make good money, but unskilled jobs are gone forever....
See:
Written in 1986.
>>Yeah. It’s fairly common for people to note that America doesn’t actually have “poor” people. Our poor people have cell phones, cable TV and Facebook accounts.
>>If we want people to work, we should probably strive to make poverty less desirable. I don’t like EBT cards. I like bags of rice, bags of beans and boxes of cheese distributed once a month. Somebody wants “stuff”? They should get a job.
I agree. It’s too easy to be comfortably poor in the USA. Get some skills and do work under the table and you can live like a king and still be “poor”.
This is where most of the Obama trillion dollar deficit has gone.
So many people on disability, social security and workman’s compensation who should not have it. I personally know two men younger than 30 years old who are receiving at least partial disability. It’s a total scam. They both are perfectly capable of working but instead choose not too. They are basically bums leaching off the productive class.
This is happening all over the USA at an accelerated rate.
They will be the first to die withing a month when the entire system collapses.
That is the greatest dirty little secret, and an unsustainable evil. It will be corrected by an inevitable and cruel collapse.
Wow.
You (like most Generation XBox hedonistic metrosexual poodles) really have no clue what conservatism is actually about.
What's the advantage to having sociobiological fitness, Foofoo?
Both men and women are marrying later than in our day.
The question IMO isn’t what they choose in their 20’s, but from their 30’s on.
And how much social pressure to marry is good? It seems to me that some is, as it turns out to be a good choice for both many individuals and of course society, but we probably had too much pressure in the past to just get married to someone (in part as the ticket to having sex), without greater considerations and other accepted options.
But George still will vote Hitlery over Trump.
>>You (like most Generation XBox hedonistic metrosexual poodles) really have no clue what conservatism is actually about.
I actually do. Conservatism has to be pragmatic over ideological.
>>What’s the advantage to having sociobiological fitness, Foofoo?
Can you discuss this like an adult and leave off the ad hominem attacks?
Sociobiological fitness is a dream. If you spend your life raising kids, they will go to college and be taught to hate everything you ever taught them. So, it is all for nothing.
I am sorry you have had a bad relationship or three. However, the problem is not that, as you put it, “ marriage and children are a sucker bet,” the problem is the destruction of the family and the removal of God and His saving grace from our society. If men followed God’s plan for our lives then there would be no problem.
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