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 not job growth if the number of new, never before existing jobs does not exceed the number of new, never held any job before citizens (graduates of colleges or H.S., legal immigrants, or those reaching legal age to work)
I had to read the article. It’s amazing how they can bring Trump into that.
It’s all tied to marriage. When American men realized that marriage and children are a sucker bet, they didn’t need to worry about chasing the “American dream” anymore.
Let’s see, for three decades we have been told we have to do this thing to help females and that thing to help females and spend a billion dollars to promote females and then, one day, we suddenly notice that males have been screwed? Astounding levels of brilliance from folks who consider themselves smart. Intellectuals, even. Morons, the lot of them.
For half a century our governments accepted that a majority of black males would contribute nothing to our country; if anything, they were a drain of resources. Now it is an issue because Hispanic and white men are doing the same?
I work with too many females who only hire other women (basically to protect their jobs from competition); they are reaping what they sow as they age without marriage/children. Many men realize they can toil as beast of burden without economic benefit (just paying bills for other people), and are instead choosing to prolong childhood until death.
Tough sh!t...
>>It’s not job growth
The gummint considers it job growth if you lose 1000 full time jobs with benefits that pay $25/hr and replace them with 1001 part time jobs with no benefits that pay $9/hr.
I was right in the tail end of that category. I closed down my private business and went back to the corporate world.
If I were a black female at that age, with my experience I would have gotten about twenty job offers (because most of the jobs I did not get went to 40+ year old black women.)
Being an old white guy is tough. It took almost a year of full time looking to get a job. It is a job I would have gotten when I was 25. The pay is about 1/3 of what I was making when last in the suit and tie world.
I am not bitter about the job I DID land. I like it and the people are great. But don’t kid yourself, finding a job after 50 was akin to an Irishman trying to find a job in Protestant Boston back in the 1840s.
F*ck George Will!
Once affirmative action withstood legal challenges, men (at least white and Asian ones) knew they’d do all the work while “preferred minorities” got the money and promotions for their efforts. Having men opt out of raising families was the initial problem; at this point they can’t get them to do the work for everyone else anymore.
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...
Here in NJ those black females are toxic; companies hire Hispanic females instead. Less legal hassles, better work ethic; basically both groups have the same language issues while one seems much more interested in working.
Isn’t it because it is too easy for them to go on “disability” for minor or trumped up reasons? Seems like a moral hazard that is putting them out of work, and the ones who should care about it are the taxpayers (primarily) and employers (secondarily) who have to pay for it.
I think of the firemen and police who check out of work for “disability” reasons. Even if they can no longer do physical work, there is plenty of nonphysical work (e.g., call centers) they could do, even from home.
And then there are those who “retire” for nearly regular pay by the time they are 50. Those tend to be government union employees, and again, the taxpayer gets the shaft on that.
He couldn’t resist blaming Trump. “Reversing social regression is more difficult than causing it. One manifestation of regression, Donald Trump, is perhaps perverse evidence that some of his army of angry men are at least healthily unhappy about the loss of meaning, self-esteem and masculinity that is a consequence of chosen and protracted idleness.”
So men are better off single and not working than married, with a family, and working?
They are still better off working vs not working, from a health POV. However, the penalties for divorcing are large enough that being forever single is far less risky.
All the ranting and raving on FR about the loss of jobs overlooks this glaring fact. The vast majority of these "men" are voluntarily outside the workforce. They are not looking for a job; they are content to live off of the rest of us and steal benefits from those who are truly disabled.
Largely because of government benefits and support by other family members, nonworking men 25 to 54 have household expenditures a third higher than the average of those in the bottom income quintile. Hence, Eberstadt says, they "appear to be better off than tens of millions of other Americans today, including the millions of single mothers who are either working or seeking work."
Trump supporters need to remember all the enthusiasm in the world won't overcome self-interest. There is a growing class of people who make more money from benefits than many of the people working to support them. They don't attend rallies; they don't respond to surveys; they don't care about social, political, or economic arguments; but they will vote to ensure their gravy train keeps running. Their number was estimated around 42% the last election, and Obama has spent his entire career ensuring that number grows. The Democrats know 51% ensures them a permanent majority.
This article is written by an ignoramus with no clue. The jobs are going to H1b immigrants. I used to worked in technology and got replaced by Indians. The economy has never recovered and once your out of work a couple of years..you might as well have Ebola. The middle class jobs are going going gone
So is not living at all, I suppose.
>>I work with too many females who only hire other women
Other women - and non-threatening poodles who wear pink shirts on Thursday.
When a nation kicks God and His plan for families out of consideration, choosing to try once again to “improve” His model as given in the Bible, disaster results. How many times does this have to happen before the ungodly humanists are knocked off their perches in government, academia, and the media?
I’m just an old, retired guy, but the solution is simple:
Up in the mountains there are signs telling people “Do Not Feed The Bears”. The rationale being if they get handouts from people, they will lose the ability (and the motivation) to hunt and feed themselves.
Stop the handouts, and people will get jobs, or go hungry.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.