For the past few decades, there s been an intense focus on getting more women in the workplace and helping them thrive and succeed there. At the same time, a silent problem has emerged that could have serious repercussions on our economy and society. More and more men have been dropping out of the workforce completely.
00:07:09.400unemployment statistics and also for finding out about people who are neither working nor looking for work but are of uh prime working age
00:07:18.720so roughly based on the these statistics how many men in the prime working age are not working today
00:07:26.880uh round number today seven million between the ages of 25 and 54 seven million it's an enormous army
00:07:37.520and this army of men who are neither working nor looking for work in prime work ages
00:07:47.920has been growing three times as fast as the total population of prime age men for fully half a century
00:07:58.640so if you do anything three times as fast as something else for half a century you change the world
00:08:04.000at this point in time more than a tenth of all civilian non-institutional prime age men
00:08:13.120are out of the workforce altogether neither working or looking for work and that's in addition to
00:08:20.400those who are formally unemployed and this isn't a recent phenomenon this this as you argue in the book this
00:08:26.560began in the 1960s yeah um from the first months of the jobs reports in the late 1940s until
00:08:38.720the mid-1960s there was really no trend the uh the proportion of men not at work kind of bounced around
00:08:48.720without any sort of uh real you know direction to it it was kind of seemingly stable over the long this
00:08:54.640long period around the mid-1960s there's a breaking point and since then the proportion of guys who are
00:09:05.680neither working nor looking for work has grown exponentially and if you flip it around the other way
00:09:14.400if you look at the percentage of guys who have paid work you can see a a real collapse
00:09:24.880the percentage of guys with paid work in the united states has dropped from almost 96 percent in the
00:09:37.440mid-60s to about 85 percent today it's dropped by more than 10 percentage points and in fact if you look at
00:09:48.400the latest figures that came out last month for the percentage of uh prime age guys with paid work even uh
00:09:58.400you know even an hour of paid work a week it's slightly worse than it was in 1940 in the 1940 census
00:10:08.800which is to say at the tail end of the great depression when the national unemployment rate
00:10:14.400was over 14 percent so the scale of the problem we're looking at today is kind of great depression
00:10:22.240scale wow and is this a uniquely american problem or other western industrialized countries saying the same
00:10:28.640issue well all rich western democracies have seen some decline in the percentage of prime age guys
00:10:43.200in the workforce over the past let's say two generations but our decline is by far the worst
00:10:50.960ours is the steepest and the largest so we have to wonder why is that i mean there are a bunch of
00:11:01.840other rich countries around the world who've had economies that have been a lot more moribund than ours over
00:11:10.080the last you know 50 years i mean look at what's happened in japan over the last generation it's been
00:11:15.520pretty flat in the water but but japan's performance it's a lot better than ours you take a look at a
00:11:22.720place like france which has got a famously rigid set of rules on the labor market it's got a great big
00:11:31.680expensive welfare state their labor force participation for guys is a bunch above ours i mean you know um
00:11:39.520greece is in extremis you're kind of perennially but it's uh performance is also uh more favorable
00:11:46.960than ours so there's something what would you say we've won a race that we don't want to win and we're
00:11:52.800exceptional in a way that we shouldn't want to be exceptional so why is that i mean what is going on
00:11:59.440in america is are there fewer well-paying jobs is it a cultural thing what do you what do you suspect i
00:12:05.440know there's no definitive answers but what are your hunches well of course like any other great
00:12:09.680big historical change i don't think we can have a kind of like a one-factor theory of history it's
00:12:15.040probably a bunch of different things in uh in the usa like other rich industrial democracies we've had
00:12:23.760a big you know what you might call structural economic change we've had the decline of manufacturing
00:12:29.680we've had more trade competition china and the world trade organization outsourcing decline in demand
00:12:38.320for less skilled work uh all of that's a very big factor in this we've also clearly had some
00:12:48.960changes in the way that our social welfare state works our social welfare state as you know i'm
00:12:56.240constantly reminded when i go to other affluent societies it's a very stingy one compared to
00:13:01.200theirs so it's not the the scale of generosity perhaps of our social welfare state but maybe some
00:13:07.920of the perverse incentives we have a sort of a disability archipelago which plays a very important0.99
00:13:17.200role in providing alternative income to men who are neither working nor looking for work in this
00:13:25.920prime age of life we also have something which is kind of invisible and i think terribly
00:13:33.200sad and overlooked in our society which is quite different from almost any other country on earth
00:13:40.400and this is the enormous invisible population of felons of people who have been sentenced to a felony
00:13:51.360who are not behind bars uncle sam does not collect information on this i think to our shame but others who have attempted to estimate the
00:14:03.920the size of this population suggest that as of the year 2010 there were over 19 million
00:14:13.200adults in america with a felony in their background now they're obviously overwhelmingly guys
00:14:18.800if you do the arithmetic and look at flows and stocks today there are most likely over 20 million americans
00:14:28.560not behind bars in society as a whole who have a felony in their background overwhelmingly guys
00:14:36.160this means that today whether or not we discuss it in general in public something like one in eight
00:14:43.760adult guys not behind bars has a felony in his background and uh probably a somewhat higher
00:14:51.520proportion for the men of prime working age this is one thing that is very different in america from
00:14:59.600any other rich country and i have to think that this is part of the tableau we're looking at as well
00:15:06.320right because most on most job applications they ask you if you have committed a felony
00:15:11.920and that might be a reason people don't hire them well that's one of the reasons i mean there's
00:15:18.320it's kind of ironic there's a movement in different places around the country called ban the box which is
00:15:27.840supposed to mean that employers are not allowed to ask about that and ironically in the places where
00:15:35.840this initiative has has succeeded people are much more likely not to hire uh ex-cons because they
00:15:45.200presume that everybody's an ex-con and um right so it has the it has the opposite of its intended effect
00:15:54.160but it's certainly true that if you've committed a felony there are a whole bunch of things you can't
00:15:58.880do you can't work in financial services i mean you could just think about all the different things you
00:16:02.800can't do but there are other aspects which i don't think we really understand uh well enough i mean
00:16:08.800in my book using non-government data i show that no matter what a guy's age or his ethnicity or his
00:16:19.120educational level he's way more likely to be out of the workforce if he's been to prison than if he is
00:16:27.040just you know been arrested and way more likely to be out of the workforce if he's just been arrested
00:16:33.280than if he's never had any trouble with the law now i can't tell you why that is i mean one reason
00:16:40.480might be discrimination against felons another might be that people who go to prison lose their skills
00:16:48.240somehow while they're in another hypothesis might be that employers just aren't all that interested in
00:16:56.000the type of people who tend to get in trouble or there may be something else or there may be other
00:17:01.440things or it may be some combination of these but as long as we have this glaring lack of information
00:17:09.760about this now enormous share of our adult male population we don't don't know we can't know right
00:17:21.680well give us a snapshot i mean what does this disengaged male worker look like i mean what
00:17:28.880average age i guess the average age is you know between 25 and 50 but where do they live primarily uh
00:17:35.200what do they do with their all their spare time if they're like if they're not working
00:17:38.640what are they doing well let's start with that we can we can tell about that aspect of life from
00:17:47.840information the government regularly collects in what are called time use surveys these are things
00:17:55.120which the labor department collects you know to get an idea of when people are working and you know
00:18:00.880what they're doing getting to work and stuff like that but they also ask people who aren't employed
00:18:05.840about this adults who aren't employed so of the seven million neither working nor looking for work
00:18:13.760between the ages of 25 and 54 a little bit more than a tenth are adult students you know they're studying
00:18:24.880they're trying to gain skills presumably to get back into the game and get a better job
00:18:31.680um their time use looks pretty much like employed men um the overwhelming majority though of guys in this
00:18:45.440out of the labor force pool are in what is called the neat category n-e-e-t neither employed nor in
00:18:56.880education or training and for them the picture is pretty grim i mean for one thing and this is all
00:19:07.440self-reported people in this group basically don't seem to do civil society not much volunteering
00:19:16.400not much charitable work not much worship you might think they have nothing but time on their hands
00:19:22.880but they do relatively little in the way of child care or caring for other people in their household
00:19:32.960family and not that much in the way of household chores what they do what they report doing is watching
00:19:44.640and the surveys don't ask whether it's watching a tv or a handheld device or a laptop or whatever but
00:19:55.840it's watching stuff about 2100 hours a year i mean which is akin to a full-time job and these same time
00:20:06.480use surveys suggest that these guys are getting out less and less that they're
00:20:15.280not leaving the house not traveling outside the house as much today as they used to in the past now
00:20:22.960some other work that was done since i published this book uh suggests that a very large proportion
00:20:32.400of these um men not in the labor force are taking uh pain pills maybe something like almost half taking pain
00:20:46.480pills every day according to self-reported uh survey data so this tableau is not just of guys
00:20:57.600as sitting at home you know playing world of warcraft it's uh playing world of warcraft while stoned
00:21:05.680and it's it's a very grim picture that is grim i mean what are i mean that for the individual it's
00:21:14.480grim but let's talk about a like sort of a societal ramification what are the some of the economic
00:21:19.680and social ramifications of having so many disengaged men from the workforce more or less exactly what
00:21:26.960you'd imagine and none of it good uh so what does it mean you have this enormous chunk of prime age
00:21:36.160male manpower sidelined in this sort of way well slower economic growth bigger income gaps bigger wealth
00:21:47.120gaps in society more social welfare dependence probably higher budget deficits and thus higher public debt
00:21:55.920obviously more pressure on fragile families less social mobility less healthy civil society i mean
00:22:04.080you know just go through the whole thing there's nothing good in it it's all bad i i mean i wish i could
00:22:09.440figure out a good thing in it but it's it's it's it's a problem for the individuals it's a problem for
00:22:15.440their families for their communities and for our nation do like i mean i guess the individuals are having
00:22:20.320because they're taking pain medication which they probably might not even have physical pain might
00:22:25.360be a way to soothe the psychological campaign but i think when guys hear like oh you just get to watch
00:22:30.480tv and play video games all day and it sounds like the dream life are there some men who are like that
00:22:34.160they're like yeah just i have no desire to get back into work even though i could this is great for me and
00:22:40.640i want to keep doing this well if you look in particular at what has happened to the anglos the
00:22:50.960non-hispanic whites at working age men it's true of working age women too i guess but if you look at
00:22:58.560the men in particular there's been a noticeable increase in death rates for lower skilled prime age anglo
00:23:08.480men over the past two decades let's say and a lot of these are from what the princeton economists uh
00:23:17.120and case and angus deaton angus um won the nobel prize in economics a couple of years ago a lot of
00:23:23.440these deaths are from what they call deaths of despair from um cirrhosis of the liver and from drug
00:23:30.720overdoses and from suicide so that aspect of it doesn't look like such a happy picture
00:23:38.880now this isn't only men not in the workforce i hasten to say that they weren't focusing just on
00:23:45.520that group but but that's part of it and the consumption of pain medication looks to be a lot
00:23:54.240higher for those who are out of the labor force altogether than for unemployed or for employed guys
00:24:01.920going back to what this demographic looks like our education level is it primarily just high school
00:24:08.960grads are there college grads or is it primarily a lower education uh demographic i'm glad you asked
00:24:15.520that so now if you have let's say seven million uh people in a group you're going to have some of
00:24:21.920everybody most likely but as you indicate some uh groups are overrepresented and some are underrepresented
00:24:29.360so to start with the ethnic thing african americans are decidedly overrepresented in this group
00:24:37.840but among what's called persons of color both asian and latinos are underrepresented they're more
00:24:46.320likely to be in the labor force than the national average with education it's just like you said high
00:24:51.520school dropouts way more likely to be in this group than the national average college grads and
00:24:59.440people with graduate degrees way less likely turns out that marital status is a big predictor no matter
00:25:06.640what your educational background or ethnicity if you're married you're less likely to be in this
00:25:14.800group if you've never been married you're way more likely to be in this group no matter whether you
00:25:19.920have kids or not having a kid at home by the way all other things being equal means you're less likely
00:25:25.680to be out of the labor force more likely to be in the game in the labor force looking for work or
00:25:31.040getting work then there's finally this category that the census bureau awkwardly calls nativity and it
00:25:37.920doesn't mean like christmas scenes it's uh it means like whether you were born in the usa or not guys
00:25:45.360who are born in america are more likely to be out of the workforce altogether than guys who are born
00:25:51.520abroad and it doesn't matter again about your ethnicity asian anglo african-american latino immigrants
00:26:01.520of all flavors are more likely to be in the workforce than their native-born counterparts so
00:26:10.160that's kind of like the broader picture of how you know different source of code uh social
00:26:16.880categories uh look in this respect how are these men supporting themselves and what's their living
00:26:22.320standard like so you mentioned disability payments as one source from what we can divine from
00:26:31.520government information on spending patterns which i think are the important
00:26:40.080numbers in trying to understand consumption and standards of living the men who are out of the
00:26:49.120workforce altogether are not in the bottom fifth of our income distribution people who are in the bottom
00:26:58.240fifth of our income distribution and our spending patterns are single mothers they're the ones who are1.00
00:27:06.400in the most disadvantaged in the most disadvantaged position these men without work without workforce
00:27:13.120participation are in the quintile above that ironically they're kind of in the group that used to be the
00:27:23.440kind of the status for people who are called working class except these are guys who are neither working
00:27:28.960or looking for work they clearly have lower standards of living than men who are at work they are drawing their sustenance
00:27:42.880off of their families other family members off of their girlfriends and off of their uncle and that uncle would be uncle sam
00:27:54.960according to one government survey done by the census bureau
00:28:02.560almost three and five of the guys who are neither working or looking for work in this critical group
00:28:09.760the 25 to 54s almost three and five receive benefits from at least one government disability program
00:28:20.080and if you qualify for benefits uh from disability programs by convention then are eligible for other
00:28:29.200benefits as well low income healthcare medicaid snap which we used to call food stamps and other things like
00:28:37.120that so it is clear that men who are out of the workforce um don't live like princes but on the other hand
00:28:47.920they are not at the bottom of u.s society either and what do you think we can do about this i know you're
00:28:56.800primarily describing the problem and don't get too much of the prescriptions but what what could we
00:29:02.960do to solve this issue or is it solvable well it's a it's a big long-term historical trend so i tend to
00:29:13.680think that big uh long-term historical trends take a while to turn around doesn't mean they can't be
00:29:20.080turned around of course we have to try to turn them around i was very light on recommendations in this
00:29:27.280book partly because i didn't want to bigfoot this it seemed to me was much more important to get people
00:29:33.600talking about the problem and offering discussions from all around the public square than to have nick come
00:29:41.760in with his i don't know you know a 10-point program or whatever to uh you know uh show us the
00:29:48.000tablets from the mountain for what it is worth i would talk about things that government can do and
00:29:56.640things that government can't do and then a couple of things that maybe government should be looking at
00:30:03.440among things that it possibly might be able to do so this problem clearly corresponds with the breakdown
00:30:11.520of the family in post-war america that's something i don't think the government can fix and i i think
00:30:17.840i'd be kind of scared if the government you know set up a bureau for fixing the family in america because
00:30:23.760the unintended consequences of that would be unimaginable and maybe worse than anything positive
00:30:29.680they tried to do so the family is a huge uh aspect in here and probably outside of washington's purview
00:30:38.720by the same token religion and faith has some important role here and i'm not sure we should
00:30:48.080want uncle sam to be monkeying around with that either that's a civil society matter among things that
00:30:55.280the government might be able to do however i i would point to three or four in particular
00:31:01.120one is skills college is not for everybody obviously but nobody should graduate without having a skill
00:31:12.720and one of the awful things about education in america today is a lot of people graduate from high
00:31:21.680school without a marketable skill we need to fix that broken aspect of our educational system
00:31:29.840and maybe destigmatize vocational training a little bit so that's one thing that could be done
00:31:37.040not necessarily in washington maybe in localities but it's something in general that should be examined
00:31:43.360second thing we've seen small businesses in america increasingly struggling and this is a trend that goes back
00:31:51.520decades it's happened under republican presidents under democratic administrations under red congresses blue
00:31:59.920congresses we've had a long-term trend of declining business startups it's not entirely clear why this
00:32:11.040is i mean i suspect it is related in part to the increasing difficulties that small businesses face in attracting
00:32:20.720finance and the growing tax burden that they face and the growing regulatory burden not just in washington and
00:32:30.160states and localities as well if we have a healthier small business environment we're going to have a much better
00:32:38.400job creating engine than we enjoy right now so that's a second thing i think worth looking at third has to do
00:32:46.880with our disability insurance programs they were established for a very good purpose which is to provide social
00:32:56.160insurance for people who can't work the programs as a whole have mutated away from their intended purpose
00:33:04.240and there are a lot of people now who rely on disability programs as an alternative to employment
00:33:14.800it's hardly a princely life it's a penurious income but it is an alternative to working life we had a welfare
00:33:24.480reform 20 years ago that worked pretty well in transforming aid for families with dependent children
00:33:33.040into uh temporary assistance for needy families i think we should wholesale reform our national
00:33:42.000programs for disability benefits into on a kind of a work first principle i realize that's easier said than
00:33:49.840done but that would be the objective and then finally we've got this invisible population of 20 million
00:33:56.640people who are ex-felons who are kind of living in the shadows of society i mean that's that's kind of1.00
00:34:03.520appalling we're a government that set up the census uh in 1790 because our founders thought that information
00:34:13.120was important for public policy that was more than two centuries ago can't we really have some information
00:34:21.040about how people in this enormous group live what their health is like what their employment is like
00:34:27.600what their incomes are like what their government program dependence is like we can't have evidence-based
00:34:33.840policies for bringing people out of this pool and into the workforce unless we have the evidence so
00:34:40.320those would be a couple of the directions that i think might be worth examining let's put it that way
00:34:46.480and what do you think for people who are listening to this podcast they could sure they could go and
00:34:51.040you know write a letter to their congressman about these issues and vote for someone who who's doing
00:34:56.160you know who's on the same who's got this on their platform but what can individuals like in civil society do
00:35:02.160you know to help with that that problem well i mean of course there's to begin with what we might call the
00:35:10.240the empathy barrier in a time of increasingly gated communities and decreasing contact between social strata you might start by wanting to get
00:35:25.920out a little bit and seeing how the other half is living and what the real life circumstances of some of your fellow american citizens are like
00:35:38.240and then maybe you'd have a little bit more perspective on some of the problems which we are facing today
00:35:48.160because what's happened in the us over the last decade or so is that the escalator has broken for a large
00:35:58.640fraction of our fellow citizens and i guess i'd say the first thing we ought to do
00:36:06.000is get out a little bit and kind of you know recognize the reality the information revolution
00:36:13.680has been wonderful in innumerable ways but it's also balkanized us and in a way it's kind of separated us
00:36:23.520from our fellow citizens because we all find you know kind of like self-validating self-confirming
00:36:30.320kind of sources of news and in some ways may kind of like retreat from the uh from the public square
00:36:37.120a bit i think it would be really valuable for for more contact between americans and i realize that's
00:36:44.000extraordinarily vague to say but i think that might be a very positive starting point for for self-informing
00:36:52.320approaches towards addressing really long-term problems in our country well nicholas eberstadt
00:36:58.480this has been a great conversation thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure
00:37:03.120my guest is nicholas eberstadt he's the author of the book men without work it's available on amazon.com
00:37:07.840also check out our show notes at aom.is men without work where you can find links to resources
00:37:12.240where you delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the art of
00:37:25.680manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website
00:37:29.360at artofmanliness.com if you join the podcast i've gotten something out of it i appreciate if you take
00:37:33.200one minute to give us a review on itunes or stitcher it helps out a lot and if you've already done that
00:37:36.720thank you please share the show with a few of your friends word of mouth is how this show expands
00:37:40.960his audience the more the merrier as always thank you for your continued support and until next time
00:37:45.120this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly