10 Million More Jobs Needed

The Idle Army: America’s Un-working Men

Millions of young males have left the workforce and civic life. Full employment? The U.S. isn’t even close. By Nicholas Everstadt.  9/1/16

Labor Day is an appropriate moment to reflect on a quiet catastrophe: the collapse, over two generations, of work for American men. During the past half-century, work rates for U.S. males spiraled relentlessly downward.

America is now home to a vast army of jobless men who are no longer even looking for work—roughly seven million of them age 25 to 54, the traditional prime of working life. This is arguably a crisis, but it is hardly ever discussed in the public square. Received wisdom holds that the U.S. is at or near “full employment.” Most readers have probably heard this, perhaps from the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, who said in a speech last week that “it is a remarkable, and perhaps underappreciated, achievement that the economy has returned to near-full employment in a relatively short time after the Great Recession. ”Near-full employment?

In 2015 the work rate (the ratio of employment to population) for American males age 25 to 54 was 84.4%. That’s slightly lower than it had been in 1940, 86.4%, at the tail end of the Great Depression.

Benchmarked against 1965, when American men were at genuine full employment, the “male jobs deficit” in 2015 would be nearly 10 million, even after taking into account an older population and more adults in college.

Or look at the fraction of American men age 20 and older without paid work. In the past 50 years it rose to 32% from 19%, and not mainly because of population aging. For prime working-age men, the jobless rate jumped to 15% from 6%. Most of the postwar surge involved voluntary departure from the labor force.

Until roughly the outbreak of World War II, working-age American men fell into basically two categories: either holding a paid job or unemployed. There was no “third way” for able-bodied males. Today there is one: neither working nor seeking work—that is, men who are outside the labor force altogether. Unlike in the past, the U.S. is now evidently rich enough to carry them, after a fashion. The no-work life hardly consigns these men to destitution. This is at least somewhat true throughout the affluent West, but the U.S. has led the pack.  Not even in dysfunctional Greece or “lost generation” Japan has the male flight from work proceeded with such alacrity.

The paradox is that Americans—those who do have jobs—are still among the rich world’s hardest-working people. No other developed society puts in such long hours, and at the same time supports such a large share of younger men neither holding jobs nor seeking them. Who are America’s new cadre of prime-age male un-workers? They tend to be: 1) less educated; 2) never married; 3) native born; and 4) African-American.

But those categories intersect in interesting ways. Black married men are more likely to be in the workforce than unmarried whites. Immigrants are more likely to be working or job-hunting than native-born Americans, regardless of ethnicity. High-school dropouts from abroad are as likely to be working or looking for work as native-born college grads.

What do un-working men do with their free time? Sadly, not much that’s constructive. About a tenth are students trying to improve their circumstances. But the overwhelming majority are what the British call NEET: “neither employed nor in education or training.” Time-use surveys suggest they are almost entirely idle—helping out around the house less than unemployed men; caring for others less than employed women; volunteering and engaging in religious activities less than working men and women or unemployed men.

For the NEETs, “socializing, relaxing and leisure” is a full-time occupation, accounting for 3,000 hours a year, much of this time in front of television or computer screens. Clearly big changes in the U.S. economy, including the decline of manufacturing and the Big Slowdown since the start of the century, have played a role. But something else is at work, too: the male flight from work has been practically linear over the past two generations, irrespective of economic conditions or recessions.

What we might call “sociological” factors are evident, not least the tremendous rise in un-working men who draw from government disability and means-tested benefit programs. There are also the barriers to work for America’s huge pool of male ex-prisoners and felons not behind bars—a poorly tracked cohort that accounts for one adult male in eight in the civilian population, excluding those in jail now.

Regardless of its cause, this new normal is inimical to America’s national interests. Declining labor-force participation and falling work rates have contributed to slower economic growth and widening gaps in income and wealth. Slower growth in turn reduces tax revenue and increases budgetary pressures, producing higher deficits and national debt.

Un-working men have increased poverty in the U.S., not least among the great many children whose fathers are without jobs. There are the social effects, too. The male retreat from the labor force has exacerbated family breakdown, promoted welfare dependence and recast “disability” into a viable alternative lifestyle.

Among these men the death of work seems to mean also the death of civic engagement, community participation and voluntary association. In short, the American male’s postwar flight from work is a grave social ill. Strangely, nearly everyone—the news media, major political parties, intellectuals, business leaders, policy makers—has managed to overlook it.

The urgency of the moment is to bring this invisible crisis out of the shadows. Imagine how different America would be today if another roughly 10 million men held paying jobs. It is imperative for the future health of the country to make a determined and sustained effort to bring these detached men back—into the workplace, into their families, into civil society. 

Mr. Eberstadt is a political economist at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. This is adapted from his book “Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis,” out this month from Templeton Press.

Why Are Men Disappearing From The Work Force? 

Demographer Nicholas Eberstadt says hard work is becoming increasingly rare for a growing number of men who opt to stay out of the workforce.

While the Fed and government policymakers fret over "full employment," a new study by one of America's leading demographers and economists argues that in fact we are in the midst of a full-blown unemployment crisis — one that remains, in his words, "hidden." The new jobs report is out. It shows the unemployment rate continuing to hover around 5% while nonfarm payrolls grew a pathetic 151,000 for the month. But even that weak performance doesn't tell the whole story.

Nicholas Eberstadt, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argues in a new book called "Men Without Work," due out next week, that we're suffering not from full employment, but massive underemployment — in particular, nearly one out of six working-age men have no job and are no longer looking for one. A release for his book calls this "a hidden time bomb with far-reaching economic, social and political consequences." With 10 million fewer male workers in the labor force than we should have, it's hard to disagree. Eberstadt, who is highly respected on both sides of the political spectrum for his rigorous use of data, notes a number of shocking statistics that belie the current wisdom of a booming jobs market. To wit:  

   - Men age 25 to 54 now have a lower labor participation rate than they did in 1940, as the Great Depression was winding down. It's also far lower than in 1948, the year millions of men from World War II were flooding the labor market.

   - As noted earlier, one in six men today have no job and most have given up looking. At current trends, one in five will be out of the labor force in a generation.

   - African-American men are twice as likely to be in this condition as either whites or Latinos.

   - Many of these nonworking men support themselves by government disability benefits.

   - Surveys show an alarming increase among men age 25 to 54, the prime working years, engaged in doing such things as "socializing, relaxing and leisure," "attending gambling establishments," "tobacco and drug use," "listening to the radio" and "arts and crafts as a hobby." Many men, it seems, have virtually no work skills at all — and no way to get them.

   - Many of these trends in the collapse of male work may be a result of our soaring prison population and the "prevalence of non-institutionalized felons and ex-prisoners," Eberstadt argues.

This portends an entire generation of men with only a tenuous connection to the discipline and rewards of work, and will have an enormous impact on future generations of young men. This is not exclusively a problem of the lower income classes. Today, women make up 57% of all college graduates, meaning that men in the current generation will be enormously underrepresented in the well-paying professions that require a college degree. In short, men are in danger of becoming a hidden, and combustible, underclass. And Eberstadt isn't the only one who has noticed. "Over the last three decades the labor-market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition, employment rates, occupational stature and real wage levels," wrote MIT economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman in "Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor and Education. "In other words, in every important category men are losing ground. The MIT economists further argue that young men "born into low-income, single-parent-headed households — which, in the vast majority of cases are female-headed households — appear to fare particularly poorly on numerous social and educational outcomes." With more and more males born into single-parent households, the crisis won't end soon. Eberstadt in 2013 warned that our reliance on the standard unemployment rate "seriously disguises and understates the magnitude of the ongoing jobs crisis. "We agree fully. As we wrote last week in IBD: "We keep hearing we are 'at or near full employment.' ... This, frankly, is nonsense. Since 2006, the U.S. population has grown from 298 million people to 323 million people, a gain of 25 million, or 8.4%. Over that same time, the number of people who have left the labor force jumped from 76.7 million to 94.3 million, a 23% increase. That's not full employment. "This is a long-term trend, but by far most of those who have left the labor force have been men.

Eberstadt, in a piece in the Wall Street Journal, called it an "army" of unemployed men. This can be seen in the civilian labor-force participation rate for men, which gives a far broader idea of how many men are working. Official data show a shocking slide starting in 1948, when roughly 87% of men were taking part in the labor force, falling to about 69% currently — an 18-percentage-point decline. This is indeed a silent time bomb ticking at the heart of our economy. To ignore it will surely lead the U.S. down the path to terminal economic and productivity decline, a lower standard of living and an also-ran status among the global economies. Why Are Men Disappearing From The Work Force?

Why Are Men Disappearing From The Work Force?Jobs: While the Fed and government policymakers fret over "full employment," a new study by one of America's leading demographers and economists argues that in... |

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The disappearing male worker, by Rich Morin

Are men losing interest in work? Male labor force participation rates in the United States have been in steady decline since at least 1950 while women’s labor market participation steadily rose before leveling off about a decade ago.

Two recent analyses of U.S. Census data document this trend and offer some unexpected reasons why this shift is occurring. Economists Stefania Albanesi and Ayşegül Şahin of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York analyzed U.S.

Census data extending back four decades.  They found the labor force participation gap between men and women has closed dramatically since 1970 when only 43% of women but 80% of men 16 years and older were employed or looking for work.

The gap stood at about 12 percentage points  (57.7% vs. 70.2%) in 2012 and is projected to narrow slightly over the next few decades as participation rates for both sexes slowly decline.“ Women have become less likely to leave employment for nonparticipation—a sign of increased labor force attachment—while men have become more likely to leave the labor force from unemployment and less likely to re-enter the labor force once they leave it—a sign of decreased labor force attachment,”  

Albanesi and Şahin wrote in a recently released working paper. Translation:  Women are less likely than they were in the past to leave a job and drop out of the labor force to raise a family, take care of aging parents or family members, or for other reasons.  Men, on the other hand, are increasingly more likely to quit, be laid off or fired, or otherwise leave a job and opt not to look for another.

But why are men having an increasingly hard time entering or staying in the labor market–and why are some dropping out entirely? MIT economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman think they know one of the reasons why. In a recent  study for the Third Way think tank they found that men are falling behind women in acquiring necessary job skills—primarily high school and college degrees—and it’s showing in the inferior kinds of work they get, the lower wages they are paid and in their diminished chances of finding and keeping a job.  Little wonder guys are discouraged.

“Over the last three decades the labor market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition; employment rates; occupational stature; and real wage levels,” Autor and Wasserman write. These researchers acknowledge that scholars don’t yet know all of the causes of these changes.

They suggest globalization, the diminishing power of labor unions and the dizzying pace of technological change all may pose barriers to stable employment and raise frustration levels, particularly among men.  Other scholars have cited

institutional changes that have made it easier for mothers to work.  Changes in family structure, immigration and the aging of the Baby Boom generation also may contribute to these trends.  Add to that the simple fact that men—particularly those with a working wife—don’t need to work as long or as hard these days to support a family, or to even work at all.

To this long and growing list Autor and Wasserman add another intriguing possibility: Absentee dads. Sifting through Census data, they find a significant share of this shift in employment outcomes is largely occurring in one group: men born into single-parent households, most of which are headed by women.

As a group, these boys are significantly less likely to graduate from high school or go to college than other children, they found. Even girls raised by a single parent fare better in later life than a boy who grew up in similar circumstances, even though both suffered from lower incomes, less advantageous school and neighborhood environments and higher stress levels than other children.

But they add that “boys in single female-headed families are particularly at risk for adverse outcomes across many domains, including high school dropout, criminality and violence,” also noting that “male parental absence may appear to differentially disadvantage boys because boys are more sensitive than girls to either male role models or these other forces.”

The disappearing male worker. Are men losing interest in work?  View on www.pewresearch.org

An additional piece:

http://content.thirdway.org/publications/662/Third_Way_Report_-_NEXT_Wayward_Sons-The_Emerging_Gender_Gap_in_Labor_Markets_and_Education.pdf