#614 - Nicholas Eberstadt - Why Do Millions of Men Not Want to Work?

0:00You can't say that this men without work thing is because there isn't any work for the man millions and millions of those jobs are not for like hedge fund managers or you know chemical engineers a lot of jobs where the main qualification is showing up on time every day not stone and even so employers have not been able to fill these millions and millions of extra jobs. How did you come upon the topic of male unemployment? I make my living off of finding things that are hiding in plain sight. I've been doing this for over 40 years. I started during the Cold War looking at the Soviet health crisis.

0:43Looked at problems of poverty in the US. This particular one came to me about 10 years ago. But when I was hearing happy talk about the full employment or near full employment situation in the United States from the Federal Reserve, from politicians, from Wall Street, and I was also reading things which said that half of Americans said we were in recession. So those two things don't really go together terribly well, do they? So I think you said, what's the problem here? And I pulled on the thread and realized very quickly what the problem was. Our national employment statistics system was developed to track the great depression.

1:30And during the great depression times, you'd want to know how many people were unemployed. You'd want to know how many people were employed. And if a guy was neither working nor looking for work, you wouldn't even think this would be a great phenomenon. That would be kind of like a little bit of an end game. Today, it turns out that we've got four prime age men, with the 25 to 54s. We've got four times as many guys who are neither working nor looking for work as actually unemployed, as out of a job and looking for a job. So if you're only looking at the unemployment number, you're missing four fifths of the problem.

2:12That's how I stumbled across it. So what does that turn into in terms of actual numbers? Well, more than 7 million, I'll get really nerdy on you. More than 7 million men between the ages of 25 and 54, the prime ages for obvious reasons, who are in the civilian non -institutional population. So, Villians are not counting military, non -institution because we're not counting prisoners or people who are in mental or health facilities. And other people who could reasonably be expected to be in the workforce looking for a job. What sort of men are in this group, demographically education, family structure, ethnicity, who makes up this group?

3:02Well, as you would guess, Chris, if there are seven million guys, there's some of everything. That's a big number. But some are more represented than others. So ethnically, African Americans are overrepresented. But if we go into the persons of color formulation, Latinos and Asian Americans are underrepresented. So for white, non -white, it's almost a wash. Education is what you'd think. High school dropouts way overrepresented with just high school quite overrepresented. But surprisingly large representation of guys with college or even college degrees. 40 % of this group has at least some college and as I recall about of fifth or sixth, the college grads.

4:01Here's a funny one, marital structure, family structure. It turns out that married guys, no matter what their ethnicity, are way less likely to be in this pool. They're way more likely to be out looking for work or having work. Guys who've never been married way more likely to be in this pool. And it's not just the wedding ring, although that obviously is a big predictor. If you're living under the same roof with kids and you're a guy, you're way more likely to be looking for work. I mean, that's not surprising to me, but it's going to kind of like the provider effect or something. And last but not least, the Census This bureau has something that they call nativity, which seems kind of weird to me.

4:51It sounds like a Christmas scene. What they mean is where you're born. Are you born overseas or native born? Foreign -born guys are way more likely to be not in this pool, no matter what their ethnic background, more likely than their counterparts. And that's not a surprise to me. and I'm sure it's not a surprise to you in particular because people who come here from overseas are kind of motivated to do something here and they're more likely to be in the workforce. A lot of overlapping different groups there. I remember hearing you say that a married African -American man is less likely to be in this cohort than an unmarried white American man.

5:45Absolutely true. Absolutely true. And in effect this this little ring and it overcomes or erases the ethnic differential disadvantage if you want to call it that. And there are other things like that as well. If you are a foreign born guy and you're a high school dropout, your labor force participation is going to be very close to that of a native born college guy. I mean, so it's not just it's not just the disadvantage of the skills, right? I mean, there's something else there's something else going on. Did you look at family structure that they came from? Were you able to break this down by single -parent household that they'd grown up in?

6:39No, I wasn't. I mean, that's a really good question. It's a really good question. But I didn't have the information that could allow me to give you a good answer on that. Okay, so we have upfront a rather dramatic 7 million person cohort of men in the US, a large chunk of whom are not looking for work. What is the story of modern mail and employment? How do we get to the stage where this is a hidden catastrophe? Well, like so many things in history, it happens gradually, it doesn't come upon us all at once like a meteor strike. after the end of the Second World War. For about 20 years, the work rates and the labor force participation rates of this group of guys were discussing the 25, the 25 to 54s, it's pretty close to 100%.

7:44Not 100 % but pretty close. And it wasn't going anywhere, it was bouncing around a little bit. Then starting in the mid -1960s, things started to change. And from, let's say, about 1965, it was a good year in a market, but it may not be perfect, but it's pretty close. From 1965 to our conversation today, it's been basically a straight line out out of the workforce of men, a flight from work, leaving work, not in labor force, whatever you'd like to call it. And it's eerie if you track this on a graph for a piece of paper. I did a first edition of a book, Men Without Work in 2016, and I used this graph as the cover, which it's almost a straight line.

8:43I mean, it's not quite geo -estronomy. It's not quite that perfect, but it's pretty close for the social sciences. And what was really shocking to me was when I came back to do an update after the pandemic last year, it's almost exactly the same line. I could have taken the cover of that book and just found a ruler and kept the thing going. I have no explanation for that. I mean, this is something that happens in the physical sciences. This is not something that happens in the social sciences. I mean, it will change eventually, but I was just stunned by that. I heard that since around about 1950, men have retreated from the labor force at around about 0 .1 % per month, solidly.

9:36Is that about right? I'd have to do the numbers on paper, but it's been, it has been absolutely relentless. And I would have started it in the mid -60s for the 1950s. For 1950s, it's more or less a kind of a slightly bouncing line with no trend that I could divide. Okay, so, well, economies, demographics, you know, unemployment, we go through peaks and troughs, we go through cycles, boom and bust. How have you managed to find, like, explained to me the underlying dynamic that has managed to create a ruler shape? Yeah, all right. Well, we can start by the explanations that don't work, right? And because those are always so popular and they're I think they're called received wisdom right so The received wisdom in this area Is that this is a phenomenon driven by economic and structural technological change that We've had this extraordinary Revolution since the end of second world war which is true and we've had this tremendous set of technological changes, and that's true.

10:59And we've had this big shift in demand, less demand for less skilled labor, true, outsourcing true, China enters the World Trade Organization true, true, true, true, true. Okay, but that's not the whole story, and it's not even most of the story, I don't think. If it were most of the story, you couldn't get a straight line like the one I'm describing to you because we have the business cycle, right? I mean, we've got boom and bus periods and you'd see a big, you'd see a big, you'd see a big kappa when China enters the world trade organization. You'd see a big disruption, it doesn't show up. You know, when we have our, you know, beautiful little monsters that, you know, disrupt our technology, you know, You'd see something.

11:49So that's not happening. What else isn't happening? Well, if you take a look at men with less skills, they are not all, you know, commonly disadvantaged in the labor force. If you take a look at foreign -born guys who are high school dropouts, but they're married, their work rates and labor force participation rates are indistinguishable, as I mentioned from college born. I mean college guys are domestic. On the other hand, if you take a look at a native born guy who's never been married, it's a disaster. It's like 50 % or less a chance of being even in the workforce. So in this group that's supposedly homogenous, they're like 40 percentage points of difference in participation.

12:41So that part doesn't work so well either. The really biggest, I think, challenge to this idea is the extraordinary peacetime labor shortage that we're having now, which at, you know, at time of our conversation, 10 or a million unfilled jobs in the United States. So you can't say that this men without work thing is because there isn't any work for the man and millions and millions of those jobs are not for like hedge fund managers or you know chemical engineers. There are a lot of jobs where the main qualification is showing up on time every day not stoned. And even so, employers have not been able to fill these millions and millions of extra jobs.

13:41Is that that employers can't get somebody to come and do the job without getting them fired or is that that people simply aren't applying for the jobs? There are a lot of jobs that people aren't applying for. I mean, we have seen a spike of about 4 million in the total number of unfilled jobs since the eve of the pandemic. We have also seen a slump of about 4 million total in the size of the workforce by comparison and to what we would have expected from the pre -COVID trends. Not all of these are guys, I hasten to say. We're seeing now a sort of a new face to the flight from work in America. But the problem with the men fleeing the workforce was the original origin of all of this.

14:40How many women are added into this cohort? If you count women who are over the age of 55, a considerable number, there are some under 55 as well. There is a problem that is, one might say, no bigger than a man's fist on the horizon heading towards us, which is the kind of the doppelganger, the women without work. I'll mention, I'll tell you that in a moment, but if we look at the 55 -plus group, they account for more than half of the shortfall that I just mentioned to you. This is a very new phenomenon because from the 50s until about the 90s, American men and women were kind of starting to enjoy the notion of retiring early.

15:37But from the mid -90s up to the eve of COVID, these older workers were basically the only bright spot in the American labor tablobe. Their work rates were going steadily up. Their labor force participation rates were going steadily up. But since then, there's been a shock and a drop and despite the rollout of COVID, of vaccines, and everything else, they haven't come back to the big cohort of invisible men. How are they surviving and paying for life? Well, as best I could figure out as a research nerd, kind of looking at statistics and, you know, like one of my computer in the basement, it looked to me as if there's a couple of different factors.

16:30Girlfriends and family, as long as you count Uncle Sam as part of the family. People are, there are quite a large number of these guys who are living with people, either cohabiting or at home with parents or others. And that's helping to pay the bills. What's also helping to pay the bills is, as I said, the US government, in particular, our disability programs for people who are unable to work. Those programs seem to have morphed away from their original humane intention and now seem to provide an alternative income source to regular employment for several millions, for actually for millions and millions of these guys.

17:33How many? What's the proportion? This is a really hard question to answer. But I'll do my best. It should be an easy question. You should be able to go to an office in Washington and ask a bureaucrat, how many checks are being cut for people who are on disability? I mean, taxpayers want to know, right? I mean, it sounds like a pretty easy thing. The reason it's not easy is because we have a crazy quilt of disability programs that don't play nice with each other. So the Social Security Administration has three different programs that kind of talk to each other. Then there's the Veterans Administration that has Veterans Benefits.

18:16Then there's Workman's Comp Programs all around the country. Then there are state -level disability programs. There are probably others that I don't even know about. And as best I could figure out from trying to draw in the dragnet, before COVID, over half of the guys who were in this 7 million pool were obtaining at least one of these benefits. Many of them were obtaining more than one. And about two thirds were living in a home that was getting at least one of these benefits. Now I would hasten to add that these are not, these are not princely prices that these guys are getting. It's pretty penuurious, but with the add -ons from other welfare benefits, which you can become eligible for through disability is enough to provide this alternative to working life.

19:22Okay, so that may be able to get them by given the fact that they're not working, not in education, employment or training. What are they doing? What do they spend their time doing? Well, we only know what they say they're doing and we know what they say they're doing because they answer surveys that Uncle Sam sends them sometimes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has this annual program it calls an American Time Use Survey and it asks thousands and thousands of people, what do you do from the moment you get up in the morning till the time you go to sleep, but how long do you sleep? So they don't just ask people who are working.

20:06They ask people who are adults at all ages. So we've got a fair, you know, a fair number of returns from the neither working or looking for work guys, right? Now, I hasten to say everybody is a liar and surveys are full of But we can take this, you know, self -reported information as a first cut. They say they basically don't do civil society. Almost no worship, almost no charitable work, almost no volunteering. They got a lot of time on their hands, we know that. But they do surprisingly little housework. They say they do surprising little housework and surprising little help with other people in the home What they say they do a lot of is watch screens now these surveys Don't tell you what they're watching or how they're watching at just you know that their screen time About 2000 hours a year Okay, now 2000 hours a year would qualify as a fair full -time job.

21:20I mean, maybe not a fewer in a law firm, but pretty much anywhere else. So it qualifies a pretty good full -time job. And the skill which they're developing is being in front of a screen on a couch. And to make the situation even more dispiriting than that sounds, every so often these surveys have a little extra component of questions. And before the pandemic, one of these components was, do you take pain medication? And about half of these guys said, yes, I take pain medication every day. Now doesn't say what the medication is, doesn't say if it's actually a prescription, but that's a lot of people sitting on their couches in front of screen -stoned.

22:11I'm a writing saying that what you've just said is of this neat 7 million cohort, on average, they spend around about 2 ,000 hours per year watching screens, and of this same cohort, half of them are taking daily pain medication of one kind or another. That's what they say. And I should be a little careful about the not -in -labor force versus neat. About 10 % or slightly more than 10 % of these guys are basically full -time students. They're getting ready, they're training to get back to work. Their time use looks like an employed guy's time use. So we're talking about 6 plus million who are in the neat pool.

22:59I was going to say it's a silver lining around a cloud to say, well, it's 10%. It's not all seven minutes, but it's a big number. It's a big almost all of them. What about the way that having a criminal record gets folded into this? Well, Chris, once again, there is no office you can go to in Washington. and in Washington has a great many offices that can tell you how many adult felons there are in the US or how many prime -age guys have a criminal record. And I tried to get at that and the best I could do was to use some, I think, pretty good work by some defiant demographic nerds who tried to reconstruct the whole post -war period of crime and punishment, how many people had survived over the long period, how many had come back to jail.

24:06They estimated that as of 2010 there were 19 .5 million adults overwhelmingly man in the United States who had a criminal record. And with a reasonable back -of -the -envelope estimates, that would take us to about 25 million today. We know that the US has got this famous mass incarceration thing going on, but the prisons have got about two million people on them. That means that for every person who is behind bars, there are 10 million or more or 10 or more who are in society as a whole in general and not behind bars. I have a criminal record. My own back of the envelope and I can't be too precise about this given the uncertainties.

25:04But my own back of the envelope is that about one in seven adult guys has a Criminal conviction in his background in the United States of America at this point and probably slightly more than that in the prime age group so we're talking about a lot of A lot of guys with convictions in their background who are kind of invisible to our statistics. But from what little evidence of our senses, we can draw upon, they're way more likely, not to be at work, to be in this kind of pool. Have you got any idea whether that's because they're struggling to be accepted for jobs because they have to list the fact that they do have a felony record?

25:53It's maddening. It's maddening because I can't give you a straight forward answer to this, which is a terribly important question and millions of people's lives depend on the answer to it. We don't have the evidence in a sort of a statistical way. We've got this world of anecdotes and there are thousands and thousands of points of light out there that are trying to deal with this, but they're all disconnected. If we lifted a finger and got this information together, which we could do pretty quickly, wouldn't be perfect, but it would shine a big light on part of this. We'd have the evidence for evidence -based programs all around the country.

26:43And we don't have that. It's clear that there are some areas where there are restrictions against employment of ex -cons, including the financial sector and other places. There's a whole question about whether they ban the box, whether there should be a ban the box, whether asking people if they'd had trouble is prejudicial. My own contrarian impression is that employers actually end up discriminating more if they don't know the answer to that question. They kind of overestimate on their own part. And they're more likely to, they're more likely to be suspicious of less educated minority young men than if they have the actual information, but that's my impression.

27:38So your concern is that among many, many concerns is that because we have very, very inferior data to what we should do in order to be able to dig down into this, any interventions that you do want to do to try and fix the problem can be pointing in the wrong direction. They can miss the mark entirely because we don't know, let's just use the X, Khan, Falanie example cohort. But you don't know if it's an intervention that needs to be done on the side of the employer to encourage employers to bring on people who do have criminal records. You don't know if the intervention needs to be to get these people from prison back into looking for jobs, get them into training, get them into the routine.

28:19Maybe it's support groups, maybe it's something to do with psychological health. You don't know where this issue is coming from because you have insufficient inferior data. Well, there will be people who are working in, you know, God's own trenches, you know, with reentry for ex -cons, who will have a wealth of knowledge on this. And it can tell everybody more about this. But in terms of numbers and patterns, we're blind on this. As a general observation, we always have to be careful about unintended consequences because there's always a policy and there's always an unintended consequence of the policy.

29:05And if you don't ask about both of those, you're not looking at the whole situation. How haven't we heard more about this? Like how haven't we heard about this huge seven million man behemoth? Well, I have some guesses. I mean, one guess is that this is a disadvantaged group that doesn't fall within the academy and the media's preconceptions of disadvantage. Their guys, their, you know, prime working age, and they don't fit the victim profile terribly well, so, you know, horsemen pass by. That's part of it. It's also true that in the United States, these prime age men have not been a menace to society.

30:05They've been a menace mainly to themselves. They've been dying of deaths of despair and overdoses. They haven't been out like in the banities of Paris like setting the cars on fire. So they haven't been getting a lot of attention for themselves. And because they're not an organized political group, there is no real constituency for them. So, you know, as long as, so they can be neglected at no great peril for any immediate constituency is in the country. I've heard you talk about the difference between poverty and misery as well. How does that fold in? By any 19th century standard, whether it's in the UK or in the US or Australia or in any of the affluent societies of the 1800s, these guys are rolling in money.

31:16I mean, they're probably in about the second quintile on average in our consumption scale in the United States, but that would make you a very, very, very wealthy person back in the 1860s or 1870s and any of our English -speaking countries. So, lack of resources, lack of material resources is not the issue here. You can be miserable on quite a high standard of living. And the degradation that these men experience or self -inflicted to some degree is, you know, it's heart -rending. And it's a tremendous loss of human potential. But just think of it. I mean, you don't have to be a philosopher to know that, 2 ,500 years ago, Aristotle said that there were human beings or social creatures.

32:23If you're not connected to society and you're a human being, you're kind of suffer for it. That's why solitary confinement is considered a cruel, unusual punishment by some people. So if you're not connected to work, you're more likely not to be connected to family. More likely not to be connected to faith, although that's another story. And you don't even go out of your house to be in your community. That is a pretty miserable baseline. I mean, I can imagine being out of work and spending all of your time doing community gardening or volunteering or I don't know memorizing Kapital and the original German or something.

33:12I mean, something like that, which would be a use of your time that wouldn't necessarily degrade you. But what I've described to you is not that. It's kind of like a path of misery. Yeah, whanking on weed isn't the same as hoeing a garden and building some flowers. So this is one really, I guess, interesting area that I've spoken about an awful lot recently, I flew to Doha to have a debate about traditional masculinity being degraded and stuff. What do you understand about how men are seeing themselves and their role in the world, given this change in terms of what they're doing with work?

34:00Well, you don't have to be a sociobiologist to say that there is something unnatural about society and history's long -term providers, suddenly being flipped into this position of dependence. And you don't have to be sigma and Freud to think that there might be some sort of psychological fallout from this inversion here.

34:34Whether this speaks to greater metaphysical problems in the US or the world is a bigger topic. My boss, Mary Eberstadt, has opined about that at some length and she's always right. So I will refer to that. I am very interested in the idea of providers becoming dependents and us not having the language or the archetype framing or the guardrails to be able to give them something that makes them feel proud and then also the distinction between poverty and misery you know being told that you are from benefiting from the past, oppressive patriarchal superstructure, which is giving you all of the advantages that some other group hasn't had.

35:36Meanwhile, guys are not starving, at least in terms of for money or for food, but very much are for meaning, very much are for social connection, very are for sobriety. It just seems to me like the absolute sort of synthesis of everything that performative empathy allows to happen, which is to do what looks good in place of what is good when it comes to trying to enact social policy and campaigning for people that are struggling? Well, I think you've put it very well. You can take a technocratic approach to addressing some of the problems I've described. The nice thing about a technocratic approach is that you can pretend that it is value neutral.