09.14.16
Not now, I’m watching porn and having a polish
The Grave Social Ill of unemployed stupid white guys will, I predict, continue to gain in popularity.
So, to refresh, from Nicholas Eberstadt’s Labor Day weekend piece at the WSJ:
What do unworking 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 …
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.
John Podhoretz, a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and five-time Jeopardy gameshow champion adds at the New York Post, in other words, a brilliant man:
Men have been withdrawing from the workforce across two generations in a steady downward pattern that continues no matter the economic circumstances of the moment. They have left the workforce even though work itself has gotten easier — hours shorter, labor less physically taxing.
Make no mistake; these aren’t “discouraged workers.??? They’re un-workers. Only “about 15 percent of the prime-age men who did not work at all in 2014 stated they were unemployed because they could not find work. In other words, five out of six of prime-age men gave reasons other than a lack of jobs for their absence from the workplace??? ..
Eberstadt: “These men appear to have relinquished what we think of ordinarily as adult responsibilities not only as breadwinners, but as parents, family members, community members and citizens. Having largely freed themselves of such obligations, they fill their days in the pursuit of more immediate sources of gratification.???
And this part I really like:
What do the un-working have in common? They’re not married. They’re largely undereducated. And, most telling, they have a history of entanglement with the criminal justice system.
Economist Dean Baker has been taking this one on for the past week or so at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Today, with colleague Cherrie Bucknor, he covers more ground:
Most importantly, there has been a sharp drop in labor force participation rates. As a result, in spite of the relatively low unemployment rate, the employment rate is still close to 3.0 percentage points below its pre-recession level. This story holds up even if we restrict ourselves to looking at prime-age workers (between the ages of 25–54), with an EPOP that is close to 2.0 percentage points below pre-recession levels and almost 4.0 percentage points below 2000 peaks.
The response of the proponents of higher interest rates has been to attribute this drop to a problem with prime-age men rather than a lack of demand in the economy. For example, Tyler Cowen argued that less educated men were watching Internet porn and playing video games rather than working. The problem with this explanation is that the decline in EPOPs is comparable for non-college educated men and women. There is also a decline in EPOPs since 2000 for both college educated men and women, albeit a smaller one than for their less-educated counterparts.
The EPOP is the Employment-to-Population ratio.
Since there is a drop in prime-age EPOPs for all groups, this would seem to suggest that the main problem is a lack of demand and not some new difficulty that some relatively narrow group of workers has in dealing with the labor market. Before going through these trends, it is worth making an additional point; this decline in EPOPs was not expected before it happened …
The more fundamental issue is that it is difficult to explain a drop in EPOPS for all workers, regardless of education levels, as being a problem of workers lacking skills or a desire to work. This looks pretty clearly like a story of weak demand. In other words, the problem is not them; it is us, where “us??? is the people who make economic policy.
Tyler Cowen, from the original:
Keep also in mind that the decline in labor force participation probably comes from structural factors …
Maybe employers just aren’t that keen to hire those males who prefer to live at home, watch porn and not get married. Is that more of a personal failure on the part of the worker than a market failure?
Keep in mind there is plenty of other evidence for a partial collapse of norms among some of the lower earners in the U.S. It has been detailed in numerous books. I am claiming that some of that labor is now perceived as being of lower quality, which is entirely possible.
Additional impetus for the unworking stupid men watching tv shtick is its attachment to whether or not full employment has been achieved so interest rates can be raised.
If it’s only stupid lazy men who are unemployed, then there’s nothing to be done. The economy has recovered and it’s time to raise the rate so inflation doesn’t creep in and damage the hoards of rich people.
However, if all groups are still seeing underemployment, then the men who are grave social ills argument loses some of its juice.