Penna Dexter

The official unemployment rate is low right now. In August, it was 4.9 percent for the fourth month in a row. The bad news is: there’s this huge pool of so-called missing workers, people who are neither employed, nor any longer seeking a job. People who have dropped out of the workforce, not because it was time to retire, but because they have given up on the possibility of finding a job they are qualified for. If there were more and better jobs available, these folks would be out there looking for one. This group is composed mostly of men. Able-bodied males neither working nor seeking work.

This is a sad economic story in America and we don’t hear much about it. Political economist, Nicholas Eberstadt says that, despite the hype that we’re at or near full employment, we’re not even close. In his new book, Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis, he describes the collapse, over the past two generations, of work for American men.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Dr. Eberstadt writes: “America is now home to a vast army of jobless men who are no longer even looking for work — roughly seven million of them ages 25 to 54, the traditional prime of working life.”

This group didn’t used to exist. “Until roughly the outbreak of World War II,” writes Nicholas Eberstadt, “working age American men fell basically into two categories: either holding a paid job or unemployed. There was no ‘third way’ for able-bodied males.”

There is now. These men are not destitute. Dr. Eberstadt points out, with a bit of sarcasm, that “the country is now evidently rich enough to carry them, after a fashion.”

Eberstadt points out that, in the last 50 years, the fraction of American men aged 20 and older without work rose from 19 to 32 percent. The jobless rate for prime working-age men rose from 6 to 15 percent during this time period. His research shows these men tend to be less educated, never married, native born, and African American.

Saul Kaplan, Founder of the Business Innovation Factory, wrote in Harvard Business Review of a burgeoning “educational attainment gap” which has negative consequences for the American economy. “Young men in the US,” he writes, “are in trouble by any measure of educational attainment.”

Why does this group exist? And why is it growing?

The decline of manufacturing in the US explains some of it. Once a young man could find a good, high wage job without a college degree. That’s much more difficult now. Often, low-wage jobs pale against “government disability and means-tested benefit programs.” One adult male in eight is an ex-prisoner or felon not behind bars. Barriers to employment are high for this group.

As males have retreated from the workforce, we’ve seen more family breakdown, greater welfare dependence, and less civic engagement among men.

We need to bring these men back.