The article lacked empathy to the point of myopia, and misused a number of statistics - most blatantly, the government's job seeking numbers, that is heavily massaged to keep the unemployment figures appearing as low as possible.
The Washington Post is currently an arm of the DNC, to the point where they run their articles past the DNC prior to publication and where they hold clandestine fundraisers together that the DNC's own lawyers forbade.
While this is readily apparent from reading the DNC email leaks, I've seen very little discussion of it.
Yeah, exactly. Ending the war on drugs doesn't change that the US has fucked millions of people, prevented them from getting employed, then blamed them for most of this.
Drug testing prior to/during employment doesn't help the matter, either. A cook as a McDonald's doesn't need to be drug tested. Neither does a programmer. The country is full of this moralistic and paternalistic garbage, as is parts of the world within its sphere of influence (like the worst offenders in SE Asia (Singapore, Phillipines, Thailand, etc.)).
Im not sure it's possible to legislate that (iirc it's in article 1 of the constitution, ex postfacto I think it's called). The executive branch could do it because that has near unlimited power to pardon.
I'm not sure any of this is politically viable because of the moralistic bullshit and the "hard on crime" bullshit. I have few hopes that any of this will change. Plus, many of these people have more offenses added on in prison because of what it does to and potentially requires of people. It seems to make a non-violent offender into a more violent person with no hope because of the bigotry we have towards former prisoners.
I really want step one to be cleaning up prisons so they actually help people, instead of being crucibles of hatred staffed by sadistic meatheads. Step two can be getting rid of immoral laws and trying to get these people out.
When there are 90 jobs, and 100 people looking for work, are then ten who end up unemployed choosing to not work?
I suppose they could offer to work more hours, and accept lower wages. Would that mean that the 10 people that they replace are now choosing not to work?
The structurally unemployed don't choose to be idle - or more specifically, some amount of the population will always be idle, regardless of whether or not it does so by choice, or not.
The only countries that have full employment are war economies, and communist states.
The "idle" in the title refers only to being unemployed. George doesn't care what you're doing while "idle" -- the tone of the article is that if you don't have a job you're not a "real man".
To those downvoting me -- note the usage of the terms "infantilization" and "emasculation". You don't really have to read between the lines to hear what George is saying, you just need to look those words up.
There's an easy solution: only give UBI to full citizens. Since you usually need to live in and pay taxes in a country for ~10 years to get full citizenship, this is an easy solution.
Like most easy solutions, it's probably too extreme, some permanent residents definitely deserve UBI too. But it doesn't seem difficult to imagine an appropriate test based on years of residency, et cetera. It's certainly an easier problem than some others, like how to pay for UBI.
As the value of employment declines, it is unsurprising that fewer people choose to work. I would recharactetize the 'crisis' (why it is a crisis was never articulated in anything but thinly puritanical moral terms) as the natural consequence of increased elasticity in the demand for employment (caused by improved benefits, shifting social norms) combined with reduced payoffs for employment (stagnant wages).
I think that's overly reductive, but I'm having trouble pinning down why (in the terms laid out by the article) there is a crisis rather than a shifting market.
> As the value of employment declines, it is unsurprising that fewer people choose to work
That doesn't follow at all. The value of employment was dramatically lower in 1880 or 1910 than it is today. The value proposition was much worse for the worker, in regards to the harshness of the work, the compensation, and the worker protection laws (near complete lack thereof). You can now purchase a far greater standard of living with far easier work and far fewer hours worked. The difference is that there was zero social safety net a century ago. If you didn't work back then, the suffering was dramatically greater and it would increase your mortality rate astronomically. Today if I choose not to work, I can get free food, free healthcare, free or near-free shelter, and numerous other benefits. A debate can certainly be had about the extent of those benefits. However having grown up in one of the poorest regions in the US, I knew plenty of families that existed solely based on welfare programs and never worked, they were masters at gaming the welfare state. Today millions of people are faking disability to leech off of SS disability. Such things simply did not exist previously, you either worked or else suffered immensely.
Being occupied/having a purpose is not the same thing as having a 9-5 job that you do to pay the bills. Many people would prefer to occupy themselves in ways that don't necessarily generate money.
It's easier to have purpose when the market doesn't have to decide if that purpose has value. Want to stay at home and take care of a child or aging parent? Ain't going to happen without budgeting or basic income.
He keeps harping on government benefits but besides Social Security and Medicare there's not really any welfare to speak of in this country. So I don't know what these men are supposed to be living off of.
Britain did something very similar after the deindustrialisation of the 1970s. The number of Incapacity Benefit claimants more than trebled between 1980 and 1995. As a welfare adviser, I personally witnessed claimants being coached to apply for incapacity benefit. There was a clear quid-pro-quo - unemployed people disappeared from the statistics in exchange for a bit more money.
Millions of unemployed men in former industrial towns were effectively consigned to the scrapheap, with no real effort made to create new jobs or provide retraining. Both major parties maintained the ruse for decades. The current Tory government has attempted to reform the system, but in the most brutal and cack-handed way imaginable; they have simultaneously forced long-term claimants off benefits while cutting programmes that could help them into work. It's a shite state of affairs.
Well then this theory should be pretty easy to corroborate, does the increase in non-working male 20-54 number matchup with the increase in disability number?
It seems to me that so-called "herbivorism" is spreading from Japan into all of Western civilization, a result of commodities like video games, pornography and social networks sufficiently simulating the context in which rewards are pursued by the sort of employment that is strangely absent in the current male labor force.
commodities... sufficiently simulating the context in which rewards are pursued by the sort of employment that is strangely absent in the current male labor force
What? What does it mean for commodities to stimulate a context?
He's saying that working men are so looked down upon that the unemployed consider themselves a step above them. A bit like a perverse parody of aristocrats refusing to work.
This is not theoretical, I've seen it, I believe it. It is typical for the middle classes, especially the younger ones and what I can only really call kept women to look down on working class men as being one step removed from the prison population. Possibly feral. Never enlightened.
I think the primary cause is an education system that strongly gave the impression to young people that it was 'Yale or Jail'.
Basically the universities have created a class system by creating a new social class. Unemployment is less egregious than picking up a hammer or spade.
Otherwise you might be one of those ditchdiggers, you know, in "the world needs ditchdiggers too" quote.
I think it's going to get sorted eventually as most other work automates away. Watch for men taking ditch digging jobs ironically. I give it 5, maybe 10 years.
>> Donald Trump, is perhaps perverse evidence that some of his army of angry men are at least healthily unhappy about the loss of meaning, self-esteem and masculinity that is a consequence of chosen and protracted idleness.
This is a part of my theory as well. There are several groups of Americans who have had a bad time of it over the last 10-15 years. Many of them/us fall into more than one group, whether its chronically unemployed, or paying more than $20,000/yr. for health insurance, or staring at a $160,000 tuition bill per child. Many voters feel neglected by policy makers and point the finger at lobbyists and elected officials becoming too, say, symbiotic in Washington. Trump calls them out, and his outlandish proclamations of wrongdoing and wrongheadedness resonate. When you add these groups up, it turns out to be a lot of Americans because, in my view at least, this has been going on for a long time.
One of those groups who have had a bad time of it, for example, is African American males. If your theory doesn't include race (and racism), it's woefully incomplete.
HN doesn't like your comment, but it brings up a good point.
Groups that have had (or have had the promise of) something react differently when that something is taken away, compared to groups that never had (or were promised) it in the first place.
There were never the same promises made to black men as were made to white men. So while black men have lost that nebulous "american dream", they're much less interested in demagoguery and strongman solutions.
A portion of white men, however, might feel a sense of strong injustice at losing something that has felt almost like our birthright. Others might change their perspective and realize that the promise was never all that concrete to begin with.
> they're much less interested in demagoguery and strongman solutions
The existence of the Black Panther Party and numerous similar movements for decades, says otherwise. Louis Farrakhan is an obvious recent example of a demagogue.
I think the reasoning goes: mass underemployment -> discontent -> voting for in-group-identifying representative to fight on their behalf. There may be many black men who have reached the second step, but who view Trump as an outsider (from their perspective) and have not found a substitute representative (i.e., their "black Trump").
This is the approximate tuition for 4 years at Harvard (@ $40k/year), and not at all representative of the the real cost of university degrees in the US. Tuition at state schools, which are often quite good, is much less. CSU schools, where I went to school, estimate total cost of attendance at about $25k/year [0] split roughly evenly between school costs and living costs... on the high end (less if you live with family, or in a lower cost area of California). Anecdotally, I can verify these numbers.
Unless you are a very high net worth family, $160k for college tuition is overpriced.
I have a master's degree and 20 years if experience in engineering and design but my income and work are always under threat. I doubt these men who are not working wouldn't like to have income if we are honest we can admit that just because you're willing and able to work does not mean you get to have a job. Plus once you hit 40 they are always dumping you for juniors or interns for cheap.
I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, but it would be nice if the non-working time were allocated better. Instead of XX million people not working, get everybody working, but only 3 or 4 days a week.
It's kind of sad that we're more efficient than ever before, but instead of using that efficiency to give everybody more leisure and improve their lives we're forcing people to work crappy, low paying service jobs where they're struggling to survive.
Why are you talking about crappy, low paying service jobs? This article is about people not working at all.
And why is XX million people not working a bad thing? This crappy article doesn't for a second question, much less investigate, what these "idle" people are doing with their time or how happy they are compared to those of us who are working for a living.
Flag because you disagree with the validity of the analogy? Or because it's offensive to you?
Should we flag invalid arguments? Potentially offensive material? Since you didn't elaborate, other than the 'definitely' qualifier, it's unknown what your beef or overall goal is, here.
Because it's an inflammatory insult. Calling a group of the population a bunch of babies isn't really appropriate intellectual conversation for a site like this.
It's not every day someone suggests flagging a column by George F. Will.
"The collapse has coincided with a retreat from marriage (“the proportion of never-married men was over three times higher in 2015 than 1965”), which suggests a broader infantilization."
Sadly, Mr. Will comes from an age with a rather rigid standard for "manhood" - job, wife, big house, 2.5 kids, dog.
Moreover, he forgets that while many people wanted and worked hard for things such as equality, very few considered the possibility that social progress would turn out to be a (nearly) zero-sum game.
Obviously Mr. Will didn't get it. So he blames the victim.
I feel like this article muddies so much of what is cause and what is effect. It pushes the idea that there is an "age-old male quest for a paying job", whereas I don't think men or women or animals or anything has ever had that as their primary objective. The pressure has been to meet basic needs, meet societal obligations and expectations, meet peer pressure and similar outside forces that lead someone to take up a 9-to-5 job.
I think it's natural as those forces have weakened for this to be the consequence. It's become easier to meet basic needs, gender roles have become less rigid and there's not the same expectation of a male breadwinner, and society no longer demands everyone has children.
"One manifestation of regression, Donald Trump, is perhaps perverse evidence that some of his army of angry men are at least healthily unhappy about the loss of meaning, self-esteem and masculinity that is a consequence of chosen and protracted idleness."
Maybe they are, but just taking up a "pointless" job isn't going to change that. Without the sense that there's something bigger that they're working towards, being a Gap Factory Store employee in itself (as per the header image) isn't going to give any kind of meaning. People don't work bad jobs for themselves, they work it for something bigger. Family, society, some kind of grand purpose. Can just look at that Congo cobalt mining piece by the WaPo to see what motivates people to endure horrific work.
There are racial/gender differences, for instance, men and blacks seem to be worse off than the other groups, women and Chinese people are better off (as are immigrants in general), but still down. Of course you only get to be an immigrant if you have a job, so not much of a surprise there. It's down across the board. The only exception I could find is people who should be pensioners (men 55+), or at least near pension, but clearly people are hesitant to start their pension.
Which brings the real question. How can it be in the US that unemployment is essentially fixed while the number of people with actual jobs varies so wildly ? The only explanation I can find is that the government must be actively denying unemployment benefits to people who are in fact unemployed, or otherwise fail to count them. I am curious to understand what the actual mechanism is here. I have heard that the US essentially fails to count long-term unemployed people as unemployed, but I haven't put enough effort into verifying this. If this is true, maybe we should assess what the real US unemployment rate is. It's the reported unemployment rate, plus let's say 80% of the jobs lost since 2001, which comes to about 8.9%. Add another percent to account for people who study in order to avoid looking for a job, or who've otherwise resumed study because of getting laid off, and we're close to 10%.
That would mean that what the Fed says is nonsense, and the reason there is considerable slack in the labor market (no wage growth) is simply that at this rate, the US labor market will only have recovered from the 2008 losses around 2022, nor was it recovered from the 2000-2001 job losses in 2008. The odds of a recession between now and then making the problem worse, however, seems to me to be essentially a certainty.
The story here is wrong to focus on men. Men have it slightly worse than women, but not much. The problem is widespread and has little or nothing to do with gender.
For me prose is a really hard medium for parsing trends like the ones Will is describing here, so I made a scraper that turns the Bureau of Labor Statistics API into live D3 charts that refresh themselves every day and stay current. I’ve found it really useful.
For instance, here’s manufacturing jobs per capita -- you can see that the bump during the Obama administration, while real, is truly nothing to get excited about.
Conversely it becomes clear that manufacturing jobs have been pretty much smoothly and steadily disappearing since World War II, and it seems (to me) highly unlikely that any kind of immediate policy solution is going to reverse that.
And here’s the civilian labor force participation rate that Will is talking about in the article:
You can see clearly how much lower the value is now than it was at the turn of the millennium -- this is Will’s point at the start of the piece -- but you can also see that we’re still above the entire 40s, 50s, 60s, and most of the 70s.
Although the difference there is that the people not participating in the labor force were, I’d have to guess, women. Interesting that Will focuses specifically on men. It doesn’t look like the BLS breaks labor participation out by gender, which would be interesting.
If there are other BLS stats of interest to HN readers, I haven’t finished making a way for other users to add their own scrapers, but I’m more than happy to add figures for other BLS data. Just let me know.
If you’re trying to make a point about a change over a specific period, you can select a range and the selection gets appended by JS to the URL, such that if you send someone else the link they’ll see exactly the selection you made. It’s also possible to follow figures and be updated when they change. But also interesting things become possible across datasets. For instance, it becomes possible to mash up absolute job numbers from the BLS with population estimates from the Census and get accurate per-capita figures, that stay current when either the BLS or the Census publish new numbers.
very interesting data! It would be even better if we could see the "Active population"(18 to 65)
Looking at the 20+ charts:
Back in the 50s, only ~30% of women used to work. Since 1950 it now went up by 27 points. (31% -> 58%). In the meantime men employment went down of 17 points (88% -> 71%).
So overall for the population, we went to 59.5% ((88+31)/2) of the population working (Assuming as many men as women) to 64.5%((71+58)/2) of the population working. Where is the 'quiet catastrophe'?
Compared to 1950, 5% more of the current population is now working. Shouldn't the author feel happy about the gain of "meaning, self-esteem and masculinity" of those 5%?
I think it has to do with the sudden rise of cheap pornography, cheap computer games, social media, and the lack of women who need a provider due to societal pressures and government safety nets.
Before, if you wanted a girlfriend/wife, you had to get a decent job. That way the lady in your wife knew that she'd be reasonably taken care of. Now, the money you make is somewhat superflous - there are ways to get cash from the government/family members/divorce, making the man's income less important than the way you feel about the man at any particular point in time.
These days, with cheap pornography and entertainment and social media, you can (somewhat) satisfy your sexual desires, your need for entertainment, and your need for social interactions with porn, video games, and social media without much monetary cost.
Plus, if you missed out on the education train fairly early on, the way the job market is structured, you get fairly low wage jobs that are not intellectually fulfilling.
Looking at the cost benefit analysis, if you don't have in-demand or highly paid job skills, you chocies are to sit on your butt and mooch off your parents (which is increasingly possible and fulfilling and socially acceptable), or take a low-paying boring job for 40 hours a week that will only incrementally raise your happiness level.
There is a high cost to feeling like you're falling behind your peers or not contributing to the world. The math may seem easy but I think too much idleness is costly to one's sense of worth and place in the world.
I refuse to believe that enabling women to be financially independent is a negative thing. If men's income is less important this means men can invest in careers or outlets that they didn't have the freedom to pursue before due to familial obligations. It does not mean that men must be idle.
> There is a high cost to feeling like you're falling behind your peers or not contributing to the world. The math may seem easy but I think too much idleness is costly to one's sense of worth and place in the world.
The whole point is that cost is getting lower and lower.
> I refuse to believe that enabling women to be financially independent is a negative thing
The author is very blase about describing these men as having "chosen to not seek work". Discouraged workers are a well-known phenomenon in labour economics - people who have given up looking for work because they believe that they have no realistic chance of finding it.
America might have plenty of job vacancies, but it has very few vacancies for unskilled men living in rustbelt towns. For these men, the obstacles to finding work are often overwhelming. When graduates are struggling to find work, the prospects for socially disadvantaged people are very bleak. If someone has limited literacy, mental health problems or a felony conviction, I can't really blame them for giving up on the prospect of finding work.
I seem to recall that unemployment pays better than minimum wage in many cases. If you qualify for unemployment or disability, why would you give up that benefit and at the same time lower your income?
Mac: Unemployment runs out, what are you gonna do then?
Dennis: Well then we'll just go on welfare.
Mac: Welfare is for people who need it, like drug addicts
and single mothers. It's not for over-privileged pieces of
shit who want to waste millions in taxpayer dollars...
Basically,
1) unemployment runs out;
2) it's difficult to get welfare unless you have children or have a disability, and being classified as disabled is more difficult than commonly believed, especially for younger people, even though it sometimes seems like every idle soul is drawing a disability check; and
3) since the Clinton-era reforms many welfare programs have a lifetime cap.
FWIW, unemployment can pay better than minimum wage because unemployment is usually paid as a percentage of your earnings. But you'd need to have been making substantially more than minimum wage.
Also, a lot of social programs are pretty good about proportionally cutting back on benefits as income grows. It's still a real problem with some programs (there are many, and they're byzantine), but I think it's exaggerated somewhat. It's like "write-offs" for taxes--most people have no understanding of them, and believe they function far differently than they do in reality. To quote another one of my favorite shows:
Kramer: "It's a write-off for them."
Jerry: "How is it a write-off?"
Kramer: "They just write it off."
Jerry: "Write it off what?"
Kramer: "Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything."
Jerry: "You don't even know what a write-off is, do you?"
Kramer: "No, I don't. But they do. And they're the ones writing it off."
The timeline of "88 consecutive months of the economic expansion that began in June 2009" conveniently leaves out quite a few years of the building boom, when hordes of capable males were employed in construction and ancillary industries.
Which is also why every high-level politician in every economic speech circa 2008 and on has been harping about the need to generate more construction jobs.
81 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadYet another reason to end the war on drugs.
It was just above the level of a hit piece.
While this is readily apparent from reading the DNC email leaks, I've seen very little discussion of it.
EDIT: Might as well cite sources.
Here's the original email from the Wikileaks DB with the mangled formatting: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699
Here's a copy of it properly formatted on some news site I've never heard of before: http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/wikileaks-emails-clinton-berni...
Commuting non-violent felony drug charges to class A misdemeanors would be a huge first step.
I'm not sure any of this is politically viable because of the moralistic bullshit and the "hard on crime" bullshit. I have few hopes that any of this will change. Plus, many of these people have more offenses added on in prison because of what it does to and potentially requires of people. It seems to make a non-violent offender into a more violent person with no hope because of the bigotry we have towards former prisoners.
I really want step one to be cleaning up prisons so they actually help people, instead of being crucibles of hatred staffed by sadistic meatheads. Step two can be getting rid of immoral laws and trying to get these people out.
I suppose they could offer to work more hours, and accept lower wages. Would that mean that the 10 people that they replace are now choosing not to work?
The structurally unemployed don't choose to be idle - or more specifically, some amount of the population will always be idle, regardless of whether or not it does so by choice, or not.
The only countries that have full employment are war economies, and communist states.
There isn't a labour shortage. In fact, there is quite the opposite.
Or, more specifically, there is a labour shortage, but in fields that our economy does not seem to care to pay for.
UBI is incompatible with open borders. Neo-liberalism doesn't know how to square that circle.
How this escapes otherwise rational people is just stunning.
Anybody with an explanation? Some kind of virtual citizenship?
Unless every single country all had UBI at parity. Then UBI and open borders are both fine.
(Obviously, that's nearly impossible to actually achieve. But since we're dreaming, might as well go all the way...)
Like most easy solutions, it's probably too extreme, some permanent residents definitely deserve UBI too. But it doesn't seem difficult to imagine an appropriate test based on years of residency, et cetera. It's certainly an easier problem than some others, like how to pay for UBI.
I think that's overly reductive, but I'm having trouble pinning down why (in the terms laid out by the article) there is a crisis rather than a shifting market.
That doesn't follow at all. The value of employment was dramatically lower in 1880 or 1910 than it is today. The value proposition was much worse for the worker, in regards to the harshness of the work, the compensation, and the worker protection laws (near complete lack thereof). You can now purchase a far greater standard of living with far easier work and far fewer hours worked. The difference is that there was zero social safety net a century ago. If you didn't work back then, the suffering was dramatically greater and it would increase your mortality rate astronomically. Today if I choose not to work, I can get free food, free healthcare, free or near-free shelter, and numerous other benefits. A debate can certainly be had about the extent of those benefits. However having grown up in one of the poorest regions in the US, I knew plenty of families that existed solely based on welfare programs and never worked, they were masters at gaming the welfare state. Today millions of people are faking disability to leech off of SS disability. Such things simply did not exist previously, you either worked or else suffered immensely.
leisure != idleness
http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
Millions of unemployed men in former industrial towns were effectively consigned to the scrapheap, with no real effort made to create new jobs or provide retraining. Both major parties maintained the ruse for decades. The current Tory government has attempted to reform the system, but in the most brutal and cack-handed way imaginable; they have simultaneously forced long-term claimants off benefits while cutting programmes that could help them into work. It's a shite state of affairs.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/c...
commodities... sufficiently simulating the context in which rewards are pursued by the sort of employment that is strangely absent in the current male labor force
What? What does it mean for commodities to stimulate a context?
This is not theoretical, I've seen it, I believe it. It is typical for the middle classes, especially the younger ones and what I can only really call kept women to look down on working class men as being one step removed from the prison population. Possibly feral. Never enlightened.
I think the primary cause is an education system that strongly gave the impression to young people that it was 'Yale or Jail'.
Basically the universities have created a class system by creating a new social class. Unemployment is less egregious than picking up a hammer or spade.
Otherwise you might be one of those ditchdiggers, you know, in "the world needs ditchdiggers too" quote.
This is a part of my theory as well. There are several groups of Americans who have had a bad time of it over the last 10-15 years. Many of them/us fall into more than one group, whether its chronically unemployed, or paying more than $20,000/yr. for health insurance, or staring at a $160,000 tuition bill per child. Many voters feel neglected by policy makers and point the finger at lobbyists and elected officials becoming too, say, symbiotic in Washington. Trump calls them out, and his outlandish proclamations of wrongdoing and wrongheadedness resonate. When you add these groups up, it turns out to be a lot of Americans because, in my view at least, this has been going on for a long time.
Groups that have had (or have had the promise of) something react differently when that something is taken away, compared to groups that never had (or were promised) it in the first place.
There were never the same promises made to black men as were made to white men. So while black men have lost that nebulous "american dream", they're much less interested in demagoguery and strongman solutions.
A portion of white men, however, might feel a sense of strong injustice at losing something that has felt almost like our birthright. Others might change their perspective and realize that the promise was never all that concrete to begin with.
The existence of the Black Panther Party and numerous similar movements for decades, says otherwise. Louis Farrakhan is an obvious recent example of a demagogue.
This is the approximate tuition for 4 years at Harvard (@ $40k/year), and not at all representative of the the real cost of university degrees in the US. Tuition at state schools, which are often quite good, is much less. CSU schools, where I went to school, estimate total cost of attendance at about $25k/year [0] split roughly evenly between school costs and living costs... on the high end (less if you live with family, or in a lower cost area of California). Anecdotally, I can verify these numbers.
Unless you are a very high net worth family, $160k for college tuition is overpriced.
[0] http://www.calstate.edu/sas/costofattendance/
I'm paying for UC Davis, $35,000 | $140,000 [1]
My next kid wants to go to Loyola Marymount, $63,000 | $252,000 [2]
Average student loan debt in 2005 was $15,600
Average student loan dept in 2016 was $37,000 [3]
[0] https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-works/cost...
[1] https://www.ucdavis.edu/admissions/cost/
[2] http://financialaid.lmu.edu/generalinformation/costofattenda...
[3] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/congrats-class-of-2016-youre-the...
It's kind of sad that we're more efficient than ever before, but instead of using that efficiency to give everybody more leisure and improve their lives we're forcing people to work crappy, low paying service jobs where they're struggling to survive.
And why is XX million people not working a bad thing? This crappy article doesn't for a second question, much less investigate, what these "idle" people are doing with their time or how happy they are compared to those of us who are working for a living.
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000
often we can construct the narrative first and find supporting data later. what cross section does he use here in the Washington Post?
So if a male chooses another path outside of employment he is to be compared to an infant?
This post should be flagged. That is definitely not okay.
It's OK to disagree with an author and discuss why you disagree but there's no need to stifle the conversation altogether.
Should we flag invalid arguments? Potentially offensive material? Since you didn't elaborate, other than the 'definitely' qualifier, it's unknown what your beef or overall goal is, here.
"The collapse has coincided with a retreat from marriage (“the proportion of never-married men was over three times higher in 2015 than 1965”), which suggests a broader infantilization."
Sadly, Mr. Will comes from an age with a rather rigid standard for "manhood" - job, wife, big house, 2.5 kids, dog.
Moreover, he forgets that while many people wanted and worked hard for things such as equality, very few considered the possibility that social progress would turn out to be a (nearly) zero-sum game.
Obviously Mr. Will didn't get it. So he blames the victim.
Fewer men are working, and it's been a long term trend. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300025
Women's participation increased dramatically but has come down in recent years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300026
I think it's natural as those forces have weakened for this to be the consequence. It's become easier to meet basic needs, gender roles have become less rigid and there's not the same expectation of a male breadwinner, and society no longer demands everyone has children.
"One manifestation of regression, Donald Trump, is perhaps perverse evidence that some of his army of angry men are at least healthily unhappy about the loss of meaning, self-esteem and masculinity that is a consequence of chosen and protracted idleness."
Maybe they are, but just taking up a "pointless" job isn't going to change that. Without the sense that there's something bigger that they're working towards, being a Gap Factory Store employee in itself (as per the header image) isn't going to give any kind of meaning. People don't work bad jobs for themselves, they work it for something bigger. Family, society, some kind of grand purpose. Can just look at that Congo cobalt mining piece by the WaPo to see what motivates people to endure horrific work.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/c...
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-pa...
It's down for men:
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.MA.ZS?locati...
It's down for women:
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?locati...
White/Black/Chinese/Hispanic ... all down.
There are racial/gender differences, for instance, men and blacks seem to be worse off than the other groups, women and Chinese people are better off (as are immigrants in general), but still down. Of course you only get to be an immigrant if you have a job, so not much of a surprise there. It's down across the board. The only exception I could find is people who should be pensioners (men 55+), or at least near pension, but clearly people are hesitant to start their pension.
Which brings the real question. How can it be in the US that unemployment is essentially fixed while the number of people with actual jobs varies so wildly ? The only explanation I can find is that the government must be actively denying unemployment benefits to people who are in fact unemployed, or otherwise fail to count them. I am curious to understand what the actual mechanism is here. I have heard that the US essentially fails to count long-term unemployed people as unemployed, but I haven't put enough effort into verifying this. If this is true, maybe we should assess what the real US unemployment rate is. It's the reported unemployment rate, plus let's say 80% of the jobs lost since 2001, which comes to about 8.9%. Add another percent to account for people who study in order to avoid looking for a job, or who've otherwise resumed study because of getting laid off, and we're close to 10%.
That would mean that what the Fed says is nonsense, and the reason there is considerable slack in the labor market (no wage growth) is simply that at this rate, the US labor market will only have recovered from the 2008 losses around 2022, nor was it recovered from the 2000-2001 job losses in 2008. The odds of a recession between now and then making the problem worse, however, seems to me to be essentially a certainty.
The story here is wrong to focus on men. Men have it slightly worse than women, but not much. The problem is widespread and has little or nothing to do with gender.
For instance, here’s manufacturing jobs per capita -- you can see that the bump during the Obama administration, while real, is truly nothing to get excited about.
https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/manufacturing-emplo...
Conversely it becomes clear that manufacturing jobs have been pretty much smoothly and steadily disappearing since World War II, and it seems (to me) highly unlikely that any kind of immediate policy solution is going to reverse that.
And here’s the civilian labor force participation rate that Will is talking about in the article:
https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/civilian-labor-forc...
You can see clearly how much lower the value is now than it was at the turn of the millennium -- this is Will’s point at the start of the piece -- but you can also see that we’re still above the entire 40s, 50s, 60s, and most of the 70s.
Although the difference there is that the people not participating in the labor force were, I’d have to guess, women. Interesting that Will focuses specifically on men. It doesn’t look like the BLS breaks labor participation out by gender, which would be interesting.
If there are other BLS stats of interest to HN readers, I haven’t finished making a way for other users to add their own scrapers, but I’m more than happy to add figures for other BLS data. Just let me know.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 (Men)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002 (Women)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300025 (Men, 20+)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300026 (Women, 20+)
Here’s a comparison of men (in black) vs. women (in blue). Very interesting.
https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/labor-force-partici...
Back in the 50s, only ~30% of women used to work. Since 1950 it now went up by 27 points. (31% -> 58%). In the meantime men employment went down of 17 points (88% -> 71%).
So overall for the population, we went to 59.5% ((88+31)/2) of the population working (Assuming as many men as women) to 64.5%((71+58)/2) of the population working. Where is the 'quiet catastrophe'?
Compared to 1950, 5% more of the current population is now working. Shouldn't the author feel happy about the gain of "meaning, self-esteem and masculinity" of those 5%?
Before, if you wanted a girlfriend/wife, you had to get a decent job. That way the lady in your wife knew that she'd be reasonably taken care of. Now, the money you make is somewhat superflous - there are ways to get cash from the government/family members/divorce, making the man's income less important than the way you feel about the man at any particular point in time.
These days, with cheap pornography and entertainment and social media, you can (somewhat) satisfy your sexual desires, your need for entertainment, and your need for social interactions with porn, video games, and social media without much monetary cost.
Plus, if you missed out on the education train fairly early on, the way the job market is structured, you get fairly low wage jobs that are not intellectually fulfilling.
Looking at the cost benefit analysis, if you don't have in-demand or highly paid job skills, you chocies are to sit on your butt and mooch off your parents (which is increasingly possible and fulfilling and socially acceptable), or take a low-paying boring job for 40 hours a week that will only incrementally raise your happiness level.
The math seems easy to me.
I refuse to believe that enabling women to be financially independent is a negative thing. If men's income is less important this means men can invest in careers or outlets that they didn't have the freedom to pursue before due to familial obligations. It does not mean that men must be idle.
The whole point is that cost is getting lower and lower.
> I refuse to believe that enabling women to be financially independent is a negative thing
That sounds like an ideological argument.
America might have plenty of job vacancies, but it has very few vacancies for unskilled men living in rustbelt towns. For these men, the obstacles to finding work are often overwhelming. When graduates are struggling to find work, the prospects for socially disadvantaged people are very bleak. If someone has limited literacy, mental health problems or a felony conviction, I can't really blame them for giving up on the prospect of finding work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discouraged_worker
FWIW, unemployment can pay better than minimum wage because unemployment is usually paid as a percentage of your earnings. But you'd need to have been making substantially more than minimum wage.
Also, a lot of social programs are pretty good about proportionally cutting back on benefits as income grows. It's still a real problem with some programs (there are many, and they're byzantine), but I think it's exaggerated somewhat. It's like "write-offs" for taxes--most people have no understanding of them, and believe they function far differently than they do in reality. To quote another one of my favorite shows:
Which is also why every high-level politician in every economic speech circa 2008 and on has been harping about the need to generate more construction jobs.