The Vanishing Male Worker

The Vanishing Male Worker

"Working, in America, is in decline. The share of prime-age men — those 25 to 54 years old — who are not working has more than tripled since the late 1960s, to 16 percent. More recently, since the turn of the century, the share of women without paying jobs has been rising, too. The United States, which had one of the highest employment rates among developed nations as recently as 2000, has fallen toward the bottom of the list.

"As the economy slowly recovers from the Great Recession, many of those men and women are eager to find work and willing to make large sacrifices to do so. Many others, however, are choosing not to work, according to a New York Times/CBS News/Kaiser Family Foundation poll that provides a detailed look at the lives of the 30 million Americans 25 to 54 who are without jobs.

"Many men, in particular, have decided that low-wage work will not improve their lives, in part because deep changes in American society have made it easier for them to live without working. These changes include the availability of federal disability benefits; the decline of marriage, which means fewer men provide for children; and the rise of the Internet, which has reduced the isolation of unemployment.

"At the same time, it has become harder for men to find higher-paying jobs. Foreign competition and technological advances have eliminated many of the jobs in which high school graduates like Mr. Walsh once could earn $40 an hour, or more. The poll found that 85 percent of prime-age men without jobs do not have bachelor’s degrees. And 34 percent said they had criminal records, making it hard to find any work.

"The resulting absence of millions of potential workers has serious consequences not just for the men and their families but for the nation as a whole. A smaller work force is likely to lead to a slower-growing economy, and will leave a smaller share of the population to cover the cost of government, even as a larger share seeks help.

“They’re not working, because it’s not paying them enough to work,” said Alan B. Krueger, a leading labor economist and a professor at Princeton. “And that means the economy is going to be smaller than it otherwise would be.”

Read this one carefully: it's the New York Times, the economy is NOT recovering from the Great Recession when most of your population is unemployed fools! You ever notice that constant discrepancy in our news? The elites who manage our news, see this as business as usual. The article is cloying in it's acceptance of this as the norm.

Notice the age of the men with no jobs, begins at age 54. 20 years ago, they were the 34 year old and below crowd being labeled as "slackers". They are Generation X and the millennials! That is the thing being ignored in this article.

Did the Baby Boomers not retire? One chart I saw accompanying this showed the over 55 and above crowd, as having good jobs unless they had retired already. How come Generation X hasn't been able to move into those jobs of people who were more numerous? It blows my mind. We are playing big time for the selfish Baby Boom generation who have 47 times more the wealth.

Look at that poor guy in the picture, he is probably living at home with his Mom! One sees this so often now, shamed 40 and 50 something people living at home with their parents.

The job system is failing when a man can't even get a job to support a family. This came for the ghettos first and now it is across the spectrum. Get in a time machine, what kind of country do you see when a man can't get a job. They don't marry, don't have children unless they are illegitimate, can't buy a house or build a community. When you have nothing but low wage work, your life is reduced down to survival, not building a future. The future will suck, and the blame for this will lay at the feet of the greedy who have destroyed livelihoods for millions--The Squawker