This is CBS Eye on the World.

Here's John Batchelor.

Men without work, I welcome Nicholas Aberstow of the American Enterprise Institute

to help me understand his book published some years before and now republished with a post-pandemic note from the author

about what we learn from these years of statistics about men without work. I will transfer my

thinking immediately to a metaphor that Nick uses in the course of his presentation.

A Ghost Army. Nick, congratulations again for updating your observations of the middle of this

second decade of the 21st century. We're now plunged into the third decade. And after the

pandemic, there are lessons here that are fresh. We're going to begin,

however, with what is the Ghost Army? What do you mean by that? Thank you, Nick.

John, thank you so much for inviting me on. The Ghost Army are the men without work in modern America.

I'm focusing in particular on what are called the men of prime working age, not my term,

25 to 54 years old, the backbone of the economy still,

the group that is absolutely indispensable in the forming of

families and the raising of children as well. For over half a century, we have seen a collapse

of work for this critical group, mainly due to an exit of men from the workforce

altogether. And as we speak, John, over 7 million men between the ages of 25 and 54 are out of the workforce altogether, neither working nor looking for work.

In the old, in the ancient classical days, if one talked about a Roman legion being decimated, that meant that they had lost a tenth of their membership.

We now have lost over a tenth of our prime age men from the workforce.

They're out of it altogether.

They're not even unemployed because they're not looking for work.

But they're in this netherworld, which I think we can talk of as a ghost army.

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