This is CBS, I on the World.

I'm John Batchel with Nicholas Ebersstadt of the American Enterprise Institute.

His book, Men Without Work, republished as a post-pandemic edition,

and we will come to what Nick can tell us of the statistics

after the shutdown of the American economy in the late winter, early spring of 2020.

But now to two of Nick's colleagues, Henry Olson and Jared Bernstein, who contribute a different look at the men without work statistics we've been discussing.

I begin with Henry Olson because he speaks of

recessions. There have been seven since the war, I believe, Nick, what you provide. And he points to

the twin shocks of the 1970s. Why so? What does that mean for him? Well, so Henry is talking,

Henry is talking about the, about the recession and

stagflation, the, the big shocks that came to the economy, where we started to see the decline

and manufacture, the really acceleration of the decline in manufacturing. And Henry and other critics,

and I think it's great to include some critics and dissent in a book

because you get the argument started,

have pointed to these structural changes

as being fundamentally unfavorable to the former male sort of employment mode.

The observation is that you've overestimated government causes and underestimated the change in labor market.

That would be the twin shocks of the 1970s.

And yet there's more here.

This is what was known as the Rust Belt, right, Nick, the deindustrialization of the Midwest. In reading your book, I had this image in my mind, I don't know, about factories getting out and seeing this team of human beings moving in this way, all men, and then they go through the front gate and go on to their lives

that day. And then the next day, they'd reverse the course. That was possible in the 1960s,

but it was all gone by the 1970s. I'm imagining how Henry Olson is looking at this. How does that

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