HOW MUCH OF THE TRAGEDY IS FENTANYL ETC? 3/4: Men Without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition (2022) (New Threats to Freedom Series)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2024
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Men-Without-Work-Americas-
Nicholas Eberstadt’s landmark 2016 study, Men Without Work, cast a spotlight on the collapse of work for men in modern America. Rosy reports of low unemployment rates and “full or near full employment” conditions, he contends, were overlooking a quiet, continuing crisis: Depression-era work rates for American men of “prime working age” (25–54).
The grim truth: over six million prime-age men were neither working nor looking for work. Conventional unemployment measures ignored these labor force dropouts, but their ranks had been rising relentlessly for half a century. Eberstadt’s unflinching analysis was, in the words of The New York Times, “an unsettling portrait not just of male unemployment, but also of lives deeply alienated from civil society.”
The famed American work ethic was once near universal: men of sound mind and body took pride in contributing to their communities and families. No longer, warned Eberstadt. And now—six years and one catastrophic pandemic later—the problem has not only worsened: it has seemingly been spreading among prime-age women and workers over fifty-five.
In a brand new introduction, Eberstadt explains how the government’s response to Covid-19 inadvertently exacerbated the flight from work in America. From indiscriminate pandemic shutdowns to almost unconditional “unemployment” benefits, Americans were essentially paid not to work.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a |
| 0:05.0 | CVS, I on the world. I'm John Bachelor with Nicholas Eversdada of the American |
| 0:09.8 | Enterprise Institute. His book, Men Without Work, republished as a post-pandemic |
| 0:14.4 | edition and we will come to what Nick can tell us of the statistics after the |
| 0:19.8 | shutdown of the American economy in the late winter early spring of 2020. But now to two of Nick's |
| 0:26.2 | colleagues, Henry Olson and Jared Bernstein, who contribute a different look at the men without work statistics we've been discussing. |
| 0:36.0 | I begin with Henry Olson because he speaks of recessions. |
| 0:40.7 | There have been seven since the war, believe Nick is what you provide and he |
| 0:45.0 | points to the twin shocks of the 1970s. Why so? What does that mean to him for |
| 0:50.8 | him? Well so Henry is talking, Henry is talking about the |
| 0:55.7 | about the recession and stagflation the the big shocks that came to the economy where we started to see the decline and manufacture |
| 1:06.8 | or the really acceleration of the decline in manufacturing and Henry and other other critics and I think it's great to include some |
| 1:15.8 | critics and dissent in a book because he got the argument started have pointed to |
| 1:20.6 | the structural changes as being fundamentally unfavorable to the former male |
| 1:27.0 | sort of employment mode. |
| 1:30.0 | The observation is that you've overestimated government causes and |
| 1:36.2 | underestimated the change in the labor market. That would be the twin shocks of the |
| 1:39.8 | 1970s. And yet there's more here. this is what was known as the Russ Belt right Nick the |
| 1:45.8 | D industrialization of the Midwest in reading a book I had this image in my mind |
| 1:50.6 | I don't know about factories getting out and seeing this team of human |
| 1:56.2 | beings moving in this way all men and then they go through the front gate and go |
| 2:00.8 | on to their lives that day and then the next day they'd reverse the course. |
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