This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 3rd, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

Since the late 1940s, the proportion of working age men who are not working is more than

doubled and the problem has grown steadily.

What accounts for it, and what are these men doing with their days?

And why does marriage overcome other predictors of employment like education and race?

Nicholas Eberstadt is author of men without work, America's Invisible Crisis.

He says the public policy response isn't clear,

but the crisis deserves more attention than it's getting.

When did demography... deserves more attention than it's getting.

When did demographers and economists begin to discover that this was a serious problem with no clear answers?

I would say that in the labor economics literature, articles

started being published in the early 1980s, saying, gee, there's been a decline in workforce

participation for prime age men in America over the last 15 years.

That's odd.

Well, I guess it'll just a blip.

And then in the early 90s, people said,

yeah, this is still going down down but it's so anomalous it's going to

turn around and we kept on hearing in the expert literature that this is

odd and not the way that the real world is supposed

to work so it's probably going to turn around and here we are 50 years later and it's still

getting worse.

Does the data with respect to labor force participation for these prime age men, does that move

...