If you were looking at the unemployment rate, you were missing four-fifths of the problem.

And all of the happy talk from the Fed and from Washington about how we were at full employment or near full employment

was missing the fact that we had this economic and social, under our noses.

We didn't see this crisis because these guys were not rioting in the streets.

They were sitting at home and all too many of them were getting ready to die deaths of despair. A new jobs report is just out and while the unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 3.7% in August from the half century low of 3.5% in July, job growth

still remains well above the pre-Covid trend. So labor market strength endures. There are north of 11 million

job openings. Think about that. That's more than twice the number of actual

unemployed people. For every unemployed person today, there are more than two job openings available.

But according to a growing body of economics and social science research,

the headline jobs numbers that we all track so closely conceal a much bigger problem.

The hidden crisis of able-bodied workers, predominantly men, in their prime working age 25 to 54 years old,

actually choosing to completely withdraw from the labor force.

This has been a growing trend since the mid-1960s,

but the pandemic accelerated it to a whole other level of crisis.

One of these experts who has been screaming from the hilltops about this and its implications

for society is Nicholas Eberstadt.

Nick was also early in identifying another worrisome trend.

The coming population decline, which he joined this podcast earlier this year to discuss.

As for the Hidden Jobs Crisis, Nick wrote a book in 2016 called Men Without Work, America's

Invisible Crisis, and he's re-releasing the book this week updated as the post-pandemic

edition.

Nick is at the American Enterprise Institute, where he researches and writes extensively on demographics

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