Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is my colleague, Stephen Malanga. He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a

city journal's senior editor. He writes about state and local governance, economic policy, many other

matters ranging from taxation to unionization to birth rates. His work has appeared in many other

outlets, along with City Journal, including the Wall Street Journal, where he appears regularly. Today,

we're going to discuss Steve's feature story in our summer issue, which is called Unemployable. And it's

about the growing number of Americans who are out of work, not because there are no jobs out there, but because they're no longer fit for work for various reasons.

So Steve, thanks, as always, for joining us on 10 blocks.

My pleasure.

So you open this essay, Unemployable, by talking about how both American parties, major parties,

the Republicans and the Democrats, have in different ways been arguing and contending that they

want to recapture American manufacturing jobs for the country to build up the manufacturing

sector again for workers. Before he dropped out of the campaign,

President Biden was pushing for policies that would, in fact, penalize firms for sending jobs

overseas, and he'd reward them for bringing jobs back home. Donald Trump had imposed tariffs

when in Washington to protect domestically produced goods. He also wanted to

motivate companies to keep manufacturing jobs here in the country. But as you point out in this

essay, all of these efforts are running into the same obstacle, which is a growing labor shortage.

Many construction firms, for example, can't fill the many open positions. They've got an ever-growing number of adult working-age Americans, as you note,

are out of the workforce, and they're not looking for work. So, you know, the first big question is,

why are so many Americans not working,

particularly when there are these kind of opening? Yeah, well, first of all, there isn't a

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