This is a

This is CBS I on the world. Here's John Bachelor

Men without work.

I welcome Nicholas Aberstout of the American Enterprise Institute to help me understand his book published some years before and now republished with a post-pandemic note from the author about

what we learn from these years of statistics about men without work. I will transfer my thinking immediately to a metaphor that

Nick uses in the course of his presentation. A Ghost Army. Nick, congratulations again

for updating your observations of the middle of this second

decade of the 21st century. We're now plunged into the third decade, and after the pandemic, there are lessons here that are fresh. We're going to

begin however with what is the ghost army? What do you mean by that? Thank you Nick.

John, thank you so much for inviting me on.

The Ghost Army are the men without work in modern America.

I'm focusing in particular on what are called the men of prime working age, not my term, 25 to 54 years old, the backbone of the economy still the group that is absolutely indispensable in the

forming of families and the raising of children as well.

For over half a century,

we have seen a collapse of work

for this critical group, mainly due to an exit of men from the workforce altogether.

And as we speak, John, over 7 million men between the ages of 25 and 54 are out of the workforce altogether, neither working nor looking for work.

In the old, in the ancient classical days if one talked about a Roman legion being decimated that

meant that they had lost a tenth of their membership.

We now have lost over a tenth of our prime age men from the workforce. They're out of it altogether. They're not even

unemployed because they're not looking for work. They are in this nether world, which I think

we can talk of as a ghost army.

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