Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and life.

My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of the spectator. I am delighted to be joined today

by Nicholas Eberstadt, who is at the American

Enterprise Institute, and he is the author of Men Without Work, post-pandemic edition, which is a

reissuing and updating of a very important book that came out before the pandemic called

Men Without Work.

And it was about the issue of worklessness among men in America.

Nicholas, first off, the jobs figures in America seem to be almost preposterously good at the moment.

The Biden administration likes to boast about them.

The Trump administration also boasted about them. The Trump administration also

boasted about them. But you suggest that it's disguising a bigger crisis of worklessness. Can you

explain to us what we're not seeing? Absolutely. Thank you for inviting me on. Our employment

statistics in the United States were constructed, devised to fight the last war.

The last war was the Great Depression.

The Depression era mentality, which created the framework of our employment statistics,

couldn't conceive of the possibility that able-bodied men wouldn't be in the workforce if they

could possibly get a job. And so our employment statistics today look at the number of men who are

out of work and looking for a job in comparison to the total number of comparators in the workforce.

They don't look at the dropouts. They don't look at the people who have decided neither to work nor to look for work.

And over the past half century, this has turned out to be an invisible but steadily growing crisis in the United

States. From the mid-1960s to the present, it's been almost a straight line upward, the exit

from the labor force of the men not in labor force, Nilf called sometimes.

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