The shocking pain of American men

[Milo]

The shocking pain of American men

The Washington Post
Jeff Guo

Once upon a time, nearly every man in America worked. In 1948, the labor-force participation rate was a staggering 96.7 percent among men in their prime working years.

That statistic has been steadily declining ever since. Today, about 11.5 percent of men between the ages of 24-54 are neither employed nor looking for a job. Economists say that these people are “out of the labor force” — and they don’t figure into statistics like the unemployment rate.

This demographic trend has been the subject of much noise and consternation lately. Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, calls the development a “quiet catastrophe: the collapse, over two generations, of work for American men.”

Eberstadt concedes that he can’t pinpoint the precise causes, but he implies that the problem, at its root, emanates from some kind of moral or societal dysfunction.

“Time-use surveys suggest [these men] are almost entirely idle,” Eberstadt wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed a few weeks ago. “Unlike in the past, the U.S. is now evidently rich enough to carry them, after a fashion,” he added.




Full article: http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-shocking-pain-of-american-men/ar-AAiUtNC?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=SL5KDHP