Modern Wisdom - #614 - Nicholas Eberstadt - Why Do Millions of Men Not Want to Work?

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

Nicholas Eberstadt is a political economist, demographer, American Enterprise Institute scholar, and an author. More than 7 million prime working age men in America are not looking for work, and each year that number continues to grow. Given that unemployment is at a massive low, why are so many capable men checking out of the workforce and don't intend on coming back? Expect to learn why massive cohorts of men aren’t looking for employment, the repercussions of mass joblessness, how these men are able to support themselves, why they spend over 2000 hours a year on screens while smoking weed, the reason you haven’t heard about this issue before, what it does to men's mental health, the impact of women being the bread winners and much more... Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on all Keto Brainz products at https://ketobrainz.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) and follow them on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/ketobrainz/ Extra Stuff: Buy Men Without Work - https://amzn.to/3nRIz9k  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Nicholas Everstad. He's a political economist, demographer, American Enterprise Institute scholar, and an author. More than 7 million prime working age men in America are not looking for work, and each year that number continues to grow. Given that unemployment is at a massive low, why are so many capable men checking out of the workforce and don't intend on coming back? Expect to learn why massive cohorts of men aren't looking for employment, the repercussions of mass joblessness, how these men are able to support themselves, why they spend over 2,000 hours a year on screens while smoking weed, the reason you haven't heard about this

issue before, what it does to men's mental health, the impact of women being the breadwinners, and much more. This is one of the wildest things that I've learned about recently. The fact that Nicholas has uncovered this and has been tracking it for quite a while is phenomenal. It's so interesting, concerning, I think it is endemic and a symptom of what we're seeing in terms of men's general retreat from society, from dating, from education and employment at the moment, are really, really fascinating. You're gonna love this one.

If you do, don't forget to hit the subscribe button. It really does help the show. It assists me in getting bigger and better guests every single week. And it means that you're never going to miss an episode when it goes live. So if you're on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever else, just go and hit the subscribe button. And thank you. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. It is a healthy alternative to sugary

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Keto Brains' new tropic creamer is the perfectly dialed beverage to bring you focus on demand. You can start your day right, conquer the midday slump, leverage it as a pre-workout, use it as a study aid, or simply brighten your day when you're experiencing brain fog. KetoBrainz has an efficacious dose of focus inducing alpha-GPC, BDNF producing lines main alpha wave promoting althene and ketone stimulating C8 MCT powder. All of these high functioning new tropics are blended together in a delicious and creamy coconut cream powder. Basically, keto brains is your coffee's favorite creamer, your full new tropics stack and your morning ketone body producer, all in one delicious little

scoop. Also, there is a 20% discount sight-wide if you go to ketobrains.com slash modern wisdom and use the code MW20, a checkout that's k-e-t-o-b-r-a-i-n-z.com slash modern wisdom and the code MW20. A checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Nicholas Everstad. How did you come upon the topic of male unemployment? I make my living off of finding things that are hiding in plain sight. I've been doing this for over 40 years. Started during the Cold War, looking at the Soviet health crisis, looked at problems of poverty in the US.

This particular one came to me about 10 years ago when I was hearing happy talk about the full employment or near full employment situation in the United States from the Federal Reserve, from politicians, from Wall Street. And I was also reading things which said that half of Americans said we were in recession. So those two things don't really go together terribly well, do they? So I think, so what's the problem here? And I pulled on the thread and realized very quickly what the problem was. Our national employment statistic system was developed to track the great depression.

Ensuring the great depression times, you'd want to know how many people were unemployed, you'd want to know how many people were employed. And if a guy was neither working or looking for work, you wouldn't even think this would be a great phenomenon. That would be kind of like a little bit of an end game. Today, it turns out that we've got four prime age men, but the 25 to 54s, we've got four times as many guys who are neither working nor looking for work as actually unemployed, as out of a job and looking for a job. So if you're only looking at the

unemployment number, you're missing four fifths of the problem. That's how I stumbled across it. What does that turn into in terms of actual numbers? Well, more than seven million, I'll get really nerdy on you. More than seven million men between the ages of 25 and 54, the prime ages for obvious reasons, who are in the civilian non-institutional population. Civilian, so we're not counting military, non-institution because we're not counting prisoners or people who are in

mental or health facilities and other people who could reasonably be expected to be in the workforce looking for a job What sort of men are in this group? demographically education family structure ethnicity who makes up this group? Well as you would guess Chris if there are 7 million guys, there's some of everything, right? That's a big number. But some are more represented than others. So, ethnically, African Americans are overrepresented. But if we go into the persons of color formulation, Latinos and Asian Americans are under

represented. So for white non-white, it's almost a wash. Education is what you'd think. High school dropouts way overrepresented with just high school, quite overrepresented, but surprisingly large representation of guys with college or even college degrees, 40% of this group has at least some college, and as I recall, about a fifth or a sixth, the college grads, here's a funny one, marital structure, family structure.

It turns out that married guys, no matter what their ethnicity, are way less likely to be in this pool. They're way more likely to be out looking for work or having work. Guys who've never been married, way more likely to be in this pool. And it's not just the wedding ring, although that obviously is a big predictor. If you're living under the same roof with kids and you're a guy,

you're way more likely to be looking for work. I mean, that's not surprising to me, but it's kind of like the provider effect or something. And last but not least, the Census Bureau has something that they call nativity, which seems kind of weird to me. It sounds like a Christmas scene. What they mean is where you're born. Are you born overseas or native born? Foreign-born guys are way more likely to be not in this pool, no matter what their ethnic background, more likely

than their counterparts. And that's not a surprise to me, and I'm sure it's not a surprise to you in particular, because people who come here from overseas are kind of motivated to do something here, and they're more likely to be in the workforce. A lot of overlapping different groups there. I remember hearing you say that a married African American man is less likely to be in this cohort than an unmarried white American man. unmarried white American man. Absolutely true. Absolutely true. And in effect, this little ring and it overcomes or erases the ethnic differential disadvantage if you want to call it that. And there are other things like that as well. If you are a foreign, born guy and you're a high school dropout, your labor force participation is going to be very close

to that of a native born college guy. I mean, so it's not just the disadvantage of the skills, right? I mean, there's something else going on. Did you look at family structure that they came from? Were you able to break this down by single-parent household that they'd grown up in? No, I wasn't. I mean, that's a really good question. It's a really good question. But I didn't have the information that could allow me to give you a good answer on that. Okay, so we have up front a rather dramatic 7 million person cohort of men in the US,

a large chunk of whom are not looking for work. What is the story of modern male and employment? How do we get to the stage where this is a hidden catastrophe? Well, like so many things in history, it happens gradually. It doesn't come upon us all at once like a meteor strike, after the end of the Second World War, for about 20 years, the work rates and the labor force participation rates of this group of guys were discussing the 25 to 54s. It's pretty close to 100 percent Not 100% but pretty close. And it wasn't going anywhere. It was bouncing around a little bit. Then starting in the mid-1960s, things started to change. And from, let's say, about 1965, it was a good year in the by, may not be perfect, that's pretty close.

From 1965 to our conversation today, it's been basically a straight line out of the workforce, of men, a flight from work, leaving work, not in labor force, whatever you'd like to call it. And it's eerie if you track this on a graph or a piece of paper. I did a first edition of a book, Men Without Work, in 2016, and I used this graph as the cover, which it's almost a straight line. I mean, it's not quite a geo-estronomy, it's not quite that perfect, but it's pretty close for the social sciences. And what was really shocking to me was, when I came back to do an update after the pandemic,

last year, it's almost exactly the same line. I could have taken the cover of that book and just found a ruler and kept the thing going. I have no explanation for that. This is something that happens in the physical sciences. This is not something that happens in the social sciences. It will change eventually, but I was just stunned by that. I heard that since around about 1950, men have retreated from the labor force at around about 0.1% per month.

Solidly. Is that about right? I'd have to do the, I'd have to do the numbers on paper, but it's been, it has been absolutely relentless. And I would have started it in the mid 60s for the 1950s. For 1950s, it's more or less a kind of a slightly bouncing line with no trend that I could divide. Okay. So, economies, demographics, you know, unemployment, we go through peaks and troughs, we go through cycles, boom, and bust. How have you managed to find, like, explained to me, the underlying dynamic that has managed to create a ruler shape? Yeah. All right. Well, we can start by the explanations that don't work, right? And because those are always so popular, and I think they're called received wisdom, right?

So the received wisdom in this area is that this is a phenomenon driven by economic and structural technological change that we've had this extraordinary revolution since the end of Second World War, which is true. And we've had this tremendous set of technological changes, and that's true. And we've had this big shift in demand,

less demand for less skilled labor, true, outsourcing true, China enters the World Trade Organization true, true, true, true, true. But that's not the whole story, and it's not even most of the story, I don't think. If it were most of the story, you couldn't get a straight line like the one I'm describing to you because we have the business cycle, right? I mean, we've got boom and bus periods and you'd see a big, you'd see a big, big capo when China enters the world trade organization. You'd see a big disruption, it doesn't show up. When we have our beautiful little monsters that disrupt all our technology, you'd see something.

So that's not happening. What else isn't happening? Well, if you take a look at men with less skills, they are not all commonly disadvantaged in the labor force. If you take a look at foreign-born guys who are high school dropouts, but they're married, their work rates and labor force participation rates

are indistinguishable, as I mentioned from college-born. I mean college guys are domestic. On the other hand, if you take a look at a native born guy who's never been married, it's a disaster. It's like 50% or less a chance of being even in the workforce. So in this group that supposedly homogenous, there are like 40 percentage points of difference in participation, so that part doesn't work so well either. The really biggest, I think, challenge to this idea is the extraordinary peacetime labor shortage that we're having now, which at, you know, at time of our conversation, 10 or a million unfilled jobs in the United States. So, you can't say that this men without work thing is because there isn't any work for the men. And millions and millions of those jobs are not for like hedge fund managers, or

you know, chemical engineers. There are a lot of jobs where the main qualification is showing up on time every day not stoned. And even so, employers have not been able to fill these millions and millions of extra jobs. Is that that employers can't get somebody to come and do the job without getting them fired? Or is that that people simply aren't applying for the jobs? There are a lot of jobs that people aren't applying for. I mean, we have seen a spike of about four million in the total number of unfilled jobs since the eve of the pandemic. We have also seen a slump of about 4 million total in the size of the workforce by comparison to what we would have expected from the pre-COVID trends. Not all of these are guys, I hasten to say. We're seeing now a sort of a new face to the flight from work in America,

but the problem with the men fleeing the workforce was the original origin of all of this. How many women are added into this cohort? If you count women who are over the age of 55, a considerable number, there are some under 55 as well. There is a problem that is, one might say no bigger than a man's fist on the horizon heading towards us, which is the kind of the doppelganger, the women without work. I'll mention, I'll tell you that in a moment. But if we look at the 55-plus group, they account for more than half of the shortfall that I just mentioned to you. And this is a very new phenomenon because from the 50s until about the 90s, American

men and women were kind of starting to enjoy the notion of retiring early. But from the mid-90s up to the eve of COVID, these older workers were basically the only bright spot in the American labor tablobe. Their work rates were going steadily up. Their labor force participation rates were going steadily up. But since then, there's been a shock and a drop in despite the rollout of COVID, of vaccines and everything else, they haven't come back to the workforce. Getting back to this big cohort of invisible men. How are they surviving and paying for life? Well, as best I could figure out as a research nerd, looking at statistics and one of my computer in the basement. It looked to me as if there's a couple of different factors.

Girlfriends and family, as long as you count Uncle Sam as part of the family. People are, there are quite a large number of these guys who are living with people, either cohabiting or at home with parents or others. And that's helping to pay the bills. What's also helping to pay the bills is, as I said, the U.S. government, in particular, our disability programs for people who are unable to work. Those programs seem to have morphed away from their original humane intention and now seem to provide an alternative income source to regular employment for several millions, for actually for millions and millions of these guys. How many? What's the proportion? This is a really hard question to answer, but I'll do my best. It should be an easy question. You should be able to go to an office in

Washington and ask a bureaucrat, how many checks are being cut for people who are on disability? I mean, taxpayers want to know, right? I mean, it sounds like a pretty easy thing. Reason it's not easy is because we have a crazy quilt of disability programs that don't play nice with each other. So the Social Security Administration has three different programs that kind of talk to each other. Then there's the Veterans Administration that has Veterans benefits. Then there's Workman's Comp Programs all around the

country. Then there are state-level disability programs. There are probably others that I don't even know about. As best I could figure out from trying to draw in the dragnet, before COVID, over half of the guys who were in the 7 million pool were obtaining at least one of these benefits. Many of them were obtaining more than one. And about two-thirds who were living in a home that was getting at least one of these benefits. Now, I would hasten to add that these are not, these are not princely prices that these

guys are getting. It's pretty penuurious. But with the add-ons from other welfare benefits, which you can become eligible for through disability, it's enough to provide this alternative to working life. Okay. So that may be able to get them by, given the fact that they're not working, not in education, employment or training. What are they doing? What do they spend their time doing? Well, we only know what they say they're doing and we know what they say they're doing because they answer surveys that Uncle Sam sends them sometimes.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has this annual program that calls an American Time Use Survey, and it asks thousands and thousands of people, what do you do from the moment you get up in the morning till the time you go to sleep, and how long do you sleep? So they don't just ask people who are working. They ask people who are adults, all ages. So we've got a fair number of returns

from the neither working nor looking for work guys, right? Now, I hasten to say, everybody is a liar and surveys are full of lies, but we can take this, you know, self-reported information as a first cut. They say they basically don't do civil society. Almost no worship, almost no charitable work, almost no volunteering.

They got a lot of time on their hands, we know that, but they do surprisingly little housework. They say they do surprisingly little housework and surprisingly little help with other people in the home. What they say they do a lot of is watch screens. Now these surveys don't tell you what they're watching or how they're watching at just you know that they're screen time. About 2000 hours a year. Okay now 2000 hours a year would qualify as a fair full-time job. I mean maybe

not if you're in a law firm but pretty much anywhere else. So it qualifies a pretty good full time job. And the skill which they're developing is being in front of a screen on a couch. And to make the situation even more dispiriting than that sounds, every so often these surveys have a little extra component of questions. And before the pandemic, one of these components was,

do you take pain medication? And about half of these guys said, yes, I take pain medication every day. Now, it doesn't say what the medication is. It doesn't say if it's actually a prescription. But that's a lot of people sitting on their couches in front of screen stopped. I'm a right in saying that what you've just said is of this neat 7 million cohort, on average, they spend around about 2,000 hours per year watching screens,

and of this same cohort, half of them are taking daily pain medication of one kind or another. That's what they say. And I should be a little careful about the not-in-labor force versus need. About 10% or slightly more than 10% of these guys are basically full-time students. They're getting ready, they're training to get back to work. Their time use looks like an employed guy's time use. So we're talking about 6 plus million who are in the need pool. I was going to say it's a silver lining around a cloud to say, well, it's 10%.

It's a silver lining around a cloud to say, well, there is 10% of the 10%. It's not all seven minutes, but it's a big number. It's a big one. Almost all of them. Okay. What about the way that having a criminal record gets folded into this? Well, Chris, once again, there is no office. You can go to in Washington and Washington has a great many offices that can tell you how many adult felons there are in the US,

or how many prime-age guys have a criminal record. And I tried to get at that. And the best I could do was to use some, I think, pretty good work by some, you know, defiant demographic nerds who tried to reconstruct the whole post-war period of crime and punishment, how many people had survived over the long period, how many had come back to jail.

They estimated that as of 2010 there were 19.5 million adults overwhelmingly men in the United States who had a criminal record and with a reasonable back-of-the-envelope Estimates that would take us to about 25 million today. We know that the US has got this famous mass incarceration thing going on, but the prisons have got about 2 million people in them. That means that for every person who is behind bars, there are 10 million or more, or 10 or more, who are in society as a whole

in general, and not behind bars. I have a criminal record. My own back of the envelope, and I can't be too precise about this, given the uncertainties. But my own back at the envelope is that about one in seven adult guys has a criminal conviction in his background in the United States of America at this point, and probably slightly more than that in the prime age group. So we're talking about a lot of We're talking about a lot of guys with convictions in their background who are kind of invisible to our statistics, but from what little evidence of our senses, we can draw upon, they're way more likely not to be at work to be in this kind of pool. Have you got any idea whether that's because they're struggling to be accepted for jobs,

because they have to list the fact that they do have a felony record? You know, it's maddening. That's, it's maddening because I can't give you a straightforward answer to this, which is a terribly important question, and millions of people's lives depend on the answer to it. We don't have the evidence in a sort of a statistical way. We've got this world of anecdotes, and there are thousands and thousands of points of light out there that are trying to deal with this, but they're all disconnected. If we lifted a finger and got this information together, which we could do pretty quickly, wouldn't be perfect, but it would shine a big light on part of this.

We'd have the evidence for evidence-based programs all around the country, and we don't have that. It's clear that there are some areas where there are restrictions against employment of ex-cons, including the financial sector and other places. There's a whole question about whether they ban the box, whether there should be a band-the-box, whether asking people if they'd had trouble is prejudicial. My own contrarian impression is that employers actually end up discriminating more if they don't know the answer to that question. They kind of overestimate on their own part and they're more likely to, They kind of overestimate on their own part and they're more likely to be suspicious of low less educated, minority young men than if they have the actual information. But that's my impression.

So your concern is that among many, many concerns is that because we have very, very inferior data to what we should do in order to be able to dig down into this any interventions that you do want to do to try and fix the problem can be pointing in the wrong direction they can miss the mark entirely because we don't know if it's an intervention that needs to be done on the side of the employer to encourage employers to bring on people who do have criminal records, you don't know if the intervention needs to be to get these people from prison back into looking for jobs, get them into training, get them into the routine, maybe it's support groups, maybe it's something to do with psychological health, you don't know where this issue is coming from because you have insufficient inferior data. Well, there will be people who are working in, you know, God's own trenches, you know, with reentry for ex-coms, who will have a wealth of knowledge on this.

And it can tell everybody more about this. But in terms of numbers and patterns, we're blind on this. As a general observation, we always have to be careful about unintended consequences because there's always a policy and there's always an unintended consequence of the policy. And if you don't ask about both of those, you're not looking at the whole situation. How haven't we heard more about this? Like how haven't we heard about this huge 7 million man behemoth? Well, I have some guesses. I mean, one guess is that this is a disadvantaged group that doesn't fall within the academy

and the media's preconceptions of disadvantage. They're guys, they're of, you know, prime working age. And they don't fit the victim profile terribly well. So, you know, horsemen pass by. And then that's part of it. It's also true that in the United States, these prime age men have not been a menace to society. They've been a menace mainly to themselves.

They've been dying of deaths of despair and overdoses. They haven't been out like in the banities of Paris, like setting the cars on fire. So they haven't been getting a lot of attention for themselves. And because they're not an organized political group, there is no real constituency for them. So, you know, as long as they can be neglected

at no great peril for any immediate constituencies in the country. I've heard you talk about the difference between poverty and misery as well. How does that fold in? By any 19th century standard, whether it's in the UK or in the US or Australia or any of the affluent societies of the 1800s. These guys are rolling in money. They're probably in about the second quintile on average in our consumption scale in the United States, but that would make you a very, very, very wealthy person back in the 1860s or 1870s, and any of our English-speaking countries. So lack of resources, lack of material resources is not the issue here. You can be miserable

on quite a high standard of living. The degradation that these men experience or self-inflicted to some degree, is it's heart-randing, and it's a tremendous loss of human potential. But just think of it. I mean, you don't have to be a philosopher to know that, you know, 2500 years ago, Aristotle said that, you know, there were human beings or social creatures. You know, if you're not connected to society and you're a human being, you kind of suffer for it. That's why solitary confinement is considered

a cruel, unusual punishment by some people. So if you're not connected to work, you're more likely not to be connected to family. More likely not to be connected to faith, although that's another story. And you don't even go out of your house to be in your community. That is a pretty miserable baseline. I mean, I can imagine being out of work and spending all of your time doing community gardening or volunteering or I don't know memorizing kapital and the original German or something. I mean, something like that, which would be a use of your time that wouldn't necessarily

degrade you. But what I've described to you is not that. It's kind of like a path of misery. Yeah, whanking on weed isn't the same as hoeing a garden and building some flowers. So this is one really, I guess, interesting area that I've spoken about an awful lot recently. I flew to Doha to have a debate about traditional masculinity being degraded and stuff. What do you understand about how men are seeing themselves and their role in the world, given this change in terms of what they're doing with work?

Well, you don't have to be a sociobiologist to say that there is something unnatural about society and history's long-term providers, suddenly being flipped into this position of dependence. And you don't have to be sigma and Freud to think that there might be some sort of psychological fallout from this inversion here. Whether this speaks to greater metaphysical problems in the U.S. or the world is a is a bigger topic. My my boss Mary Epperstadt has opined about that at some length and she's always right so I will defer to that. I am very interested in the idea of providers becoming dependents and us not having the language or the archetype framing or the guardrails to be able to give them something that makes

them feel proud. And then also the distinction between poverty and misery, you know, being told that you are from a benefiting from the past, oppressive patriarchal superstructure, which is giving you all of the advantages that some other group hasn't had. Meanwhile, guys are not starving, at least in terms of for money or for food, but very much are for meaning, very much are for social connection, very much are for sobriety. It just seems to me like the absolute sort of synthesis of everything that performative empathy allows to happen, which is to do what looks good in place of what is good when it comes to trying to enact social policy and campaigning for people that are struggling. Well, I think you've put it very well. You can take a technocratic approach to addressing some of the problems I've described. The nice thing about a technocratic approach is that you can pretend that it is value neutral. But what

we're describing here is completely laden with values and the normative questions of how you find meaning in life and what one does with life and what your purpose is and what you know what fills the soul you know what fills the whole new soul is absolutely critical here and you know if we kind of pretend none of this really matters well you can kind of guess what's going to happen. This, to me, seems to point a rather worrying picture at the potential for UBI, not that I was a massive proponent of it in any case, but you mentioned that the pandemic basically caused Washington to stumble into a dress rehearsal for UBI, and we're seeing these guys who have sufficient material wealth to be able to keep them going, but they don't

seem to be flourishing. There's a whole argument about whether UBI would bankrupt our public finance system. That's a separate argument. It's a very important argument and it might put an end to this discussion right there. I would say, however, take a look at the time use of these neat men and then ask yourself, do you want to buy more of this? Is this something that society should really want to subsidize? Because you're going to get it. You're going to get a lot of people with UBI who have a lot of time on their hands. What are they going to do with that if they don't have the gyroscope for it? And absolutely during the early months of the pandemic, for almost a year and a half in the pandemic, we were dispensing more benefits in pandemic uninsurance, then unemployment insurance, then we had unemployed people in the United States. At one point for every hundred people who were unemployed, we had about 250 beneficiaries

of pandemic unemployment insurance. So it was indeed a kind of a test drive. Fortunately, it's over. What's unfortunate is we don't know how long the lingering effects of it will reverberate or how badly they will reverberate. Would you guess, would you hypothesize that there is going to be a hangover of some kind, that the trend and the routine that people got into of not working during the pandemic is going to set a habit going forward.

I think we're living in it right now, look around. 10, 11 million open jobs, great resignation, giving more bargaining power to people who are job applicants than any time in my long life. Millions of people still sitting on the sidelines, more than before the pandemic. That sounds to me like immediate consequences. What we can see from the labor market is if you stay with the labor market,

if you declare yourself unemployed, your chances of getting back to work within a matter of weeks are very high. Once you cut that line, it's a little bit like going off under the space shuttle and then you kind of out in space and your odds of doing something other than being a long-termer get really bad. long-term get really bad. I thought that unemployment rates weren't that bad at the moment overall. What sort of fuckery is going on with the numbers to be able to allow your world and the world of low unemployment to exist? Well, we've ended up with the best of all possible worlds, haven't we Chris?

We've got low unemployment and also low work. And so how do you let it? Low work, low unemployment, and what's the rest of it? Oh, it's the people who aren't looking for work, I remember now. So we've got this circumstance, which of course only a fabulously affluent society could afford without immediately careening into disaster. We can eventually careen into disaster with this, I guess, but we can postpone it for quite a while.

And this is what happens when you're fighting the last war. Our employment statistics are still fighting the Great Depression. So they get great numbers on, or as good numbers they can get, on unemployment, good numbers on work, and then whatever the other thing is, well, that wasn't happening much during the Depression. So here we are. Because anybody that could work would work back then. That was a presumption. And I think it was probably a pretty good presumption. That's very interesting. So I'm currently kind of obsessed with the role of men

in the modern world. They're retreat from relationships. They're retreat from friendships overall. Have you considered if there is a broader Dynamic going on here that ties together the general sort of malaise that Manor finding themselves in Well, I'm not a philosopher, but I do demographics and I can count and I mean I may I'm a I'm a 67-year-old grandfather

with four kids, right? And so I am so far from the forefront of the battlefield right now, but I can kind of read it the way I read science fiction and try to kind of understand it. But the idea that, the idea, let's see, how do I put this for a family audience? The idea that young men would not be interested

in real-life women would have been kind of absurd 50 years ago. Did you see, so my favorite or most terrifying piece of research that I've seen recently was from Pew in 2019 61% of men said that they were looking for either casual or long-term relationships. In 2023 that number has dropped to 50%. One in two men between the ages of 18 and 30 aren't looking for either casual or long-term relationships. Now, the men that are listening who have been through that age bracket or in it, you understand the power, the reality distortion field,

that is the male sex drive between the ages of 18 and 30. The fact that you can have something that happens that can overcome that is wild. Yeah, no, it's like science fiction. What's going on? Come on, let's give me, put your best philosopher tinfoil hat on and give me, give me your ideas. Yeah, sure. I started looking at this, we're getting away a little bit from men without work, but I think I'll wander back to it.

I started looking at this in Japan, the numbers about Japan about two decades ago, when young men and women were not only saying that they were less likely to have had sex by given, you know, age 25, age 20, whatever, but also saying that they were less interested in this. And at the time, I thought, well, everybody knows that the Japanese are just separate from the rest of humanity. They see us as old Gaijin. They see us as all unspeakably weird. This is just some Japanese thing. Little did I know that this was the leading indicator for where everything else was going to be going. And I had assumed that we were just in our regular garden variety family decay thing in post-war America. But then this new eruption comes along and the wonderful little devices kind of turn out to be turbocharging this, or at least complicit in some sort of way with this. And I again defer to my boss, Mary Eberstadt. Mary has, I won't say argued, but she has ominously mused about

the possibility that nurture and wanting family and wanting children is not something that is hardwired into us in our DNA, inviolably, but rather is something more like a muscle that we develop through use and through seeing, the same way that little cats know how to climb down from trees if they live with other cats and they get stuck up in the trees if they don't have cats to look at. Oh, okay. So it's kind of like a mimetic. Yes, exactly.

René Gerard, a mimicist, that sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, that's the music of it. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, I mean, so there's a guy, Steven Shaw, he's familiar with Steven? I've heard the name, yeah. Yeah, so he did birth gap, which is a fantastic documentary. I know that you're big, I'm your...

I talked to him a while ago, I haven't seen the documentary. He was in Qatar with me. So he had a debate a couple of days after me. So we got to go for a bunch of lunches and dinners while I was out there. Also brought him on the show. I thought he was absolutely fantastic. I mean, going back to the men in work thing, but also feel free to fold demographic collapse in as well. How worried do you about all this? Well, I'm worried about it as a citizen. I'm worried about it as a researcher. I'm worried about it as a parent and a grandparent. Somebody who'd like to see our society continue. Things can turn around. Things don't always head in a linear direction. In fact, they seldom seem to head for very, very long in a linear direction. This 50-year

trend in the exit from the labor force is pretty long linear trend. It's exceptional in that way, I think. What will turn it around? I think it's not going to be economic and structural change. It's going to be a change in people's viewpoints and values and metaphysics. We've had, as you know, we've had a couple of great awakenings in the United States in the past. We've had other little eruptions. It's going to be a change in mindset. And I don't see why we can't have a change in mindset. As a social observer analyst, I can tell you that our tools are poor enough that it takes us a while even to recognize when a change has already started. So for all we could know that this conversation has already started and to blind and weak

to have detected it yet. Are you alluding to the fact that a social change to be able to give some sympathy, support to the chunk of men that are in this 7 million? Not just, yes, of course, empathy and support. I mean, we have an extraordinary empathy gap in the United States today. We can't even, people who are in the intellectual classes and the describing classes can't accurately describe the arguments of people with whom they disagree because of, because those arguments are bad and evil. They can't even do the intellectual thing of describing this accurately.

I mean, that's a huge empathy gap. But more than that, I think, finding spiritual and other meaning in life that takes you outside of yourself and reattaches you to humanity and to eternity. That's going to be a challenge given how atomized devices have made us. Even if you want to go secular with this, right, and you want to say, join a local Pickleball Club, pick up trash, look after the local dogs, join an art class, do yoga, do whatever, right? Yeah. For as long as you have a incredibly convenient,

incredibly distractable, highly distracting device that sits in your pocket, getting a sun flip off the couch on an evening time is going to be hard. If you're spending $2,000 per year on the couch playing video games, smoking weed, there's a very high bar feed to get over that. Man, and I can't tell you what the next big innovation is, whether it's going to be a

chip in the head or what the next virtual reality or virtual reality is already here. Sure. or virtual reality is already here, sure. I mean, it'll get better and more enticing. It's going to have to come from people themselves. And it may be a revulsion, it may be a sad learning process, but I don't have any doubt that we won't entirely be enslaved by this. There will be some sort of a reaction which will I think help to open people's minds again. Oddly, the revolution actually sounds like quite a good thing, although that's not usually what I would say.

There's one other element that I've been playing with for Nelia Yurna, which is given the highest ever rates of male sexlessness that we've seen, this sort of despondency in terms of the lack of work and meaning and so on and so forth. Why hasn't young male syndrome kicked in? Why isn't it that guys are running around, setting cars on fire and pushing over granny and graffiti and walls and stuff like that? And to me it seems like the most obvious potential outlet is that they're being sedated by screens, porn, easy access to video games, social media, etc, etc. That seems to be the most obvious one and the problem that you have, it's like a perfect marriage of what you've taught me today and what I already kind of knew, which is if

you are part of a previously identified beneficiary of a system, the ability for the people now in charge of that system to give you sympathy and to try and raise you up is going to be so low. No one is going to come and say, why don't we spend more time raising up men, especially predominantly white, predominantly American men? Who's going to come along and do that? There's no card carrying campaign, and it's the exact same people you said it earlier on. They haven't galvanized themselves into one group that goes down the street with placards,

waving things and creating social media campaigns. I think it's going to be a spontaneous movement. I think it's highly unlikely that something will be organized and developed much less centrally uh centrally distributed from Washington. Um, but the proposition that something will generate spontaneously and spread like a prairie fire would not surprise me. So when people see something good, they want more of it. Just one final thing. What's the economic cost of this? What's the economic cost of this group of people being outside of the workforce? Well, it means slower economic growth for the country as a whole, but not just that, means bigger income and wealth gaps, means more welfare dependence, it probably means more public

debt. It means you have to start doing the second-order impact on fragile families and the third-order impact on what this means for trust and social institutions. I haven't tried to do a whole of parts calculation on this, but it's a big economic cost and it's an enormous moral cost to our society. Nicholas Abistat, ladies and gentlemen, Nicholas, I really, really enjoy this. I think that this insight is one that much, much, much more people should be talking about. Where can people go if they want to keep up to date with the work that you do? You can probably, for the foreseeable future, you've seen Google to look for Nicholas Abistat.

I've got this book, Men Without Work. You can probably find that somewhere. I have a scholar's webpage at the American Enterprise Institute at AEI.org, Nicholas Eberstadt. Nicholas, I appreciate you. Thank you for today. Hey, thank you for making the time for me. Absolutely terrifying. That is so wild to think that there is just this massive cohort of unemployed, undesiring for employment men lurking out there and not only lurking out there, but slipping through the demographics and the surveys that usually give us insight into what's happening with employment. Very, very interesting. I really, really hope that you enjoyed that one.

Anyway, thank you very much for tuning in, and I'll see you next time. for tuning in. And I'll see you next time.