The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 274: Nicholas Eberstadt—It's Worse Than You Think

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

The workforce participation rate that is.  The number of able-bodied men choosing not to work is a crisis, and Nicholas Eberstadt, Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, can prove it.

Hello, friends, and welcome to the way I heard it. Episode number 274 is upon us, and it's worse than you think. What? The episode's worse than we think? What? No, that's the title I'm going with Chuck, because after reflecting on the conversation I just had with our incredible guest, Nicholas Eberstadt, I'm afraid the situation in our country,

vis-a-vis our workforce, I knew it was bad, but it's worse than I thought. And be honest. you feel the same way. Well, it's true. I do. And he raises some great points in this discussion. He's a really smart guy. He works at the American Enterprise Institute.

Harvard, Ph.D. Oh, yeah, Harvard. He's got all the letters, the alphabet. All the initials you need to see behind a man's name to convince you that he might know what he's talking about. Yes. Follow the name of Nicholas Eberstadt. He wrote a book that caught my attention back in 2016,

though I didn't really read it because I had already come to a similar conclusion. It was called Men Without Work. His book is being reprinted because what just happened as a result of the lockdowns has launched an extraordinary flight from work that has created a labor participation rate lower than anything we've ever seen. You guys hear me rant all the time about 11 million open jobs and nobody out there. Well, that's based on a lot of my gut and a lot of anecdotal evidence over the years and on the foundation that I run. But when I read an article in the Wall Street Journal, back in early September, September 2nd, in fact, I have to tell you, man, full disclosure, I was so jazzed to finally find somebody of Nick's caliber with a giant body of research that basically proves everything I've been going on about for the last.

14 years. It's a very gratifying conversation for me. And for me as well. It was fascinating. His book is called Men Without Work. It's the post-pandemic edition that is out now, the one to which you refer. And he goes through the numbers. I don't want to turn into a sermon, but here's how the article starts. And this is what got my attention. And this is where we're headed with this conversation. Quote, the latest monthly job numbers underscore a troubling paradox about the state of work in America. Despite recession worries, job growth seems strong. Employment levels are finally above pre-pandemic highs, and unemployment rates continue to skirt 50-year lows. But that is only part of the picture. An extraordinary flight from work is also underway. Inadvertently exacerbated by the largesse of the

COVID-19 emergency measures, that flight is spreading to parts of the United States workforce that that did not suffer from it before the pandemic. Here's the part that kills me. We now face an unprecedented peacetime labor shortage with employers practically begging for workers, while vast numbers of grown men and women sit on the sidelines of the economy, even though job applicants have more bargaining power in the great resignation than at any time in recent history.

never has work been so readily available in modern America and never have so many been uninterested in taking it. So that's it, guys. Something truly troubling has been happening for a long time and the chickens are coming home to roost. This is not a conversation about unemployment. It's a conversation about opportunity. You know, it's not as serious as I'm making it out.

It's just that the stakes are awfully high. and so I wanted to make sure that this time I didn't just rant and rave with my old buddy Chuck. I wanted to rant and rave with a PhD. And by God, I found one. I think that's a wise choice, Mike. A wise choice. You decide for yourself. This is episode 274.

That's not debatable. But is it worse than you think? I think it is. We'll find out for sure right after this. Dumb. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical.

In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Rowe gently criticizing her oldest son for his longstanding and well-established commitment issues, you'll learn about the latest offer from Pure Talk, which includes unlimited talk, text, and data for just $34.99. a month with no contracts and no commitments of any kind. You can see why I love these guys. If, on the other hand, you have better things to do with your time, then watch my mom and me be impossibly charming together, then allow me to remind you here, without all the cleverness and charm, that unlimited talk, text, and data on a blazing fast network

for just 3499 a month really is an unmitigated bargain from an American wireless company that keeps all their customer service in this country, supports our veterans in a meaningful way, as well as the Microwworks Foundation, and allows me to exploit my own mother in a national advertising campaign. Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just 3499 a month at puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Where do you want to start?

You tell me, boss. Okay. Let's start with the research that led you to conclude that the unemployment numbers we typically rely on are based on a very, very old metric, a depression-era way to calculate the health of the economy, when in fact the thing we should be looking at, the number. the number of able-bodied people participating in the workforce goes largely ignored. So I'm not a labor economist. I'm a kind of professor of arithmetic, let's say, who looks at problems that are hiding in plain sight. And about 10 years ago, I was starting to read all of this happy talk about how we were at full employment or near full employment. When at the same time, I was seeing all of these public.

opinion polls where most Americans said they thought we're still in a recession. So I think it was, what's going on here? And I started looking at our employment numbers and especially our employment numbers for men, for prime age men, the 25 to 54s, who are the backbone of the workforce. And I discovered that we were kind of trying to fight the last war. We had an employment statistic system that was set up to measure the Great Depression, which is to say they'd look at the number of people who were employed, they'd look at the number of people who were unemployed, and they wouldn't look at the number of workforce dropouts, because why would you be a workforce dropout if it was 1939?

You'd be looking for a job. Right. The problem is that over the past half century in the United States, the fastest growing group of guys has been workforce dropouts, has been prime age men who are neither working nor looking for work. And from 65 to the present, their numbers have grown three and a half times as fast as employed men and three times as fast as prime age men overall. You know, you do something three times faster than average for half a century, you change

the world. And so now, for every unemployed guy, out of work, looking for a job, in 2022, there are four guys who are neither working nor looking for work. So if you're looking at the unemployment figures, you're missing four-fifths of the problem. Wow. And when you say we're fighting the last war, is that another way of saying that I think so many people assume that high unemployment can typically be cured by creating more opportunity. That's been, albeit, somewhat rudimentary, but that's the assumption I always worked on. A lot of people are out of work, well, our government needs to create more jobs somehow. But you're saying that when you see an obvious glut of opportunity and a dearth of people willing to work, then that narrative is simply

wrong. And at some point, we just have to, A, accept it and B, try to figure out what's driving it. The conventional wisdom in academic and policy circles is that the work problem for guys is what they call economic and structural change, you know, the decline of manufacturing. China enters the World Trade Organization, that sort of stuff. And there's some truth to it, but that isn't the whole story. And I don't think it's most of the story. Look at where we are today, Mike. We've got 10, 11 million unfilled jobs in the United States, and the work rate for prime age guys is down to depression levels.

It's lower than it was in 1940 for the whole. of the 21st century, look at all of the months of the last 22 years, the average is worse than it was in 1940 when we started to measure this stuff and when the national unemployment rate was almost 15%. In terms of work rates for the United States today for guys, we're at about a 1937 level, even though we've got over 10 million unfilled jobs in the country. What does it mean? Right? I mean, when we see a lot of people out of work, we know what that means.

We can still remember the breadlines and all of the horror of being unemployed. But what does it mean to see millions and millions of open jobs that no one seems to want? And what does that say about our country? Well, I mean, if you could argue that all of these jobs were for like computer coders or chemical engineers, as you could say, this is just a shortage of skills. But you really can't make that argument right now. I mean, anybody who travels across the United States at all sees all of the help-wanted applications, signs,

kind of everywhere for everything. We know about it in hospitality. We know about it in retail. I mean, the skills that people need for millions of these open jobs are just the simple skills of, you know, coming to work, showing up on time, every day, not stoned. Yeah, piss clean. So pretty modest skills, right?

And so I'm not persuaded by the skills mismatch argument that we've heard. There may be some of that, but there's also, there are a huge number of jobs that are just going begging, and people are sitting on the sidelines staying away from the opportunity that's there. This has been really humbling for me, Nick, in a personal way, because when I started my foundation, Labor Day, 2008, we were getting into another recession. I think back then we were allowed to call it that. And to your point, every day, more and more people unemployed all over the headlines. And yet, everywhere I go, I see these help wanted signs. I can clearly see there's another narrative in the country that's unfolding because I had to prove.

to work in every single state half a dozen times. So I knew it was real. But in my head, what I wanted to do was say something that wouldn't alienate my friends on the left or my friends on the right. And so I said, here's what I think the problem is. There is a gap in skills. There's a mismatch in skills. And if we can only get more people who are unskilled, skilled, then we'll start to move the needle. And then, like a frog in the boiling water, I started to think, maybe it's not a skills gap. Maybe it's a will gap.

And that's when I got a lot of pushback from a lot of people. And that's why I'm so excited by your research, because it seems to indicate really more than a lack of skill, a genuine lack of will. And am I putting words in your mouth or is that close? No, you're not. I mean, I think that your work on trying to encourage skills is noble. We need more skills.

Nobody argues against that. I mean, that wins on the merits. What we see in addition to that is that people who drop guys in particular who drop out of the labor force tend to be long-termers. Once you get out, you kind of tend to stay out. It's one thing if you are unemployed, if you are out of a job and looking for work. That seems to be a very different dynamic from dropping out of the labor force because the people who drop out of the labor force don't seem to respond to the miracle of the marketplace and trying to figure out how we get people back from this pool of misery that I think a lot

of people are in. It wins on all sorts of ways, but it's humanitarian as much as anything else. How many millions of men are we talking about? And if they're not working or looking for work, I'm assuming these are able-bodied men, both mentally healthy, physically healthy, prime of their life, affirmatively not looking for a paycheck. What are they doing? Well, about a tenth, maybe more than a tenth of the seven million-plus guys who are not working or looking for work. are look to be like full-time students. They're not at work. They're training.

They want to get back into the game. Their patterns of life look pretty much like employed people's patterns, you know, for obvious reason. The overwhelming majority, unfortunately, are in this pool of neither employed nor in education or training, what the Brits call N-E-E-E-T neat. And we know a little bit about what they're doing because the government comes up with these time use surveys,

and they ask all adults whether they're working or not, you know, to kind of get a sample to respond to this. It's kind of heartbreaking what the self-response is on this. Basically, these guys say that they don't do civil society. They don't do worship. They don't do charity. They don't do volunteering. They've got a lot of time on their hands,

but they don't do a lot of help around the house. They say, their words. their report, they don't do much help with other people in the house. What they say they do is to watch. And these surveys can't tell us what they're watching or what they're watching it on, but it's like 2,000 hours a year of watching screens. It's like as much time as a full-time job. And you add to that the awful little extra,

which you've got from a couple of these special surveys, right before the COVID epidemic broke on the eve, almost half of these guys said that they were taking pain medication every day. Didn't say what type of pain medication. So you've got this picture of people who are spending their lives, not only, you know, playing call of duty, but playing call of duty stoned. And it's a huge waste of human potential.

It's a tragedy, you know, in its own right. And it's also probably kind of like a training ground for the sort of deaths of despair that we're seeing all too many of in America today. Deaths of despair. That rhymes pretty nicely with a, was it Thoreau? Lives of quiet desperation. Desperation, yeah. Would ultimately lead you to some kind of demise rooted in despair. But God, what a horrible trap.

because you enter into that world, probably not despairing. You enter into that world. Screens are fun. Let's take a deep dive. Let's just take a few days off and then maybe a few days more. But Nick, how are they eating? How are they paying for things? Is there money coming from a trust?

Is it the government? Did they save up for some premature retirement? Who's paying for it? That's a great question. And, Mike, of course, if you're talking about seven, million people. There's kind of some of everything in there. But if you're playing the odds, you'd say that most of these dropout men are being supported by their girlfriends and their families, if you include Uncle Sam as part of the family. One of the things that I found is that

more than half, at least before COVID, more than half of the dropout men receiving at least one benefit from one disability program. Now, that's not a princely life, but that's enough to afford a non-work lifestyle until you get old enough to qualify for social security. Do you think these men are as addicted to the screens that they're spending 2,000 hours a year observing, or to whatever they're using to medicate themselves in a pharmacological fashion? Well, there is some sort of metaphysical misery going on in the United States that doesn't have anything to do with poverty as we had previously thought of it, as meaning a lack of resources. There are people who in any sort of historical perspective would not be considered to be

desperately materially poor who are experiencing this sort of distress, misery, disconnection. I mean, it's perfectly possible, as you said, to have a lot of fun playing games, playing video games. It's fun to use your free time in ways that restore you or are uplifting. What I think we're seeing here is a use of a huge amount of free time in a way that's unfortunately kind of degrading, not just for the people in the people in the way. involved, but it has kind of a knock on effect for their loved ones, for their community, maybe even for society as a whole.

I have a question. You mentioned before, Nick, that you put out a survey. You know, people responded to say that they were watching screens and whatnot. But the one question that I'm asking is, is there anything in that survey that asks them why, why they're choosing to do this? So this is a U.S. government survey put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. a American time-use survey. I think what the government mainly wanted to know is, you know,

how much time are people spending working? What hours are they doing? How much time are they spending commuting, that sort of stuff? And none of the deep questions that you're probing, Chuck, can get answered in something like this. This is very much just the facts, ma'am. To deal with these sorts of questions, you know, you'd have to have a human touch

that government statistics, unfortunately, are really good at lacking. Do we have an idea? Do you have an idea? Well, you could do a lot worse than starting with something like J.D. Vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy. I mean, before he became a politician, J.D. Vance lived in this world. He lived in one of these communities that was severely affected, you know, in Appalachia.

And he describes this very whimsically and I think quite lovingly circumstances that other people might have been left in kind of permanent anger with. But I think he gives a very clear description of what life was like in this sort of part of the world. But I think we need 100 J.D. Vances to write about this in all different parts of America. One of the things that I think we can see today, unfortunately, is that our describers and our deciders are more out of touch with. ordinary people in our country, much less people who were, you know, in trouble and seriously disadvantaged, than they were 50 years ago, maybe more than ever before. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being

deceptively marketed and labeled. as domestic, and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American farms and ranches and promises to deliver high-quality American-grown meat for a fair price. Today, that promise, and Ben's absolute determination to keep it, has not only propelled good ranchers into the top tier of meat delivery companies, it's fueled enormous awareness among meat eaters like me, that we have all been affirmatively deceived by policies that allow imported me to be marketed as domestic. That's the reason I switch to good ranchers. If I'm

being honest, though, I doubt that I would have stayed this long had the quality not been so exceptional. Every single cut I've devoured from good ranchers has been straight up delicious and every morsel was raised on a small American farm or ranch. Give them a try. Subscriptions are affordable and flexible. In fact, if you start your plan today, you'll get free meat for life and $40 off your first order. Just use code mic at good ranchers.com. Free meat for life, $40 bucks off your first order. Good ranchers.com. American meat delivered. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch. Get good ranchers now. Hey-haw! Part of what I

wrestle with is how to fix it. And I don't mean from a policy standpoint, because that's way out of my lane. I guess what I mean to say is here on my computer screen are three well-intentioned, middle-aged white guys talking about what sounds a lot like the degradation of character and the vanishment of that thing we used to call work ethic. How can I be persuasive? What can I do that I'm not doing? I mean, we award work. Ethics Scholarships every year, Nick, usually one and a half million dollars worth of them. We try and find examples of people who have prospered as a result of learning a trade. We try and push back against the stereotypes and the stigmas that have somehow turned

vocational education into a mark of cane. And I feel sometimes like we are moving the needle, because now I've got more than anecdotal evidence. I can point to actual people, but I can't tell you how often when I go. and talk about these things, to many of the men you've just described, who have torn themselves away from their screens long enough to sit there to watch the dirty jobs guy rail against the dying of the light. I don't think I'm reaching them. So what can we do? Well, I mean, I think you're doing yeoman service, Mike. I mean, we live in kind of a time, it seems to me, when we're

kind of watching slowly the death of truth in the public square. So maybe the first thing we can do is to kind of, you know, commit truth in public. And we can talk about the nobility of work. Work is a service to others that helps to complete you. It helps to connect you to society. People need society. I mean, we're social beings. We need to be connected to family and to work and to our institutions and to faith and to other things. It helps to complete us. And it's got all sorts of personally remunerative aspects in a totally non-monetary fashion. And just talking about that, I think, kind of is truth in the service of the public good. I mean, another thing that occurs to me, and you may have thought about this a lot,

is about the whole death of the summer job in the United States. I mean, I've got some numbers on this, which I think would make you cry. back when I was a young and I mean, you know, summer jobs were a thing. I'd get a summer job. Everybody else I knew would get summer jobs. It would help you be independent. It might help you, you know, pay for school and stuff. But it would also help you understand what the work world was like.

And so by the time that you were, say, 25, you had 10 years already of experience in the work world. Now you find people whose first. experience in the work world isn't until they're in their 20s or their mid-20s. So it's like this extended adolescence or childhood period when you finally have a collision with the work world. It may not go as well as it would have if you'd have a kind of more experience and training earlier. But perversely, this thing has happened, this incredible mismatch of opportunity with willing applicants so that the natural consequence that somebody in their mid-20s, should encounter when they run headlong into the cold, hard realities of reporting for work,

that natural consequences now is crumbling because employers seem so desperate to hire anybody that the bar is so low. Well, you have a pulse. Look at you. You're fogging a mirror. When can you start? And so on the one hand, we've got this completely warped set of expectations, but we don't have the consequences that we used to have because of this short in the basic work force, what are employers supposed to do? Keep lowering the standards, go out of business, hire robots? The market can only produce its miracles on forces that are susceptible to basic economics. Some of what we're seeing now, I think, is almost like a social pathology.

What I mean in particular is to have unprecedented peacetime labor scarcity when you've got more bargaining power on the part of job applicants than at any time in my living memory, when you've had up until at least recently the fastest rising wages in an awful long time. and you still have millions fewer people in the workforce, even looking for work, than you would have had on pre-COVID trends. There are other things that are going on now, right? Does the government have a role to play with those other things? Or does that fall somehow to the thousand points of light that Bush talked about, civic organizations, well-intended foundations like my own, mentorships, parents, guidance counselors, right? I mean, who is going to be that connective tissue? Well, I think we can't understand where we are in this post-pandemic era unless we look not only at the infection itself, the virus,

but at the consequences of the government policies for dealing with the calamity. I mean, we lost a million people. It's a terrible catastrophe. The government interventions, which were, massive, may have saved us from the second Great Depression, but I learned that every government intervention has an unintended consequence. And if you have massive government interventions, you're going to have massive. Massive unintended consequences.

And the unintended consequences of our COVID emergency relief programs were to shoot a fire hose of borrowed money at American households so that their income levels. actually rose above trend during the emergency. It's the only national economic crisis in which per capita disposable income actually increased. And because people had more money to spend than they could spend, the savings rate more than doubled during the emergency. So people carried forward a nest egg of over $2.5 trillion coming out of 2021. Now, you can use that to either, you know, supplement your work, earn.

or to substitute for it. And I think what we're seeing at the moment is a fair amount of substituting for work. It may turn out that there are people in a sort of a, you know, a premature and unsustainable retirement. We will see that money be spent down and then we'll see whether people go back into the workforce or whether they become, you know, kind of like long-termers like I was describing for the prime mail. dropouts. It's kind of like unemployment. I remember I had a cousin once who was on unemployment, and she was like, oh, man, I got to start looking for a job because my unemployment's going to end next week. This is going to be, I mean, I assume that the $2.5 trillion is being spent down right now.

It's hard to get month-by-month numbers on this, but it looks like it's being spent down right now. And then we're going to hit the point of reality, and we're going to see who's going to be going back into the labor force and who's going to be, you know, a new long-termer. Here's where it gets political, though. Well, actually, I mean, it gets political in a lot of different areas. But if we ask the question, what are we to make of this level of unprecedented opportunity? At the same time, how are we to explain this level of unprecedented non-participation? then it feels like my friends on the left will quickly say, look, what you have here is a problem of

income distribution, wealth distribution, greedy, rapacious business owners paying too little for hard work. And this whole thing could be corrected if those greedy, rapacious business owners simply paid more. Paul Krugman, I think, wrote years ago, there's no skills gap. There's no will gap. It's just a function of people not paying enough money. My friends on the right will gravitate more toward the moralistic ideas that you said before and basically just say, well, what you had here is seven million lazy layabouts. That's what you got. So over here, conservatives are saying you got a lazy character problem. And over here, liberals are saying you've got an unfair distribution of wealth. And I have my opinion, but I'm just wondering, is there some truth in both and is there a way to talk about it without showing your slip too much?

Yeah, well, I think there is enough truth that both sides can, you know, ratify themselves. They can see things that convince them that they're right. There's a lot more to the story, I think. I mean, of course it is true. Of course it is true that mores and attitudes. are different in the United States from the way they were in 1965 before this flight from work really began. I mean, just give you just one example, like, back in 65, before all of the civil rights

panoply really started to take hold. African American guys had higher work rates than Anglo guys do today, with all of their advantages today compared to back then, their educational advantages and everything else. Back in 65, overwhelmingly guys were, prime age guys, were married and responsible for kids at home. Most of them had gone through military service. A lot of them had fought in the Second World War or in Korea. If you did illegal drugs, you got in a lot of trouble. The welfare state was still a kind of a twinkle in Lyndon Johnson's eyes. So you have to recognize that our mores and expectations are way different today. But there are also other factors as well. For instance, here's one of them

and neither left nor right talks that much about them. We have this invisible population of over 20 million ex-cons in the United States, right? Uncle Sam and his great wisdom forgot to collect information on felons and ex-felons in the population. So we talk about the two million people behind bars as mass incarceration, and that is different from any other modern country. But we don't talk about the group that's 10 times as large as that, the men and women with felonies in their biographies who are in society at large and who are invisible and for whom there are any sort of efforts that kind of like bringing them back into work and back into society are kind of episodic and from those thousand points of light that you're describing because we don't

have the evidence for evidence-based approaches to this. Speaking only for myself, the conflict is this. I turn on the news and I see what appears to be an unprecedented wave of crime sweeping the country. I see rampant lawless I see a total lack of consequence. I see with my own eyes people getting away with it on virtually every level. And it makes me so angry, Nick, that I want to see the stocks brought back. I want to see people publicly shamed. I want to see somebody step up and fix this.

Now, at the same time, unless we're prepared to send everybody, whoever goes to prison, off to Convict Island, where they can live out the rest of their days in some fantastic Lord of the Flies game show, then we have to do something about not just recidivism, but we have to think about who's going to live down the street from us? You know, and what do we want that person to have? Do we want them to have bitterness and antipathy and all the inertia that's surely going to return them to the same cell?

Or do we want them to have a skill? and some kind of work ethic, some kind of something that might give them a measure of hope. And so I think a lot of people feel the same way. I'm so angry with criminals right now. I could scream. But what are we going to do? Build a nation of jails? Is there an answer?

Well, it's trying to entertain two ideas at once, isn't it, Mike? It's hard for us to do. I mean, it was a lot easier sell to talk about bringing millions of invisible ex-cons back into the workforce and back into society when crime rates are going down. But the last two years, crime seems to be out of control. By the way, I don't like that the FBI has come out with new Happy Talk numbers that show that with their new improved statistics, crime went down last year because I don't believe it. And I don't think that anybody else who sees those numbers believe it. Well, sure, it goes down if you don't enforce it.

If there's no crime here, look the other way. Yeah, I think part of what we're all talking about is that stigma, you know, whether it's a stigma with preventing crime or stigma with, you know, unworking life, is stigma good? Well, of course stigma is good. Stigma is a kinder, gentler alternative to a police state, right? I mean, it's like the way that society tries to encourage norms. and tries to promote and value virtue.

We've used stigma pretty well to reduce smoking, for example, and that's had some public health benefits. I think we could probably positively deploy stigma into some of the problems we've been discussing. What about shame? Because stigma and shame seems to be just a harsher stigma, is it? Or maybe the other way around, right? There are two houses on the same street.

but if we want to discourage people feeling shame, for whatever reason, then how can the stigma exist around a criminal? Like Charles Koch and I do a lot of work together, and we agree with this notion of not having to check the box on an application. Because if you paid your debt and if you did your time, what possible benefit can it be to start off by saying, oh, yeah, yeah, I did five years for this, that, or the other. So he wants to get rid of the stigma that comes with checking the box on an application.

And I agree. But I don't want to get rid of the stigma or the shame that these seven million able-bodied men should be feeling because they've chosen to sit home and play call of duty under the influence of either vodka or fentanyl or something in between. And right now when I talk about that, what I hear back is, hey, don't you shake your finger at them? who are you to shame them? They're making their choices and so forth and so on. So, yeah, shame and stigma can be really good or really bad. Well, so some of the seven million are disabled and are incapable of work.

And that's why we put the disability programs into place and, you know, in the original thing. That was the intention for them. The disability programs have been, I'm afraid, terribly misused. and kind of perverted from their original intentions into, in too many cases, this alternative for a work-free existence. We want to be able to protect the people who really need the protection, and we want to get everybody else back into the game.

It's going to be better for them to get back into the game. I mean, we had this really interesting experiment back in the 1990s, you'll recall, with welfare reform. And this was mainly for single mothers. And there were skeptics who thought that this was going to lead to a social catastrophe. But this kind of work first principle for welfare reform actually brought millions of women and families back into a paycheck life, back into more dignity. And I say that without any irony, genuine dignity, the way that, you know, people describe this themselves. I think that if we had a really, you know, a really wholesale reform of our disability archipelago, which is in terrible dysfunction, we might be able to get a lot of

people back into the game. Shamedless plug. Long before she was Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired her. me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel and later start a foundation that honored the kind of work Carl Noble did for a living, trade work, skilled labor. That foundation is called MicroWorks, and today I'm proud to tell you that we've helped thousands of people get the training they need to begin a career in the skilled trades. In fact, we'd love to help you. You can apply for a work ethic scholarship right now at microwworks.org.

We've set aside $10 million for this year's applicants. to a number of very effective fundraisers, including the one with my grandfather's name on the label. I refer, of course, to Noble Tennessee Whiskey, K-N-O-B-E-L, which is now available in a variety of delicious mash bills, all of which you can peruse at Noble Spirits.com. In fact, if you spend $100 and use code Carl, C-A-R-L, you'll get one tube of orange-bitter-infused sugar cubes for free. That's code Carl with a C to get nine sugar cubes, ingeniously engineered to make nine perfect old fashions every time. It's my favorite way to support microworks and my favorite whiskey to sip responsibly after a long day of interviewing people on this podcast. Pick up a bottle at noblespirates.com.

K-N-O-B-E-L-Spirates.com. Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the way to be. is done, we'll take a drink and go. You said something else earlier about people having families. Like back in 1965, you were more likely to have kids, you were more likely to be married. And it made me wonder if that is possibly part of the problem here. And one word comes to mind for me that could be missing in a lot of these people is purpose.

Can you speak to that? that purpose and meaning purpose and meaning in life you know who are you and what do you do and that's maybe the flip side of shame and stigma is affirmation and validation so it's the push and the pull there isn't it carrot and a stick right i mean truly that's what it is regarding women and possibly i guess we can talk about immigration too in terms of how your data either confirms or denies some of these notions that people have, right? I mean, women come into the workforce and whole new numbers. Are they taking opportunities that some of these men might otherwise have? Are immigrants taking opportunity? I hear it all the time. I know it's a popular talking

point, but part of the reason we do what we do is because I know my buddy's in the construction industry, every single one of them, Nick, in every single state that I know of are desperately hiring. all of this seems to turn a lot of traditional talking points on their heads. Yeah. Well, so first with women, I mean, as we all know, women have always worked. It's just more or less since the end of World War II that they've gotten paid for it. So there was this huge influx into paid labor. But if women had been totally displacing men, our labor force participation numbers wouldn't have gone up that have been flatline.

We had a big increase in national labor force participation, which meant that they were augmenting. Since about the year 2000, though, men and women's labor force participation has been going down, so they've both been losing at the same time. There's a third thing that's going on with women right now that I would say is kind of like a yellow flashing light, not a red flashing light yet. I think it bears watching. we're seeing a very rapidly grow, small but rapidly growing group of prime age women who are neither working nor looking for work, who do not have children at home and are not currently

married. And some of what they say about the way they're using time is a little bit too close for comfort to the stuff that we're seeing with the guys that I described to you. Call of duty and opioids? Well, opioids and painkillers, for example. The latest numbers on this group of women who are now millions, there are millions of women in this group that I've just described to you, almost half of them say that they're taking pain stuff every day. So it's a little too close for comfort, like I say.

But on the immigration side, I mean, we've got this picture where no matter what your ethnicity, your educational background, if you were born abroad and you're a guy, you're more likely to be in the workforce. looking for work or having work, then your American-born counterpart. And it looks like work effort to me, right? We had this kind of natural experiment in 2020 and 2021 when the immigration process, the chaotic immigration process was interrupted by the pandemic. And we're probably about a million workers short of where we would have been just because of the disruption of our chaotic immigration flows.

that gap was not filled by native-born Americans, you know, stepping up and trying to get these jobs. So at least in the short term, the argument that these are jobs that are being taken from Americans is kind of hard to make. I'd say, though, however, it is to me and I think to most Americans absolutely maddening to see what's going on at the southern border today. I mean, illegal immigration and government laughing within attention to the chaos at the border is an affront to the rule of law and it's an affront to the people's democracy. And so I think it's possible to have both legal immigration and, you know, big flows of talent into the United States at the same time. It's only a matter of national security, right? That has to happen. that that has to eventually happen.

But I want to step back a little bit because I want to temper my remarks and not paint with too broad a brush, because those seven million, to the degree that you can really break it down, Nick. I get that 10% or 700,000 are in school. So let's just say, okay, they're in some process of bettering themselves. And I get that some other percentage, although I don't know quite what it is, are disabled.

I'd like to know what that percentage is and any other worthwhile metric that would make this a smaller category. So ultimately, I'm left with a number of truly able-bodied people who have affirmatively chosen to do nothing to contribute to society or better themselves. Just so it's clear in my mind what the real-world numbers are. Well, so we've got this crazy quilt, broken disability system where we've got lots of different programs. And they don't talk to each other. They don't play nice with each other. The programs that are run by the Social Security Administration don't talk to the Veterans Administration. And neither of them talk to a workers' comp.

And none of those talk to the state disability programs. So there's no office in Washington where you can find the person. and will tell you exactly how many Americans are getting one or more disability payments, right? So as best I could figure out, before COVID, about half of the guys who were out of the workforce were receiving one or more disability program benefits. And about two-thirds of them lived in a home that was receiving at least one disability program benefit. Now, how are they qualifying for disabilities? Well, if they're in the Social Security archipelago, the two fastest growing areas of eligibility

for benefits are what's called musculoskeletal and psychological problems. If any of us go to a doctor, they can tell us whether we have a broken leg or not. Or if we go to a doctor, they can tell us whether we've got TB, right? If any of us go to a doctor, they can't tell us if we've got pain in our back, because that's something back pain, there's no doctor who can tell you whether you do or not. And if I go to a doctor and I say I've got sad feelings, there's no doctor who can disprove me. So we've got this huge gray area out there, Mike. where the fastest growing segment of disability beneficiaries are in this kind of gray zone here.

And we don't actually get these numbers off of clinical assessments. We get these off of applications for a legal process, right? And so I can't give you the exact number, but you can see what the devilish ambiguity there is, right? Yeah, trust me, it hurts. Oi, okay, so if two-thirds of the seven million live in households that are receiving some form of disability, that means over two million are not. That doesn't sound like as big a number as the other, but it's still not the number that scares me most. It's the 11 million number. It's just the number of jobs that for whatever reason are not. not being filled. And as soon as we're done, our conversation, I'm pre-taping some interviews over at

Fox. And they're going to ask me the stuff that they always ask me. But the thing I want to talk about is this. So if I could just, on a very selfish level, pick your brain right now, what's the best way to set the table with Hannity or Tucker? When it comes down to really just framing this thing in a way that's going to make me sound slightly smarter than I am. I don't think you need much help with that. No, I'll take it, Nick. I'll take it. Since the pandemic broke, the number of unfilled jobs has gone up by about four million. The number of people in the labor force has dropped about four million below trend. So we've got actually this weird mirror image where the spike in unfilled positions looks really close to the shortfall in men and women in the workforce that we

would have expected. Wow. What a perfectly horrible storm. I mean, has anything like that ever lined up in the history of our economy? Not that I'm aware of. And partly that's because, you know, when I was taught economics back in the Stone Age, They told us that the lump of labor fallacy was a fallacy, that it wasn't the good Lord sprinkling a certain number of hours of work

on the North America and Europe and other places, right? But this looks like the lump of labor fallacy incarnate. You've got this spike up that's almost exactly like the slump down. It's almost like it was done by a Soviet gospel, you think. Right, right. Somebody figured out a way to hold. hollow out our work ethic at the same time as they blessed us with lots of new opportunity. And what's left are millions of small business owners. And again, to make it personal,

I mean, ZipRecruiter's been sponsoring this podcast for years. And now, whenever I talk on their behalf, I always come to this. Imagine trying to hire right now, whether you're a restaurateur or a boatmaker or a construction company. I talk to these guys every day, Nick. I've never heard anything like the collective cry that comes from them. Well, it's completely perverse. I mean, why would we expect, with the bounty in our country, to have a peacetime labor shortage of, you know, 10 or 11 million people? Labor shortages happen during war. Labor shortages happen when you've got some sort of crisis or catastrophe that you've got to mobilize a whole part of your population and take it away from the workforce. That's not at all what's happening right now.

How much of the responsibility lies on the people who are enabling these people to play call of duty and take opioids? You mean taxpayers or Washington? I meant even family members or family members. you can do the sort of time machine thought experiment, Chuck. You can say, let's take all of what we've got going on here now, and let's move it back to Salem, Massachusetts in like 1670, and how would that play out there, right? I mean, I don't think it would play out terribly well

because a lot of people back then would have looked at this and say, you know, yeah. Well, they had stocks. They also had witches. Yes. And they also believed in going to hell, right? And so all of those things, I think, would have put a tiny bit of a damper on what we see going on now, right? That's just kind of like a thought experiment way of thinking about how the difference in, you know, ethics look. You know, I think Tom Wolfe wrote an essay years ago about this where he came out at it the opposite way.

He was asked to explain not why people do bad things, but why they do good things. and what changed. And he basically told a story of 100 years ago, well, today, a responsible mother catches her kid shoplifting. You stop him and you say, son, you can't do that. That's stealing. And this man who owns this shop works hard to make a living. And when you steal from him, you hurt his family and you hurt society.

And, you know, don't be an asshole. Put the candy bar back. Okay. Now go to your room and think about what you've done. 100 years ago, the same mother says, hey, dummy, smacks his hand. You'll go to hell for that, right? Well, it's also true that when we were looking at things 100 or 300 years ago, if you were stealing from other people, you were putting them at a way higher risk of starving than today.

So stealing seemed to be a way more violent crime in a society that wasn't like sloshing with wealth the way ours does. Interesting. I've got a religious buddy who I just spent a few days with working on a show, and we were talking about the most important commandment. And my argument was it's got to be, it's got to be thou shalt not steal. Because all of the other ones reflect some form of theft, right? All of them. But today, you're right. When you look at the looting. Good God, when you tell a society, go ahead, we still hope you don't do it. But if you steal less than, than $1,000 worth of stuff from the Walgreens, we're not going to do anything. If that's where we are, then what other doors, talk about an unintended consequence, what other doors does that kick open? Oh, sure. I mean, if we have a sort of an antinomian system where, you know, good is described as evil and evil is described as good, you're setting up an experiment that probably isn't going to end terribly well, but it is going to end.

I want to be respectful of your time, but Antinomian, referring essentially to a society where words no longer mean what we thought they meant. Black is white, white is black, good is bad, boys are girls. Girls are boys. Successful withdrawal from Afghanistan can involve individuals falling from a great height out of a plane and so forth. What role does the language play in your research? Well, trying to be truthful is, I think, kind of the number one imperative in doing the sort of homework that I do, trying to look at what you can say, what you can't say, and not saying the opposite about what you're seeing.

We can know by looking at certain things what's really going on, and we can see what we kind of guess. but this all gets back, I think, Mike, to this question about the death of truth in the public square. One of the things which I think is in shortest supply right now isn't, in research areas at least, isn't smarts, it's courage. Because people are afraid to say what they see in front of their faces. They're afraid to describe the evidence of their senses because they think that they're going to be punished or hurt. or that their families are going to be bullied. And I think that's really one of the most important things that we need to pay attention to right now.

The more truth-saying we have, the more we describe what the evidence of our senses shows us about our current circumstances, the better way we're going to have. What about humility? This podcast originally called the way I heard it because not necessarily because I'm humble, but because I was trying to acknowledge the fact

that in this world of fake news, even the most well-intended people, they come to the party with their sources and they've got their conclusion worked out and there's just a lot of cutting and pasting and screaming and such. As a researcher, who's looking to tell the truth as best he can, what's your take on the amount of certainty

that seems to be present everywhere we go, juxtapose with the incredible. amount of incorrectness. Right. Yes, Mike. They go hand and gloves, don't they? You've answered your own question. I will say this, that one of the best things that someone in kind of like my line of work

and a lot of the other kind of like describers and deciders kind of lines of work can do is to present a recognizable version of the argument of people with whom you disagree. because if you can make a recognizable version of the other point of view, then you actually can have a conversation. And that's what the Anglo-American system of politics and laws based upon. You want to get the best of both arguments, you know, duking it out, and then you let the public decide. If you say that, you know, in our great wisdom as the inspector or whatever, that there is only one truth. and you're going to suppress the rest, then we get to, I think, a really scary world

where we all lose a lot of our freedoms. I feel it's kind of frightening, too, when it's binary. I mean, if it's always door number one or door number two, then you wind up with blue collar or white collar. And I just don't know that the color of collars matters anymore these days any more than the unemployment rate matters today. For me, because I don't know. For me, because I don't really know anything definitively, I tend to come back to language.

And when I see the way it's being bent and shaped and redefined right in front of us, I just wonder if you've seen anything like that in your lifetime. What's the words you use that I didn't know? Fancy, ante. Antenomian, like calling good bad and bad good. I had an uncle nomian, but never an ante. Well, I've read about this stuff. I've read about it in history books.

What it makes me think of is Czechoslovakia in 1947, when the free society there was being squashed by people who didn't believe in truth for various reasons. But in Czechoslovakia, the excuse for that was that this was being imposed by an occupying army. We don't have the excuse of an occupying army imposing this on us. Finally, Nick, I know in my gut, in the same way I suspected 14 years ago, something was afoot with work ethic, I know in my soul that something is fundamentally wrong with universal basic income. And it keeps coming up. And I do my best to push back against it. But I'm wondering if you could improve my argument, assuming you agree with me. Please tell me you agree with me.

Surely, in a world of unintended consequences, those arising from a universal basic income would be something akin to catastrophic. Mike, I completely agree with you, and it's got nothing to do with the crippling costs that would likely be imposed by UBI. My evidence is the time use patterns of men who were without work, of the dropouts from the labor force. as I said before. Almost no civil society, very little help at home with the family or with housework, lots of watching screens, lots of pain medication. Do we really want to buy more of that for our country? Do we really want to use taxpayers' money to get more of that? If we have a UBI, do we think that this is going to mean a lot more community service and, you know, boning up on your Schopenhauer or something?

Or do we think it's going to mean a lot more deaths of despair? I know what I think it would mean. Yeah. Not a lot of poetry writing is going to happen with UBI. Boning up on your Schopenhauer. Was that the guy with the cat? Was Schopenhauer's cat a thing? Can you remind me what that is, some sort of philosophical paradox?

No, I can't remind you what that is. Sorry. It's a thing, Schopenhauer's cat. I remember it from some philosophy class I dropped out of. But look, it's beside the point. The point, Nick, is that I'm so grateful for your time and I'm so grateful for your work. I don't want to overplug it, but for the love of God, people, this book matters. It's called Men Without Work, and it's based on some of the most compelling research I've ever seen.

The reprint has come out. The post-pandemic edition, I suppose we could call it. That's what it's called. Well, you know, forgive me, but had I been your publisher, I might have suggested, you know, you go with work without men because... That's what it is now. That's what it is, right? We went from men without work to work without men. Yeah, I've got a chart in the post-pandemic edition, and that's the title of the chart.

Showing that huge spike in unfilled positions. Work without men or women, for that matter. Yeah, that's it. It is called Men Without Work, Post-Pandemic Edition. and I'm told if you go to templetonpress.org, that's the best place to get it because you'll receive a 40% discount and free shipping. How's that? Who told you that, Chuck? Somebody at Templeton Press. Well, then it must be true.

I believe so, yeah. It must be true. Nick, I know you're not in this for the money. I know it's hard work, you know? Everybody I know in your world, you can follow the science or you can follow the money or you can follow the truth. and good on you for following the truth. Really, really so appreciate all of your work. And you've already made me sound smarter. I've got to call Hannity right now. God help me.

It's a blast doing this. Thank you so much for this. It's been a lot of fun for me. Terrific. Thanks, Nick. Thank you, Chuck. Thank you, Mike. It's been a delight.

This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile. Sorry it went on so long. But if it made you smile, then share your satisfaction in the way that people do. Take some time to go on life and leave us a review. I hate to ask, I hate to beg, I hate to be a nudge.

But in this world, the advertisers really like to judge. You don't need to write. a bunch just a liner two all you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review all you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review and not three all you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review definitely not too

all you've got to do is leave a quick five star review we need five all you got to do is leave a quick even if you hate it five star especially if you hate it. Thank you