American men’s work rates have fallen relentlessly since the 1950s, with prime-age male labor force participation now approaching Depression-era lows—a trend political economist Nicholas Eberstadt has spent decades documenting. In this episode of Terms of Engagement, Eberstadt joins hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer to unpack how this quiet collapse in male employment has shaped not just the economy but American manhood itself, eroding the social role and cultural expectations long tied to work. They discuss links between “un-working” men and the rise of populist politics in the U.S., why this trend remained hidden in official unemployment statistics for so long, and what it reveals about the fraying bonds between work, dignity, and civic life.
About our Guest:
Nicholas Eberstadt is a political economist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he researches and writes extensively on demographics, economic development, and international security. Domestically, he focuses on poverty and social well-being. He has written a number of books including “Men Without Work,” “A Nation of Takers,” and “The Tyranny of Numbers.” He has offered invited testimony before Congress on numerous occasions and has served as consultant or adviser for a variety of U.S. government agencies. Eberstadt earned his PhD in political economy and government and an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School, a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an AB from Harvard University.
Voiceover:
You are listening to Terms of Engagement, a weekly show from the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, featuring Ash Center Director Archon Fung and senior practice fellow in American Democracy, Stephen Richer. Now let's get to the show.
Archon Fung:
Hey everyone. Welcome to Terms of Engagement. My name's Archon Fung. I'm a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
Stephen Richer:
And I'm Stephen Richer. I'm the former elected Maricopa County recorder, and I'm now a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School and a fellow at the Ash Center.
Archon Fung:
And we're recording this show live. If you happen to be joining live, put in your comments, questions, reactions into the chat and we will try to bring them into the discussion.
Stephen Richer:
Absolutely. And as always, Archon and I are speaking on behalf of ourselves and only ourselves, not on behalf of the Kennedy School, not on behalf of the university, not on behalf of the Ash Center. And so turning to today, turning to this week, it's an exciting week. Classes are starting here at the Kennedy School. Today is election day in Massachusetts for the primary. And I just remembered-
Archon Fung:
I hope you didn't vote, Stephen.
Stephen Richer:
No, I did not vote. I did not vote. Domicile is where you intend to remain. And so Arizona is still my intended home. It's where I still spend the majority of my time. So I am lawfully registered in one state and one state only, and that state is Arizona. And then Archon just reminded me-
Archon Fung:
I voted. I voted this morning. Can you see my "I voted" sticker? I voted in [inaudible 00:01:39]-
Stephen Richer:
Oh, what is that? That's a pretty cool one.
Archon Fung:
It's a cat who is an election worker staffing the ballot box evidently.
Stephen Richer:
That's pretty great. And then we've got this weekend is the American Political Science Association at which your very own Archon Fung was speaking.
Archon Fung:
Along with probably six or 7,000 other distinguished political scientists.
Stephen Richer:
Very good. Well, perhaps some of you will be out there, but turn us to the topic at hand, which is of course the most exciting of all of those events.
Archon Fung:
So today we're talking about social and economic patterns and their impacts on democracy and what democracy can do to wrap its arms around those. So by some measures, our economy is really cooking along. The unemployment rate is 4.2%, but as we'll explore, what that statistic hides is people who aren't even looking for work anymore. So to be counted as unemployed, you have to have been looking for a job over in recent weeks, but more than a hundred million Americans, 102 million Americans according to a 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics stat, are out of the labor force. Now, many of them are of retirement age, but that's still a lot of people. And what we're going to focus on is over the last decades, the number and the percentage of men who are not in the labor force has just grown and grown and grown. And our guest today thinks that has a lot ... first, has drawn a lot of attention to this problem. There's not much attention to this problem and that it raises not just economic concerns, but social and political concerns as well.
Stephen Richer:
Yeah. So is there a problem with men? If so, to what extent is the problem exists? And then we'll discuss the democracy angle. And to do that, we have an absolutely fantastic guest who is an authority on this topic. His name is Nick Eberstadt. He holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute, also known as AEI, where I have the honor of having worked for nine months, but I played on the softball team for four years, and that is my distinction there.
Archon Fung:
Because you were the ringer, they wouldn't let you go.
Stephen Richer:
I was a far better softball player than I was a research assistant, and in some ways that continues to be the case. Nick is no stranger to Harvard University. He has three degrees from Harvard University, including at the college. He has an MPA from the Kennedy School. He also has a PhD. And he received also a master's in science from the London School of Economics. Importantly for today, he has written a number of books and monographs on this topic, including Men Without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition, which was published in 2022, and the previous version of that same book, which was published in 2016. You'll see his writings on this topic frequently. So if you dig in, you're likely to come across him again. So welcome, Nick.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Hey, thanks for inviting me.
Stephen Richer:
So do we have a problem? Do we have a male employment problem in the United States or is this just another social media phenomenon?
Nicholas Eberstadt:
We've got a longstanding serious problem, a severe problem with work for men in the US. If you look at the latest monthly jobs report, the employment to population ratio, work rate, let's call it, was lower when most recently sounded than the first time the Census Bureau ever trundled this number, this stat out, which was in the 1940 census. And early 1940, you'll recall, was the tail-end of the Great [inaudible 00:05:46]. So we have a slightly lower work rate for men 25 to 54 years of age. That's the group mainly discussed. We can talk about others. They're defined by the census, by the BLS, for reasons that are fairly straightforward as prime working age. Prime working age men in the United States have a slightly worse employment rate today than they did at the tail end of the Great Depression. And if you look at the entirety of our century so far since 2000 or 2001, the average rate is worse than it was in March of 1940. So I'd say that's a problem.
Stephen Richer:
When did this start?
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Started in the mid 1960s. We had a work rate and a labor force participation rate for prime age men in the late '40s when we started coming out with these monthly job report numbers from the late '40s through the '50s to the mid '60s. It was kind of bouncing around in the mid to high 90s. And then it just gradually drifted down for two generations. It hasn't worsened appreciably since, let's say, 2015, but it hasn't improved either.
Archon Fung:
So just to be a little more specific about it, if there's a hundred working age men, 16 to 55, as you were saying, how many of them are actually working and then how many of them have just stopped looking for a job?
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Right. Okay. Well, so this is a K-school discussion, so I can let my inner nerd out a little.
Archon Fung:
Let your nerd flag fly. Yeah.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Okay. Let's-
Stephen Richer:
We'll allow it.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Okay, let's go. Let's go. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the civilian non-institutional population.
Archon Fung:
So not in the army.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Not in the army and, critically nowadays, not in prison or in jail.
Archon Fung:
Right. We'll talk about that. Yeah.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
And for our civilian non-institutional population, we have about, for every hundred prime age men in this restricted group, we've got about 86, a little less than 86, who have some paid work during the previous month. Can be as little as one hour of paid work during the previous month to qualify as paid laborers. We have another 3.7 who are unemployed formally, the definition being no work but looking for it. And then the remainder 10-plus percent, are neither working nor looking for work. Our statistics, our job statistics were, as I said, put together to track the Great Depression. It was a little late to the game, but we started doing this in '39 and in '40. And back then, the idea that a guy who didn't have a job wouldn't be looking for one wasn't something that anybody had ever thought about.
Archon Fung:
Right. So that's one out of 10 or maybe 15 out of 100 who are out of the workforce in that prime working age period. Is that a lot or a little? It doesn't seem like that much to me. I mean, 85, they have jobs.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Well, yeah. I mean, it's true that 85 have jobs, but if you went back to-
Archon Fung:
Or working a little bit at least, like you said.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Yep, yep, or have had some paid work. But if you went back two generations, it would be closer to 95. So it's a big drop. It's a big drop. And as I said, I mean, judge it against 1940, judge it against America when our national employment rate was north of 14%, between 14 and 15%. People didn't think that that was so much fun back then.
Archon Fung:
No, they did not.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
And so the tricky part of this is that because our statistics were made to track, they were developed for the Great Depression, we're looking at employed and unemployed people, and we don't talk about those who are out of the game. So right now for every unemployed prime age man, there are over three who are neither working nor looking for work. So if you just read the headline figures about unemployment, you're missing three quarters of the problem.
Archon Fung:
Yeah. Right. And so we'll get into the reasons why, but maybe we can just begin to explore that. Why are one in 10 men in this prime working ages of their lives? Why are they not looking for a job even? They're out of the labor force, as you say.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Well, the Census Bureau and the BLS in their wisdom have a questionnaire that they ask people about this. And it makes me think back in the day, there was this show called Naked City about New York City. There are eight million stories in the naked city. Well, there are about seven million of these prime age men who are neither working nor looking for work. I mean, I think it was about 6.9 last month, but say seven among friends. And the questionnaire I think has less than 10 options. So it's going to be a little procrustean, right?
Archon Fung:
Yeah, yeah.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
But one of the possible answers for why did you have no work last year is there weren't any jobs. And I think in the most recent survey, about 8% of the guys who were out had not participated in the workforce, the prime age guys, said that it was because there wasn't any work. Now, and sometimes after the Great Recession, it was a lot higher than that, but a lot higher means like 25%.
Archon Fung:
Said, "There's no work for me, that's why I'm out."
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Yep. But even when there was a terrible economy, it was a very, very small fraction of all of the prime age men who answered the survey said that there were dropouts from the workforce because it was a bad economy. There are other reasons, they say.
Archon Fung:
Yeah. So one of the things we do in this show is try to get some ideological political diversity. So a gross stereotype, I think, is people on the left kind of attribute out of the workforce and unemployment to demand-side issues. It's the China shock, there's no jobs, maybe manufacturing has gone away, and a tendency, again, gross generalization from more conservative perspectives is it's a supply-side issue. People are, as you mentioned in one of the chapters in your book, over reliant on disability insurance, et cetera. Obviously the truth has both dimensions to it. Yeah.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Yeah, for sure. And I don't think it's just people on the left who look at it as a demand-side or people exclusively on the right who [inaudible 00:13:54] supply-side. But I would say that in the guild of labor economists today, the received wisdom is that it's mainly due to structural transformation of the economy and shifts within technological innovation and things, outsourcing, less demand for unskilled or less skilled labor. And obviously there's truth to that. I mean, this is not just happening in the United States. It's happening in almost every other affluent democracy in the world. It's happening a lot more in the United States. The drop has been much more severe, much more extreme in the US than in any other country except for Italy. And honestly, I don't believe the Italian employment statistics because of that huge gray economy there.
Archon Fung:
Yeah, there's a big secondary informal economy. Jerry in the chat asks a question, maybe that 85% is even obscuring, makes the problem look a little bit better than it really is. He asked, "How many of those jobs are full-time of the 85? And do we know how many of those are your regular 1960s, 1970s, 35, 40 hour a week versus more gig type occasional?"
Nicholas Eberstadt:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics in principle, and note that phrase, in principle tracks gig work, work from the gig economy. It probably doesn't get all of the gray market work that's being done, but I don't think that that would make the picture radically different. I don't want to put a statistic on it because I'll get the decimal point wrong on this, but there is a non-trivial number of men who say that they don't have as much work as they would want who are in the economy. Archon, I wanted to make a point about the supply and demand-side argument.
Archon Fung:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the explanations. Yeah.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
So for sure we know that the economy is dynamic and structurally changing and we know that there are big forces that are affecting this from the demand side, but it cannot explain this problem in the United States in the whole, and I'm not even sure it explains most of it. And I'll give you a couple of examples what I mean. If this were a demand-side problem primarily, we would expect this not-in-labor force group to rise and shrink or to-
Archon Fung:
Cyclically with it. Yeah.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
... to cyclically change, to fluctuate in accordance somehow with the business cycle, not a year later, two years later, whatever. There's absolutely no correspondence between the business cycle and this almost eerily steady rise that we see. Similarly, if it were just a lack of demand for low-skilled labor, we wouldn't expect the heterogeneity that we see in labor force participation rates for high school dropouts, for example, guys who are high school dropouts. If you are a high school dropout who is a native-born American and never married, you've got about a 50% chance of even being in the labor force at all. If you are an immigrant who is married and a high school graduate, your labor force participation rate is going to be 35%, 40 points higher than that.
Archon Fung:
Oh, I see. Right. So same demand structure for that [inaudible 00:18:16] ... Yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
And it's not that the school system in El Salvador in the first 10 years is that much better-
Archon Fung:
Is so much better than ours.
Stephen Richer:
Okay. So let me invoke my grandfather who's no longer with us, but he's going to serve this purpose because I want to deflect any criticism onto him instead of on me and simply say, "What the heck then is going on with seven million men who have just dropped out of the force?" Which Archon says as a percentage it's not that large, but it's just slightly smaller than the population of Massachusetts and my home of Arizona. And so a very significant number. And then I also want us to say, appreciate the comments coming in. We are keeping track of those, so keep feeding them in there. So what the heck is going on, Nick? Why are these people just dropping out if it's not an economic feature?
Archon Fung:
Is the video game and social media explanation just something, kind of a joke that the pundits pay attention to, or do you attribute something real to that?
Nicholas Eberstadt:
There is something real to that. And you can see that there's something real to that because our government in its wisdom also asks people in some of their surveys, "What do you do all day long from the time you wake up until the time you go to sleep? And by the way, how long do you sleep?" These are these time use surveys.
Archon Fung:
Yeah, right. Those are great.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
So they're self-reported. I mean, it's not like there's an anthropologist going into people's basement. This is self-reported. Everybody lies, but still, I mean, surveys are interesting.
Archon Fung:
Yeah. You wouldn't want to over-report how much you're playing Call of Duty, I'm guessing.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Yeah. So you have to parse the seven million because some of the seven million are actually full-time students who are just out temporarily getting skills and getting back in the game. What I think we're really concerned about is what the Brits call NEET, N-E-E-T, neither employed nor in education or training, because that's the real dropout group.
And if you look at what the six million-plus in this group say, they basically say that they don't do civil society, is my words, not theirs. Not much worship, not much volunteering, not much charitable. They say that they don't do much help around the house, even though they've got a fair amount of time. They don't do much housework, much helping with other people in the house. They don't even get out much, according to them. What they say they do is they say they spend about 2,000 hours a year watching screens. Now the surveys, for the same reason that the government just asked, gives you 10 options for why you're not in the workforce, government doesn't ask you, "What are you watching? I mean, is it porn?"
Archon Fung:
Right. And so just as a benchmark, I think a full-time job is 2,050 hours a year.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Yeah. So it's almost as if it were a full-time job. And the other thing which is pretty discouraging is every so often there's a component asking people some special set of questions. And after the pandemic, there was a set of questions about pain medication. How often do you take pain medication? Not necessarily narcotics. I mean, it could be narcotics, but it could be pain meds. And about half of the NEET, prime-age men, said they were taking pain medication every day. So it's not just Call of Duty, it's like Call of Duty stone.
Archon Fung:
Wow. So Lisa asked a great, great question in the chat that was actually a bullet point in my little outline notes to myself. So she says, "How much of the challenge of finding jobs might be attributed to the presence or competition of women in the workforce?" So I think there's more normativity there. You could say, "Well, for that 1950 to mid-1960s period, women were excluded from the workforce. And now what you're seeing is some equality in labor market participation between men and women, and so the guys just have to take one on the chin for gender equality in the labor market."
Nicholas Eberstadt:
It's a very good question, and it's a very reasonable surmise. If you look at the numbers though, you see that at the same time that ... at the time that women were entering the workforce in the '50s through the turn of the century, the overall labor force participation rate for the United States was going up strongly. If it were a one for one, it would've flat-lined. And since the beginning of the 21st century, both are going down. So women are feeling the pain too. And by the way, even though we are getting unprecedentedly high workforce participation rates for prime age women in the US in recent months and years, it doesn't look that good compared to other countries. If you take a look at the US prime age labor force participation rate for women, it's lower now in the US than it is in Europe, which is supposed to be kind of a vacation-crazy population.
Archon Fung:
30-hour work week place.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
And it's way lower than in Japan. So both the US male and the US female labor force participation rates for prime age women and for the 55 to 64s don't look so good now in international perspective. That didn't used to be the case.
Stephen Richer:
So I think the quick rejoinder would be what Jerry said in the chat, which is I was thinking of, well, in Europe, they allow for more childcare and they allow for more maternal leave on average, and therefore they can participate in a higher rate. But address that if you will. And then also just then what's the overly simplified explanation for what's happening in the United States, realizing that this is a hotly contested, hotly debated item and that there are different perspectives, but if you had to oversimplify it from your perspective, what would you say?
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Yeah, like maybe top three causes or something. Yeah, sure, sure. Well, do bear in mind that, again, we're in this self-reporting portion of the program. The long-term dropout guys almost never give taking care of somebody at home as a reason that they're staying at home. There is still a care chasm between men who are at home and women who are at home. I mean, it's a big time gap. Probably the most important thing that we don't look at, we don't look at it because we don't have data on it. I mean, it's one of these sorts of nerd circus things. But it is the number of men who have felonies in their biographies. For some reason, Uncle Sam does not enumerate or track people after they are released from correctional supervision. And we have had an explosion of crime and punishment in the US over the last two generations. And back of the envelope sort of calculations, and about as close as you can get, I think, suggests that now maybe one in seven adult guys in America has a felony as background.
Archon Fung:
Wow. Right. And there's both supply and demand-side factors if you've been incarcerated about how [inaudible 00:26:39]-
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Yeah, and barrier to entry back into the workforce. And so this is unlike any other OECD country. So I mean, this is a big distinction between the US and all other affluent democracies. So that's one aspect. I mean, it is possible that ... We can't get into causation on social benefits and disability programs because you can't do causation.
Archon Fung:
Yeah, yeah. It goes both ways. Yeah.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
But you can observe that, at least when I was looking at this stuff in my first book, got into the weeds a little bit in this, that it looked like over half of the men who were long-termers out of the workforce were obtaining one or more benefits from various disability programs. So it does not mean that causes it, but it means it finances long-term absence from the workforce. And what I can't tell you, because I don't have anything that I can wrap my hands around and quantify here, but one of the questions which you have to ask is how has stigma changed? I mean, there was a time when men were thought to be ... Their role was to be providers rather than provided for. And over the course of a couple of generations, it looks like the condition of men has changed from that of being typically providers to, in a lot of cases, kind of dependents. And so we can't get into culture stuff, but there may be some sort of change in mentality that's also occurring, but I can't prove that.
Archon Fung:
Yeah. I mean, it's obviously a huge change that's multidimensional and part of it is gender equality that has many, many knock-on effects that are just hard to wrap your mind around, including the decline of that stigma, who's providing for whom at the household level, all those things.
Stephen Richer:
Okay. So I want to turn us to politics. The table setting question is, do these seven million men even vote? And then if so, what is-
Archon Fung:
Who do they vote for? Yeah.
Stephen Richer:
What is the political impact of seven million men who are watching 2,000 hours of screen time a year? Have we studied that or is it all just suppositional? Because a lot of people describe the new right as the rise of the angry, underemployed, white male. And I think that's an oversimplification, but there is a measure of that that is true in this new coalition. And we've seen some changes even. And of course, the vice president wrote famously about the forgotten man, the forgotten Rustbelt worker of Ohio. I guess, pontificate on that.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Sure. Well, we know there are these huge kind of slap your forehead data gaps in our knowledge. I mentioned one about the tens of millions of ex-cons we don't track. There's no office in Washington, D.C., that can tell you how many people are on one or more disability benefit programs in the United States. We don't have data from public opinion pollsters on the employment status of voters. We've got it on their age, their sex, on their ethnicity, on their ideological disposition perhaps, but we don't have it on whether you're employed, unemployed, or not in the workforce. If we had that, we'd know a lot more than we do right now.
My surmise, and I cannot prove this, but my surmise is that the same people who are staying at home and playing video games or watching stuff on screens are not going to be standing in long poll lines. My guess is that they're disproportionately not voting.
Archon Fung:
I think we know that they're less civically engaged.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Yes.
Archon Fung:
Yeah.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Well, we know that in terms of charity and volunteering and worship, but I don't think asked about political.
Archon Fung:
Right, right.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
But, now, their family members and their communities may be affected by this in ways that make them possibly more active or possibly more attentive to politics. But what I can tell you is that it's not the same all across the country, and this is a meandering way of trying to be responsive, Stephen. We've got huge variations from one county to the next and from one standard metropolitan statistical area to the next in terms of prime age, male labor force participation. Within given states, there are enormous differences. Even you go 10 miles, 15 miles, and you've got communities that have huge differences.
The places in America that have the very highest levels of male and female workforce participation tend to be clustered in the upper Midwest. They tend to be in Wisconsin, in Iowa, in Minnesota, in the Dakotas. The places which have the very bottom, really the most discouraging profiles are in a big swath across the south of the US going through Appalachia, going through Florida, going through Louisiana, but also going through California. There are red and blue tendencies among the highest. There are also red and blue tendencies among the lowest. A lot of this I think has to do with stuff that's going on at the local level that we should be paying a lot more attention to.
Archon Fung:
That makes sense. Alex Keyssar in the chat, I think that must be Alex Keyssar, who's our colleague who's an American political historian, he says, "Is it possible that the period from 1940 to 1970 was an exception in that what we're seeing is a reversion to patterns that existed in labor markets before?" Which is, I don't think he would put it this way, but maybe that post-war period was just a very orderly period of big industrial employers and a career ladder that enables a certain kind of family structure. And now we're reverting to more gigness and informality in ways that are more normal in a broader historical span.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
We've never had as long a spate of work rates this low for prime age American men. I mean, our numbers go back to the 1890s and we had some pretty bad recessions and [inaudible 00:34:51]. And so we've got a long record that we can demarcate at least by the census findings in those times. And I think this has been the longest worst period for employment for US men of prime working age.
Stephen Richer:
So in that first category of states, it's hard to avoid race when you name Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin as some of the highest participation. In the second category, however, it's not. You have very different racial profiles of the states that you named. And so I don't think that that's necessarily an easy explanation or something that would factor in. Obviously it could be indicative of other things that are going on there too. But is there a line at which you feel like just society can't really function? I mean, economically, the United States is still probably the exception among developed nations in that we continue to grow. Our GDP is now, I think, three or four times larger, what most European GDP per person outputs are. But from a structural standpoint, from a societal standpoint, from a democracy standpoint, do you think that there's a threshold level in which it becomes problematic for us to conduct ourselves as we have been?
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Well, first to the ethnic or racial question, the white versus persons of color, if you use that formulation kind of distinction is kind of interesting because the dropout proportions or the dropout risk is about the same for whites and non-whites, but then it breaks down. I mean, if you're Black or African American, it's higher than non-Hispanic whites. But if you're Hispanic or Asian American, it's way lower than for non-Hispanic whites. So we've got a very varied ethnic pattern in the United States that might not necessarily assume. And of course, Native-born Americans are way more likely to be in this male dropout pool than immigrants. Doesn't matter what your ethnicity is. If you were born abroad, you're more likely to be in the workforce if you're a guy than if you're born here.
Stephen Richer:
I think that's worth repeating just because it's such a dynamic right now that if you were born abroad, you are less likely to be in the dropout population.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Yes. If you're a guy, if you're a prime age guy and you're here, you're way more likely to be in the workforce, more likely to be in the workforce, way less likely to be in the dropout pool, no matter what your ethnicity, than if you're a native born American. So that's a big difference.
We have all of these problems of wealth without wellbeing in the United States now. We're brilliant at this Archimedes thing of just a mass manufacturer of wealth, but wellbeing is a completely different question for a lot of America. And so we are so rich that probably some of these dysfunctions could not be maintained without the sorts of affluence that we have. Put it that way. Other places would have to face the music and dance, if you see what I mean.
Archon Fung:
Yeah, because there's less social surplus to ... So Patrick Levine notes that ... And people should look at this work from David Autor, David Dorn, and our colleague Gordon Hanson on the China shock says it's demand-side, that exposure to manufacturing import competition reduce men's employment, which I think the translation is a bunch of manufacturing happened in China and went to China, manufacturing jobs decline. Many of those jobs were held by men. That is a structural explanation of the reduction in employment that we're seeing.
Returning to Stephen's kind of political energy point, I mean, I think there's probably much less survey evidence on this and the anecdotal kind of goes both ways. There's two dimensions. So imagine these 10 million men at minimum and then probably the gig penumbra is substantially larger than that. Where does that energy go of disaffection from society and disconnection from the labor market? There's a left/right question. Is it Bernie or Trump? I could make both arguments. And then there's I think a central concern of Stephen's as well as mine is does it go institutional or tear it all down? Which is neither left nor right. And so I think both of those, where does the energy go? Both of those axes are pretty important.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Well, I mean the defining fact at the moment is the lack of energy. It's more likely lives of quiet desperation kind of portion of the program. And we can't forget about all of the deaths of despair.
Archon Fung:
Also great, great work by Angus Deaton and Anne Case.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
By the way, in both cases, both with this men without work and with the deaths of despair, these were problems that had been building for decades, I mean really for decades, before the academy or the policy community or the government noticed this. I mean, we've got some serious blinders on-
Archon Fung:
So I wanted to ask you about that. I mean, for me, really a central feature of a good democracy is it's able to sense problems that are on the horizon, social problems, war, climate change, pandemic, and then do something about them, manage those problems. Since 2016, probably before that, you've been trying to ring the alarm bell on this big social change and economic and political problem. Why was our policy apparatus, the academy, insensitive and resistant to acknowledging, understanding, acting on that problem, in your view?
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Well, I mean, Angus and Anne spotted the problem of the lower-education whites because it was primarily the Anglos. It took a couple of hundred thousand Anglo deaths before anybody spotted it. We've got a $4 trillion health science economy. The men without work, they weren't out in the banlieues burning cars or rioting. So I think there's a lot of-
Archon Fung:
Just dying quietly, as you said.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
... people dying quietly. The 25 million, maybe more, ex-cons in the United States now who for the most part are not causing trouble, so they can be neglected benignly. I think some of this is the ideological blinders of our ameliorative industrial complex, and there's not the source of empathy and connection with people outside of the bubble that you'd hope to have in a flourishing democracy.
Archon Fung:
Yeah. I mean, to borrow a term from the COVID era, that bubble is in part defined by everybody in it being part of the laptop class, which is definitionally disconnected from a lot of folks you're talking about.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
So I think part of the problem is lack of connection. Part of the problem is lack of sympathy. Whom are you disposed to think of as a vulnerable group?
Stephen Richer:
Do you think that's changing?
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Well, I don't think there's been, in my experience, from my very limited perspective, I don't see that much additional attention being devoted to the men without work problem. I mean, more to the deaths of despair, of course, because part of-
Archon Fung:
Opioid crisis and-
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Exactly. The 25 million felons are still invisible and nobody wants to quantify, find out about their life patterns, their health, their family living arrangements or anything else. So we seem to be, as a society at the moment, fairly content with ignoring the sorts of evidence that would force us to act on this.
Stephen Richer:
I feel like intelligentsia, even if it hasn't translated into public policy, has started saying, especially what is the issue with school-age boys and why are they not graduating from high school at the same rates and why are they struggling additionally? I don't know if that will translate then into a more prolonged concern for men and if it will change to the older demographic as well. Let's not just map them until they're 18, but until they're 55 or something like that.
I know you have a hard stop, Nick, at 1:00 Eastern Time. So before you head out, just sort of cribbing off of a question we commonly ask people about the state of American democracy, on a scale of one to five where five is really, really bad and one is like it's something that is just sort of blipping on the radar just a little bit, how big of an issue for American governance do you think this is?
Nicholas Eberstadt:
It's a problem for economic prosperity. It's a problem for the stability of our family life. It's a problem with regard to income and wealth gaps in our country. It certainly is a problem with regard to trust in institutions and to national morale. So I don't think there's anything good that comes out of this. There's nothing good at all. And I'm not even sure that this is something that gets solved primarily by politics as we think of politics. If I were the-
Stephen Richer:
That was going to be my last question. Magic wand.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
If I were the creator, I would want to bring on a great enlightenment right about now, because I think there's nothing so much as a great enlightenment. We've seen what great enlightenments in America have done in the past. We've seen what a Wesleyan movement did in Britain and the era of the gin house. Some sort of religious awakening might have a surprisingly powerful impact in the United States and might be the most irresistible force for getting men off of the couch.
Archon Fung:
So it's at the cultural-spiritual level maybe then, some policy wand or ...
Nicholas Eberstadt:
It's a lot easier to think about something spiritual or metaphysical working at local levels in a way that people didn't think of exactly as politics. Might have political consequences, but wouldn't think of it as politics necessarily.
Archon Fung:
Yeah. I mean, the phenomenon resists this kind of economic or easy explanation. It's just as we've been talking about, has so many facets. So maybe it's that order of solution that needs to.
Nicholas Eberstadt:
I'd settle for a small awakening, as my [inaudible 00:47:51]-
Stephen Richer:
And of course, this is at a time in which church attendance I think is at its lowest in American history, and that is another thing that we do study to an extent. I don't know where those statistics come from. I'm sure you do. Is that a government statistic or is that just a Pew type?
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Your colleague Robert Putnam is the expert on that and General Social Survey now and then earlier surveys that he kind of wedged them to.
Archon Fung:
Yeah, absolutely. Monty in the chat suggests maybe compulsory public service. That would be ... Yeah. Well, I mean the last Roosevelt solution was mass mobilization of a work-kind in the CCC and the WPA and so on. Yeah.
Stephen Richer:
And I'll sort of close with what Pablo says, which is we've diagnosed as a group, we've done a good job diagnosing. He's not convinced about the solutions. I don't know that we're necessarily convinced-
Archon Fung:
Yeah, I'm with you, Pablo.
Stephen Richer:
Okay. Well, Nick, want to be respectful of the fact that you need to duck out here now. And so just thank you very much for coming on the show today.
Archon Fung:
Absolutely.
Stephen Richer:
And thank you to all-
Nicholas Eberstadt:
Stephen, Archon, thank you for inviting me. It was a lot of fun for me.
Archon Fung:
Yeah, it was a great discussion. Yeah, I learned a lot. Thank you so much. All right. See everyone next week.
Stephen Richer:
And then, yeah, thanks as always to our production team. Thanks to Ralph, thanks to Colette, thanks to Courtney, and thanks to Evelyn, and thank you to you all for joining us live. And if you're not watching live, then of course we do record this and we make it available on YouTube and all podcasting platforms. And as Archon mentioned, we will see you next week. We've already got some good guests lined up for future weeks.
Archon Fung:
We'll be talking about voting.
Voiceover:
Thank you for listening to Terms of Engagement. Email us your questions, suggestions, or thoughts for future episodes. You can find an email address in the show notes below. See you next time.