How Are 7 Million Unemployed Men Actually Surviving? - Nicholas Eberstadt

you can't say that this men without work thing is because there isn't any work for the map millions and millions of those jobs are not for like hedge fund managers or you know chemical Engineers a lot of jobs where the main qualification is showing up on time every day not stoned and even so employers have not been able to fill these millions and millions of extra jobs how did you come upon the topic of male unemployment uh I make my living off of finding things that are hiding in plain sight I've been doing this for over 40 years uh started during the Cold War uh looking at the Soviet Health crisis looked at problems of poverty in the U.S this particular one came to me about 10 years ago when I was hearing happy talk about the uh about the Full Employment or near full employment situation in the United States from the Federal Reserve from politicians from Wall Street and I was also reading things which said that half of Americans said we were in recession so those two things don't really go together terribly well do they so I was thinking so what's what's the problem here and I pulled on the thread and realized very quickly what the problem was our National Employment statistics system was developed to track the uh the Great Depression and during the Great Depression times you'd want to know how many people were unemployed you'd want to know how many people were employed and if a guy was neither working nor looking for work you wouldn't even think this would be a great uh a great phenomenon that would be kind of like uh you know a little bit of an end game today it turns out that we've got four prime age men with the 25 to 54s we've got four times as many guys who are neither working nor looking for work as actually unemployed as out of the job and looking for a job so if you're only looking at the unemployment number you're missing four-fifths of the problem that's how I stumbled across it what does that turn into in terms of actual numbers well uh more than seven million I get really nerdy on you um more than seven million men between the ages of 25 and 54 the prime ages for obvious reasons um who are in the civilian non-institutional population civilians are not counting military non-institution because we're not counting prisoners or people who were in mental or health facilities in other people who could reasonably be expected to be in the workforce looking for a job what sort of men are in this group demographically education family structure ethnicity who makes up this group well as you would guess Chris uh if there are seven million guys there's some of everything right that's a big number but some are more represented than others so um ethnically African Americans are over represented but if we go into the persons of color formulation uh Latinos and Asian Americans are underrepresented so uh so for white non-white it's almost a wash um education is what you'd think uh High School dropouts way over represented um with just High School quite over represented but surprisingly large um we say representation of guys with college or even college degrees 40 percent of this group has at least some college and as I recall about A fifth or a sixth the college grads here's a funny one marital structure family structure it turns out that um married guys no matter what their ethnicity are way less likely to be in this pool they're way more likely to be out looking for work or having work uh guys who've never been married way more likely to be in this pool and it's not just uh the the wedding ring although that obviously is a big predictor if you uh if you're living under the same roof with kids and you're a guy you're way more likely to be looking for work I mean that kind of that's not surprising to me but it's you know kind of like the provider effect or something and last but not least uh the Census Bureau has something that they call Nativity which seems kind of weird to me it sounds like a Christmas scene it's what they mean is where you're born are you born overseas or native born uh foreign-born guys are way more likely to be not in this pool um no matter what their ethnic background uh more likely than their counterparts and that's not a surprise to me and I'm sure it's not a surprise to you in particular because people who come here from overseas are kind of motivated to do something here and they're they're more likely to be in the workforce a lot of overlapping uh different groups there I remember hearing you say that a married African-American man is less likely to be in this cohort than an unmarried white American man absolutely true absolutely true and uh in effect this uh this little ring kind of overcomes or erases the ethnic differential disadvantage if you want to call it that uh and there are other things uh like that as well if you are a foreign born guy and you're a high school dropout and your labor force participation is going to be very close to that of a native born college guy I mean it so it's not just it's not just the disadvantage of the skills right I mean there's something else there's something else going on did you look at a family structure that they came from were you able to break this down by single parent household that they'd grown up in no I wasn't I mean that's a really good question it's a really good question but uh but I didn't have the information that could uh could allow me to give you a good answer on that okay so we have uh upfront a rather dramatic seven million person cohort of men in the US a large chunk of whom are not looking for work what is the story of modern male unemployment how do we get to the stage where this is a hidden catastrophe well like like so many things in history it happens gradually it doesn't come upon us all at once like a meteor strike after the end of the second world war for about 20 years the work rates in the labor force participation rates of this group of guys we're discussing the 25 that 25 to 50 for us pretty close to a hundred percent not not a hundred percent but pretty close and it wasn't going anywhere it was bouncing around a little bit then starting in the mid 19th 60s things started to change and from let's say about 1965 it's a good year to Market by may not be perfect but it's pretty close from 1965 to our conversation today it's been basically a straight line out out of the workforce of men a flight from work leaving work not in labor force whatever you'd like to call it and it's Eerie if you track this on a graph or a piece of paper I did a first edition of a book on men without work in 2016 and I used I used this graph as the cover which means almost a straight line I mean it's not quite uh Geo you know geoastronomy it's not quite that perfect but it's pretty close for uh for the social sciences and was really shocking to me was when I came back to do a you know an update after uh after the pandemic uh last year it's almost exactly the same line I could have taken the cover of that book and just you know found a ruler and kept the thing going you know I have no explanation for that I mean this is that this is something that happens in the you know in the physical sciences this is not something that happens in the social sciences I mean it will change eventually but I was just stunned by that I heard that since around about 1950 men have retreated from the labor force at around about 0.1 percent per month solidly is that about right um I'd have to do the I'd have to do the numbers on paper but it's been it has been absolutely Relentless and uh I would have started it in the mid 60s for the 1950s uh for 1950s it's more or less a kind of a slightly bouncing line with no trim that I could divide okay so well economies demographics you know unemployment we go through Peaks and troughs we go through Cycles boom and bust how have you managed to find like explain to me the underlying Dynamic that has managed to create a ruler shape yeah all right um well we can start by the explanations that don't work right and uh because those are always so popular and they're I think they're called received wisdom right so the received wisdom in this area uh is that this is a phenomenon driven by economic and structural technological change that we've had this extraordinary Revolution since the end of the second world war which is true and we've had this tremendous uh set of technological changes and that's true and we've had this big uh shift in demand less demand for Less skilled labor crew uh Outsourcing true China enters the World Trade Organization true true true true true true okay but that's but that's not the whole story and it's not even most of the story I don't think if it were most of the story you couldn't get a straight line like the one I'm describing to you because we have the business cycle right I mean we've got boom and bust periods I need to go up and down um you'd see a big you'd see a big kapow when uh China enters the World Trade Organization you see a big disruption doesn't show up um you know when we have our you know beautiful little monsters that you know disrupt all our technology you know you'd see something so that's not happening what else isn't happening well um if you take a look at men with less skills um they are not all you know uh commonly disadvantaged in the labor force uh if you take a look at foreign-born guys who are high school dropouts but they're married their uh work rates and uh labor force participation rates are indistinguishable as I mentioned from college born uh I mean college guys for domestic on the other hand if you take a look at a native born guy who's never been married it's a disaster it's like 50 or less a chance of being even in the workforce so in this group that supposedly homogeneous there are like 40 percentage points of difference in participation so that part doesn't work so well either um the really biggest I think challenge to this uh idea uh is the um is the extraordinary peacetime labor shortage that we're having now which at you know at the time of our conversation 10 or a million uh unfilled jobs in the United States so you can't say that this men without work thing is because there isn't any work for the men I mean and millions and millions of those jobs are not for like hedge fund managers or you know or you know chemical Engineers they're um a lot of jobs where uh the main qualification is showing up on time every day not stoned and uh and even so employers have not been able to fill these millions and millions of extra jobs is that that employers can't get somebody to come and do the job without getting them fired or is that that people simply aren't applying for the jobs uh there are a lot of jobs that people aren't applying for I mean we've we have we have seen a spike of about 4 million in the total number of unfilled jobs since the eve of the pandemic we have also seen a slump of about 4 million total uh in the size of the workforce by comparison to what we would have expected from the pre-covered trends not all of these are guys I hasten to say we're seeing now a sort of a new face to the flight from work in America but the problem with the you know men fleeing the workforce was the original origin of all of this how many women are added into this cohort um if you count if you count women who are over the age of 55 a considerable number there are some under 55 as well uh there is a problem that is one might say no bigger than a man's fist on the horizon heading towards us which is the kind of the doppelganger the uh women without work uh I'll mention I'll tell you that in a moment but if we look at the 55 plus group they account for more than half of the shortfall that I just mentioned to you and this is a very new phenomenon because from this fifth from the from the 50s until about the 90s uh American men and women were kind of starting to enjoy the notion of retiring early but from the mid 90s up to the uh Eve of covid um these older workers were basically the only bright uh spot in the American labor Tableau their work rates were going steadily up their labor force participation rates are going steadily up but since then there's been a shock and a drop and despite the rollout of kovid of vaccines and everything else they haven't come back to the workforce getting back to this big cohort of invisible men yeah how are they surviving and paying for life well um as best I could uh as best I could figure out as a research nerd um you know kind of looking at statistics and you know when my computer in the basement um it looked to me as if there's a couple of different factors uh girlfriends and family as long as you count Uncle Sam as part of the family um people are there are quite a large number of these guys who are living with people I mean uh either cohabiting or at home with parents or others and that's helping to pay the bills what's also helping to pay the bills uh is as I said uh the U.S government in particular uh our disability programs for people who are unable to work those programs seem to have morphed away from their original Humane intention and now seem to provide an alternative income source to regular employment for several Millions for actually for millions and millions of these guys how many what's what's the proportion this is a really hard question to answer uh but I'll do my best the it should be an easy question you should be able to go to an office in Washington and ask a bureaucrat how many checks are being cut for people who are on disability I mean taxpayers want to know right I mean it sounds like a pretty easy thing the reason it's not easy is because we have a crazy quilt of disability programs that don't play nice with each other so the Social Security Administration has three different programs kind of talk to each other then there's the Veterans Administration that has veterans benefits then there's uh workman's comp programs all around the country then there are state level uh disability programs they're probably others that I don't even know about and as best I could figure out from you know trying to draw in these you know drawing the Dragnet before covid over half of the guys who were in The 7 million pool um were obtaining at least one of these benefits many of them were obtaining more than more than one and about two-thirds were living in a home that was getting at least one of these benefits now I would hasten to add that these are not um these are not princely prizes that these guys are getting it's pretty pennurious but with the add-ons from other welfare benefits which you can um become eligible for through disability is enough to provide this alternative to working life okay so that may be able to get them by given the fact that they're not working not in education employment or training what are they doing what do they spend their time doing well we only know what they say they're doing and we know what they say they're doing because they answer surveys that Uncle Sam sends them sometimes the the Bureau of Labor Statistics uh has this annual program it calls it American time use survey and it asks thousands and thousands of people what do you do from the moment you get up in the morning till all the time you go to sleep and how long do you sleep so they don't just ask people who are working they just people they ask people who are adults of all ages um so we've got a fair uh you know a fair number of returns from the neither working nor looking for work guys right now I hasten to say everybody is a liar and surveys are full of lies but we can take this you know self-reported um information as a first cut they they say they basically don't do um Civil Society uh almost no worship almost no uh charitable work almost no volunteering they got a lot of time on their hands we know that but they do surprisingly little housework they say they do surprising little housework and surprisingly little help with other people in the home what they say they do a lot of is watch screens now these surveys don't tell you what they're watching or how they're watching it just you know that their screen time about 2 000 hours a year okay now two thousand hours a year would qualify as a fair full-time job I mean maybe not if you're in a law firm but pretty much anywhere else it would qualify as a pretty uh pretty good full-time job and um the skill which they're developing is being in front of a screen on a couch um and to make the situation even more dispiriting than that sounds every so often these surveys have a little extra component of questions and before the um before the pandemic one of these components was do you take pain medication and about half of these guys said yes I take pain medication every day now it doesn't say what the medication is doesn't say if it's actually a prescription uh but that's a lot of people sitting on their couches in front of screen stoned I'm a writing saying that what you've just said is of this neat seven million cohort on average they spend around about two thousand dollars per year Watching screens and of this same cohort half of them are taking daily pain medication of one kind or another that's that's what they say and I should be a little careful about the uh not in labor force versus neat about 10 or slightly more than 10 percent of these guys are basically full-time students uh they they're getting ready they're training to get back to work their time use looks like an employed guy's time is so we're talking about six plus million who are in the neat pool I was gonna say it's a it's a silver lining around a cloud to say well there is ten percent the ten percent it's not all seven million but it's a big number it's a big almost all of them okay yeah what about the way that being having a criminal record gets folded into this well Chris once again uh there is no office you can go to in Washington and Washington has a great many offices that can tell you how many uh how many adult felons there are in the U.S or how many prime age guys have a criminal record um and I tried I tried to get at that and uh the best I could do was to use some oh I think pretty good work by some uh you know defiant demographic nerds who tried to reconstruct the whole post-war period of Crime and Punishment how many people had survived over the long period how many have gone back to jail um they estimated that as of 2010 there were 19.5 million adults overwhelmingly men in the United States who um had a criminal record and with a reasonable back of the envelope estimates that would take us to about 25 million today we know that the U.S has got this famous mass incarceration thing going on but the prisons have got about 2 million uh people in them that means that for every person who's behind bars they're 10 million or more uh of a 10 or more who um are in society as a whole in general and not uh not behind bars have a criminal record um my my own uh back of the envelope and I can't be too you know can't be too precise about this given the uncertainties but my own back of the envelope is that about one in seven adult guys has a criminal conviction in his background in the United States of America at this point and probably slightly more than that in the prime age group The so we're talking about a lot of a lot of guys with uh convictions in their background who are kind of invisible to our statistics but from what little evidence of our senses uh you know we can draw upon they're way more likely uh not to be at work to be in this kind of pool have you got any idea whether that's because they're struggling to be accepted for jobs because they have to list the fact that they do have a felony record you know it's maddening um that's it's maddening because I can't give you a straightforward answer to this uh which is a terribly important question and millions of people's lives depend on the answer to it um we we don't have the evidence in a sort of a statistical way you know we've got this world of anecdotes and there are you know thousands and thousands of points of light out there they're trying to deal with this but they're all disconnected um if we had if we lifted a finger and got this information together which we could do pretty quickly um wouldn't be perfect but it would shine a big a big light on part of this we'd have the evidence for evidence-based programs all around the country um and we don't have that there it's clear that there are some areas where there are restrictions uh against uh employment of x-cons including the financial sector and other places um there's a whole question about whether the ban the Box question whether there should be a ban the Box whether asking uh people if they'd had a trouble uh is uh prejudicial my own contrarian impression is that employers actually end up discriminating more if they don't know the answer to that question they kind of overestimate on their own part and they're more likely to um they're more likely to be suspicious of less educated minority uh young men than if they had the actual information but that's my impression so your concern is that among many many concerns is that because we have very very inferior data to what we should do in order to be able to dig down into this any interventions that you do want to do to try and fix the problem can be pointing in the wrong direction they can miss the mark entirely because we don't know let's just use the x-con felony example cohort you don't know if it's an intervention that needs to be done on the side of the employer to encourage employers to bring on people who do have criminal records you don't know if the intervention needs to be to get these people from prison back into looking for jobs get them into training get them into the routine maybe it's support groups maybe it's something to do with psychological Health you don't know where this issue is coming from because you have insufficient inferior data well there there will be people who are working in you know God's Own trenches you know with re-entry for x-cons who will have a wealth of knowledge on this and who can tell everybody more about this but in terms of numbers and patterns we're blind on this as a general observation we always have to be careful about unintended consequences because there's always a policy and there's always an unintended consequence of the policy and if you don't ask about both of those you're not looking at the whole situation how haven't we heard more about this like how how haven't we heard about this huge seven million man behemoth well I have some guesses uh I mean one guess is that this is a disadvantaged group that doesn't fall within the academy and the media's preconceptions of disadvantage their um their guys their uh you know Prime working age and they don't fit fit the victim profile terribly well so you know Horsemen pass by I mean that's part of it um it's also true that in the United States the um these prime age men have not been a menace to society they've been a menace mainly to themselves they've been dying of deaths of Despair and overdoses they haven't been out uh like in the Manlius of uh Paris like setting the cars on fire uh so they haven't been getting a lot of attention uh for themselves and um you know because they're not an organized political group there is no real constituency for them so um you know as long as so they can be neglected uh at no great Peril for any immediate constituencies in the country I've heard you talk about the difference between poverty and misery as well how does that fold in um by any 19th century uh standard whether it's in the UK or in the U.S or Australia or in uh any of the affluent societies of the 1800s these guys are rolling in money I mean they're the they're probably in about the second quintile on average in our consumption scale in the United States but that would make you a very very very wealthy person back in the 1860s or 1870s and in any of our English-speaking countries so lack of resources lack of material resources is not the issue here they you can be miserable on quite a high standard of living and the degradation that these men experience or self-inflict to some degree um is uh it's heart random and it's a tremendous loss of human potential but just think of it I mean you don't have to be a philosopher to know that you know 2500 years ago Aristotle said that you know that we're human beings are social creatures you know if you're not connected to society and you're a human being you kind of suffer for it uh that's why it's like solitary confinement is a considered a cruel and unusual punishment by some people uh so if you're not connected to work you're more likely not to be connected to family uh like more likely not to be connected to Faith although that's another story and you're you don't even go out of your house to be in your community um you know that is a pretty miserable Baseline I mean I can imagine being out of work and spending all of your time doing community gardening or volunteering or I don't know um memorizing capital in the original German or something I mean something like that which would be a use of your time uh that wouldn't necessarily degrade you but what I've described to you is not that it's kind of like a path of misery yeah wanking on weed isn't the same as hoeing a garden and building some flowers so this is one uh really I guess interesting area that I've spoken about an awful lot recently I flew to Doha to have a debate about traditional masculinity being degraded and stuff what do you understand about how men are seeing themselves and their role in the world given this change in terms of what they're doing with work well um it's you don't you don't have to be a sociobiologist to say that there is something unnatural about society and history's long-term providers suddenly being flipped into this position of dependence uh and you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to think that there might be some sort of psychological Fallout from this inversion here um [Music] whether this speaks to um greater metaphysical problems in the U.S or the world is a uh is a bigger topic um my uh my boss uh Mary epperstadt has opined about that at some length and she's always right so I will defer to that I am very interested in the idea of providers becoming dependents and us not having the language or the archetype framing or the guard rails to be able to give them something that makes them feel proud and then also the distinction between poverty and misery you know being told that you are from a benefiting from the past oppressive uh patriarchal superstructure which has given you all of the advantages that some other group hasn't had meanwhile guys are you know not starving at least in terms of for money off of food but very much are for meaning very much R for social connection very much are for sobriety um it's it just seems to me like the absolute sort of synthesis of everything the performative empathy allows to happen which is to do what looks good in place of what is good when it comes to trying to enact social policy and campaigning for people that are struggling well I think you've put it very well um you can take a technocratic approach to addressing some of the problems I've described um the nice thing about a technocratic approach is that you can pretend that it is value neutral but what we're describing here is completely Laden with values and uh the normative questions of how you find meaning in life and what one does with life and what your purpose is and what you know what fills the soul you know but fills the hole in your soul is absolutely critical here and you know if we kind of um pretend pretend none of this really matters well you can kind of guess what's going to happen this to me seems to point a rather worrying picture at the potential for Ubi not that I was a massive proponent of it in any case but you mentioned that the pandemic basically caused Washington to stumble into a dress rehearsal for Ubi and we're seeing these guys who have sufficient material wealth to be able to keep them going but they don't seem to be flourishing there's a whole argument about whether uh Ubi would bankrupt uh our Public Finance system uh that's a separate argument um it's a very important argument and it might put an end to this discussion right there I would say however take a look at the time use of these neat men and then ask yourself do you want to buy more of this is this something that Society should really want to subsidize because you're going to get it you're going to get a lot of people with Ubi who have a lot of time on their hands uh what are they going to do with that if they don't have the you know gyroscope for it and absolutely during uh during the early months of the pandemic actually for almost a year and a half in the pandemic we were dispensing more benefits in pandemic uninsurance then unemployment insurance then we had unemployed people in the United States at one point for every hundred people who were unemployed we had about 250 beneficiaries of pandemic unemployment insurance so it was indeed a kind of a test drive fortunately it's over what's unfortunate is we don't know how long the lingering effects of it will Reverb rate or how badly they will reverberate would you guess would you hypothesize that there is going to be a hangover of some kind that the trend and the routine that people got into of not working during the pandemic is going to set a habit going forward I think we're living in it right now look around um you know 10 11 million open jobs of great resignation giving more bargaining power to people who are job applicants than any time in my long life uh millions of people still sitting on the sidelines more than before the pandemic that sounds to me like like immediate consequences what we can see from the labor market is if you stay with the labor market uh if you're if you declare yourself unemployed your chances of getting back to work within a matter of weeks or very high once you cut that line it's a little bit like going off under the space shuttle and then you kind of out in space and your odds of uh doing something other than being a long-termer uh get really bad foreign rates weren't that bad at the moment overall what sort of [ __ ] is going on with the numbers to be able to allow your world and the world of low unemployment to exist well we've We've Ended up with the best of all possible worlds haven't we Chris we've got the we've got low unemployment and also low work and so how do you add low work low unemployment and what's the rest of it oh it's the people who aren't looking for work I remember now so we've got this uh we've got this circumstance which of course only a fabulously affluent society could afford without immediately careening into disaster you know we can eventually Korean into disaster with this I guess but we can postpone it for quite a while um and this is this is what happens when you're fighting the last war our uh employment statistics are still fighting the Great Depression so they got great numbers on or good as good numbers they can get on unemployment good numbers on work and then whatever the other thing is uh well that wasn't happening much during the Depression so here we are uh because anybody that could work would work back then that was the presumption and and I think it was probably a pretty good presumption that's very interesting so I'm I'm currently kind of obsessed with the role of men in the modern world their Retreat from relationships their Retreat from friendships overall have you considered if there is a broader Dynamic going on here that ties together the general sort of malaise that men are finding themselves in um well I'm not a philosopher but I do demographics and I can count and uh I mean I'm a uh I'm a I'm a 67 year old grandfather with four kids right and so I am so far from the the Forefront of the battlefield right now that I can kind of read it the way I read science fiction and try to kind of understand it uh but the the idea that uh the idea let's see how do I put this for a family audience the idea that young men would not be interested in real life women uh would have been kind of absurd uh 50 years ago did you see so my favorite or most terrifying piece of research that I've seen recently was from Pew uh in 19 2019 61 of men said that they were looking for either casual or long-term relationships in 2023 that number has dropped to 50 one in two men between the ages of 18 and 30 aren't looking for either casual or long-term relationships now for the men that are listening who have been through that age bracket or in it you understand the power the reality Distortion field that is the male sex drive between the ages of 18 and 30 the fact that you can have something that happens that can overcome that is yeah wild yeah numb it's like science fiction uh what's going on give me put your best philosopher tin foil hat on and give me give me your ideas yeah sure um I started looking at this we're getting away a little bit from Men Without work but I think I'll wander back to it um I started looking at this in Japan the numbers about Japan about uh uh two decades ago when uh young men and women were not only saying that they were less likely to have had sex by given you know 20 age 25 age 20 whatever but also saying that they're less interested in this and at the time I thought well everybody knows that the Japanese are just separate from the rest of humanity they see us as old Gaijin they see us as all unspeakably weird this is just some Japanese thing little did I know that this was the leading indicator for where everything else was going to be going and I had assumed that we were just in our regular Garden variety family Decay thing and you know post uh War America but then this um this new eruption comes along and the uh you know the the wonderful little devices kind of turn out to be turbo charging this or at least complicit in some sort of way with this and um I again defer to my boss Mary eberstadt um Mary has uh I won't say argued but she has ominously mused about the possibility that nurture and wanting family and wanting children is not something that is hardwired into us in our DNA inviolably but rather is something more like a muscle that we develop through use and through seeing the same way that little cats know how to climb down from trees if they live with other cats and they get stuck up in the trees if they don't have cats to look at oh okay so it's kind of like a mimetic yes exactly Renee Gerard and Nemesis that sort of thing yeah I mean that's that's the musing of it I you know that's interesting well I mean so there's a guy uh Stephen Shaw are you familiar with Stephen yeah I've I've heard the name yeah yeah so he did birth gap which is a fantastic documentary I know that you're bigger I talked to him I talked to him a while ago I haven't seen the documentary he was in Qatar with me so he had a debate a couple of days after me so we got to go for a bunch of lunches and dinners while I was out there also brought him on the show I thought he was absolutely fantastic um I mean going back to the men and work thing but also feel free to fold demographic collapse in as well how worried you about all this well I'm worried about it as a citizen I'm worried about it as a researcher I'm worried about it as a parent and you know a grandparent somebody would like to see you know our society continue um things can turn around things things don't always head in a linear Direction in fact they seldom seem to have for very very long in the linear Direction this 50-year trend in uh the exit from the labor force a pretty long linear Trend uh it's exceptional in that way I think um what will turn it around I think is uh some uh is not going to be uh economic and uh structural change it's going to be a change in people's viewpoints and values and metaphysics we've had um as you know we've had a couple of uh great Awakenings in the United States in the past we've had other little eruptions it's going to be a change in mindset and um I don't see I don't see why we can't have a change in mindset as a you know as a social Observer analyst I can tell you that our tools are poor enough that it takes us a while even to recognize when a change has already started so for all we could know that you know this conversation it's already started and too you know blind and weak to have detected it yet are you alluding to the fact that a social change to be able to give some sympathy support to the chunk of men that are in this 7 million um natural yes yes of course of course empathy and support I mean we have an extraordinary empathy Gap in the United States today uh we can't even uh people who are in the intellectual classes in the describing classes can't accurately describe the arguments of people with whom they disagree because of because those arguments are bad and evil you know they can't even do the intellectual thing of describing this accurately I mean that's a huge empathy Gap but more than that I think um uh finding um finding spiritual and other meaning in life that takes you outside of yourself and reattaches you to humanity and to Eternity that's going to be a challenge given how atomized our devices have made us you know if you even if you want to go secular with this right and you want to say um join a local pickleball club uh pick up trash look after the local dogs you join an art class do yoga do whatever right yep for as long as you have a incredibly convenient incredibly distractible uh highly distracting device that sits in your pocket getting yourself up off the couch on an evening time is going to be hard if you're spending two thousand hours per year on the couch playing video games smoking weed there's a very high bar for you to get over there amen amen and uh and I can't tell you what the next big innovation is whether it's going to be a chip in the head or uh what the next virtual reality well virtual reality is already here sure I mean just it'll get better and uh and more uh more enticing um it's it's going to have to um it's going to have to come from uh you know from each from people themselves and it uh it can't it may be a it may be a revulsion it may be a sad learning process but um I don't I don't have any doubt that uh that we won't we won't entire we will not entirely be enslaved by this there'll be some sort of a reaction which will I think help to uh help to open people's minds again oddly the revolution actually sounds like quite a good thing although that's not usually what I would say there's uh one other element that I've been playing with for but nearly a year now which is given the highest ever rates of male sexlessness that we've seen this sort of despondency in terms of the lack of work and meaning and so on and so forth why hasn't young male syndrome kicked in why isn't it that guys are running around setting cars on fire and pushing over granny and graffitiating walls and stuff like that and to me it seems like the most obvious potential Outlet is that they're being Sedated by screens Pawn easy access to video games social media etc etc um that seems to be the most obvious one and the problem that you have it's like a perfect um marriage of what you've taught me today and what I already kind of knew which is if you are part of a previously identified uh beneficiary of a system the ability for the people now in charge of that system to give you sympathy and to try and raise you up is going to be so low no one is going to come and say why don't we spend more time raising up men especially you know predominantly white predominantly American men who's going to come along and do that there's no card carrying campaign and it's the exact same people you said it earlier on they they haven't galvanized themselves into one group that goes down the street with placards waving things and creating social media campaigns there's going to be a spontaneous movement um I think it's highly unlikely that something will be organized and developed much less centrally uh centrally distributed from Washington um on but the proposition that something will generate spontaneously and spread like a prairie fire would not surprise me because when people see something good they want more of it just one final thing what's the economic cost of this what's the economic cost of of this group of people being outside of the workforce uh well it's it means uh it means slower uh slower economic growth for the country as a whole and but not just that means bigger income and wealth gaps means more welfare dependence it probably means more public debt it means you have to start doing the second order impact on fragile families and the third order impact on what this means for trust in social institutions I haven't tried to do uh you know a whole of Parts calculation on this but it's it's a big economic cost and it's an enormous moral cost to our society Nicholas EverStart ladies and gentlemen Nicholas I really really enjoy this I think that this Insight is one that much much more people should be talking about uh where can people go if they want to keep up to date with the work that you do um you can probably for uh for the foreseeable future using Google to look for Nicholas everstadt uh I've Got This Book Men Without work you can probably find that uh somewhere uh I have a uh I have a Scholars webpage at the American Enterprise Institute aei.org Nicholas eberstadt necklace I appreciate you thank you for today hey thank you for making the time for me what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here 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