Labor Day is an appropriate moment to reflect on a quiet catastrophe: the collapse, over two generations, of work for American men. During the past half-century, work rates for U.S. males spiraled relentlessly downward. America is now home to a vast army of jobless men who are no longer even looking for work””roughly seven million of them age 25 to 54, the traditional prime of working life.
This is arguably a crisis, but it is hardly ever discussed in the public square. Received wisdom holds that the U.S. is at or near “full employment.” Most readers have probably heard this, perhaps from the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, who said in a speech last week that “it is a remarkable, and perhaps underappreciated, achievement that the economy has returned to near-full employment in a relatively short time after the Great Recession.”
Near-full employment? In 2015 the work rate (the ratio of employment to population) for American males age 25 to 54 was 84.4%. That’s slightly lower than it had been in 1940, 86.4%, at the tail end of the Great Depression. Benchmarked against 1965, when American men were at genuine full employment, the “male jobs deficit” in 2015 would be nearly 10 million, even after taking into account an older population and more adults in college.
Read it all from Nicholas Eberstadt.
Shadowstats, which computes the real unemployment rate, says that real unemployment in the U.S. is still somewhere between 22-25%, has increased from 2007-08, and is as bad as it was in the worst days of the Great Depression.
http://www.shadowstats.com/
Of course, besides manipulation of economic statistics, the Government is masking the country’s dismal economic situation through handouts, printing of money and artificially low interest rates. This is all being done on borrowed money the government cannot pay back — at some point the piper will have to be paid.
Meanwhile, the government distracts us from the real problems through such things as “Black Lives Matter,” “climate change” and the need for to give transgenders special legal preferences.