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Men Without Work

America's Invisible Crisis

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Men Without Work

Written by: Nicholas Eberstadt
Narrated by: Stephen R. Thorne
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About this listen

By one reading, things look pretty good for Americans today: The country is richer than ever before, and the unemployment rate is down by half since the Great Recession.

But a closer look shows that something is going seriously wrong. This is the collapse of work - especially among America's men. Political economist Nicholas Eberstadt shows that while "unemployment" has gone down, America's work rate is also lower today than a generation ago - and that the work rate for US men has been spiraling downward for half a century. Astonishingly, the work rate for American males aged 25-54 - or "men of prime working age" - was actually slightly lower in 2015 than it had been in 1940, before the war and at the tail end of the Great Depression.

Today, nearly one in six prime working-age men has no paid work at all - and nearly one in eight is out of the labor force entirely, neither working nor even looking for work. This new normal of "men without work", argues Eberstadt, is "America's invisible crisis".

So who are these men? How did they get there? What are they doing with their time? And what are the implications of this exit from work for American society?

©2016 Nicholas Eberstadt (P)2017 Tantor Business & Careers Economics Gender Studies Ideologies & Doctrines Politics & Government
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What the critics say

“An unsettling portrait not just of male unemployment, but also of lives deeply alienated from civil society.” ( The New York Times)

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Profile Image for Daniel Bell

hollow argument confusing data for moral inference

I was so incredibly disappointed. in the sample it was made clear that he wanted to not simply discuss a point of data or a series of points of data that point to a decline in men working, but far more critically the moral argument for why we should care.

I'm still tempted to make the argument that the reason why men have left the workforce is because they can. that individual decision making is based on the hand of cards witnessed by a given individual. if there are millions of men who have the power to not work telling them they ought to because they ought to because they ought to is meaningless.

The central thesis is missing from the book. what remains is a didactic conclusion without any justification. begging the question, circling back and doing so again.

I could not be more disappointed.


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