
America’s ‘quiet catastrophe’: Millions of idle men - stanleydrew
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-quiet-catastrophe-millions-of-idle-men/2016/10/05/cd01b750-8a57-11e6-bff0-d53f592f176e_story.html
======
jimmywanger
I think it has to do with the sudden rise of cheap pornography, cheap computer
games, social media, and the lack of women who need a provider due to societal
pressures and government safety nets.

Before, if you wanted a girlfriend/wife, you had to get a decent job. That way
the lady in your wife knew that she'd be reasonably taken care of. Now, the
money you make is somewhat superflous - there are ways to get cash from the
government/family members/divorce, making the man's income less important than
the way you feel about the man at any particular point in time.

These days, with cheap pornography and entertainment and social media, you can
(somewhat) satisfy your sexual desires, your need for entertainment, and your
need for social interactions with porn, video games, and social media without
much monetary cost.

Plus, if you missed out on the education train fairly early on, the way the
job market is structured, you get fairly low wage jobs that are not
intellectually fulfilling.

Looking at the cost benefit analysis, if you don't have in-demand or highly
paid job skills, you chocies are to sit on your butt and mooch off your
parents (which is increasingly possible and fulfilling and socially
acceptable), or take a low-paying boring job for 40 hours a week that will
only incrementally raise your happiness level.

The math seems easy to me.

~~~
angmarsbane
There is a high cost to feeling like you're falling behind your peers or not
contributing to the world. The math may seem easy but I think too much
idleness is costly to one's sense of worth and place in the world.

I refuse to believe that enabling women to be financially independent is a
negative thing. If men's income is less important this means men can invest in
careers or outlets that they didn't have the freedom to pursue before due to
familial obligations. It does not mean that men must be idle.

~~~
jimmywanger
> There is a high cost to feeling like you're falling behind your peers or not
> contributing to the world. The math may seem easy but I think too much
> idleness is costly to one's sense of worth and place in the world.

The whole point is that cost is getting lower and lower.

> I refuse to believe that enabling women to be financially independent is a
> negative thing

That sounds like an ideological argument.

------
11thEarlOfMar
>> Donald Trump, is perhaps perverse evidence that some of his army of angry
men are at least healthily unhappy about the loss of meaning, self-esteem and
masculinity that is a consequence of chosen and protracted idleness.

This is a part of my theory as well. There are several groups of Americans who
have had a bad time of it over the last 10-15 years. Many of them/us fall into
more than one group, whether its chronically unemployed, or paying more than
$20,000/yr. for health insurance, or staring at a $160,000 tuition bill per
child. Many voters feel neglected by policy makers and point the finger at
lobbyists and elected officials becoming too, say, symbiotic in Washington.
Trump calls them out, and his outlandish proclamations of wrongdoing and
wrongheadedness resonate. When you add these groups up, it turns out to be a
_lot of Americans_ because, in my view at least, this has been going on for a
long time.

~~~
ac29
>$160,000 tuition bill per child

This is the approximate tuition for 4 years at Harvard (@ $40k/year), and not
at all representative of the the real cost of university degrees in the US.
Tuition at state schools, which are often quite good, is much less. CSU
schools, where I went to school, estimate total cost of attendance at about
$25k/year [0] split roughly evenly between school costs and living costs... on
the high end (less if you live with family, or in a lower cost area of
California). Anecdotally, I can verify these numbers.

Unless you are a very high net worth family, $160k for college tuition is
overpriced.

[0]
[http://www.calstate.edu/sas/costofattendance/](http://www.calstate.edu/sas/costofattendance/)

~~~
11thEarlOfMar
I wrote 'tuition' but was talking about 'total cost', which is what matters.
Harvard is $65,000 | $260,000 [0]

I'm paying for UC Davis, $35,000 | $140,000 [1]

My next kid wants to go to Loyola Marymount, $63,000 | $252,000 [2]

Average student loan debt in 2005 was $15,600

Average student loan dept in 2016 was $37,000 [3]

[0] [https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-
works/cost...](https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-works/cost-
attendance)

[1]
[https://www.ucdavis.edu/admissions/cost/](https://www.ucdavis.edu/admissions/cost/)

[2]
[http://financialaid.lmu.edu/generalinformation/costofattenda...](http://financialaid.lmu.edu/generalinformation/costofattendance/)

[3] [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/congrats-class-of-2016-youre-
the...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/congrats-class-of-2016-youre-the-most-
indebted-yet/)

------
jknoepfler
As the value of employment declines, it is unsurprising that fewer people
choose to work. I would recharactetize the 'crisis' (why it is a crisis was
never articulated in anything but thinly puritanical moral terms) as the
natural consequence of increased elasticity in the demand for employment
(caused by improved benefits, shifting social norms) combined with reduced
payoffs for employment (stagnant wages).

I think that's overly reductive, but I'm having trouble pinning down why (in
the terms laid out by the article) there is a crisis rather than a shifting
market.

~~~
Spooky23
People need to be occupied and have purpose. Many people on HN don't grok
this, which illustrates the gap.

~~~
toomuchtodo
It's easier to have purpose when the market doesn't have to decide if that
purpose has value. Want to stay at home and take care of a child or aging
parent? Ain't going to happen without budgeting or basic income.

------
brchr
For me prose is a really hard medium for parsing trends like the ones Will is
describing here, so I made a scraper that turns the Bureau of Labor Statistics
API into live D3 charts that refresh themselves every day and stay current.
I’ve found it really useful.

For instance, here’s manufacturing jobs per capita -- you can see that the
bump during the Obama administration, while real, is truly nothing to get
excited about.

[https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/manufacturing-
emplo...](https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/manufacturing-employees-
per-
capita?from=2009-11-30T00%3A00%3A00.000Z&to=2016-09-26T00%3A00%3A00.000Z&y_scale=from_zero)

Conversely it becomes clear that manufacturing jobs have been pretty much
smoothly and steadily disappearing since World War II, and it seems (to me)
highly unlikely that any kind of immediate policy solution is going to reverse
that.

And here’s the civilian labor force participation rate that Will is talking
about in the article:

[https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/civilian-labor-
forc...](https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/civilian-labor-force-
participation-rate)

You can see clearly how much lower the value is now than it was at the turn of
the millennium -- this is Will’s point at the start of the piece -- but you
can also see that we’re still above the entire 40s, 50s, 60s, and most of the
70s.

Although the difference there is that the people not participating in the
labor force were, I’d have to guess, women. Interesting that Will focuses
specifically on men. It doesn’t look like the BLS breaks labor participation
out by gender, which would be interesting.

If there are other BLS stats of interest to HN readers, I haven’t finished
making a way for other users to add their own scrapers, but I’m more than
happy to add figures for other BLS data. Just let me know.

~~~
dahdum
I posted separately, but your graph is for everyone while the article is about
idle men, which is on clear downward trend over decades.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001)
(Men)

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002)
(Women)

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300025](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300025)
(Men, 20+)

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300026](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300026)
(Women, 20+)

~~~
brchr
Oh I stand corrected that the BLS doesn’t break that out!

Here’s a comparison of men (in black) vs. women (in blue). Very interesting.

[https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/labor-force-
partici...](https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/labor-force-
participation-rate-men-20-years-and-over?y_scale=from_zero)

~~~
roymurdock
Is there any special function your website can do that FRED can't? I'm pretty
sure all BLS data ends up in FRED.

~~~
brchr
If you’re trying to make a point about a change over a specific period, you
can select a range and the selection gets appended by JS to the URL, such that
if you send someone else the link they’ll see exactly the selection you made.
It’s also possible to follow figures and be updated when they change. But also
interesting things become possible across datasets. For instance, it becomes
possible to mash up absolute job numbers from the BLS with population
estimates from the Census and get accurate per-capita figures, that stay
current when either the BLS or the Census publish new numbers.

------
klagermkii
I feel like this article muddies so much of what is cause and what is effect.
It pushes the idea that there is an "age-old male quest for a paying job",
whereas I don't think men or women or animals or anything has ever had that as
their primary objective. The pressure has been to meet basic needs, meet
societal obligations and expectations, meet peer pressure and similar outside
forces that lead someone to take up a 9-to-5 job.

I think it's natural as those forces have weakened for this to be the
consequence. It's become easier to meet basic needs, gender roles have become
less rigid and there's not the same expectation of a male breadwinner, and
society no longer demands everyone has children.

"One manifestation of regression, Donald Trump, is perhaps perverse evidence
that some of his army of angry men are at least healthily unhappy about the
loss of meaning, self-esteem and masculinity that is a consequence of chosen
and protracted idleness."

Maybe they are, but just taking up a "pointless" job isn't going to change
that. Without the sense that there's something bigger that they're working
towards, being a Gap Factory Store employee in itself (as per the header
image) isn't going to give any kind of meaning. People don't work bad jobs for
themselves, they work it for something bigger. Family, society, some kind of
grand purpose. Can just look at that Congo cobalt mining piece by the WaPo to
see what motivates people to endure horrific work.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/c...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/congo-
cobalt-mining-for-lithium-ion-battery/)

~~~
candiodari
Well labour participation is down across the board, regardless of gender
roles.

[http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-
pa...](http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-
participation-rate)

It's down for men:

[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.MA.ZS?locati...](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.MA.ZS?locations=US)

It's down for women:

[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?locati...](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?locations=US)

White/Black/Chinese/Hispanic ... all down.

There are racial/gender differences, for instance, men and blacks seem to be
worse off than the other groups, women and Chinese people are better off (as
are immigrants in general), but still down. Of course you only get to be an
immigrant if you have a job, so not much of a surprise there. It's down across
the board. The only exception I could find is people who should be pensioners
(men 55+), or at least near pension, but clearly people are hesitant to start
their pension.

Which brings the real question. How can it be in the US that unemployment is
essentially fixed while the number of people with actual jobs varies so wildly
? The only explanation I can find is that the government must be actively
denying unemployment benefits to people who are in fact unemployed, or
otherwise fail to count them. I am curious to understand what the actual
mechanism is here. I have heard that the US essentially fails to count long-
term unemployed people as unemployed, but I haven't put enough effort into
verifying this. If this is true, maybe we should assess what the real US
unemployment rate is. It's the reported unemployment rate, plus let's say 80%
of the jobs lost since 2001, which comes to about 8.9%. Add another percent to
account for people who study in order to avoid looking for a job, or who've
otherwise resumed study because of getting laid off, and we're close to 10%.

That would mean that what the Fed says is nonsense, and the reason there is
considerable slack in the labor market (no wage growth) is simply that at this
rate, the US labor market will only have recovered from the 2008 losses around
2022, nor was it recovered from the 2000-2001 job losses in 2008. The odds of
a recession between now and then making the problem worse, however, seems to
me to be essentially a certainty.

The story here is wrong to focus on men. Men have it slightly worse than
women, but not much. The problem is widespread and has little or nothing to do
with gender.

------
shams93
I have a master's degree and 20 years if experience in engineering and design
but my income and work are always under threat. I doubt these men who are not
working wouldn't like to have income if we are honest we can admit that just
because you're willing and able to work does not mean you get to have a job.
Plus once you hit 40 they are always dumping you for juniors or interns for
cheap.

~~~
riskable
When the pace of change accelerates the value of experience drops an
equivalent amount.

------
bryanlarsen
A large portion of these idle men are ex felons. Very few employers will hire
felons, is it any surprise that get discouraged and stop trying?

Yet another reason to end the war on drugs.

~~~
WalterSear
The article lacked empathy to the point of myopia, and misused a number of
statistics - most blatantly, the government's job seeking numbers, that is
heavily massaged to keep the unemployment figures appearing as low as
possible.

It was just above the level of a hit piece.

~~~
Natsu
The Washington Post is currently an arm of the DNC, to the point where they
run their articles past the DNC prior to publication and where they hold
clandestine fundraisers together that the DNC's own lawyers forbade.

While this is readily apparent from reading the DNC email leaks, I've seen
very little discussion of it.

EDIT: Might as well cite sources.

Here's the original email from the Wikileaks DB with the mangled formatting:
[https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699](https://wikileaks.org/dnc-
emails/emailid/2699)

Here's a copy of it properly formatted on some news site I've never heard of
before: [http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/wikileaks-emails-clinton-
berni...](http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/wikileaks-emails-clinton-bernie-list-
directory-photos-most-damaging-worst-rhode-island-delegate-fec-jvf/3/)

------
jdietrich
The author is very blase about describing these men as having "chosen to not
seek work". Discouraged workers are a well-known phenomenon in labour
economics - people who have given up looking for work because they believe
that they have no realistic chance of finding it.

America might have plenty of job vacancies, but it has very few vacancies for
unskilled men living in rustbelt towns. For these men, the obstacles to
finding work are often overwhelming. When graduates are struggling to find
work, the prospects for socially disadvantaged people are very bleak. If
someone has limited literacy, mental health problems or a felony conviction, I
can't really blame them for giving up on the prospect of finding work.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discouraged_worker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discouraged_worker)

------
dahdum
This chart of men's civilian labor participation rate by decade roughly
describes what the article is talking about.

Fewer men are working, and it's been a long term trend.
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300025](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300025)

Women's participation increased dramatically but has come down in recent
years.
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300026](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300026)

------
jlarocco
I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, but it would be nice if the
non-working time were allocated better. Instead of XX million people not
working, get everybody working, but only 3 or 4 days a week.

It's kind of sad that we're more efficient than ever before, but instead of
using that efficiency to give everybody more leisure and improve their lives
we're forcing people to work crappy, low paying service jobs where they're
struggling to survive.

~~~
solipsism
Why are you talking about crappy, low paying service jobs? This article is
about people not working at all.

And why is XX million people not working a bad thing? This crappy article
doesn't for a second question, much less investigate, what these "idle" people
are doing with their time or how happy they are compared to those of us who
are working for a living.

------
mrcactu5
this is at a time when Obama is bragging about our low unemployment rate (as
it is an Election year)...

[http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000](http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000)

often we can construct the narrative first and find supporting data later.
what cross section does he use here in the Washington Post?

------
ipnon
It seems to me that so-called "herbivorism" is spreading from Japan into all
of Western civilization, a result of commodities like video games, pornography
and social networks sufficiently simulating the context in which rewards are
pursued by the sort of employment that is strangely absent in the current male
labor force.

~~~
solipsism
Is it just me, or does your comment not parse?

 _commodities... sufficiently simulating the context in which rewards are
pursued by the sort of employment that is strangely absent in the current male
labor force_

What? What does it mean for commodities to stimulate a context?

~~~
internaut
He's saying that working men are so looked down upon that the unemployed
consider themselves a step above them. A bit like a perverse parody of
aristocrats refusing to work.

This is not theoretical, I've seen it, I believe it. It is typical for the
middle classes, especially the younger ones and what I can only really call
kept women to look down on working class men as being one step removed from
the prison population. Possibly feral. Never enlightened.

I think the primary cause is an education system that strongly gave the
impression to young people that it was 'Yale or Jail'.

Basically the universities have created a class system by creating a new
social class. Unemployment is less egregious than picking up a hammer or
spade.

Otherwise you might be one of those ditchdiggers, you know, in "the world
needs ditchdiggers too" quote.

~~~
golemotron
I think it's going to get sorted eventually as most other work automates away.
Watch for men taking ditch digging jobs ironically. I give it 5, maybe 10
years.

~~~
ipnon
Was it Keynes who suggested that governments bury money underground for
workers to excavate in the case of chronic mass unemployment?

------
jimmywanger
Why is this a bad thing? Aren't we looking to institute an universal basic
income?

~~~
golemotron
> Why is this a bad thing? Aren't we looking to institute an universal basic
> income?

UBI is incompatible with open borders. Neo-liberalism doesn't know how to
square that circle.

~~~
bryanlarsen
There's an easy solution: only give UBI to full citizens. Since you usually
need to live in and pay taxes in a country for ~10 years to get full
citizenship, this is an easy solution.

Like most easy solutions, it's probably too extreme, some permanent residents
definitely deserve UBI too. But it doesn't seem difficult to imagine an
appropriate test based on years of residency, et cetera. It's certainly an
easier problem than some others, like how to pay for UBI.

~~~
prostoalex
Does one also get to double/triple/quadruple their UBI by producing more US
citizens with a willing lady?

------
jschwartzi
I seem to recall that unemployment pays better than minimum wage in many
cases. If you qualify for unemployment or disability, why would you give up
that benefit and at the same time lower your income?

~~~
wahern
From Always Sunny in Philadelphia:

    
    
      Mac: Unemployment runs out, what are you gonna do then?
      Dennis: Well then we'll just go on welfare.
      Mac: Welfare is for people who need it, like drug addicts
      and single mothers. It's not for over-privileged pieces of
      shit who want to waste millions in taxpayer dollars...
    

Basically, 1) unemployment runs out; 2) it's difficult to get welfare unless
you have children or have a disability, and being classified as disabled is
more difficult than commonly believed, especially for younger people, even
though it sometimes seems like every idle soul is drawing a disability check;
and 3) since the Clinton-era reforms many welfare programs have a lifetime
cap.

FWIW, unemployment can pay better than minimum wage because unemployment is
usually paid as a percentage of your earnings. But you'd need to have been
making substantially more than minimum wage.

Also, a lot of social programs are pretty good about proportionally cutting
back on benefits as income grows. It's still a real problem with some programs
(there are many, and they're byzantine), but I think it's exaggerated
somewhat. It's like "write-offs" for taxes--most people have no understanding
of them, and believe they function far differently than they do in reality. To
quote another one of my favorite shows:

    
    
      Kramer: "It's a write-off for them."
      Jerry: "How is it a write-off?"
      Kramer: "They just write it off."
      Jerry: "Write it off what?"
      Kramer: "Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything."
      Jerry: "You don't even know what a write-off is, do you?"
      Kramer: "No, I don't. But they do. And they're the ones writing it off."

------
prostoalex
The timeline of "88 consecutive months of the economic expansion that began in
June 2009" conveniently leaves out quite a few years of the building boom,
when hordes of capable males were employed in construction and ancillary
industries.

Which is also why every high-level politician in every economic speech circa
2008 and on has been harping about the need to generate more construction
jobs.

------
golemotron
If only there was some sort of large public works program. Maybe some large
construction project that took years to finish.

~~~
jlarocco
If a person is choosing not to work, why would they change their mind to work
on public works projects that tend to be manual labor?

~~~
vkou
When there are 90 jobs, and 100 people looking for work, are then ten who end
up unemployed choosing to not work?

I suppose they could offer to work more hours, and accept lower wages. Would
that mean that the 10 people that they replace are now choosing not to work?

The structurally unemployed don't _choose_ to be idle - or more specifically,
some amount of the population will always be idle, regardless of whether or
not it does so by choice, or not.

The only countries that have full employment are war economies, and communist
states.

~~~
jlarocco
RTFA. It is specifically talking about people who are choosing not to work.

~~~
vkou
So what? Every person has a price point at which they will choose not to work.
Especially when there _isn 't_ work for them.

There isn't a labour shortage. In fact, there is quite the opposite.

Or, more specifically, there is a labour shortage, but in fields that our
economy does not seem to care to pay for.

------
Kim_Bruning
Any relationship with what in .jp is called hikikomori ? (Just viewed through
a different lens?)

------
hiou
_> infantilism_

So if a male chooses another path outside of employment he is to be compared
to an infant?

This post should be flagged. That is definitely not okay.

~~~
mancerayder
Flag because you disagree with the validity of the analogy? Or because it's
offensive to you?

Should we flag invalid arguments? Potentially offensive material? Since you
didn't elaborate, other than the 'definitely' qualifier, it's unknown what
your beef or overall goal is, here.

~~~
hiou
Because it's an inflammatory insult. Calling a group of the population a bunch
of babies isn't really appropriate intellectual conversation for a site like
this.

------
guelo
He keeps harping on government benefits but besides Social Security and
Medicare there's not really any welfare to speak of in this country. So I
don't know what these men are supposed to be living off of.

~~~
bluedino
The number of people on disability has skyrocketed starting in the 90's.

[http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/](http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/)

~~~
jdietrich
Britain did something very similar after the deindustrialisation of the 1970s.
The number of Incapacity Benefit claimants more than trebled between 1980 and
1995. As a welfare adviser, I personally witnessed claimants being coached to
apply for incapacity benefit. There was a clear quid-pro-quo - unemployed
people disappeared from the statistics in exchange for a bit more money.

Millions of unemployed men in former industrial towns were effectively
consigned to the scrapheap, with no real effort made to create new jobs or
provide retraining. Both major parties maintained the ruse for decades. The
current Tory government has attempted to reform the system, but in the most
brutal and cack-handed way imaginable; they have simultaneously forced long-
term claimants off benefits while cutting programmes that could help them into
work. It's a shite state of affairs.

[http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/c...](http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmpubacc/404/40405.htm)

