Playing video games and receiving welfare while living with the parents is probably not a bad choice for those with few opportunities. I would not want to do dead-end jobs just to never be able to own my own home and have a wife and children etc.
The lower class of today is out of luck due to immigration and globalization. Very different to previous generations who had significant leverage when they decided not to work and often got offered great benefits/higher wages after collectively withholding their labor.
...but hasn't this audience been the primary audience for military recruiters? Promise more-or-less young and healthy men a chance to get out of their shitty home town, earn some money, and maybe a paid education?
Yes but the military doesn't take just anyone. A large fraction of young men fail to meet enlistment standards due to obesity, health conditions, criminal record, illegal drug use, or lack of a high school diploma.
I think a lot of people are disillusioned in the military. There wasn't a lot of support for the last wars we've been in among young people, and most people are aware of the hardships veterans can face.
There are benefits, but I think many people feel they aren't worth the risk of death or PTSD. I don't blame them, I wouldn't want to get shot at for $20k/year either.
Willing to bet that, as the author discusses, underestimating the size of informal employment/the informal economy is a large part of the issue.
The transition to a post-industrial economy makes it significantly harder to accurately estimate how many people are employed at any given time. Especially in the states, where people are identified and tracked through Social Security/OASDI, there's a short term benefit to working under the table.
Edit: I'll take back part of my earlier comment. The Federal Reserve has a great visual breakdown of labor force participation by age. It's a little old, but it looks like the decline in labor force participation (ages 16-64) is largely attributable to schooling/university attendance: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2015/08/the-composition-effe....
the unemployment rate measures what proportion of people in the labo[u]r force don't have a job, so the proportion of all people who aren't in it is irrelevant.
IOW, "unemployment rate" means percentage of job seekers not finding a job; people who aren't seeking jobs in the first place don't affect that, and those are in stead measured as "not in the labo[u]r force".
> the economy as is produces enough surplus that one third of working aged males are able to live (and seemingly comfortably) without working
People lived without working for someone else before there was an America. So why have wealth at all?
Living off others is leveraging wealth inequality, not thriving despite it. The number of people not working for someone else, that I know, is about 10. It is not comfortable by modern standards unless your bar for "seemingly comfortable" is have a constructed roof vs living in the wilderness.
Most people without jobs, that I know, are scavengers to some degree or rely on welfare.
I have heard the scavengers called "wookies" (which is a perversion of Star Wars tropes, a misnomer for Jawas) in California. They look at what saleable items they can collect to a central location for evaluation. They repair/repurpose and sell/use or it ends up at the dump or leave it strewn about. If you've worked at a strip mall, you might notice dumped items appear in the back parking. Look for people who empty out homes after repossession or after probate deals with a solitary death, and you'll find them. Constantly in a survival mode.
A non-trivial part of my wife's family are habitual welfare consumers. One branch of the family is having another baby which will allow them to get a bigger apartment by state child welfare rules disallowing certain age boys/girls living in the same room. They habitually smoke tobacco and weed, playing Xbox (gifted by another branch) and house another "family" member. He is the grandpa dodging child support and is purely a wookie.
Not working is only part of this, many of the people are still working, just not in traditional jobs. Investing and selling drugs both need some amount of effort.
I have seen some other statistics about the hourly earnings of drug dealers, etc and the numbers were quite low for low ranking dealers.
Exactly, and apart from illegal work such as drug-dealing, the article points out a "working for cash" category with the example of electricians; I'm sure there are tons of people mowing lawns, etc. The more onerous tax reporting is, the more of that there's going to be; there was a time where this would simply have been considered "working".
