Nicholas Eberstadt\'s landmark 2016 study, Men Without Work , cast a spotlight on the collapse of work for men in modern America.
Given the devastating economic impact of the Covid calamity and the unforeseen aftershocks yet to come, this reissue of Eberstadt\'s groundbreaking work is timelier than ever..
And others may be catching the Men Without Work virus too.
The truth is that fewer prime-age American men are looking for readily available work than at any previous juncture in our history.
Current low rates of unemployment, touted by pundits and politicians, are grievously misleading.
Thus today, despite the vaccine rollouts, inexplicable numbers of working age men and women are sitting on the sidelines while over 11 million jobs go unfilled.
From indiscriminate pandemic shutdowns to almost unconditional unemployment benefits, Americans were essentially paid not to work.
In a brand new introduction, Eberstadt explains how the government\'s response to Covid-19 inadvertently exacerbated the flight from work in America.
And now--six years and one catastrophic pandemic later--the problem has not only worsened: it has seemingly been spreading among prime-age women and workers over fifty-five.
No longer, warned Eberstadt.
The famed American work ethic was once near universal: men of sound mind and body took pride in contributing to their communities and families.
Eberstadt\'s unflinching analysis was, in the words of The New York Times , an unsettling portrait not just of male unemployment, but also of lives deeply alienated from civil society.
Conventional unemployment measures ignored these labor force dropouts, but their ranks had been rising relentlessly for half a century.
The grim truth: over six million prime-age men were neither working nor looking for work.
Rosy reports of low unemployment rates and full or near full employment conditions, he contends, were overlooking a quiet, continuing crisis: Depression-era work rates for American men of prime working age (25-54).
Nicholas Eberstadt\'s landmark 2016 study, Men Without Work , cast a spotlight on the collapse of work for men in modern America
