I think there are quite a few alternative explanations for the data cited in the article than the ones the author proposes:
> "Today, one in six American men between the ages of 25 and 54 are unemployed or out of the workforce altogether: about 10 million men. This number has more than doubled since the 1970s."
We have this place in the USA called "The Rust Belt" which was once a dynamic and active manufacturing center providing millions of well-paid jobs for these now unemployed American men. California once had a world-class electronics manufacturing industry (and a garment manufacturing industry) that provided hundreds of thousands of such jobs. Under the rubric of neoliberal globalization, those jobs were shipped out to Mexico, China, Indonesia, India and other low-wage centers, and the huge cut in labor costs went right into the pockets of a small fraction of now-extremely wealthy Americans. Why neglect that phenomenon?
> "Over the past half-century, the number of men per capita behind bars has more than quadrupled."
Again, we have a robust alternative explanation: the explosion in incarceration under the War on Drugs program launched by Nixon in the early 1970s and continued and amplified by successive Democratic and Republican administrations. This resulted in the explosive growth of the quite profitable private prison complex (which did not exist before the 1970s), and of course enforcement was highly skewed towards poor and minority groups. These groups were far more likely to smoke crack on the street corner than to snort cocaine in private clubs, and a 100-wt of cocaine powder was considered equivalent to a 1-wt of crack crystal in sentencing.
So if the author wants solutions to these problems, why not promote rewriting domestic and international law to exert significant penalties on corporations who outsource manufacturing overseas, and also end the War on Drugs by eliminating incarceration for possession of drugs, and instead focus on a public education approach emphasizing the benefits of getting off drugs and alcohol?