The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work, and What They Do Instead
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Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work, and What They Do Instead
#2What about prison? It's ~1% of the adult populaion.
Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work, and What They Do Instead
#3What about prison? It's ~1% of the adult populaion.
(People in the military, prison and institutions are excluded from these figures.)
Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work, and What They Do Instead
#4What about prison? It's ~1% of the adult populaion.
Ummm... didn't you read the article?
> (People in the military, prison and institutions are excluded from these figures.)
Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work, and What They Do Instead
#5What about prison? It's ~1% of the adult populaion.
If you count imprisoned men, do you count those who work while being jailed? Seems like it's too convoluted to be included in this metric, though certainly worth noting.
Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work, and What They Do Instead
#6You have to wonder which of those trends are "secular" (in the economics sense) and which are indirect causes of high unemployment.
The article already hints at this: Apart from the young cohort (until mid-20s), the rise in men going to school is probably less about an increased desire for education and more about an inability to find work. More men caring for their families may be a good thing (increasing equality between men and women in practice), but it may also be a symptom of high unemployment. And is it really plausible that more men are disabled today compared to 15 years ago? It seems more plausible that there is a grey area of disability, and a bad economy drives more men in this grey area to apply for disability benefits.
Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work, and What They Do Instead
#7See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8738646 from December
Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work, and What They Do Instead
#8The author doesn't even mention how many more women are in the workforce as compared to 1950.
The main loss here is the exodus of manufacturing jobs. No simple way around it.
Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work, and What They Do Instead
#9Nice numbers, but what's the point? Times they are a changin'?
Re: The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work, and What They Do Instead
#10You have to wonder which of those trends are "secular" (in the economics sense) and which are indirect causes of high unemployment. The article already hints at this: Apart from the young cohort (until mid-20s), the rise in men going to school is probably less about an increased desire for education and more about an inability to find work. More men caring for their families may be a good thing (increasing equality b…
> And is it really plausible that more men are disabled today compared to 15 years ago?
Yes, that seems plausible to me. For example, there have been a number of combat operations the intervening 15 years; if someone left the military due to injury, they would be counted in the disability figures, but not in the employment ones. NPR did a big story on the factors behind this a while ago:
http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
Another big factor is that states are incentivized to move people off of welfare (which the individual states pay for) onto disability (which the nation pays for through Social Security). So a rise in disabled workers has also coincided with a decline of people on welfare -- it's just private companies shuffling people around without improving their condition.
To be fair, the NPR article was not without controversy. A number of groups objected to the way it was presented, including former Social Security commissioners.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/04/18/177745599/forme...