> Among economists and policy analysts who have examined these unsettling trends, the general consensus is that declining male workforce participation in modern America is mainly a structural, demand-driven problem — a matter of evaporating local jobs, and especially jobs requiring limited skills, in an increasingly dynamic and globalized marketplace.
Basically these are the men would have traditionally "built stuff"; factory workers, etc.
We don't have any factories anymore.
>If this assessment is more or less correct, it would be hard to overstate the importance of education and training as instruments for addressing our "men without work" crisis.
How would that help? We don't have jobs for them. And the few that maybe could find work, well, those jobs will soon enough be automated away.
> Third, there is America's curiously poor prime-age male labor-force participation-rate performance in comparison with other affluent never-communist democracies. Between 1965 and 2015, U.S. levels fell faster and sank lower than in any comparable country, with the exception of Italy (where official employment figures notoriously neglect "unofficial" work income). Yet America's race to the bottom in prime-age male labor-force participation is not readily explained by lackluster economic growth (which could also be called sluggish demand).
In America (USA) you ARE your job; it defines you. The American Way is to be hard working and self sufficient. If you can't do that, there are tremendous psychological effects. You can't blame these men for giving up.
We need to accept that this is the way forward and stop treating people who don't work like leaches. We need to retrain society that there will be plenty of able bodied people without work and society will need to take care of them.
