Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

I like it just fine.

She doesn't.

She's admittedly jealous of how much time I spend with my son, she resents having to continue on her career path and not being able to be a stay-t-home mom. She doesn't understand why I would rather raise my son than work a real programming job.

We are getting divorced.

When someone drops out of high school it's not because they had too few choices to go to college, it's because they didn't see any value in the education they were already getting.

We need more vocational education and it needs to start earlier in life.

They should also teach a class in high school called "life" in which kids have to construct a virtual life for themselves, finds a place to live on Craigslist, price furniture, calculate food expenses, gas, electric, internet, mobile, insurance, etc, etc, so they have a good concept of what they're up against. Then talk about serious alternatives to pay for that life, a vocation, the military, college professional.

My HVAC guy didn't need college; it would be a huge waste of money and it would have postponed his career by 4 years. People like him can make six figures if they're good and easily support a family of 4.

1. Nobody wants to say it, but let's be clear: these men are redundant. Even without all these "prime-age men" the Dow breaks 21,000. The market doesn't need them and they have no value to contribute.

2. The market is doing so well not just in spite of but because it has abandoned this excess labor. This is the creative destruction of capitalism that makes the whole system work. It is not a bug or even a symptom -- it is essential logic. Nobody said anything when this systemic unemployment was concentrated among minorities in inner cities ghettos but now that's its become so prevalent and the wrong type of people... to quote: "If tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panic, because it's all "part of the plan.""

3. It's interesting that the focus is on men. In reality of course it's not "men" who are being affected but whole regions. This is clearly a regional phenomenon because the market is deliberately killing off inefficient industries which happen to be concentrated in certain regions. To quote:

""" Of much greater concern is the large number of metropolitan regions with very low rates of work among prime-age men. These include many small former industrial centers in states like Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio; areas of West Virginia and Louisiana that rely on declining-employment industries like mining; and long-struggling agricultural economies in Arkansas, Texas, and inland California. """ [1]

4. The biggest losers in all this aren't men but women. American white women are experiencing an unprecedented mortality spike. And guess where these women live? [2] The dynamics are a bit fascinating but you could perhaps eyeball it and say the market doubles for each additional 10/100,000 deaths added.

It's not obvious that eliminating this excess labor is such a bad thing or why it's suddenly a crisis. Despite the bias at work in the article it's not clear why the U.S. should abandon the system of capitalism that it made the republic so great when the system is working exactly as intended.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2016/06/21/where-a...

[2] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/03/more-american-wh...