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America's "Quiet Catastrophe": Millions of Idle Men

posted by janrinok on Sunday October 09 2016, @03:39AM   

Phoenix666 writes:

The "quiet catastrophe" is particularly dismaying because it is so quiet, without social turmoil or even debate. It is this: After 88 consecutive months of the economic expansion that began in June 2009, a smaller percentage of American males in the prime working years (ages 25 to 54) are working than were working near the end of the Great Depression in 1940, when the unemployment rate was above 14 percent. If the labor-force participation rate were as high today as it was as recently as 2000, nearly 10 million more Americans would have jobs.

The work rate for adult men has plunged 13 percentage points in a half-century. This "work deficit" of "Great Depression-scale underutilization" of male potential workers is the subject of Nicholas Eberstadt's new monograph "Men Without Work: America's Invisible Crisis," which explores the economic and moral causes and consequences of this:

Is it an aberration, or a harbinger of things to come?

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Original Submission

• Re:the elephant in the room (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @12:21AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @12:21AM (#415469)

  When it didn't work as expected, they all assumed that they simply hadn't done enough and printed more money

  By some accounts it did work some, but there were enough other problems such that it wasn't good enough to fix all. They saw small improvements and thus cranked it up too far, hoping to compensate for OTHER problems. Like I said, any tool can be abused if you use it unwisely, but that's not a reason to not use tools. We use interest rates to adjust econ activity. They too could be misused.

  A second problem is that HM is ephemeral even when working as intended. You put in the money, there is a bump of economic activity, and then it's over. You need to put more in continually to get a continual increase in economic activity.

  That's a theory. But even if it were true, that's not necessarily bad. Maybe once all the major economies get back to a normal pace, they won't need "assistance". They just may need a little turbo to get up to running speed.

  This leads to the third problem of the economy rapidly adapting to HM. Once, you have a continual flow of HM, then everyone will price their products accordingly. This usually manifests as straightforward inflation.

  That's a theory. There's no evidence it triggers a run-away cycle if used in small amounts.

  But if the HM ends up concentrated in certain areas (like poor people or residental real estate building), then goods and services oriented to the particular sector of benefit can go up selectively.

  That's also a theory. I see nothing special to HM that triggers bubbles. Fads are invented by humans, not HM.

  View HM as a control valve, just as interest rate is. The algorithm may look something like:

  While true
        if inflation less than 2.0 and GDP_rate less than 2.5 then
              print a little money
              if inflation less than 1.5 then
                    decrease interest rates a little
              end if
        else if inflation greater than 2.3 or GDP_rate greater than 3.3 then
              increase interest rates a little
        end if
        wait and monitor econ for 4 months
  End While

  It's an over-simplification, but gives one an idea.

  Interest rates used to seem "good enough" to adjust for ups and downs, but stopped working in multiple countries. There's another parameter we can use to adjust.

  Parent