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

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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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by tftp on Sunday October 09 2016, @05:38AM

    by tftp (806) on Sunday October 09 2016, @05:38AM (#411951) Homepage

    They'll get wiped out by the real army

    Yes, I seem to remember how the rabble of ISIS was swiftly wiped out by the well-fed, well armed, real army of President Assad...

    The trick here is that the real army is small, and the army of the lumpenproletariat is huge. Small groups of rioters are already capable of holding whole cities hostage... and when the National Guard is called, the rioters disappear, waiting for the next opportune moment. The army will have strict rules of engagement, whereas their opponents will have no such constraint. The army will have to mount massive response to a single incident, chasing ghosts. Finally, the soldiers are not hired guns from Proxima Centauri - they have ties to the people that they are sent to fight. Their own families will see the cause of the instability firsthand; some will be unemployed, some will be living on minimal rations, some will die from lack of care. The morale in the army will plummet. The army cannot be sent to fight a severe social problem.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @06:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @06:30AM (#411976)

    The people in control of the U.S. have already anticipated these scenarios. They know how to use the FBI, CIA, and NSA to disrupt these movements. As long as some middle class and upper mobility exists, they will keep the rabble in check.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @01:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @01:42PM (#412057)

    Just deploy them to other cities/states and keep that propaganda train running.

    Operational security, don't talk to anyone, trust us, just shoot the bad guys who are enemies of FREEDOM !!.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @10:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @10:31PM (#412224)

    > Yes, I seem to remember how the rabble of ISIS was swiftly wiped out by the well-fed, well armed, real army of President Assad...

    Actually, Assad has not tried very hard to wipe out ISIS because he needed them to be a bogeyman for the US in order to take the focus off of himself.