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?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Francis on Sunday October 09 2016, @02:08PM
So, in other words, you don't actually know what you're talking about and would rather spew a bunch of bullshit.
That's not even true. How do you explain the increasing income inequality between the rich and the poor, and the increased portion of households that depend upon both people having jobs? What you're saying doesn't even make sense and it's certainly not consistent. Even minimum wage jobs allowed people to have at least some sort of quarterwise decent existence back then.
Choosing the '60s is a great way of ignoring the problem. When things continue to stagnate, will you move back to the '50s for measuring and what happens when moving to the '50s is insufficient, will you move back to the '30s? Choosing the '60s is a great way to make yourself look like a moron. The trend that people are worried about started in the '80s and we're seeing more and more wealth concentrated in a few people along with regulatory changes that make it harder for familes to earn a living based upon just one job. And it now requires a college degree for even an entry level job in many areas. Which to make matters worse, has become extremely expensive.
The solution here is to tax the rich and use that to fund programs that will increase prosperity at all levels. If we can tax them enough that they leave, then so be it. Pain in the short term is worth it, they've proven to be so greedy that they won't stop demanding lower and lower taxes until the country effectively eats itself to death Pizza the Hutt style.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @06:17PM
OK, let's take this one bite at a time.
I want to start with "inequality" but you're talking about it in terms of "rich" and "poor", so we'll have to start there.
Poor. What is poverty? Is this absolute, or relative poverty? Absolute poverty is when people are facing a near term question about their access to the necessaries of life. Food. Water. Shelter. This kind of poverty is vanishingly rare in the USA, owing to a variety of systems, programmes and funds made available precisely for the purpose of staving off naked desperation. Whether you're talking about SNAP or TANF or a variety of other federal sources, or you're talking about charitable foundations working to keep people fed and warm, the measurable result is that absolute poverty in the USA is a statistical outlier.
OK, so you have to be talking about relative poverty. You can eat (although it mightn't be great food), but that playstation isn't in the budget. So we're talking about the lowest income bracket. (This would by definition include people in absolute poverty, but those are a tiny segment.)
Is it good to be in the lowest bracket? No. But at least we have a reasonable idea of what that is. When we look at the census bureau's statistics we can use their bottom tiers of household income to estimate where the population is in terms of income - as adjusted for inflation, so we're not comparing a $20000 annual income in 1970 (not bad!) with $20000 annually today (not great).
The short version (and you can feel free to look this up yourself - don't take my word for it) is that households earning under $35000 (in real terms) annually have steadily shrunk since the mid-'60s from about 38% of the population to about 33%. This despite shrinking households, various tax changes, and so on. The change has not been entirely monotonic, but it has been pretty consistent.
OK, so let's look at the wealthy end of the scale. Using the same data set, the wealthy (and what the hell, including the near-wealthy, so everyone earning in real terms over $100000) climbed from about 8% of the population to around 26% of the population. What's more, we know that the super-wealthy are growing as a group, so (assuming you remember basic statistics here) those outliers will pull the mean up while the lower end of the bracket of poverty defines an area where you really can't have much in the way of outliers.
So there's the difference: The high income part of the country's population is growing, and has been, pretty darned dramatically for decades, while the low end has been gradually shrinking. The upper end has few hard limits on it, while the lower end has a hard base. There's your explanation.
If you want to follow along at home, start with http://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/p60/256/table3.xls [census.gov] and grab whatever else around there looks relevant.
As stated above, it just depends on which numbers are available. The general trend is identical whether you start in '67, '77, '87 or '97. Go ahead, run your own numbers. I'm not hiding anything.
Actually, the '60s weren't great for equality, but by '77 more and more women had regular, full-time employment and by the '80s it was not even worth raising an eyebrow. However, the economics of employment aren't unambiguously in favour of a working couple, either. What with the ludicrous costs of daycare and other aspects of child rearing, many couples are actually finding it makes more sense to return to one person at home, one working full time.
I won't disagree with you about the idiotic way that the colleges were turned into the new high school, but that's separate from the inequality discussion. It's just as valid whether people went to trade school or Yale.
So let me make sure I understand this: killing the goose that lays the golden eggs is not only in your game plan, but a good thing in your book? Or at least, driving it off? Let me know when you get elected someplace so that I can avoid there. How on earth will your nation be better off if you simply punitively tax anyone who has the temerity to earn more than the median?