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Binyamin Appelbaum writes at the NYT that the share of prime-age men — those 25 to 54 years old — who are not working has more than tripled since the late 1960s, to 16 percent as many men have decided that low-wage work will not improve their lives, in part because deep changes in American society have made it easier for them to live without working. These changes include the availability of federal disability benefits; the decline of marriage, which means fewer men provide for children; and the rise of the Internet, which has reduced the isolation of unemployment. Technology has made unemployment less lonely says Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, who argues that the Internet allows men to entertain themselves and find friends and sexual partners at a much lower cost than did previous generations. Perhaps most important, it has become harder for men to find higher-paying jobs as foreign competition and technological advances have eliminated many of the jobs open to high school graduates. The trend was pushed to new heights by the last recession, with 20 percent of prime-age men not working in 2009 before partly receding. But the recovery is unlikely to be complete. "Like turtles flipped onto their backs, many people who stop working struggle to get back on their feet," writes Appelbaum. "Some people take years to return to the work force, and others never do "
A study published in October by scholars at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies estimated that 37 percent of the decline in male employment since 1979 can be explained by this retreat from marriage and fatherhood (PDF). “When the legal, entry-level economy isn’t providing a wage that allows someone a convincing and realistic option to become an adult — to go out and get married and form a household — it demoralizes them and shunts them into illegal economies,” says Philippe Bourgois, an anthropologist who has studied the lives of young men in urban areas. “It’s not a choice that has made them happy. They would much rather be adults in a respectful job that pays them and promises them benefits.”
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 16 2014, @12:28PM
To make the world a better place, and to frankly save humanity, those educated, frustrated strata must move beyond their received assumptions, that they're alone and that they're powerless. They can sharply make the world a better place, if they will let go of their learned helplessness.
They did. Then they realized that their fellow educated, frustrated strata was the competition. Just look at academia, the primary manufacturer of discontent. It's a microcosm of the dynamic. Every tenured professor started life as a "strata" and won the lottery. Yet they have a peculiar tone-deafness when it comes to the needs of the next generation of would-be tenured professors.
It wouldn't take much modification to get education and research more in line with what students and society actually needs from academia. But it's more important to have a million little fiefdoms and low accountability. So we have phenomena like the student loan trap, way too high a production of PhDs (which are for a lot of fields, just training for professorships), the "every scrap of research is sacred" fantasy, a large and growing disengagement between the curriculum and relevant education for holding a job, and the usual ivory tower narcissism.
A similar thing happens with social policy in economics which currently boils down to appropriating money from people to spend on perceived social needs (usually the elimination of risk). It's never been a better time for social policy implementation. Yet all we hear about are the super-powerful evil corporations. Turns out that a company which specializes in political opportunism is better at this game than the social policy people who enabled this exploitable system. And the implementers of social policy can be readily bribed.
So what is the response to this? Scapegoat the evil corporations and double-down on the approach that caused the problems. More social benefits, more political corruption enabled.
Sometimes bad things just happen. Here, the social changes from the introduction of contraception left human males on the losing side for a couple of generations. Similarly, globalization has resulted in a substantial impact on the earning power of developed world labor while simultaneously making mobile capital a bit more valuable. But bad things are always happening. What changes is how we respond to them.
What I see discussed here are certain harmful behaviors that not only make the problems of societies worse, but which are self-perpetuating.