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posted by janrinok on Monday December 15 2014, @03:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the chasing-the-vanishing-jobs? dept.

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.”

 
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  • (Score: 1) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday December 17 2014, @03:45AM

    by curunir_wolf (4772) on Wednesday December 17 2014, @03:45AM (#126728)

    ... indentured servitude, women burning alive in ... the rich hiring their own goon squads to insure those peasants knew their place like the XXX, rivers so filled with toxins that you didn't have to worry about fish giving you [DISEASES] because nothing could live in it, the country being divided up among trusts to insure nobody could actually compete with the uber rich, golden vaginas deciding who ruled thanks to insane trust funds, groups like [X, Y, Z] who literally cannot lose

    I hate to break this to you, but ALL of these things have gone on for THOUSANDS of YEARS. These problems were not created by capitalism (or what you call "rampant unleashed capitalism", whatever that is, like it's a kraken or something), but are the result of humans being powerful dicks. Like for thousands of years. What capitalism do was improve the living conditions of the vast majority of people. I know, history, right?

    groups like Goldman Sachs who literally cannot lose because they can simply use their immense wealth to have laws written to reimburse them when they make a mistake

    If you think that has anything to do with "capitalism", maybe you're confusing it with "corporatism", or "fascism", or some other system with massive market interventionism (only for some, of course), but it's nothing like what I would consider capitalism (a market in which consumers have the power over the producers).

    Your sig stating "I am a crackpot" is oh so apropos as the second you bring in code words like "statist" we know you are a libertarian nutbar.

    Oh, sorry, I missed that you were a bigoted partisan stool pigeon.

    --
    I am a crackpot