4 ms·

Apparently if you break things down by gender the story is not as positive: 'But purportedly “near full employment” conditions notwithstanding, the work rate f

by lukasb 9y ago

Apparently if you break things down by gender the story is not as positive: 'But purportedly “near full employment” conditions notwithstanding, the work rate for the twenty-plus male was more than a fifth lower in 2015 than in 1948.' http://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/men-without-work http://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/men-withou...

ceejayoz 9y ago
I'd be interested in how many stay-at-home dads are in that drop.
- theparanoid 9y ago
  Approximately 0%. Outside the upper-middle class people don't have the luxury of not working. Real income has stagnated for middle and lower income people.
  - linkregister 9y ago
    How do you know that? From people you know or is there a resource for that information?
  - brewdad 9y ago
    As child care costs have risen, at least some families in the middle have concluded that it makes little sense for the parent with worse career prospects to work solely for the purposes of paying day care costs. When stagnated incomes can no longer pay for the expenses required to work, working makes less sense financially.
adventured 9y ago
Using 1948 or the early 1950s without adjustment doesn't make sense. The US male labor pool was absorbed due to WW2 / the still vast expansion of the US military (and soon to be even more absorbed due to Korea). We had 550k men just in the US army at the start of 1948, with a US population base 1/2 what it is today. By comparison, in 1939, between the army + navy + marines, we had just 334,000 total military personnel. By 1954 we had something like 3.3 million active military personnel. That takes up a huge amount of labor slack.
geofft 9y ago
Interesting. It seems there are two results here, probably independent. Note that the article talks both about "men" in the context of employment and "middle-aged white men without college degrees" in the context of mortality: it sounds like the explanations for these two statistics are quite different (and in particular, the first result about "men" is primarily influenced by non-white men). The book it's reviewing concludes that the work rate for men in the US is falling because of mass incarceration primarily being targeted at African-American men, and because of laws that make it anywhere from hard to impossible for convicted felons to re-enter the workforce upon serving their sentence. The author of that post has bolded this passage in quoting from the book: > As we shall see, a single variable – having a criminal record – is a key missing piece in explaining why work rates and [labor force participation rates] have collapsed much more dramatically in America than other affluent Western societies over the past two generations. This single variable also helps explain why the collapse has been so much greater for American men than women and why it has been so much more dramatic for African American men and men with low educational attainment than for other prime-age men in the United States. Other sources (e.g., The New Jim Crow) argue that mass incarceration is an intentional policy aimed at keeping black people out of public life as the Jim Crow laws did in the past, which explains this claim from the top of the blog post: "... the great majority of them have not only dropped out of the workforce, they have also dropped out from any commitments or responsibilities to society." (I am partway through reading The New Jim Crow, and it does also mention that economic / technological changes have resulted in a much poorer job market for urban workers over the last half-century or so.) So, if the joblessness rates are including men who can't work because they're literally in jail, and men who can't find a job because of their criminal record, it seems like there's an obvious explanation here - the number of men in those categories has gone up sharply since 1948. However, the blog post makes another claim sourced from The Economist that for people aged 45-54, white men in the US without a college degree, in particular, have had their mortality rates rise when the mortality rates of all 45-54-year-olds in several other rich countries have fallen. (I think. It's not very clear what groups are being compared.) This is very interesting and seems like a serious problem, but it seems likely to be entirely unrelated to the previous, given the conclusions, and I'd also like to see this un-broken by race/education/age/gender in the US, and broken by those factors in other countries. I don't have a good idea what would explain this, but it does occur to me that at the time that the people in this graph were considering getting a college degree, college was shifting towards being expected of all Americans who could attend it. (See, e.g., the uptick in the first chart in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_... ). So if this is just a proxy for "family wealth," I am relatively unsurprised to hear that mortality at age 50ish is correlated with how rich a family you were born into.

by lukasb 9y ago

ceejayoz 9y ago

I'd be interested in how many stay-at-home dads are in that drop.

theparanoid 9y ago
Approximately 0%. Outside the upper-middle class people don't have the luxury of not working. Real income has stagnated for middle and lower income people.
- linkregister 9y ago
  How do you know that? From people you know or is there a resource for that information?
- brewdad 9y ago
  As child care costs have risen, at least some families in the middle have concluded that it makes little sense for the parent with worse career prospects to work solely for the purposes of paying day care costs. When stagnated incomes can no longer pay for the expenses required to work, working makes less sense financially.

adventured 9y ago

Using 1948 or the early 1950s without adjustment doesn't make sense. The US male labor pool was absorbed due to WW2 / the still vast expansion of the US military (and soon to be even more absorbed due to Korea). We had 550k men just in the US army at the start of 1948, with a US population base 1/2 what it is today. By comparison, in 1939, between the army + navy + marines, we had just 334,000 total military personnel. By 1954 we had something like 3.3 million active military personnel. That takes up a huge amount of labor slack.

geofft 9y ago

Interesting. It seems there are two results here, probably independent. Note that the article talks both about "men" in the context of employment and "middle-aged white men without college degrees" in the context of mortality: it sounds like the explanations for these two statistics are quite different (and in particular, the first result about "men" is primarily influenced by non-white men). The book it's reviewing concludes that the work rate for men in the US is falling because of mass incarceration primarily being targeted at African-American men, and because of laws that make it anywhere from hard to impossible for convicted felons to re-enter the workforce upon serving their sentence. The author of that post has bolded this passage in quoting from the book: > As we shall see, a single variable – having a criminal record – is a key missing piece in explaining why work rates and [labor force participation rates] have collapsed much more dramatically in America than other affluent Western societies over the past two generations. This single variable also helps explain why the collapse has been so much greater for American men than women and why it has been so much more dramatic for African American men and men with low educational attainment than for other prime-age men in the United States. Other sources (e.g., The New Jim Crow) argue that mass incarceration is an intentional policy aimed at keeping black people out of public life as the Jim Crow laws did in the past, which explains this claim from the top of the blog post: "... the great majority of them have not only dropped out of the workforce, they have also dropped out from any commitments or responsibilities to society." (I am partway through reading The New Jim Crow, and it does also mention that economic / technological changes have resulted in a much poorer job market for urban workers over the last half-century or so.) So, if the joblessness rates are including men who can't work because they're literally in jail, and men who can't find a job because of their criminal record, it seems like there's an obvious explanation here - the number of men in those categories has gone up sharply since 1948. However, the blog post makes another claim sourced from The Economist that for people aged 45-54, white men in the US without a college degree, in particular, have had their mortality rates rise when the mortality rates of all 45-54-year-olds in several other rich countries have fallen. (I think. It's not very clear what groups are being compared.) This is very interesting and seems like a serious problem, but it seems likely to be entirely unrelated to the previous, given the conclusions, and I'd also like to see this un-broken by race/education/age/gender in the US, and broken by those factors in other countries. I don't have a good idea what would explain this, but it does occur to me that at the time that the people in this graph were considering getting a college degree, college was shifting towards being expected of all Americans who could attend it. (See, e.g., the uptick in the first chart in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_... ). So if this is just a proxy for "family wealth," I am relatively unsurprised to hear that mortality at age 50ish is correlated with how rich a family you were born into.