How Are 7 Million Unemployed Men Actually Surviving? - Nicholas Eberstadt

Nicholas Eberstadt is a political economist, demographer, American Enterprise Institute scholar, and an author. More than 7 million prime working age men in America are not looking for work, and each year that number continues to grow. Given that unemployment is at a massive low, why are so many capable men checking out of the workforce and don't intend on coming back? Expect to learn why massive cohorts of men aren’t looking for employment, the repercussions of mass joblessness, how these men are able to support themselves, why they spend over 2000 hours a year on screens while smoking weed, the reason you haven’t heard about this issue before, what it does to men's mental health, the impact of women being the bread winners and much more... Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on all Keto Brainz products at https://ketobrainz.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) and follow them on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/ketobrainz/ Extra Stuff: Buy Men Without Work - https://amzn.to/3nRIz9k Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #unemployment #masculinity #men - 00:00 Intro 00:25 Exploring the Topic of Male Unemployment 06:51 Why Are So Many Men Unemployed in America? 16:05 How These Men Are Surviving 23:15 Impact of a Criminal Record on Male Employment 30:40 Differences Between Poverty & Misery 33:45 The Evolving Role of Masculinity 37:09 Would Universal Basic Incomes Be a Net-Negative? 41:56 What is Causing Malaise in Men? 46:35 Is Nicholas Worried for the Future? 51:16 Are Men Being Sedated? 54:16 Where to Find Nicholas - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You can't say that this men without work thing is because there isn't any work for the men. Millions and millions of those jobs are not for like hedge fund managers or, you know, chemical engineers. A lot of jobs where the main qualification is showing up on time every day, not stoned. And even so, employers have not been able to fill these millions and millions of extra jobs.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  How did you come upon the topic of male unemployment?

• 0:30Speaker 00

  I make my living off of finding things that are hiding in plain sight. I've been doing this for over 40 years. Started during the Cold War, looking at the Soviet health crisis, looked at problems of poverty in the US. This particular one came to me about 10 years ago when I was hearing happy talk about the about the full employment or near full employment situation in the United States from the Federal Reserve, from politicians, from Wall Street. And I was also reading things which said that half of Americans said we were in recession. So those two things don't really go together terribly well, do they?

• 1:13Speaker 00

  So I was thinking, so what's what's the problem here? And I pulled on the thread and realized very quickly what the problem was. Our national employment statistics system was developed to track the Great Depression. And during the Great Depression times, you'd want to know how many people were unemployed. You'd want to know how many people were employed. And if a guy was neither working nor looking for work, you wouldn't even think this would be a great phenomenon. That would be kind of like, you know, a little bit of an end game. Today, it turns out that we've got four prime age men, the 25 to 54s.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  We've got four times as many guys who are neither working nor looking for work as actually unemployed, as out of a job and looking for a job. So if you're only looking at the unemployment number, you're missing four fifths of the problem. That's how I stumbled across it.

• 2:14Chris Williamson?

  What does that turn into in terms of actual numbers?

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Well, more than seven million, I'll get really nerdy on you. More than seven million men between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four, the prime ages for obvious reasons, who are in the civilian, non-institutional population. Civilian because we're not counting military, non-institution because we're not counting prisoners or people who were in mental or health facilities. And other people who could reasonably be expected to be in the workforce looking for a job.

• 2:55Chris Williamson?

  What sort of men are in this group? Demographically, education, family structure, ethnicity? Who makes up this group?

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Well, as you would guess, Chris, if there are seven million guys, there's some of everything. That's a big number. But some are more represented than others. So ethnically, African-Americans are overrepresented. But if we go into the persons of color formulation, Latinos and Asian-Americans are underrepresented. So for white, non-white, it's almost a wash. Education's what you'd think. High school dropouts, way overrepresented.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  With just high school, quite overrepresented. But surprisingly large, we say, representation of guys with college or even college degrees. Forty percent of this group has at least some college. And as I recall, about a fifth or a sixth are college grads. Here's a funny one. Marital structure, family structure. It turns out that married guys, no matter what their ethnicity, are way less likely to be in this pool. They're way more likely to be out looking for work or having work. Guys who've never been married, way more likely to be in this pool. And it's not just the wedding ring,

• 4:27Speaker 00

  although that obviously is a big predictor. If you're living under the same roof with kids and you're a guy, you're way more likely to be looking for work. I mean, that's not surprising to me. But it's kind of like the provider effect or something. And last but not least. The Census Bureau has something that they call nativity, which seems kind of weird to me. It sounds like a Christmas scene. Uh, it's what they mean is where you're born. Are you born overseas or native born? Uh, foreign born guys are way more likely to be not in this pool. Um, no matter what their ethnic background, uh, more likely than their counterparts.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  And that's not a surprise to me, and I'm sure it's not a surprise to you in particular, because people who come here from overseas are kind of motivated to do something here. And they're, they're more likely to be in the workforce.

• 5:26Chris Williamson?

  A lot of overlapping, uh, different groups there. I remember hearing you say that a married African American man is less likely to be in this cohort than an unmarried white American man.

• 5:45Speaker 00

  Absolutely true. Absolutely true. And, uh, in effect, this, uh, this little ring kind of overcomes or erases the ethnic differential disadvantage, if you want to call it that. Uh, and there are other things, uh, like that as well. If you are a foreign born guy and you're a high school dropout, and your labor force participation is going to be very close to that of a native born college guy. I mean, so it's not just, it's not just the disadvantage of the skills, right? I mean, there's something else, there's something else going on.

• 6:31Chris Williamson?

  Did you look at, uh, family structure that they came from? Were you able to break this down by single parent household that they'd grown up in?

• 6:39Speaker 00

  No, I wasn't. I mean, that's a really good question. It's a really good question. But, uh, but I, I didn't have the information that could, uh, could allow me to give you a good answer on that.

• 6:49Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so we have, uh, upfront, a rather dramatic seven million person cohort of men in the US, a large chunk of whom are not looking for work. What is the story of modern male unemployment? How do we get to the stage where this is a hidden catastrophe?

• 7:15Speaker 00

  Well, like, like so many things in history, it happens gradually. It doesn't come upon us all at once like a meteor strike.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  After the end of the Second World War, for about twenty years, the work rates and the labor force participation rates of this group of guys we're discussing, the twenty-five, the twenty-five to fifty-fourers, is pretty close to a hundred percent. Not, not a hundred percent, but pretty close. And it wasn't going anywhere. It was bouncing around a little bit. Then, starting in the mid nineteen sixties, things started to change. And from, let's say, about nineteen sixty-five, it's a good year to market by, may not be perfect, but it's pretty close.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  From nineteen sixty-five to our conversation today, it's been basically a straight line out, out of the workforce, of men, a flight from work, leaving work, not in labor force, whatever you'd like to call it. And it's eerie if you track this on a graph or a piece of paper. I did a first edition of a book on men without work in twenty sixteen, and I used, I used this graph as the cover, which is, it's almost a straight line. I mean, it's, it's not quite geo, you know, geo astronomy. It's not quite that perfect, but it's pretty close for, for the social sciences.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  And what was really shocking to me was when I came back to do a, you know, an update after, after the pandemic last year, it's almost exactly the same line. I could have taken the cover of that book and just, you know, found a ruler and kept the thing going. You know, I have no explanation for that. I mean, this is, that, this is something that happens in the, you know, in the physical sciences. This is not something that happens in the social sciences. I mean, it will change eventually, but I was just stunned by that.

• 9:26Chris Williamson?

  I heard that since around about 1950, men have retreated from the labor force at around about 0.1% per month, solidly. Is that about right?

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Um, I'd have to do the, I'd have to do the numbers on paper, but it's been, it has been absolutely relentless. And I would have started it in the mid 60s. For the 1950s, uh, for 1950s, it's more or less a kind of a slightly bouncing line with no trend that I could divine.

• 10:00Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so economies, demographics, you know, unemployment, we go through peaks and troughs. We go through cycles, boom and bust. How have you managed to find, like, explain to me the underlying dynamic that has managed to create a ruler shape?

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, all right. Um, well, we can start by the explanations that don't work, right? And because those are always so popular and they're, I think they're called received wisdom, right? So the received wisdom in this area is that this is a phenomenon driven by economic and structural technological change, that we've had this extraordinary revolution since the end of the Second World War, which is true. And we've had this tremendous set of technological changes, and that's true.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  And we've had this big shift in demand, less demand for less skilled labor, true. Outsourcing, true. China enters the World Trade Organization, true, true, true, true, true. Okay, but that's, but that's not the whole story, and it's not even most of the story, I don't think. If it were most of the story, you couldn't get a straight line like the one I'm describing to you, because we have a business cycle, right? I mean, we've got boom and bust periods, and you could go up and down. You'd see a big, you'd see a big kapow when China enters the World Trade Organization. You see a big disruption, doesn't show up. You know, when we have our, you know, beautiful little monsters that, you know,

• 11:45Speaker 00

  disrupt all our technology, you know, you'd see something. So that's not happening.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  What else isn't happening? Well, um, if you take a look at men with less skills, they are not all, you know, uh, commonly disadvantaged in the labor force. If you take a look at foreign-born guys who are high school dropouts, but they're married, their, uh, work rates and, uh, labor force participation rates are indistinguishable, as I mentioned, from college-born, uh, I mean, college guys who are domestic. Uh, on the other hand, if you take a look at a native-born guy who's never been married, it's a disaster. It's like 50% or less, uh, chance of being even in the workforce.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  So in this group that's supposedly homogenous, there are like 40 percentage points of difference in participation, so that part doesn't work so well either. Um, the, the really biggest, I think, challenge to this, uh, idea, uh, is the, um, is the extraordinary peacetime labor shortage that we're having now, which at, you know, at, at the time of our conversation, 10 or a million, uh, unfilled jobs in the United States. So you can't say that this men without work thing is because there isn't any work for the men. I mean, and millions and millions of those jobs are not for like hedge fund managers

• 13:19Speaker 00

  or, you know, I don't know, you know, chemical engineers. There are a lot of jobs where, uh, the main qualification is showing up on time, every day, not stoned. And, uh, and even so, employers have not been able to fill these millions and millions of extra jobs.

• 13:42Chris Williamson?

  Is that that employers can't get somebody to come and do the job without getting them fired? Or is that that people simply aren't applying for the jobs?

• 13:50Speaker 00

  There are a lot of jobs that people aren't applying for. I mean, we've, we have, we have seen a spike of about four million in the total number of unfilled jobs since the eve of the pandemic. We have also seen a slump of about four million total in the size of the workforce by comparison to what we would have expected from the pre-COVID trends. Not all of these are guys, I hasten to say. We're seeing now a sort of a new face to the flight from work in America.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  But the problem with the, you know, men fleeing the workforce was the original origin of all of this.

• 14:40Chris Williamson?

  How many women are added into this cohort?

• 14:45Speaker 00

  If you count, if you count women who are over the age of 55, a considerable number. There are some under 55 as well. There is a problem that is, one might say, no bigger than a man's fist on the horizon heading towards us, which is the kind of the doppelganger, the women without work. I'll tell you that in a moment. But if we look at the 55 plus group, they account for more than half of the shortfall that I just mentioned to you.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  And this is a very new phenomenon because from the 50s until about the 90s, American men and women were kind of starting to enjoy the notion of retiring early. But from the mid 90s up to the eve of COVID, these older workers were basically the only bright spot in the American labor tableau. Their work rates were going steadily up. Their labor force participation rates were going steadily up. But since then, there's been a shock and a drop. And despite the rollout of COVID, of vaccines and everything else, they haven't come back to the workforce.

• 16:04Chris Williamson?

  Getting back to this big cohort of invisible men.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:09Chris Williamson?

  How are they surviving and paying for life?

• 16:12Speaker 00

  Hmm. Well, um, as best I could, uh, as best I could figure out as a research nerd, um, you know, kind of looking at statistics and, you know, on my computer in the basement. Um, it looked to me as if there's a couple of different factors. Uh, girlfriends and family, as long as you count Uncle Sam as part of the family. People are, there are quite a large number of these guys who are living with people. Uh, either cohabiting or at home with parents or others. Uh, and that's helping to pay the bills.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Uh, what's also helping to pay the bills, uh, is, as I said, uh, the US government, in particular, uh, our disability programs for people who are unable to work. Those programs seem to have morphed away from their original humane intention. And now seem to provide an alternative income source to regular employment for several millions, for, actually for millions and millions of these guys.

• 17:33Chris Williamson?

  How many? What's, what's the proportion?

• 17:35Speaker 00

  This is a really hard question to answer, uh, but I'll do my best. It should be an easy question. You should be able to go to an office in Washington and ask a bureaucrat, how many checks are being cut for people who are on disability? I mean, taxpayers want to know, right? I mean, it sounds like a pretty easy thing.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Reason it's not easy is because we have a crazy quilt of disability programs that don't play nice with each other. Uh, so the Social Security Administration has three different programs that kind of talk to each other. Then there's the Veterans Administration that has veterans benefits. Then there's, uh, workman's comp programs all around the country. Then there are state level, uh, disability programs. There are probably others that I don't even know about. And. As best I could figure out from, you know, trying to draw in these, you know, draw in the

• 18:36Speaker 00

  dragnet, uh, before COVID, over half of the guys who were in this seven million pool,

• 18:46Speaker 00

  were obtaining at least one of these benefits. Many of them were obtaining more than, more than one. And about two thirds were living in a home that was getting at least one of these benefits. Now, I would hasten to add that these are not, um, these are not princely prizes that these guys are getting. It's pretty penurious. But with the add-ons from other welfare benefits, which you can,

• 19:14Speaker 00

  become eligible for through disability is enough to provide this alternative to working life.

• 19:22Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so that may be able to get them by, given the fact that they're not working, not in education, employment, or training. What are they doing? What do, what do, what do they spend their time doing?

• 19:36Speaker 00

  Well, we only know what they say they're doing, and we know what they say they're doing because they answer surveys that Uncle Sam sends them sometimes. The, uh, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, uh, has this annual program it calls an American Time Use Survey, and it asks thousands and thousands of people, what do you do from the moment you get up in the morning till the time you go to sleep, and how long do you sleep? So they don't just ask people who are working, they just people, they ask people who are adults of all ages. Um, so we've got a fair, you know, a fair number of returns from the neither working nor looking for work guys, right?

• 20:18Speaker 00

  Now, I hasten to say, everybody is a liar, and surveys are full of lies. But we can take this, you know, self-reported, um, information as a first cut. They, they say, they basically don't do, um, civil society, uh, almost no worship, almost no charitable work, almost no volunteering. Uh, they got a lot of time on their hands, we know that, but they do surprisingly little housework. They say they do surprising little housework, and surprising little help with other people in the home. What they say they do a lot of is watch screens.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  Now, these surveys don't tell you what they're watching or how they're watching at just, you know, their screen time.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  About 2,000 hours a year. Okay, now 2,000 hours a year would qualify as a fair full-time job. I mean, maybe not if you're in a law firm, but pretty much anywhere else. So it qualifies as a pretty, uh, pretty good full-time job. And, um, the skill which they're developing is being in front of a screen on a couch. And to make the situation even more dispiriting than that sounds, every so often, these surveys have a little extra component of questions. And before the, um, before the pandemic, one of these components was, do you take pain medication? And about half of these guys said, yes, I take pain medication every day.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  Now, doesn't say what the medication is, doesn't say if it's actually a prescription. Uh, but that's a lot of people sitting on their couches in front of screens, don't.

• 22:12Chris Williamson?

  Am I right in saying that what you've just said is of this neat 7 million cohort, on average, they spend around about 2,000 hours per year watching screens? And of this same cohort, half of them are taking daily pain medication of one kind or another?

• 22:32Speaker 00

  That's, that's what they say. And I should be a little careful about the, uh, not in labor force versus neat. About 10% or slightly more than 10% of these guys are basically full-time students. Uh, they're, they're getting ready, they're training to get back to work. Their time use looks like an employed guy's time is. So we're talking about six plus million who are in the neat pool.

• 23:00Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say it's a, it's a silver lining around a cloud to say, well, there is 10%, the 10% are...

• 23:08Speaker 00

  It's not all 7 million, but it's a big number. It's a big...

• 23:11Chris Williamson?

  Almost all of them, okay.

• 23:14Chris Williamson?

  What about the way that being, having a criminal record gets folded into this?

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Well, Chris, once again, there is no office you can go to in Washington, and Washington has a great many offices that can tell you how many, how many adult felons there are in the US, or how many prime age guys have a criminal record.

• 23:42Speaker 00

  And I tried, tried to get at that, and the best I could do was to use some, I think, pretty good work by some defiant demographic nerds who tried to reconstruct the whole post-war period of crime and punishment, how many people had survived over a long period, how many had gone back to jail.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  They estimated that as of 2010, there were 19.5 million adults, overwhelmingly men, in the United States who had a criminal record. And with a reasonable back-of-the-envelope estimates, that would take us to about 25 million today. We know that the US has got this famous mass incarceration thing going on, but the prisons have got about 2 million people in them. That means that for every person who's behind bars, there are 10 million or more, or 10

• 24:46Speaker 00

  or more, who are in society as a whole, in general, and not, not behind bars, have a criminal record. My, my own back-of-the-envelope, and I can't be too, you know, can't be too precise about this, given the uncertainties, but my own back-of-the-envelope is that about 1 in 7 adult guys has a criminal conviction in his background in the United States of America at this point, and probably slightly more than that in the prime age group. So. We're talking about a lot of, a lot of guys with convictions in their background,

• 25:31Speaker 00

  who are kind of invisible to our statistics. But from what little evidence of our senses, you know, we can draw upon, they're way more likely, you know, not to be at work, to be in this kind of pool.

• 25:45Chris Williamson?

  Have you got any idea whether that's because they're struggling to be accepted for jobs? Because they have to list the fact that they do have a felony record?

• 25:53Speaker 00

  You know, it's maddening. That's, it's maddening because I can't give you a straightforward answer to this, which is a terribly important question and millions of people's lives depend on the answer to it. We, we don't have the evidence in a sort of a statistical way. You know, we've got this world of anecdotes and there are, you know, thousands and thousands of points of light out there that are trying to deal with this, but they're all disconnected. If we had, if we lifted a finger and got this information together, which we could do pretty quickly, wouldn't be perfect, but it would shine a big, a big light on part of this.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  We'd have the evidence for evidence-based programs all around the country. And we don't have that. There, it's clear that there are some areas where there are restrictions against employment of ex-cons, including the financial sector and other places.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  There's a whole question about whether the ban the box question, whether there should be a ban the box, whether asking people if they'd had trouble is prejudicial. My own contrarian impression is...

• 27:15Speaker 00

  That employers actually end up discriminating more if they don't know the answer to that question. They kind of overestimate on their own part and they're more likely to, they're more likely to be suspicious of low, less educated minority, uh, young men than if they had the actual information. But that's my impression.

• 27:38Chris Williamson?

  So your concern is that, among many, many concerns, is that because we have very, very inferior data to what we should do in order to be able to dig down into this, any interventions that you do want to do to try and fix the problem can be pointing in the wrong direction. They can miss the mark entirely because we don't know, let's just use the ex-con felony, uh, example cohort. You don't know if it's an intervention that needs to be done on the side of the employer to encourage employers to bring on people who do have criminal records. You don't know if the intervention needs to be to get these people from prison, back into looking for jobs, get them into training, get them into the routine. Maybe it's support groups, maybe it's something to do with psychological health.

• 28:23Chris Williamson?

  You don't know where this issue is coming from because you have insufficient inferior data.

• 28:27Speaker 00

  Well, there, there will be people who are working in, you know, God's own trenches, you know, with reentry for ex-cons who will have a wealth of knowledge on this and who can, uh, tell everybody more about this. But in terms of numbers and patterns, we're blind on this. As a general observation, we always have to be careful about unintended consequences because there's always a policy and there's always an unintended consequence of the policy. And if you don't ask about both of those, you're not looking at the whole situation.

• 29:10Chris Williamson?

  How haven't we heard more about this? Like, how haven't, how haven't we heard about this huge seven million man?

• 29:18Chris Williamson?

  Behemoth.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Well, I have some guesses. I mean, one guess is that this is a disadvantaged group that doesn't fall within the academy and the media's preconceptions of disadvantage. They're, they're guys, they're of, you know, prime working age and they don't fit, fit the victim profile terribly well. So, you know, horsemen pass by. I mean, that's part of it. It's also true that in the United States, the, these prime age men have not

• 30:03Speaker 00

  been a menace to society. They've been a menace mainly to themselves. They've been dying of deaths of despair and overdoses. They haven't been out like in the banlieues of Paris, like setting the cars on fire. So they haven't been getting a lot of attention for themselves. And, you know, because they're not an organized political group, there is no real constituency for them. So, you know, as long as, so they can be neglected at no great peril for any immediate constituencies in the country.

• 30:46Chris Williamson?

  I've heard you talk about the difference between poverty and misery as well. How does that fold in?

• 30:55Speaker 00

  By any 19th century standard, whether it's in the UK or in the US or Australia or in any of the affluent societies of the 1800s.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  These guys are rolling in money. I mean, they're the, they're probably in about the second quintile on average in our consumption scale in the United States. But that would make you a very, very, very wealthy person back in the 1860s or 1870s in any of our English speaking countries. So, lack of resources, lack of material resources is not the issue here. They, you can be miserable on quite a high standard of living.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  And the degradation that these men experience, or self inflict to some degree, is, it's heartrending and it's a tremendous loss of human potential. But just think of it, I mean, you don't have to be a philosopher to know that, you know, 2,500 years ago Aristotle said that, you know, that we're human beings or social creatures. You know, if you're not connected to society and you're a human being, you kind of suffer for it. Uh, that's why, you know, it's why solitary confinement is considered a cruel and unusual punishment by some people. Uh, so if you're not connected to work,

• 32:39Speaker 00

  you're more likely not to be connected to family. Uh, like more likely not to be connected to faith, although that's another story. And you're, you don't even go out of your house to be in your community. Um, you know, that is a pretty miserable baseline. I mean, I can imagine being out of work and spending all of your time doing community gardening or volunteering, or I don't know, memorizing kapital in the original German or something. I mean, something like that, which would be a use of your time uh, that wouldn't necessarily degrade you. But what I've described to you is not that.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  It's kind of like a path of misery.

• 33:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, wanking on weed isn't the same as hoeing a garden and building some flowers. So this is one, uh, really, I guess.

• 33:35Chris Williamson?

  Interesting area that I've spoken about an awful lot recently. I flew to Doha to have a debate about traditional masculinity being degraded and stuff. What do you understand about how men are seeing themselves and their role in the world? Given this change in terms of what they're doing with work?

• 33:59Speaker 00

  Well, it's you don't, you don't have to be a sociobiologist to say that there is something unnatural about society and history's long-term providers suddenly being flipped into this position of dependence. And you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to think that there might be some sort of psychological fallout from this inversion here.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  Whether this speaks to greater metaphysical problems in the US or the world is a, is a bigger topic. My, my boss, Mary Eberstadt has opined about that at some length and she's always right. So I will defer to that.

• 35:02Chris Williamson?

  I am very interested in the idea of providers becoming dependents and us not having the language or the archetype framing or the guardrails to be able to give them something that makes them feel proud. And then also the distinction between poverty and misery, you know, being told that you are from a

• 35:26Chris Williamson?

  Benefiting from the past oppressive patriarchal superstructure, which has given you all of the advantages that some other group hasn't had. Meanwhile, guys are, you know, not starving, at least in terms of for money or for food, but very much are for meaning, very much are for social connection, very much are for sobriety.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 35:50Chris Williamson?

  It's, it just seems to me like the absolute sort of synthesis of everything that performative empathy allows to happen, which is to do what looks good in place of what is good when it comes to trying to enact social policy and campaigning for people that are struggling.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  Well, I think you've put it very well. You can take a technocratic approach to addressing some of the problems I've described. The nice thing about a technocratic approach is that you can pretend that it is value neutral. But what we're describing here is completely laden with values. And the normative questions of how you find meaning in life and what one does with life and what your purpose is and what, you know, what fills the soul, you know,

• 36:52Speaker 00

  what fills the hole in your soul is absolutely critical here. And, you know, if we kind of pretend, pretend none of this really matters, well, you can kind of guess what's going to happen.

• 37:07Chris Williamson?

  This, to me, seems to point a rather worrying picture at the potential for UBI. Not that I was a massive proponent of it in any case, but you mentioned that the pandemic basically caused Washington to stumble into a dress rehearsal for UBI. And we're seeing these guys who have sufficient material wealth to be able to keep them going, but they don't seem to be flourishing.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  There's a whole argument about whether UBI would bankrupt our public finance system. That's a separate argument. It's a very important argument and it might put an end to this discussion right there. I would say, however, take a look at the time use of these neat men. And then ask yourself, do you want to buy more of this? Is this something that society should really want to subsidize? Because you're going to get it. You're going to get a lot of people with UBI who have a lot of time on their hands.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  What are they going to do with that if they don't have the, you know, gyroscope for it? And absolutely during, during the early months of the pandemic, actually for almost a year and a half in the pandemic, we were dispensing more benefits in pandemic uninsurance than unemployment insurance than we had unemployed people in the United States. At one point, for every hundred people who were unemployed, we had about 250 beneficiaries of pandemic unemployment insurance. So it was indeed a kind of a test drive. Fortunately, it's over.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  What's unfortunate is we don't know how long the lingering effects of it will reverberate or how badly they will reverberate.

• 39:10Chris Williamson?

  Would you guess, would you hypothesize that there is going to be a hangover of some kind? That the trend and the routine that people got into of not working during the pandemic is going to set a habit going forward?

• 39:27Speaker 00

  I think we're living in it right now. Look around. 10, 11 million open jobs. Great resignation, giving more bargaining power to people who are job applicants than any time in my long life. Millions of people still sitting on the sidelines, more than before the pandemic. That sounds to me like, like immediate consequences. What we can see from the labor market is if you stay with the labor market, if you're, if you declare yourself unemployed, your chances of getting back to work within a matter of weeks are very high.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Once you cut that line, it's a little bit like going off under the space shuttle. Then you're kind of out in space and your odds of doing something other than being a long-termer get really bad.

• 40:27Chris Williamson?

  I thought that unemployment rates weren't that bad at the moment overall. What sort of fuckery is going on with the numbers to be able to allow your world and the world of low unemployment to exist?

• 40:44Speaker 00

  Well, we've ended up with the best of all possible worlds, haven't we, Chris? We've got low unemployment and also low work. And so how do you add it? Low work, low unemployment, and what's the rest of it? Oh, it's the people who aren't looking for work, I remember now. So we've got this circumstance, which of course only a fabulously affluent society could afford without immediately careening into disaster. You know, we can eventually careen into disaster with this, I guess, but we can postpone it for quite a while. And this is what happens when you're fighting the last war. Our employment statistics are still fighting the Great Depression.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  So they get great numbers on, as good numbers they could get, on unemployment, good numbers on work, and then whatever the other thing is, well, that wasn't happening much during the Depression, so here we are.

• 41:43Chris Williamson?

  Because anybody that could work would work back then.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  That was a presumption, and I think it was probably a pretty good presumption.

• 41:52Chris Williamson?

  That's very interesting. So I'm currently kind of obsessed with the role of men in the modern world, their retreat from relationships, their retreat from friendships overall.

• 42:06Chris Williamson?

  Have you considered if there is a broader dynamic going on here that ties together the general sort of malaise that men are finding themselves in?

• 42:18Speaker 00

  Well, I'm not a philosopher, but I do demographics and I can count. And I mean, I'm a sixty-seven-year-old grandfather with four kids, right? And so I am so far from...

• 42:35Speaker 00

  The forefront of the battlefield right now, but I can kind of read it the way I read science fiction and try to kind of understand it. But the the idea that the idea, let's see, how do I put this for a family audience? The idea that young men would not be interested in real live women would have been kind of absurd 50 years ago.

• 43:03Chris Williamson?

  Did you see, so my favorite or most terrifying piece of research that I've seen recently was from Pew. In nineteen, in 2019, sixty one percent of men said that they were looking for either casual or long term relationships. In 2023, that number has dropped to 50%. One in two men between the ages of 18 and 30 aren't looking for either casual or long term relationships. Now, for the men that are listening who have been through that age bracket or in it, you understand the power, the reality distortion field that is the male sex drive between the ages of 18 and 30. The fact that you can have something that happens that can overcome that is

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:49Chris Williamson?

  wild.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's like science fiction.

• 43:53Chris Williamson?

  What's going on? Come on, Nicholas, give me, put your best philosopher tinfoil hat on and give me, give me your ideas.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. I started looking at this, we're getting away a little bit from men without work, but I think I'll wander back to it. I started looking at this in Japan, the numbers about Japan about two decades ago, when young men and women were not only saying that they were less likely to have had sex by given, you know, 20, age 25, age 20, whatever, but also saying that they were less interested in this. And at the time, I thought, well, everybody knows that the Japanese are just separate from the rest of humanity. They see us as all gaigen, they see us as all unspeakably weird. This is just some Japanese thing. Little

• 44:45Speaker 00

  did I know that this was the leading indicator for where everything else was going to be going.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  I had assumed that we were just in our regular garden variety family decay thing in, you know, post-war America. But then this, um, this new eruption comes along and the, uh, you know, the wonderful little devices kind of turn out to be turbocharging this, or at least complicit in some sort of way with this. And, um, I again defer to my boss, Mary Eberstadt. Um, and Mary has, uh, I won't say argued, but she has ominously mused about

• 45:31Speaker 00

  the possibility that nurture and wanting family and wanting children is not something that is hardwired into us in our DNA inviolably, but rather is something more like a muscle that we develop through use and through seeing, the same way that little cats know how to climb down from trees if they live with other cats and they get stuck up in the trees if they don't have cats to look at.

• 46:00Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay. So it's kind of like a memetic?

• 46:05Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. Renee Girard, a memesis, that sort of thing. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the musing of it. I, you know.

• 46:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's interesting. Well, I mean, so there's a guy, Stephen Shaw. Are you familiar with Stephen?

• 46:16Speaker 00

  I've, I've heard the name, yeah.

• 46:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So he did Birth Gap, which is a fantastic documentary. I know that you're big on your.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  I talked to him, I talked to him a while ago. I haven't seen the documentary.

• 46:26Chris Williamson?

  He was in Qatar with me. So he had a debate a couple of days after me. So we got to go for a bunch of lunches and dinners while I was out there. Also brought him on the show. I thought he was absolutely fantastic. Um, I mean, going back to the men in work thing, but also feel free to fold demographic collapse in as well. How worried are you about all this?

• 46:46Speaker 00

  Well, I'm worried about it as a citizen. I'm worried about it as a researcher. I'm worried about it as a parent and, you know, a grandparent, somebody who'd like to see, you know, our society continue.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  Things can turn around. Things, things don't always head in a linear direction. In fact, they seldom seem to head for very, very long in the linear direction. This 50-year trend in the exit from the labor force, a pretty long linear trend. It's exceptional in that way, I think. What'll turn it around? I think is some, is not going to be economic and structural change. It's going to be a change in people's viewpoints and values and metaphysics. We've had, as you know, we've had a couple of great awakenings in the United States in the past.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  We've had other little eruptions. It's going to be a change in mindset. And I don't see, I don't see why we can't have a change in mindset. As a, you know, as a social observer analyst, I can tell you that our tools are poor enough that it takes us a while even to recognize when a change has already started. So for all we could know, you know, this conversation has already started and too, you know, blind and weak to have detected it yet.

• 48:22Chris Williamson?

  Are you alluding to the fact that a social change to be able to give some sympathy, support to the chunk of men that are in this seven million?

• 48:37Speaker 00

  Not just, yes, of course, of course empathy and support. I mean, we have an extraordinary empathy gap in the United States today. We can't even, people who are in the intellectual classes and the describing classes can't accurately describe the arguments of people with whom they disagree because of, because those arguments are bad and evil. They can't even do the intellectual thing of describing this accurately. I mean, that's a huge empathy gap. But more than that,

• 49:09Speaker 00

  I think finding, finding spiritual and other meaning in life that takes you outside of yourself and reattaches you to humanity and to eternity.

• 49:29Chris Williamson?

  That's going to be a challenge, given how atomized our devices have made us. You know, if you, even if you want to go secular with this, right? And you want to say, join a local pickleball club, pick up trash, look after the local dogs, you join an art class, do yoga, do whatever, right?

• 49:48Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 49:48Chris Williamson?

  For as long as you have a incredibly convenient, incredibly distractable, highly distracting device that sits in your pocket, getting yourself up off the couch on an evening time is going to be hard. If you're spending 2,000 hours per year on the couch playing video games, smoking weed, there's a very high bar for you to get over that.

• 50:10Speaker 00

  Amen, amen. And, and I can't tell you what the next big innovation is, whether it's going to be a chip in the head or what the next.

• 50:20Chris Williamson?

  Virtual reality or whatever.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  Well, virtual reality is already here, sure. I mean, it'll get better and more, more enticing.

• 50:31Speaker 00

  It's it's going to have to it's going to have to come from from each from people themselves. And it it can it may be a it may be a revulsion. It may be a sad learning process, but I don't I don't have any doubt that that we won't. We won't entire we will not entirely be enslaved by this. There'll be some sort of a reaction, which will, I think, help to help to open people's minds again.

• 51:05Chris Williamson?

  Oddly, the revolution actually sounds like quite a good thing, although that's not usually what I would say. There's one other element that I've been playing with for nearly a year now, which is, given the highest ever rates of male sexlessness that we've seen, this sort of despondency in terms of the lack of work and meaning and so on and so forth. Why hasn't young male syndrome kicked in? Why isn't it that guys are running around setting cars on fire and pushing over granny and graffitiing walls and stuff like that? And to me, it seems like the most obvious potential outlet is that they're being sedated by screens, porn, easy access to video games, social media, et cetera, et cetera. That seems to be the most obvious one.

• 51:47Chris Williamson?

  And the problem that you have, it's like a perfect marriage of what you've taught me today and what I already kind of knew, which is, if you are part of a previously identified beneficiary of a system, the ability for the people now in charge of that system to give you sympathy and to try and raise you up is going to be so low. No one is going to come and say, why don't we spend more time raising up men, especially, you know, predominantly white, predominantly American men?

• 52:22Chris Williamson?

  Who's going to come along and do that? There's no card carrying campaign and it's the exact same people. You said it earlier on. They haven't galvanized themselves into one group that goes down the street with placards, waving things and creating social media campaigns.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  I think it's going to be a spontaneous movement. I think it's highly unlikely that something will be organized and developed, much less centrally, centrally distributed from Washington. But the proposition that something will generate spontaneously and spread like a prairie fire would not surprise me. So when people see something good, they want more of it.

• 53:08Chris Williamson?

  Just one final thing. What's the economic cost of this? What's the economic cost of this group of people being outside of the workforce?

• 53:18Speaker 00

  Well, it means slower, slower economic growth for the country as a whole. But not just that, it means bigger income and wealth gaps, means more welfare dependence. It probably means more public debt. It means you have to start doing the second order impact on fragile families and the third order impact on what this means for trust and social institutions. I haven't tried to do, you know, a whole of parts calculation on this, but it's, it's a big economic cost and it's an enormous moral cost to our society.

• 54:01Chris Williamson?

  Nicholas Eberstadt, ladies and gentlemen. Nicholas, I really, really enjoy this. I think that this insight is one that much, much, much more people should be talking about. Where can people go if they want to keep up to date with the work that you do?

• 54:16Speaker 00

  You can probably, for the foreseeable future, use St. Google to look for Nicholas Eberstadt. I've got this book, Men Without Work, you can probably find that somewhere. I have a scholar's webpage at the American Enterprise Institute, AEI.org, Nicholas Eberstadt.

• 54:39Chris Williamson?

  Nicholas, I appreciate you. Thank you for today.

• 54:42Speaker 00

  Hey, thank you for making the time for me.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 55:01Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 55:08Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.