Slackers

Writing for Investor's Business Daily, the editors make a strong argument that our economy has nowhere near full employment. They cite the following from a new book by Nicholas Eberstadt called Men Without Work.

>Men age 25 to 54 now have a lower labor participation rate than they did in 1940, as the Great Depression was winding down. It's also far lower than in 1948, the year millions of men from World War II were flooding the labor market.

>As noted earlier, one in six men today have no job and most have given up looking. At current trends, one in five will be out of the labor force in a generation.

>African-American men are twice as likely to be in this condition as either whites or Latinos.

>Many of these nonworking men support themselves by government disability benefits.

>Surveys show an alarming increase among men age 25 to 54, the prime working years, engaged in doing such things as "socializing, relaxing and leisure," "attending gambling establishments," "tobacco and drug use," "listening to the radio" and "arts and crafts as a hobby." Many men, it seems, have virtually no work skills at all — and no way to get them.

>Many of these trends in the collapse of male work may be a result of our soaring prison population and the "prevalence of non-institutionalized felons and ex-prisoners," Eberstadt argues.

IBD paints a relatively dismal picture. Undoubtedly fedgov has made disability benefits too easy to qualify for, perhaps understandable during the Great Recession but no longer defensible.