Writing for
RealClearPolitics, Mona Charen reviews Nicholas Eberstadt's book
Men Without Work. His topic is the vastly increased percentage of working age male Americans who are neither working nor looking for work.
The participation of prime-age men in the labor force fell from 94.1 percent in 1948 to 84.3 percent in 2015.
Who are these new non-workers? Most are low-skilled, never married and native-born, and many are African-American. High school dropouts are the most likely group to be out of the labor force, but 40 percent of non-workers have some college under their belts, and one-sixth are college graduates. A significant number have felony convictions and/or prison time in their pasts.
How do they make ends meet? Many live with family members who earn income -- and then there are government benefits. The average working man received $500 in benefits from the government in 2014. The average non-working man got $5,700. Disability payments seem to account for a large share of the benefits the non-employed receive, and it's an open secret that most are not truly disabled.
Marriage seems to be a key factor, strongly associated with working. Does marriage cause working? Perhaps to some degree, but more likely, working enables marriage.
Married black men are more likely to be in the workforce than unmarried white men of the same age. Similarly, the labor-force participation rate for married whites with only a high school degree exceeds that of unmarried whites with some college or associate degrees.
As regular readers know, we've been writing about workforce non-participation for several years, blaming too-generous disability benefits for much of it. Perhaps we should give more credit to the unintended consequences of incarceration.
