Lucianne.com links to a Newsweek article about the declining workforce participation rate of American men. It has dropped from 97 percent in 1950 to just 89 percent today. “Workforce participation” is defined as working or actively looking for work.
At the same time, many more people are drawing Social Security disability benefits.
Of course, since 1950, there's also been growth in the United States' safety social net. While 1960 saw only 455,000 workers on Social Security disability benefits, that had moved to 7.6 million people in 2022. Of that cohort, 1.3 million were men between the ages of 25 and 54.
Non-participation is much higher among men with no college degree. This is attributed to the loss of manufacturing jobs which have ‘migrated’ overseas while the men who formerly did them remained here and often can’t find work worth doing.
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What we’re experiencing today has happened before. Employment was high during the 1920s, until the Great Depression happened. Then many men could not find jobs.
Men who had enlisted in the military during the Great War, as World War I was then called, and worked during the 1920s were out of work. Social Security didn’t exist yet but veteran’s disability payments did.
Tens of thousands of veterans who were newly unemployed decided they’d somehow been incapacitated over a decade ago while in the military and applied for veteran’s disability benefits. The Veterans’ Administration was overwhelmed when the number of applicants jumped a hundredfold.
