Hardly Working

Nicholas Eberstadt, AEI’s Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy, makes an overdue Remnant return to ...

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Nicholas Eberstadt, AEI’s Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy, makes an overdue Remnant return to discuss his new book, Men Without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition, an expanded version of his 2016 release which examined the collapse of work for men in modern America. Why are increasingly large numbers of men abandoning the workforce? Is something similar going on with women? And what will be the social, cultural, and economic effects of this trend? Tune in to hear these questions answered, and to hear some reflections on why work is valuable in the first place.

Show Notes:

– Dr. Eberstadt’s page at AEI

– Men Without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition

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  1. David Curtin

    At 53", Jonah talks about pro-natalism in terms of "pushing the wet noodle up the carpet."

    Let that sink in for a minute.

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    Andrew

    There is another element that I think needs to be discussed, and it is the expectations and response to those expectations men have of work. I have a friend who quit his job as a software engineer because of a combination of burn out and of a lack of moral fulfillment from the job. He has been out of work for most of the year.

    He is now looking for a software engineering job that is probably unobtainable and that doesn’t exist. He wants a company that is 100% in agreement with his worldview and does things 100% they way he thinks they should be done. He also doesn’t want to be a manager or to start his own company either. There is no job like this, and if that is the bar he sets, he will never find it.

    I can’t help but imagine that this is not limited to my friend, and that there are many other people who are likewise not working until they find the “perfect” job.

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  3. Laura

    The next time you have Nicholas on again, I'd be interested in hearing his take on https://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/research/Pages/hidden-workers-untapped-talent.aspx
    That report helped explain with data my personal hell from 2009 to 2011 as a recent college graduate.

    I've heard it said "if what you're seeing is possibly due to selection bias, it's selection bias." To that point, let me provide a few personal details from my experience.

    When I had no income, I did not volunteer because volunteering takes money. All of the standard volunteer opportunities I knew about required me to drive somewhere. Driving requires putting gas in your car. It's not free. I had zero income. No unemployment. Nothing. As you watch your savings drain away month after month, you have to stop driving places unless it might help you get a job.

    I was not above minimum wage jobs in the fast food industry, but no one in the fast food industry would contact me after I submitted my resume. (I think the college degree was a red flag to them that I was going to keep looking for work while they trained me. But there's no feedback, so it's just impossible to know.)

    I was young. Yup. Young people can have a hard time breaking into an industry because they have few to no contacts to help get them in the door.

    I was unmarried. (This could also be seen as an extension of "young".) Of course I was unmarried. Neither of us had a job or any source of income. We lived on opposite sides of the country with our parents, looking for work for years. We couldn't begin our life together until we knew where we were going to live.

    I'm not the only one who went through an experience like this. The shame people feel as they go through this makes it something that no one wants to talk about. Nicholas mentioned "the depths of despair", so I know he's got something of a bead on this. I may decide to get the book to see what he's got. :-)

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    Andrew

    I work full time as a software engineer and I am also a ‘gamer’. I enjoy playing video games but would never dream of giving up work to play them full time. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with video games. I think people playing an excessive amount of them is a symptom of a larger cultural problem, and video games are not a cause.

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  5. AHenry

    Why is the break between prime-working and non-prime men at 54? There is nothing special that happens at 55. 59.5 I can access retirement savings without paying a penalty. At 62 I can begin to take reduced SS and Medicare. If I wait until 65 I get full benefits.

    So why is the break at 54-55. Seems arbitrary.

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  6. Eeeeeruqek

    Maybe the culture changed because the rewards of work no longer match the demands. Promotions are rarer, scheduling is chaotic, and good luck getting any respect these days. Who’d sign up for that?

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    Dan

    I'm going to politely rant in response to this particular episode, and build upon excellent points that both Richard Greydanus and Very Old Grumpy Guy brought up.
    First let me say that I find it very difficult to argue against the logic and premises set forth by Mr. Eberstadt and Jonah in this podcast. In particular, I will acknowledge that video games and painkillers are a scourge of men--I've observed that in my own life in addition to seeing what the data says. Like Jonah, I avoided WoW (and EverCrack) precisely for the reasons identified: I knew my limits, and I wanted to succeed in life. I've known men who get addicted to MMORPGs and decide never to climb out of that hole. That's their choice, not mine.

    Regarding the structuralist versus non-structuralist issue, I present an anecdotal hypothesis: social structures only work in society when two factors are met. My hypothesis states the first factor is that the individual is able to conform to the expectations and rules of the structure. The second factor is that society itself must be pushing the individual into being able to confirm to the expectations and rules of the structure. If neither of those factors are attainable, then the structure no longer serves the needs of the individual, and alienation of the individual from both the structure and society builds.

    One of my great frustrations with the arguments for societal norms and expectations made by Jonah, David, and others on the Remnant is that they make no allowances for those who slip through the cracks and are unable to conform or even align, even when we know we should and history proves out the idea. For the lonely men, for those addicted to video games and painkillers--they see no place for themselves in society. They either cannot be the men society asks them to be, or there are too many men competing and therefore the odds of success are realistically out of reach. Coupled with the independence of women and the ongoing revelation of different sexual preferences (fraysexual, asexual, polysexual), it can feel to a cishet man as if the world no longer needs nor wants them. So why should a man try and join a system that is perceived to be actively hostile to them? Especially when it's driven home that attempting to do so will impair the ability of women to maintain their independence--and most men have mothers/sisters/nieces/wives they want to see succeed.

    And then there's men like me, who did their utmost to conform and meet expectations. I went to college, I busted my butt to land my career job, build my nest egg, meet women, got married, and then seek to buy a home and raise kids. I *DID* all the things--and then I discovered that love does not guarantee compatibility in marriage. I ended up marrying a woman who discovered five years into our marriage that she was happiest being alone and without kids. Because of her, I have no children. I met and married another woman--and then she had the nerve to up and die on me due to an unexpected brain tumor. Then I discovered I was infertile.

    Women by and large in their thirties and forties are NOT inclined to date or marry an infertile widowed man who's been married twice. That's too much baggage, and the infertility is an instant dealbreaker for any woman who put career first and then around age 35 desperately wants a baby. Nor do parents want to deal with a firstborn son who carries the family name, who cannot continue the family name and will be the last of his line. I am estranged from my parents because after losing my wife and my fertility, they expected me to give up my career and life to move back in with them, live in their basement, and be their full-time caretaker in their elderly years. They began treating me like I was 15 again. I definitely would have hooked myself on video games and pot had I gone that route--and many men have. I will forever be on the outs as an eternal bachelor. My dating pool is receding now as women my age are divorced and favoring living alone as their kids hit college age. They're burnt out on men, and with good reason.
    I give all this personal anecdote to flavor my argument that the men Mr. Eberstadt and Jonah lament about, that the alt-right is trying to recruit, that are lost, are lost because reality no longer aligns with the expectations of society. The great curse of conservatives is that they are always right--until they are wrong. And here I would submit that perhaps the age-old solutions to the problems confronting us may no longer be the best solutions. And that we're going to have to get inventive.

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  8. Very Old Grumpy Guy

    There was a recent click through to an article that looked at this issue through a slightly different lens. The "failure" of men (really, a subset of men) was contrasted with the increased "achievement" of women. I would have liked this podcast to have spent a little more time teasing out this relative performance. While I certainly have no the expertise, nor wisdom of Eberstadt, my intuition would be that evolution baked in certain characteristics that were VERY important in men, that are no longer anywhere near as important. Once humanity realized that we could all be materially better off if we stopped killing the neighboring tribe to steal their stuff and instead made our own stuff and traded with them, the value of the warrior began a long decline. The point that was somewhat glossed over is that a subset of men are STILL the most successful in our society, but the "average" man struggles. This could have easily been a 3 hour podcast with every minute more fascinating than the last.

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    Cthocas

    Gamers tend to go into apoplectic rage whenever these sorts of conversations pop up from normies, but every adult male in his 20s and 30s knows at least a couple guys who spend 20-40+ hours a week gaming. Further, once you get out of outward-facing circles (like, say, a news site's comment section) and into gaming forums like Resetera, Gamefaqs, or the various subreddits, people are very open about spending 8+ hours a day on videogames—and yes, while on prescription painkillers or cannabis.

    It's normal behavior *within* those communities, but it's only when outsiders bring it up that the denials begin.

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      Cthocas

      Speaking of which, just this morning I happened across a discussion on reddit where a poster said he and his spouse gamed 10-14 hours a day because they are on disability, and someone else chimed in and said their girlfriend played the same amount: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/xljyye/comment/ipkjvz1/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

      I hadn't even gone out of my way to look for it; this is just *normal conversation* amongst gamers.

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        Andrew

        None of the gamers I know or interact with do this (with the exception of a couple content creators who are making a large income from video games).

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          Cthocas

          None that admit to it, anyway.

          This problem seems to be a lot like the problem of pornography, which we know is deeply pervasive, almost universal, and yet strangely no one seems to know anyone with such a problem, and no one wants to talk about it outside the circles where it's welcomed.

          A few years back I knew a youth minister who boasted of having over two thousand hours in Destiny 2, and this was just a year or two after its release. But he said this in a private Facebook group, and I doubt he'd say that at the pulpit in front of a congregation.

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    ed74siasl

    It's pretty tone-deaf to observe that torture is an anti Christian practice in a conversation acknowledging the 9/11 attacks and the war on terror, and guffaw about the rationality of a leader willing to use nuclear weapons in military conflict from the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons in military conflict.
    This is absolutely textbook "but we're the good guys, so it's cute when we do it" manichaeism.
    Do better, please.
    Are we evil and insane? Then probably other actors can also hold complex, conflicting, and even hypocritical positions without being evil and insane.

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