Investor's Business Daily: Caution: Men (Not) At Work
RUSH: Okay. Investor's Business Daily, IBD, headline: "Caution: Men (Not) at Work -- While the Fed and government policymakers fret over "full employment," a new study by one of America's leading demographers and economists argues that in fact we are in the midst of a full-blown unemployment crisis -- one that remains, in his words, 'hidden.'" It's not hidden from me. Anybody with half a brain knows that we have an unemployment crisis: 94 million Americans not working!
The labor force participation rate is right now around 62%. That's the lowest it's been since the seventies, the Jimmy Carter seventies. "This Friday, a new jobs report will come out. If the Wall Street consensus is correct, it will show the unemployment rate continuing to hover around 5% while nonfarm payrolls will grow about 180,000 for the month. But that won't tell the whole story.
"Nicholas Eberstadt, a fellow," that just means he's a thinker, "at the American Enterprise Institute, argues in a new book called 'Men Without Work,' due out next week, that we're suffering not from full employment, but massive underemployment -- in particular, nearly one out of six working-age men have no job and are no longer looking for one. A release for his book calls this 'a hidden time bomb with far-reaching economic, social and political consequences.' With 10 million fewer male workers in the labor force than we should have, it's hard to disagree. This portends an entire generation of men with only a tenuous connection to the discipline and rewards of work..."
Now, I gotta say something that's gonna be... In this day and age, it's entirely yet unnecessarily provocative. For the longest time... You know, the values of work are many and varied, and some of them are direct, such as producing income. I mean, you have to live. Work is how you earn your living. It's how you pay the bills. I mean, that's the direct, number one benefit of work. But there are so many others -- and it has always been true, whether the feminazis want to hear it or not.
When talking about men -- and men and women are different, and I don't care what anybody thinks, says, or tries to say otherwise. Men and women are different, and men have derived their sense of self-worth from their work. Not only, but a great, great percentage. A great percentage of the self-worth that men have comes from their career, their job, their work. That is how they define themselves. Their job, their work, their career, their adjustments is from where they derive their self-esteem, and it may be becoming true for an increasing number of women as our culture evolves.
I'm not trying to exclude women, but for the longest time that was one of the unhidden, unmentioned but very tangible aspects of men working. And you take that away and you have a problem on your hands. Not just the idle time, not just the lack of revenue, not just no income being produced, not just the inability to provide for yourself. The whole idea for many past generations of men -- the test was, the objective was, the measure of a man was -- how well he provides for family, protection, income, and all that.
Now, feminism sought to attack that, because they saw that as giving men more substance and more meaning and not including women and so forth. But, look, all that's cockamamie, because it happens to be psychologically and physiologically true. Men do not derive their self-esteem from whether or not they can play golf, how many beers they can consume on Friday night or any of that. Now, sadly some do, but I'm speaking here now on traditional majority ways.
If you take all that away, you have a recipe for big problems.
You have men who feel worthless, purposeless, and unnecessary. And that is what is being discussed here: "An entire generation of men with only a tenuous connection to the discipline and rewards of work, it'll have an enormous impact on future generations of young men. It's not exclusively a problem of the lower income classes, however. Today women make up 57% of all college graduates, meaning that men in the current generation will be enormously underrepresented in the well-paying professions that require a college degree."
That is not, by the way, by accident. There is a reason fewer and fewer men go to college. There's a reason fewer and fewer men want to go to college. So this guy's theory is that "[i]n short, men are in danger of becoming a hidden, and combustible, underclass," and that's not good. A pull quote from the piece: "This is indeed a silent time bomb ticking at the heart of our economy. To ignore it will surely lead the U.S. down the path to terminal economic and productivity decline, a lower standard of living and an also-ran status among the global economies."
Men and women are different. And men not working, men not producing, are men who don't have a lot of self-worth. And you know what happens from that. If you don't like yourself, forget anybody else. If you don't value yourself, if you have a perpetual inferiority complex, just in itself that's not good. It's exacerbated by these kinds of economic trends. "Okay, Rush, so what's your solution?" Well, that's not... We're not at that stage yet, and I doubt that a whole lot of people would automatically agree with any of this.
So we still have to reach the, quote/unquote, "consensus" on the existence of this program.
The piece has all kinds of stats that I could share with you, but it's numbers. You lose track of numbers when you're listening to them and don't have them in front of you. But "'Over the last three decades the labor-market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition, employment rates, occupational stature and real wage levels,' wrote MIT economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman in Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor and Education." And that occupational stature is every bit as important as the wage levels the two go together.
RUSH: Okay. Investor's Business Daily, IBD, headline: "Caution: Men (Not) at Work -- While the Fed and government policymakers fret over "full employment," a new study by one of America's leading demographers and economists argues that in fact we are in the midst of a full-blown unemployment crisis -- one that remains, in his words, 'hidden.'" It's not hidden from me. Anybody with half a brain knows that we have an unemployment crisis: 94 million Americans not working!
The labor force participation rate is right now around 62%. That's the lowest it's been since the seventies, the Jimmy Carter seventies. "This Friday, a new jobs report will come out. If the Wall Street consensus is correct, it will show the unemployment rate continuing to hover around 5% while nonfarm payrolls will grow about 180,000 for the month. But that won't tell the whole story.
"Nicholas Eberstadt, a fellow," that just means he's a thinker, "at the American Enterprise Institute, argues in a new book called 'Men Without Work,' due out next week, that we're suffering not from full employment, but massive underemployment -- in particular, nearly one out of six working-age men have no job and are no longer looking for one. A release for his book calls this 'a hidden time bomb with far-reaching economic, social and political consequences.' With 10 million fewer male workers in the labor force than we should have, it's hard to disagree. This portends an entire generation of men with only a tenuous connection to the discipline and rewards of work..."
Now, I gotta say something that's gonna be... In this day and age, it's entirely yet unnecessarily provocative. For the longest time... You know, the values of work are many and varied, and some of them are direct, such as producing income. I mean, you have to live. Work is how you earn your living. It's how you pay the bills. I mean, that's the direct, number one benefit of work. But there are so many others -- and it has always been true, whether the feminazis want to hear it or not.
When talking about men -- and men and women are different, and I don't care what anybody thinks, says, or tries to say otherwise. Men and women are different, and men have derived their sense of self-worth from their work. Not only, but a great, great percentage. A great percentage of the self-worth that men have comes from their career, their job, their work. That is how they define themselves. Their job, their work, their career, their adjustments is from where they derive their self-esteem, and it may be becoming true for an increasing number of women as our culture evolves.
I'm not trying to exclude women, but for the longest time that was one of the unhidden, unmentioned but very tangible aspects of men working. And you take that away and you have a problem on your hands. Not just the idle time, not just the lack of revenue, not just no income being produced, not just the inability to provide for yourself. The whole idea for many past generations of men -- the test was, the objective was, the measure of a man was -- how well he provides for family, protection, income, and all that.
Now, feminism sought to attack that, because they saw that as giving men more substance and more meaning and not including women and so forth. But, look, all that's cockamamie, because it happens to be psychologically and physiologically true. Men do not derive their self-esteem from whether or not they can play golf, how many beers they can consume on Friday night or any of that. Now, sadly some do, but I'm speaking here now on traditional majority ways.
If you take all that away, you have a recipe for big problems.
You have men who feel worthless, purposeless, and unnecessary. And that is what is being discussed here: "An entire generation of men with only a tenuous connection to the discipline and rewards of work, it'll have an enormous impact on future generations of young men. It's not exclusively a problem of the lower income classes, however. Today women make up 57% of all college graduates, meaning that men in the current generation will be enormously underrepresented in the well-paying professions that require a college degree."
That is not, by the way, by accident. There is a reason fewer and fewer men go to college. There's a reason fewer and fewer men want to go to college. So this guy's theory is that "[i]n short, men are in danger of becoming a hidden, and combustible, underclass," and that's not good. A pull quote from the piece: "This is indeed a silent time bomb ticking at the heart of our economy. To ignore it will surely lead the U.S. down the path to terminal economic and productivity decline, a lower standard of living and an also-ran status among the global economies."
Men and women are different. And men not working, men not producing, are men who don't have a lot of self-worth. And you know what happens from that. If you don't like yourself, forget anybody else. If you don't value yourself, if you have a perpetual inferiority complex, just in itself that's not good. It's exacerbated by these kinds of economic trends. "Okay, Rush, so what's your solution?" Well, that's not... We're not at that stage yet, and I doubt that a whole lot of people would automatically agree with any of this.
So we still have to reach the, quote/unquote, "consensus" on the existence of this program.
The piece has all kinds of stats that I could share with you, but it's numbers. You lose track of numbers when you're listening to them and don't have them in front of you. But "'Over the last three decades the labor-market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition, employment rates, occupational stature and real wage levels,' wrote MIT economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman in Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor and Education." And that occupational stature is every bit as important as the wage levels the two go together.