When the game is this heavily rigged I guess some people just decide not to play...

Modern men have no incentive to support the system that force them to stress, anxiety, abuse and exploitation in the form of unreasonable demands. So most are checking out. Some are retiring early. Some coast at job. Some live minimalist lifestyle.

The Independent Women's Forum (IWF, not to be confused with the International Women's Forum) is an anti-feminist organization predominantly funded by right-wing foundations

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Independent_Women%27s_Forum

Basically, the author is backed by right-wing media moguls to say that there's nothing wrong with our current work culture or societal expectations, but rather the real problem is welfare. They don't believe anyone is actually disabled and instead imply that they're all just lazy. Why is this on r/Futurology ?

[deleted]

What on earth is this sexist bs? I was excited to read it based on the post title, as it seems an interesting and significant topic. Turns out they're talking about "prime-age" men and what happens when you don't have kids at home to cause your manly manhood to take you to work.

> It seems to be very difficult to get male long-termers back into the workforce.

This article seems to completely ignore what is probably the largest group of long-term unemployed: those who have simply given up on finding work because nobody will hire them.

Today's jobseeker is expected to submit hundreds or thousands of applications in the hope of receiving an offer. This leaves employers with hundreds or thousands of applicants for a single position, while leaving jobseekers exhausted, depressed, and mentally broken.

Additionally, it is expected that each application include a customized resume and cover letter, and if the jobseeker is lucky enough to land an interview then they can expect multiple rounds with multiple interviewers each looking for the slightest reason to exclude them from consideration.

Jobseeking in 2022 is a grinding, dehumanizing experience designed to crush the human spirit until there is nothing left but a desperate, obedient little worker drone.

It is pathological, intentionally and needlessly cruel to jobseekers, and the people who give up probably do so because the only alternative seems to be continued rejection, complete mental breakdown, and eventual suicide.

This is interesting:

>They’re disproportionately native born. Foreign-born men of every ethnicity and almost every educational attainment are more likely than their counterparts to be in the labor force or at work.

And this:

> you were intimating, there are millions and millions of jobs available for people whose skills are basically to show up on time regularly and sober. Yet, despite all of the bargaining power that job applicants have right now during this Great Resignation that we’re in, these men, and also now women, who are on the sidelines of the economy aren’t being drawn back in.

>What I would say, what I think about this, is that economic systems are pretty good, especially market systems, are pretty good at solving economic or market problems, but I think what we may face in the manpower situation of the moment is something that isn’t entirely an economic problem, isn’t a question of wages not rising rapidly enough or opportunities seeming sufficiently attractive. One of the things which we’ve, unfortunately, noticed over recent decades is that once men fall out of the workforce for some period of time, even if they are in their 20s or 30s, it’s hard to get them back in. That’s not true for people who are unemployed.

>But the huge majority of them, the ones who are neither employed nor in education and training, the NEETs as the Brits call them, the NEETs, they paint a pretty dispiriting picture of their own lives. They report that they basically don’t do civil society. They don’t do much worship or charity or volunteering. They’ve got lots of time on their hands, obviously, but they do surprisingly little help around the home, cleaning, housekeeping chores, or helping with people in the home. What they say that they do is watch. They say they watch screens. Surveys don’t tell us what the screens are. Surveys don’t tell us what they’re watching, what the content is, but 2,000 hours a year, sometimes more, as if this were their full-time job. The same self-reports say they’re getting out of the house less and less.

2000 hours a year? Holy fuck. How does this....

>Who’s paying for this? Well, again, if we look at government numbers, it looks like it’s friends and family, meaning girlfriends, other family members, and Uncle Sam. Disability insurance programs pay some benefits for more than half of these unworking men, it seems. Disability benefits do not provide a princely income, let’s be clear about that, but they do allow for an alternative to life in the working world, which is exactly the opposite of the original, and I think quite noble, intention of disability programs, which is to provide for people who couldn’t take care of themselves, couldn’t work.

It's being paid for with SSDI funds. Hmmm

>the labor force participation for women and the labor force participation for men have been going down in lockstep together. Something has happened for both men and women in the workforce and in the economy and society.

I stopped reading this when the guest summed up the swath of proposed economic solutions from "the left" as "wealth redistribution". This whole article reads like a Rogan/Peterson conversation.

Its not that the rich suddenly and unexplainably got richer since the 60s, and now the looney left wants to tax them.

The corporate tax was orders of magnitude higher before then, we stopped taxing them. The last few decades have all been a failed experiment in trickle-down economics.

Reset the corporate tax back to where it was (along with a sensible estate tax, a windfall profits tax, and a carbon tax) and use the money on social programs (housing vouchers, addiction services, M4A, mental health, etc), public infrastructure, and government-run replacements for working class employers that found it cheaper to move their operations to China.

This isn't as philosophical as these eggheads are making it out to be. And no one but an isolated minority is seriously proposing UBI. The right needs to stop thinking that Nancy Pelosi is speaking for the left.

[deleted]

>Eberstadt’s work challenges some of the underlying assumptions populist
narratives of the last six years have relied upon, and paints a picture...

Sexist. Not populist.

I'm a "successful male", married with two kids. It's brutal, working a demanding job with a spouse who also has a demanding job. If I were unhappy and got divorced I would be on the hook for 70% of my salary counting alimony and child support. I could make it work, but I could see how the prospect would crush most people.

>Today, in 2022, American men suffer Depression-era employment rates, even though they inhabit the wealthiest and most productive society ever known.

>After the pandemic, we have gone from men without work, to work without men,

this category of people that you’ve been studying, by which you mean that there are millions of open job positions after the pandemic, increasingly chasing fewer and fewer workers.

Who are these prime-age men who are just simply absent from working life, and what are they doing instead? What do their lives look like?

Nicholas Eberstadt:

>Well, it’s a trend that’s been underway for over half a century now. It began in the ’60s, and it had been underway for two generations when I wrote the first volume of “Men Without Work.”

>Now this second edition, six years later, we see that, unfortunately, the trend has only continued. We’ve got seven million prime-age men, 25 to 54 years old, who are out of the job market altogether, neither working nor looking for work.

TLDR, never got to the point

“Since the 60s some men are disenfranchised” x1000

why would I strive and sacrifice my whole life just to get exploited by useless parasites ...

I think removing income tax under 40k$ a year (shift the tax to non-labour "income) and eliminating landleeches would do the most to fix the situation

It feels disingenuous to include full time students and people who are collecting disability in these statistics.

[deleted]

Question to the "NEETs are deadbeat leeches" crowd in this thread: is it OK to make a couple million by 30 or 40 through hard work, and then immediately become a NEET and live off your savings for the rest of your life? Or is that still reprehensible in your eyes?

Why is it a problem that people choose not to work? Especially in a capitalistic economy that favors earners at the top at the expense of those at the bottom. I myself am ready to stop making others wealthy while I toil 🤷🏻‍♂️

Interesting that this phenomenon started in the 60’s. This is what we get when government and society browbeat men into submission. And, why all the sudden is this a “concern”? This has been a generational issue in Black culture and a persistent crisis as the government continues to engage in loco parentis. Men have been gaslighted (e.g. male privilege, toxic masculinity) and marginalized (e.g. parental rights, government subsidies, etc…), so yeah, the prime working age is bypassing all that shit and living their best life (no matter how bad it may be). I’m a gen-Xr, so most of us have our parents Boomer work “ethic.” But FMRB I get where these guys are coming from. Not how I want to live, but I get it.

[deleted]

I want to be part of this but i have bills. How are they doing it?

[deleted]

[deleted]

I want to work but I've been consistently turned down again and again and again..... it's really emotionally draining and the people who look down on you don't make it any better.

The following submission statement was provided by /u/capcaunul:

>Today, in 2022, American men suffer Depression-era employment rates, even though they inhabit the wealthiest and most productive society ever known.

>After the pandemic, we have gone from men without work, to work without men,

this category of people that you’ve been studying, by which you mean that there are millions of open job positions after the pandemic, increasingly chasing fewer and fewer workers.

Who are these prime-age men who are just simply absent from working life, and what are they doing instead? What do their lives look like?

Nicholas Eberstadt:

>Well, it’s a trend that’s been underway for over half a century now. It began in the ’60s, and it had been underway for two generations when I wrote the first volume of “Men Without Work.”

>Now this second edition, six years later, we see that, unfortunately, the trend has only continued. We’ve got seven million prime-age men, 25 to 54 years old, who are out of the job market altogether, neither working nor looking for work.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/z2k3wm/on_the_rising_nonworking_class_and_what_their/ixgqg8s/

Can democracy survive a situation in which perhaps half the population are functionally useless and marginalised? Nope, So what's the alternative to populist instability?

[removed]

[deleted]

As a man from a working class background, I not hat so many people like me are too proud or arrogant or lazy to pursue non traditionally masculine qualifications. They think it makes them too nerdy or geeky to attract women.

Can send a million skilled labor from India in to each of your 50 States if uncle Sam doors are open