With the unemployment rate at 3.7%—the lowest it’s been in almost 50 years—perhaps it’s a strange moment to be raising an alarm about a decline in the centrality of work in American culture.
Yet that warning has arrived, both in a new book by Oren Cass, “The Once and Future Worker,” and in a new report, “Work, Skills, Community,” by the “working class study group” of Opportunity America, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Brookings Institution.
The “Work, Skills, Community” report says, “the Great Recession of 2007-2009 seemed to lead many workers, especially men, to leave the economy on a permanent basis…among men, work levels are falling to historic lows.”
What are these men doing instead? “Well over half of prime-age nonworking white males receive some kind of disability benefit, and Medicaid likely allows many of them to fill painkiller prescriptions at minimal cost,” the report says. The report describes what economists call “inactive men,” who spend about two extra hours a day “socializing, relaxing, and engaging in leisure,” including “watching TV and movies.”
The persistence of unworking men at a moment of low unemployment is something that Cass, who was domestic policy director of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign and who was also a member of the study group that produced the report, links to “deaths of despair”—the increase in fatalities from drugs, alcohol, and suicide.
If that is the scene now, when the economy is strong, imagine how bad things may get in the next downturn, writes Ira Stoll.
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