In America: Decline of the Working Man

HopeTracker| The Economist reports that among the Group of Seven economies (US, Japan, France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Canada), America has the lowest share of ‘prime age’ males in work. Today just over 80% of those aged 25-54 have a job. In the late 1960s 95% were employed.

This decline in employment is most pronounced among the less educated and blacks.

If you adjust official data to include men in prison or the armed forces (who are left out of the raw numbers), around 35% of 25- to 54-year-old men with no high-school diploma have no job, up from around 10% in the 1960s. Of those who finished high school but did not go to college, the fraction without work has climbed from below 5% in the 1960s to almost 25% (see chart 2). Among blacks, more than 30% overall and almost 70% of high-school dropouts have no job.

Without manufacturing jobs, the uneducated are having a tough time. As the Republican War on Women moves to curtail women’s rights to birth control and other family planning services, the numbers of uneducated, unemployed young people an be expected to skyrocket in the coming decades.

Presently one black man in three is imprisoned. The Republican War on Women will surely drive those numbers higher, because the reality of lives touched by teen pregnancy is beyond dispute.