A new study released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) contains some shocking news: One out of every six young American men is either out of work or in jail.
In 2014, there were 38 million men in the United States between the ages of 18 and 34; about 5 million of those young men were jobless, and 1 million were incarcerated.
In 1980, 11 percent of all men 18–34 were jobless or imprisoned; nearly a quarter century later, that number had risen to 16 percent. What’s behind this worrisome trend? The CBO identifies three main factors: economic changes, policy changes, and the changing skill levels of less-educated young men.
On the economic front, the report says a few long-term trends are contributing to the decline of productive labor among young men, including technological advances, the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, the outsourcing of low-skill jobs, and the influx of low-skilled immigrants.
None of this is particularly new or controversial. But the report does shine an interesting spotlight on several policy changes that may have contributed to the rising number of unproductive young men.
First, the report’s authors note a drop in employment opportunities in the military, “which had long been an important source of work for less skilled young men” and thus a crucial place where the unskilled could become skilled.
Second, the authors cite the greater availability of means-tested welfare programs — such as food stamps and other benefits — and the increased enforcement of child-support payments as factors that are “possibly reducing young men’s incentives to work.”
Third, they conclude that “higher minimum wages may also have increased joblessness among young men.” (Now who could have seen that coming?)
The struggles of America’s young men and the breakdown of the American family go hand in hand.
And lastly, on the “policy” front, there are the “changes in sentencing rules, that have made nationwide incarceration rates about four times as high as they were in 1980.” Those changes have particularly affected young men, many African American, who are less educated — and who already had elevated levels of joblessness and incarceration before the report’s period of study began.
As for the change in skill level among less-educated men, the CBO report relays a disturbing truth: “More young men may have been entering adulthood without the cognitive and noncognitive skills that employers want.” Essentially, our educational system has been doing an increasingly poor job of preparing young men to enter the workforce.
#share#What are the implications of all this? Things are bound to get worse, rippling through this generation and into the next, because “young men who are neither employed nor in school are less likely to work when they get older.” For those who do reenter the labor force, a lost year of work experience can reduce average annual income by 3 percent, and a lost year of school can reduce earnings by 10 percent.
Moreover, “young men who are jobless or incarcerated today are less likely to marry, less likely to stay married, and less likely to have children who live in two-parent households than their counterparts who are employed or in school.” The struggles of America’s young men and the breakdown of the American family go hand in hand.
American males should embrace the hard work of building their lives in a way their grandfathers and great-grandfathers would have recognized.
The long-term social effects of joblessness and family breakdown were expertly documented in Charles Murray’s seminal work Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. But it seems that the immediate political effects of the listlessness and anomie among young male Americans can be seen in the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
Not all of Senator Sanders’s supporters are “Bernie Bros,” and not all of Trump’s young male backers are Trump Bots, but it’s worth asking the question: Why do so many young people of every political stripe seem to be attracted to outsider candidates who so openly advocate the political system’s destruction?
Because the system hasn’t worked for them.
As understandable as their frustrations are, the solution is the same as it’s always been. Neither incoherent rage nor drug use nor simply checking out will allow America’s wayward young men to escape the cycle of despair. That will take something far more difficult, if also far more rewarding: They’ll have to grow up.
As David French laid out in the April 25, 2016, issue of National Review, instead of embracing Donald Trump’s “counterfeit masculinity” — the masculinity of faux tough guys and bullies and sexual libertines — American males should embrace the hard work of building their lives in a way their grandfathers and great-grandfathers would have recognized:
Trump’s masculinity is a cheap counterfeit of the masculinity that’s truly threatening to the cultural Left: man not as predator but as protector, the “sheepdog” of American Sniper fame. This is the brave man, the selfless man who channels his aggression and sense of adventure into building a nation, an economy, and — yes — a family. This is the man who kicks down doors in Fallujah or gathers a makeshift militia to rush hijackers in the skies above Pennsylvania. Or, to choose a more mundane — though no less important — example: This is the man who packs up the household to take a chance on a new job, models strength for his family when life turns hard, teaches his son to stand against bullies on the playground, and lives at all times with dignity and honor.
Only the manly virtues — “bravery, strength, loyalty, and an intellectual and physical sense of adventure” — can save a generation in desperate need of a way out.
— Mark Antonio Wright is an assistant editor at National Review.