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.