Could ‘forgotten men’ lead to more political extremism in the U.S.?
Nov 22, 2016, 10:02 AM | Updated: 10:09 am
President-elect Donald Trump says the “forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.”
Well, an economics scholar who has crunched the numbers found the forgotten people most in need of Donald Trump’s help are the 7 million working-age men, age 25-54, who aren’t working and aren’t looking.
“You’ve got a really spooky two-tier society staring at you in the face,” said Nicholas Eberstadt.
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Eberstadt, the author of a book called Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis,” says these 7 million men are too old for college, and too young to retire. But they have dropped out.
“Their full-time job is television, video, Internet … over 2,000 hours a year,” he says.
That’s 5.5 hours a day!
The way most of them stay alive is disability payments.
“Almost three in five were receiving one or more disability benefits,” Eberstadt said. “And about two-thirds were in households that had at least one disability benefit.”
That’s an amazing number of disabled men. But Eberstadt is not convinced they’re unemployable. He believes that for a lot of them it’s not worth the risk of losing those disability payments to look for work. But unless someone finds a way to get them working again, their numbers will continue to grow, and that, he predicts, will have really bad consequences.
“Widening wealth and income disparities, greater government dependence,” he explained. “More pressure on fragile families. Maybe more opioid addiction.
“I myself will not connect these dots, but I think it’s possible to talk about increasing political extremism in the United States.”
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