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David Brooks’ column today focuses on a topic that Ron Haskins talked about last week here at ConservativeHome: the declining percentage of able-bodied men who are actively working.
Haskins says he “is really concerned about this trend.” Brooks says it is “a big problem.” They’re right. It’s a very disquieting trend.
As Haskins points out, it’s been underway for three decades, long before our latest recession. As Brooks points out, the percentage of working-age men who are not in work now stands at 20 percent. As they both point out, the American ratio of people of working age who are in fact working has long been higher than the European ratio, but that has now flipped. The ratio is higher in Europe.
This is especially troubling because the problem is structural, not cyclical, as Brooks says. Men with lower education levels are increasingly out of the work force. They are less interesting to employers. They become detached. That leads to more problems, and so on. Brooks calls this population the “missing fifth.”
There are two important points worth addressing here:
The first is that we don’t have a public policy response ready-made for this.
Brooks writes:
It can’t be addressed through the sort of short-term Keynesian stimulus some on the left are still fantasizing about. It can’t be solved by simply reducing the size of government, as some on the right imagine.
It will probably require a broad menu of policies attacking the problem all at once: expanding community colleges and online learning; changing the corporate tax code and labor market rules to stimulate investment; adopting German-style labor market practices like apprenticeship programs, wage subsidies and programs that extend benefits to the unemployed for six months as they start small businesses.
While it’s unclear how well these would work, since some aspect of this non-work trend is cultural, they certainly would be better than what we’re doing now.
The second important point is that our current entitlement problem means we have been shifting resources to support better-off, older portions of our population at the expense of the young – and, especially, this non-working population.
We’ve been making this point at ConservativeHome for awhile, namely that there’s something wrong about shifting resources through our entitlement programs to the affluent at the expense of poorer Americans.
Brooks makes the point with a closing rhetorical question:
The next time you see a politician demagoguing Medicare, ask this: Should we be using our resources in the manner of a nation in decline or one still committed to stoking the energy of its people and continuing its rise?
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