The Astonishing Collapse of Work In America
The following article is simply depressing: The Astonishing Collapse of Work In America Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute and is the author of A Nation of Takers: America's Entitlement Epidemic (2012). Today just under 12 million men and women are officially classified as unemployed, roughly twice as many as in early 2000. But if our national employment ratio today were as high as in early 2000, when this measure reached its zenith, about 15 million more Americans would be working today. And remember: over 10 million of today's men and women with jobs are working fewer hours than they want to-well over twice as many as in early 2000. When we look at the jobs problem this way, we see it is vastly bigger than the official unemployment rate implies. How bad is "real" unemployment and underemployment? Compare today to the not-so-distant past, when a much higher percentage of adults worked. By t...