How men live without working in America | Hacker News Reader

How men live without working in America

yahoo.com

50 pointshbcondo71417 comments

Playing video games and receiving welfare while living with the parents is probably not a bad choice for those with few opportunities. I would not want to do dead-end jobs just to never be able to own my own home and have a wife and children etc.

It's almost as if we collectively decided to not eat shit anymore.

The way society is structured is currently exactly like classic slavery for a certain class of people, and this needs to stop.

The lower class of today is out of luck due to immigration and globalization. Very different to previous generations who had significant leverage when they decided not to work and often got offered great benefits/higher wages after collectively withholding their labor.

I'm not trying to offend when I ask this...

...but hasn't this audience been the primary audience for military recruiters? Promise more-or-less young and healthy men a chance to get out of their shitty home town, earn some money, and maybe a paid education?

Yes but the military doesn't take just anyone. A large fraction of young men fail to meet enlistment standards due to obesity, health conditions, criminal record, illegal drug use, or lack of a high school diploma.

How delightfully ironic.

I think a lot of people are disillusioned in the military. There wasn't a lot of support for the last wars we've been in among young people, and most people are aware of the hardships veterans can face.

There are benefits, but I think many people feel they aren't worth the risk of death or PTSD. I don't blame them, I wouldn't want to get shot at for $20k/year either.

Willing to bet that, as the author discusses, underestimating the size of informal employment/the informal economy is a large part of the issue.

The transition to a post-industrial economy makes it significantly harder to accurately estimate how many people are employed at any given time. Especially in the states, where people are identified and tracked through Social Security/OASDI, there's a short term benefit to working under the table.

Edit: I'll take back part of my earlier comment. The Federal Reserve has a great visual breakdown of labor force participation by age. It's a little old, but it looks like the decline in labor force participation (ages 16-64) is largely attributable to schooling/university attendance: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2015/08/the-composition-effe....

33% of working age men and 45% of women are not in the labor force.

But the unemployment rate is 5.2%. Hmmm… seems legit.

the unemployment rate measures what proportion of people in the labo[u]r force don't have a job, so the proportion of all people who aren't in it is irrelevant.

IOW, "unemployment rate" means percentage of job seekers not finding a job; people who aren't seeking jobs in the first place don't affect that, and those are in stead measured as "not in the labo[u]r force".

HTH!

Not true. Lots of people “not in the labor force” are still looking for a job.

Was hoping to see age addressed but I didn't, unless I missed it. Our population is getting older on average and that may have an effect.

Meanwhile, women's labor participation rate hits a 33-year low... https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/womens-labor-force-participa...

Way out of touch with reality.

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