> Statistically, the labor force involvement for men twenty and older fell from 86% to 68% between 1948 and 2015
So what are they doing instead? How are they surviving?
So what are they doing instead? How are they surviving?
American society doesn’t know how to use low skilled men so we keep ‘em fed and put them to the side.
Others are moderately-skilled, but not to the magnitude of their competition (common in art/design); or, they have technical skills that are only useful in jobs that also require conceptual/design skills (or vice versa); or, they're skilled in a niche set of tasks which hiring managers see as nice "add-ons" to another prerequisite (if outmoded) set of skills. As an anecdote: until the Meta crisis the past fall, there were a lot of openings for jobs that amounted to, "Builds XR prototypes/vertical slices so that when VR/AR goggles take off we have some sort of killer app concept ready for production." This requires someone with 3D art and software engineering and interactive design chops, for an interaction paradigm that's maybe 30% finalized. My vantage point was as an intermediate-level amateur 3D artist trying to stumble my way around Unity/UE, watching devs stumble their way around Blender/C4D/etc., all of us watching UX designers used to Figma et al. stumbling their way around both. With no room for people to bring what they CAN do to the table, and learn the rest as they go, many don't find anywhere to land.
What's the solution though? I can think of 3:
1) Bullshit jobs (i.e. fake jobs or real jobs that exist only to support fake jobs. This is the current answer)
2) Universal Basic Income - Doesn't solve the problem of giving people meaningful work, but gives them some freedom to discover/create their own solutions
3) Artificially making life more difficult - For example, banning furniture companies that are too good at their job. Want new furniture? Here are some tools, go and make it. Maybe find some friends to help you with it too. This solution would solve the problem, but it would be extremely unpopular and would likely need to be enforced globally, or people would just go to a place where they can buy furniture cheaply.
First solution will likely continue to be the most popular one. I hope the second solution continues to gain popularity, maybe not directly as UBI, but something similar. Third solution is extremely unlikely, it's more of a thought experiment to realize how solving real problems gives us meaning and creates bonds among people. Kaczynski writes about this when he writes about three groups of human drives.
However, these jobs are viewed as harder and less attractive than white collar work and some people balk at them.
Immigration has increased since the mid century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Stat... but I don't think many low skill jobs would exclude a native born applicant
Edit: Why disagree?
Government handouts, but especially undocumented "gig" work and all kinds of crime, or relying on income women (or other family members) make from cleaning or whatever other shit paying jobs. Or they join the Army and serve as cannon fodder, which technically removes them from employment counts.
The problem is that there are a lot of "left behind" areas, not just in the rural USA aka "flyover states" but everywhere across Western societies, and governments haven't really figured out solutions for large, structural changes (industries closing down, less manual work needed in farming) other than handouts and leaving people to their own fate. The reality is that a lot of these areas simply are far too far gone to be saved, but it's political suicide to even admit that, much less do something about it - something like paying to re-settle people somewhere else, or to inject absurd amounts of money into these areas to make them livable again, e.g. incentivizing large employers for the long term (instead of the current "trend" to stay just barely long enough until tax credits expire and then re-locate to somewhere with fresh tax credits), subsidizing critical infrastructure like public transport, basic grocery and other stores, doctors, schools and basic entertainment.
Political incentives simply aren't lined up with what needs to be done, and to make it worse there are entire political parties who have made their entire policy just to be obstructionist to any common sense - first and foremost the GQP in the US, but also in Europe parties like the German AfD, UKIP/Brexit Party in the UK, FN in France or whatever Berlusconis and Salvinis parties in Italy are called. Additionally, eroded tax bases (thanks to decades of neoliberal, trickle-down bullshit) everywhere make the large-scale investments required outright impossible, and the rich elites have bought off enough politicians to make sure that meaningful change on that front won't ever come around.
Also, 1948 was fairly close after war. There was general systematic effort to get men returning from war into work. That includes goverment policies seeking that and employers firing women just to get men to work. Also economy was doing very well. Also, not insifignicant amount of men died in war.
Incarceration rates went up, America locks more people then most world countries. Majority of people going to prison are men. Being in prison or jail means being unable to work and having very hard time to find work after.
The world was different in a lot of ways.