I smell trouble: The Trump economy is smoke and mirrors

The Trump economy is going gangbusters! Wages are rising, unemployment is low, and the stock market is near an all-time high. Real estate prices are going up, the bond market is in a rally--maybe we'll all get rich.

But let's look a little closer at this halcyon picture, starting with the unemployment rate, which is now below 4 percent. As Nicholas Eberstadt explained in Men Without Work, a book that more people should read, the official unemployment rate does not measure the percentage of people who aren't working and aren't looking for work. In the years 2006 to 2016, Eberstadt wrote, 17 percent of working-age men in their prime working years (ages 20-64) reported having no employment in the previous month. (p. 27)

As Eberstadt explained, America now has a "caste" of working-age guys who have decided not to get a job. "Members of this caste can, at least, expect to scrape by in an employment-free existence, and membership in the caste is, in an important sense, voluntary" (p. 35).

And then there are the millions of people getting paychecks who aren't doing anything useful. Just look at the universities, crammed with tenure-protected men and women who have good retirement plans and excellent health insurance, but who aren't doing much of anything to improve our society. Do we really need a professor to teach medieval European literature or the history of the Ottoman empire in classrooms to students who don't give a damn? And how are these parasites getting paid? We know how they are getting paid: students are taking out massive student loans.

It is true the economy seems to be humming along, but if things are so good, why can't Congress pass a balanced budget? If we can't live within our income when the economy is rosy, how can we pay the nation's bills when the economy heads south?

Of course, people are still buying expensive cars--SUVs with all kinds of marvelous gadgets--heated seats, automatic backup features, and entertainment systems that allow our kids to watch  Shrek while we're barreling down the interstate at 70 miles an hour.

But many car buyers have to take out long-term loans to pay for these marvelous new vehicles. According to the Wall Street Journal, the average car-loan term is now 69 months, and six-year loans and even seven-year loans are becoming more and more common. As WSJ writers Ben Eisen and Adrienne Roberts observed, "Car loans that are increasingly stretched out are a pronounced sign that some American middle-class buyers can't afford a middle-class lifestyle."

In his memoir Night, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote that the Jews in his Transylvania village were warned that the Nazis were committing genocide in central Europe, but no one believed it.  Today, we have a clear sign that the American economy is a house of cards. Next week, the Trump administration will begin a new round of quantitative easing when it will buy $60 billion in Treasury bills. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this move basically means the feds have gone back into the money-printing business.

You can write me off as a grumpy old geezer, but that's only partly true. Actually, I'm a worried old geezer. My wife and I have savings, but we are largely dependent on our pensions and Social Security to maintain ourselves in our retirement years.

If the national and global economies fall apart, a lot of elderly Americans are going to suffer--and I don't just mean being forced to eat the senior breakfast at Denny's. President Trump's critics should spend more time examining the rot in the national economy and less time fulminating on Trump's phone call to Ukraine, about which nobody gives a damn.

America's "Men Without Work": It's not their fault

Almost a third of American men in their prime working years are not working. Thirty-two percent of men older than 20 are out of the labor force--double the rate in 1948. And a lot of unemployed men aren't even looking for work. According to Nicholas Eberstadt,  author of Men Without Work, only 15 percent of American men in the 25-54 age group who didn't work in 2014 said they were unemployed because they could not find a job.

Of course some of these men are disabled, but the percentage of men sitting on the sidelines because of some certified disability seems too high. Eberstadt reports that there were 134 workers for every officially disabled person in 1960 (as summarized by George Will). Today, there is one disabled person for every 16 workers--in spite of the fact that the American workplace has become much safer over the last 50 years.

Eberstadt argues that unemployment has become a "viable option" for millions of American men, and George Will implicitly scolded this vast population--saying these unemployed men have chosen a life of "protracted idleness."

But I know some of these men, and I think most would prefer to be working. Here are some examples of men I know personally.

• A friend who worked in the petrochemical industry was laid off in his 50s when the company he worked for merged with another company. He found various part-time jobs at minimal pay and then took his Social Security benefits early--at age 62. He and his wife are living frugally on Social Security income and modest savings.

• A guy I know worked as an architectural draftsman but he didn't upgrade his skills when  computer-assisted drawings (CAD) fundamentally changed the nature of his craft by greatly speeding up the drafting process and making it less expensive. He is not lazy. I've seen his enormous garden, from which he derives a substantial amount of his food.

• Another friend worked many years in public education and gained a reputation for being an effective disciplinarian in chaotic urban schools. But the work burned him out, and he took his state pension early. He does carpentry work and cabinet work from time to time, but essentially lives off his pension.

I  come in contact with unemployed men all the time, and few of them are happy. No wonder the suicide rate for middle-aged white Americans has gone up substantially in recent years, along with death from alcohol- and drug-related causes.

In my opinion, this doleful trend cannot be explained by laziness. There are lots of reasons.

First, the nation's economy has failed working-class and middle-class Americans--which is what Donald Trump has been saying with considerable effect. Millions of Americans have been shoved out of the workforce as low-skill and medium-skill jobs have gone overseas.  And of course, our multinational corporations don't give a damn about the millions of Americans who have been thrown out of work. Profits are greater if goods are manufactured by exploited Asians rather than middle-class Americans.

Second, Americans have been betrayed by our educational system. The United States has a crummy educational system. Too many people graduate from high school without the  minimum reading and math skills they need to find a job or to profit from postsecondary education. 

And postsecondary education is a disaster. Our government is shoveling money into predatory for-profit colleges that have ripped off our most vulnerable young people--minorities and first-generation college students. Our elite liberal arts colleges obsess on race and sexual identity and care more about creating "safe spaces" than they do about producing problem solvers. Our public institutions have become vast bureaucratic mazes run by spineless and clueless administrative robots.

No wonder so many working-age men are unemployed. They didn't get the skills they needed to be productive workers in our post-industrial economy. Many of them tried to get those skills and wound up with no skills and a lot of student-loan debt.

Third, American cultural institutions no longer respect and support the American family. There was a time when our government, our churches, and our civic institutions honored the American family; and it was universally understood that the foundations of our culture rested on extended families that nurtured children and provided essential support for their members in times of trouble. I thank God I am part of such a family. 

But all that is falling away. And this distressing trend, in my view, contributes to a vast subculture of working-age men who do not work. At one time family obligations and a personal sense of honor prompted men to work to support their families--even if that meant working for poverty wages under humiliating conditions.

But many men no longer recognize family obligations. They do not work and save so their children can go to college. Rather their children are expected to take out loans to pay for their college education. They do not recognize a moral responsibility to be the breadwinner for their wives and children; women are expected to work. In fact, our society celebrates the fact that it now takes two working adults instead of one to support a family--as if every working woman is a lawyer or a brain surgeon instead of working as clerk in convenience store, which is the reality for millions of working American women.

It's not their fault

In short, the high percentage of unemployed men cannot be explained by indolence. Our culture, our government, our colleges and schools, and our post-industrial economy have conspired to create a world in which millions of American men see no point in working. And to suggest--as some commentators have done--that this calamitous trend is attributable to laziness completely misses the mark.

References

Nicholas Eberstadt. Men Without Work: America's Invisible Crisis (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 2016).

George Will, America's 'quiet catastrophe': Millions of idle men. Washington Post, October 5, 2016. Accessible at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-quiet-catastrophe-millions-of-idle-men/2016/10/05/cd01b750-8a57-11e6-bff0-d53f592f176e_story.html?utm_term=.d45b9f19bab9

Anne  Case and Angus Deaton. Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white
non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century.  Accessible at: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/10/29/1518393112.full.pdf

Editorial. Death Among Middle Aged Whites. New York Times, November 5, 2015.

Katherine A. Hempstead and Julie A. Phillips. Rising Suicide Among Adults Aged
40–64 Years: The Role of Job and Financial Circumstances.  American Journal of Preventive Medicine 84(5):491-500 (2015). Accessible at: http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(14)00662-X/pdf

Jason Iuliano. An Empirical Assessment of Student Loan Discharge and the Undue Hardship
Gina Kolata. Deaths Rates Rising Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds. NewYork Times, November 3, 2015. Accessibe at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-rising-for-middle-aged-white-americans-study-finds.html

Betsy McKay. The Death Rate Is Rising for Midle-Aged Whites. Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2015. Accessible at: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-death-rate-is-rising-for-middle-aged-whites-1446499495