NILFs: Men At Work
Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis
by Nicholas Eberstadt
Templeton Press, 2016, 205 pages, US$12.95
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This is a smart, unsettling, fact-packed book. Its message is sobering. Beware of letting prime working-age males fall out of the workforce into gloomy pension-feathered indolence. America has done it. The consequences are disconcerting to say the least. Eberstadt begins by noting something basic, so basic in fact that it looms over everything else in the book. Put simply, America is a wealth-generating machine. Yet no longer is it a wage-work-producing leviathan. Wealth creation and job creation have parted company. That is the most crucial social fact of our age.
Governments that fail to understand the uncoupling of wealth-making and wage-labour fail to grasp the tectonic rearrangement that has occurred in the social landscape over the past six decades. As is so often the case, America has led the way for the rest of the world….
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