Millions of Men Are Missing From the Job Market

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD NY TIMES

Economists have long struggled to explain why a growing proportion of men in the prime of their lives are not employed or looking for work. A new study has found that nearly half of these men are on painkillers and many are disabled.

The working paper by Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist, casts light on this population, which grew during the recession that started in 2007. As of last month, 11.4 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 — or about seven million people — were not in the labor force, which means that they were not employed and were not seeking a job. This percentage has been rising for decades (it was less than 4 percent in the 1950s), but the trend accelerated in the last 20 years.

Surveys taken between 2010 and this year show that 40 percent of prime working-age men who are not in the labor force report having pain that prevents them from taking jobs for which they are qualified. More than a third of the men not in the labor force said they had difficulty walking or climbing stairs or had another disability. Forty-four percent said they took painkillers daily and two-thirds of that subset were on prescription medicines. By contrast, just 20 percent of employed men and 19 percent of unemployed men (those looking for work) in the same age group reported taking any painkillers.

Suffering From Pain

Among men ages 25-54.

On average, percent of time feeling any pain during their waking hours:  52%

Percent who took pain medication the previous day: 42%

Perhaps worse, many of those taking painkillers still said they experienced pain daily. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that these drugs are far less effective and much more addictive than previously thought.

The connection between chronic joblessn

Chart is percentage of men no longer seeking work 3% in 1948 and 12% in 2016 

ess and painkiller dependency is hard to quantify. Mr. Krueger and other experts cannot say which came first: the men’s health problems or their absence from the labor force. Some experts suspect that frequent use of painkillers is a result of being out of work, because people who have no job prospects are more likely to be depressed, become addicted to drugs and alcohol and have other mental health problems. Only about 2 percent of the men say they receive workers’ compensation benefits for job-related injuries. Some 25 percent are on Social Security disability; 31 percent of those receiving benefits have mental disorders and the rest have other ailments, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute.

While it’s hard to generalize across a large group of people, it’s clear that job market changes can have significant health effects on the labor force. Increased automation and the offshoring of jobs have hit men with less than a college education particularly hard. Add to that soaring levels of prescription opioid addiction in the general population, and the result of the Krueger study becomes less surprising.

More research is clearly needed. In the meantime, some things could be done to help workers who’ve given up. Congress could appropriate money for the opioid addiction treatment and prevention programs they authorized in July. And federal and state governments could focus economic initiatives where long-term joblessness is highest, especially in the South, Southwest and Midwest. This could be done through targeted investments in infrastructure and education that could create jobs and bolster the skills of local workers. Millions of American men are struggling with pain and missing from the labor market, a crisis that damages families and communities.

No society can hope to last when so many capable men or women are lost to gainful employment! The United States has entered a terminal phase where more than 25% of the adult male population no longer participate in the job market in a meaningful way and those that do participate are underpaid and in dead end jobs. Serious debt and social decline are the fuel of eventual rebellion or revolution! 

David A Fairbanks 

A PERIODIC TABLE OF NEW YORK CITY TRASH

By Molly Young and Teddy Blanks The New Yorker

Go to The New Yorker webpage and watch the video!

Certain items of garbage appear in every corner and borough of the city, like old, smelly, unlikable friends.

My fascination with urban litter began at some point in the past seven years, but I can’t be more specific. That’s the period in which I have lived in Chinatown, and in which I started noticing the neighborhood’s unique and heterogeneous trash footprint. My block, for one, is a garbage buffet. On a typical weekday morning, I might pass a fish head, a pair of adult underwear, a pair of kid underwear, a tertiary cut of meat, a broken settee, a soybean-oil tin, and drug baggies of all colors and shapes, some so small that I can’t imagine more than a grain or two of an illegal substance fitting inside. This all appears within the space of twenty or forty feet. Rats love my block. They frolic openly.

Amid the novel refuse, there are bits of familiarity—Dunkin’ Donuts cups and freshness seals and those little silica-gel desiccant packets printed with frantic warnings not to eat them. These items appear in every corner and borough of the city. They’re like old, smelly, unlikable friends. Because I am a compulsive list-maker, I have kept a catalogue of the recurrent items. It numbers in the hundreds. It is a ghastly document to glance over—an indictment of this city’s occupants, a record of our habits, a litany of our vices, a portrait of our tastes.

Litter generally takes one of two forms; it is either scattered or piled. At some point in my listing, I wondered what it would look like to organize the trash visually into a form that, say, Marie Kondo would approve of. What would a garbage census look like? Doesn’t anything look agreeable if you organize it neatly enough?

My partner, Teddy Blanks, runs a design studio in Brooklyn, and I asked him. He thought the answer might plausibly be yes. We compiled a master list of frequently occurring trash, then went out to find and photograph samples of each piece in the wild. The rule was that all trash had to be photographed in situ, with no human intervention or staging. No nudging with a toe, no poking with a stick. For three months, we walked with our necks at a forty-degree angle, eying the pavement and swivelling horizontally from stoop to gutter so as not to overlook a precious dirty Band-Aid or sullied toothpick. Every outing became a treasure hunt. This city is opulent with trash.

The chart that we came up with is not about the environmental impact of waste. Nor is it a comment on New York’s Department of Sanitation and how effectively its 7,197 uniformed sanitation workers and supervisors remove street litter on designated days of the week. It is simply about clocking items that recognizably recur in the city at this moment in time. It is about organizing these items loosely. And it is about putting them together to yield a snapshot of New York by way of its filthiest common denominators. But, even if this is not a purely scientific endeavor, it borrows a scientific form. Our table has the same cell count and over-all shape as the periodic table of the elements. Just as the original elements are organized by their atomic number and chemical properties (alkali metal, noble gas), the items of trash are organized by function (hygiene, beverage), and, just as the elements are referred to by symbols, each item of trash is given a one- or two-letter abbreviation.

DESIGN BY TEDDY BLANKS AND MOLLY YOUNG.

The challenge of designing the table was to take something inherently hideous and combine it with something visually pleasing, if dry. We chose bright, friendly colors to represent each category. We chose typography that vaguely suggested scientific rigor and directly evoked fashionable modernism. We sanitized the trash.

But we are, of course, missing vital pieces. There are a hundred and eighteen elements in the current periodic table, and we stuck to that number for authenticity’s sake, which meant shaving off dozens of items (a fake fingernail, a crushed pylon, a wisp of wig, a forty of malt liquor, a trampled cockroach). In five years, the chart will be pathetically outdated. That’s part of the fun. We will need to start the scouting mission all over again in order to form an accurate garbagescape of the city in 2021. I shudder to think of what we will find.

Molly Young is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. MORE
Teddy Blanks is a co-founder of the design studio CHIPS. MORE