Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington DC. He is also Senior Adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) in Seattle WA. For over four decades Mr. Eberstadt has published extensively on demographics, economic development, and international security, authoring many hundreds of articles in professional and popular journals and several dozen books, monographs, and edited volumes. His books on international questions include Poverty in China (1979), The End of North Korea (1999), and Russia's Peacetime...
Overview
For over half a century America has been suffering from a growing but strangely overlooked crisis: a flight from work by men in the prime of life. Just before the COVID crisis, almost 7 million men 25-54 were neither working nor looking for work—fully four times as many as officially unemployed—and employment rates for prime age US men mirrored those near the end of the Great Depression. In the wake of the COVID19 shock, America's "men without" work problem has become even more acute.
In this lecture, Nicholas Eberstadt outlines the dimensions of the problem, examines some of its causes, discusses its far-reaching implications, and speculates about possible solutions.
