fired, found the nerve to walk in to paul weiss, the murdoch started that investigation and told their story, believing he would continue being their boss. those women want their anonymity and i certainly would never outdone. but those are the truly courageous ones. >> much harder than it sounds. megyn has to be the kelley filed at 9:00. we could just carry on gathering. "settle for more." ever noticed her in the process. join a contract, you brought the book that the number one "new york times" the seller. congratulations. that is wonderful. [applause] what is the more you want now? what does megyn kelly want more of? >> well, for me it is prettyit'p clear. i am doing a job i love, but

there's something i loved more. three little people and a big person named doug. doug and i are good. we see each other because he's a writer. he writes books for a living. so he is a flexible work schedule and we can see each other. i have been seeing too much of my children's childhood. you know, when i first started this job, they were just barelyd four. basically they were three, to a newborn. i had the whole day with them and then i would go to work at 3:30 or 4:00 and get home at midnight and now they are aging and their seven, five and threeu and now two out of my three go to school at 8:15 and they don't get called until 3:30 when i'm

walking out the door. honestly, that is not acceptable to me. and they mean too much to me. i refuse to miss their childhood just so i can do a job that i love. so i'm not breaking news here. i've said all this to my employer.e, they know this, too. that is my challenge and decided what i'm going to do. can i find a way to work with my schedule at fox and continue to do the kelley filed and see my children and if the answer to m that is now, i'll have to make a different decision because they are most important. [applause] >> thank you all so much. >> thanks for coming. [applause]

is [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> thank you for joining us here in our aei headquarters on this beautiful fall day. thank you as well to our television audience and our online audience. i had nicholas eberstadt, the henry budd chaired. aei and author of this book,

"men without work: america's invisible crisis." a colleague here is david wetzel, director of brookings institution's hutchins center for fiscal and monetary policy. david and i are going to try something a little bit different today. dave is going to be the emcee of our event today. we'll see how this experiment in process unfolds with you here. david, do you want to take over? >> so, i thought it said thought it said the issue of the emcee talks first. well, we want to welcome a aei to the neighborhood as one of my colleagues says, we can now say that my message is definitely a stomach aei is to the left of brookings. i am really glad that nick has done this book because i think

that the acute issues that the great recession have to a large extent not completely passed and what we are now observing is a number of chronic conditions, which the shock and fraction of prime aged men who are not working to send and that is a preexisting condition, something that preceded the great recession, may be cowed or stream the great recession and require something more more they boldly, we can probably talk a little bit, something to make the economy grow faster. nick is going to talk for a few minutes and then i have a couple of flights in response and then we'll chat and bring you into the conversation. if you are watching online, we are able to field questions. go to a website called sli.d.o. and enter a code. aei events. )-right-paren name, type in your question and if we get to it, i'll post it tonight.

>> thank you, david. i'm going to discipline myself and expect you to discipline me if i don't discipline myself. my book in 10 minutes or less. so things haven't been going so well in the u.s. labor market since the turn of the century. the employment to population ratio, the work rate for americans 20 and older peeked around the turn of the century and they have dropped in what i would regard as a dire manner as i show in this chart. this is men and women together since the year 2000. what i point out in my book is that vista client work rate for men has been going on for a long time. it has been going on for these 50 years. the lower line is the work rate for men over the age of 20.

he could say wait a minute, that includes population aging and you would be right about that. but the gray line as the prime working age men. the key 25-54 group, no aging effects. you currency that has been stumbling downwards for half a century. here's another way of looking at the prime working age men employ the problem. this is the proportion of non-workingmen of prime age is from the beginning of the postwar era to the present, you can see this theory ratcheting up of every recession going to a new worst normal. right now almost 15% of prime age guys have no paid employment. if you want to compare it to the depression, you can and it's not a happy comparison. if we look at the work rates for

prime aged men in 2015, they were actually about two percentage points lower than for prime age men in 1940 at the tail end of the depression. if you look at the group 20 to 64 years old, it likewise looks worse today than at the tail end of the depression. so it's not wrong to describe the millwork problem as the massive depression scale. if we had american then back to the work rates of 1965, there'd be another almost 10 million guys paid work in america today. think how much different our country would be with that. so the main reason for this collapse; the collapse of work rates for men has been declining participation has been to withdraw a man from the work force. with that to measure unemployment, but that cannot

unemployment is a very incomplete measure of what is going on. unemployed guys are the blue line here. guys who have checked out of the work force or the gray line. today there are over three times as many men who have left the work force altogether and who are unemployed without a job and looking for work. so the exit from the workforce dominates the mailbox of work problems today. this kind of crazy chart is meant to show how the u.s. vote in international comparison and it's not a happy story. we are the dark black dashed line. you can see that we have won the race to the bottom. actually, the drop in male labor force participation in america has been worse than in countries like greece or in france or in countries that have had a sort of lost generation of economic growth like japan. we have the dubious distinction

of winning this race i'm afraid. this chart you probably won't be able to see. you may have to go into the book, amazon.com. what it shows is that men who are out of the labor force by and large are checked out of civil society. about a 10th of them are adult students tried to get back into the game. their time pattern, very much like employed men for the rest of the group, but neither employed nor education or training. there is less civil participation, less volunteer in, less charity work in workingmen are printed for unemployed men. likewise with child care and care for others, likewise with housekeeping, their full-time job is watching.

television, video, internet and the like. over two dozen hours a year. not the best way to get back into the game of employment as far as skill generation as can earn. so what are the reasons for this quiet catastrophe? i think we could call it the quiet catastrophe. clearly there are three different sets of tears. because they supply, demand institutional or we can say economic and structural, welfare related and barriers to employment. obviously, the big changes in the economy have had a major role in this story, but it's also possible to overstate the role of structural changes. what i show here in this graph is the rising proportion of men not in the workforce in this prime age group. it's almost a straight line from

1965 to the present. if he took a look at baseline, you couldn't tell when the recession's work. you couldn't tell when the boom times where, best times. almost like an astronomical gravitational change. we can also see other differences in the labor force participation rate we parse this out. we all know, for example that less educated men have been much more hardheaded that more educated man. but i've disaggregated here. the blue line and the gray line are both men without high school education, but the blue line are foreign-born and the gray line is native born american men. the bottom has fallen out for nativeborn american men without high school degrees. foreign-born college dropouts in the united states have the same labor force profiles of college

grads in the united states. one other curious thing to note, we have really big regional disparities in our labor force participation rates. some of the big disparities are between neighboring states. maine has got one of the purest profiles. new hampshire has one of the best profiles. there's only one state by state border between maine and new hampshire together. we've seen increasing disparities by state or overtime. it's curious thing. i wanted to point to the question of disability benefit. there is a lot of discussion of disability benefit and quite a bit also a disagreement about the role of disability programs. nobody can prove that disability programs have created this problem. nobody can show they have caused it.

what i try to show my book is disability programs have a role in finance in this phenomenon and they have a growing world in financing this phenomenon. in 23rd, the estimates in this book, almost three in five non- men were receiving one or more disability benefit. a million of the 7 million had two or more disability benefits and two thirds were in households had at least one disability benefit. finally, there is the question of crime. this has been all too largely overlooked is a problem with respect to the men without work phenomenon. since the 1980s we've seen an explosion and the number of americans who have a felony in their back ran now over 20 million. one in eight men.

this is surely part of the problem, but we don't collect figures very well in this aspect. in my book, i show up to regardless of age, regardless of ethnicity, irregardless, guys who have prison records are much more likely to be at its labor force than guys who have just an arrest record who in turn are much more likely to be out of the labor force than guys who don't have any record of trouble with the law. i can't tell you about the dynamics here because shamefully, our government does not collect statistics on this critical aspect of modern american society. but the fact is all have to do with the terribly worrisome growth in non-working male americans in our postwar era. 10 minutes. >> great, excellent. so i'm very pleased to be here.

i think it's really important that nick is calling to the issue in doing so as effectively as he has already, which of course is his trademark. i want to note for the record that i noticed this, too. next is no one is paying attention. this happened to be the last story i did in 2014. it is a very moving experience to talk to guys who were in this category. the prime age men, most too old to be in college, mostly too young to be retired in the conventional sense with a guy named mark rally for little rock. i asked him what did he do every day? he said the most meaningful day was working that the food bank. you give up fresh fruit and vegetables.

gives the order to his life. and make him realize there were people worse off than had and he got the leftovers. i want to make two-point bit in the week about what they say. first of all, there is a widespread agreement that this is a problem. jason furman of the council of economic advisers did a report that coincides with the publication of the book where there's a disagreement about what is the nature of the cause. how much of this is something about the man that leads them not to be interested are willing or capable of working on how much is about the demand and when you look at next chart, you can draw a line, but she also see a lot of ups and downs. recently over the last 12, the labor force participation rate has risen by one percentage

point. so we know that it's not immune to the health of the economy, but we also know from historical patterns that it's not only about the economy. it is good to focus on 25 to 54-year-old man because that eliminates the problem of baby boomers aging. in that category of man, if you look at the 35-order for your outcome of the highest labor force participation represents less of this score. it is really important. the category takes care of most of it, but not all of it. what's going on? just a couple observations. american manufacturing has changed. these were the jobs you could get with muscle and not brains. it's now very hard to get a factory job without some kind of education, some kind of computer

skills. there's something going on there. we bring back to the 1950s. we have to think about how this affects prime age men. when you look at the question about is that demand or supply, you can ask this question. if there is a shortage of unskilled men went to work, wages would be going up. what a receipt? the ratio of high school wages, high school grads to college wages. you can see relative to college wages, high school wages are going down. there's something about the man. they changed the nature of the work base in ways that you do not favor of lesser educated man were more likely to be in this pool. finally, another chart for a recent hamilton report.

this arrest -- this incarceration thing is really important and incarceration coincides with education. if your high school dropout at any rate, higher for blacks and whites though, you are more likely to have had incarceration. these are people between -- i think these are people in their 30s. so you could just see these people have a double whammy up peace. they don't have skills and education at the workforce demand and a higher proportion of them have assisted image. finally, i couldn't resist this is a fantastic paper allen kruger has been recently were based on survey evidence he asked about these men who were not in the workforce about whether they were obtained in lots of them say they were paid. this one shows whether they took pain medication. as you can see, the blue line as is men, the great minus women.

the fact that 43.5% of the men who are not in the labor force had taken pain medication. two thirds of them prescription. so as nick said, we don't know what's cause and effect, but we know from case indicate that there's something going on, opiate addiction with white working-class men. it can't be any accident here that we see this pattern more likely to be on pain meds, whether to cause you not it not to work for because you're not working and if you were in the labor wars. i believe it there. i want to remind people watching online that you can send a question to so i, sam, larry, i hear it's an entry the code at aei event. send a question and if i can remember to vote at night. so let's talk a little bit about supply and demand.

where do you -- why do you think it's so much more supply? >> i think it is more sly and jason in the cda and derrick summit report. by the way, they deserve a huge salute for putting this on washington's agenda. there are very few in the demonstration of the congress who have done as much to put this on the agenda. it is really a question of the proportions, whether we are talking about demand to 70% for demand 40%. i tend to think that both the institutional barriers have been severely underestimated. this is the incarceration and

its incarceration, felony, criminalization of a large proportion of the american population, obviously mostly young young man. i think it has been severely underestimated in part because the government kind of forgot to collect the information which would allow us to examine the period i think the supply aspect has also been to some degree understated or underestimated in the general narrative because i don't think that most of the general work has actually taken a comprehensive look at the role of disability programs in the overall tableau. i can understand why there's been a certain amount of oversight they are. we do not have any central government authority to collect information on all of the crazy quilt of programs that we have in the disability area.

that is ig syntax report, and the cpa report focused on one program in particular. they concluded that this maybe didn't have such a big role because only 28% of the men not in labor force were enrolled in that one program. i think what i show in my book is that the overall proportion is actually well over a half if you take into account ssi, veteran disability, other programs people report being a part of. it's a much bigger aspect. we get into questions about reservation wages and things like that about and i think those are quite complex to research. it's quite complex to try to answer those in the methodologically rigorous way. but i was saved for the reasons that i mentioned already in or some other reasons i mentioned

in the book as well, the notion that this is overwhelmingly a demand problem i think needs to be examined. >> if a supply problem, you need some endeavors that is keeping the skies -- >> let me give you some examples. we know in general -- a pool of 7 million has got some of everybody. but we know over represented with african-american men, native or an american men and men who have never been married or don't have kids. those are the overall patterns. but there are some striking irregularities. for example, if you like i am married, you're more likely to be in the labor force than a white guy who is very. so with that respect, marriage

trumps ethnicity. if you are foreign-born and you have no high school diploma, your profile looks like a college grad. so nativity or immigration trumps education in that particular case. there are enough of these irregularities to sit just the motivational aspect they have been neglected in much of the work that has been done so far. >> i think the demand supply, which in some cases as you hinted that it's a bit artificial because if i tell you if i have raised and doubled the earned income tax credit and pulled some of these men off the sidelines that made them more attractive to employers, it's hard to know what supply them

with demand. but your diagnosis does influence what you think the policies are. so if you are thinking about how to attack this problem, what would you put on your list? >> well, in the boat, and pretty light on policy prescriptions in part because i don't want to be seen as megyn bigfoot if pain. in my view, we need to have voices from all over the political spectrum come in from very different points of view so we can build a sustainable consensus, having all sorts of different viewpoints and this is. don't budget for a drink of forgot about. i suggest in this book three kind of areas for investigation. one is trying to reinvigorate business and particularly smaller businesses. for more job generation. i think that probably went on its own merits, but as you note very much better than i from

your work, we had more businesses closing and opening. that can't be good in all sorts of different ways. it suggested the book that we should look at a serious overhaul of our disability programs. obviously, we need to have some sort of disability guarantees and insurance. the threat of programs that they are. we also want to make sure the unintended consequences of the programs aren't enormous and perverse and i think we can argue they may be today. this sort of direction that i think we might talk about this something that we see in sweden. you heard it here first, and aei guy talking. >> this is my point. in sweden today, some of the aspects of their employment

policies are kind of like work first. they are heavy on training and skills. they incentivize showing up for job placement. they incentivize showing up for work. if we take a look at the welfare reform and the need to name these, i think in retrospect we would say that's very successful. someone could say did she realize they have a good economy in the 90s and it stinks that. fair enough. but there's been interesting work done in brookings papers on the parsing of the impact of the welfare reform and the macroeconomic environment according to some of that work was actually rather smaller part. the last part i would emphasize if it's just a scandal about we don't collect data on the social and economic circumstance is a the 20 million americans have some sort of a felony in their

past, but are not behind the bars. if we are a forgiving society and it is pr, i hope we are, part of what we should want to be doing is figuring out how we can get these ex-felons back into the economy and back into society. we can't have evidence-based policies unless we have the evidence and that also is absolute critical for the future. >> there some beginnings of research agenda on us and some really interesting work on the inside and outside the government. ..

the disability i think there's been a lot of discussion about reform and disability not of all of it has worked first. i mean, should we find a way to give employers incentives so the key people on the job rather than put them on disability? we have a system or what you go on disability you never go off. we discourage people if they apply for disability even looking for a job because if you do, and they say you, you don't need the thing. i think that's another area come partly because of the trust fund always been on the edge that the consumer, although this work and recommendations are necessary but clearly not sufficient conditions. someone wrote in a question i hear a lot which is, are these guys getting pushed out because the women are coming in?

>> between 1948 and the year 2000 in response to this, absolutely critical question, the work rate for america as a whole grows. as the work rate for american women sword. what this means, of course is that american women were not displacing men. they were supplementing them. it was a win-win situation. what we've seen since the year 2000 is a gruesome parallel decline in work rates for men and women. so i don't think it's an either or with women eating men's launches. it's been a pretty grim economy for working women for the last 15 or 16 years.

>> participation rate to grow steadily until the late '90s and level off of. >> i was talking in particular about the work rate but it's also true about the labor force participation rate. >> when you look at that chart, spaghetti chart with different colors, what do you make of the fact, what conclusion from the fact recent of the more severe problem? >> we are not, almost every society, almost every affluent industrial democracy has seen some decline, at least some decline in labor force participation rates for prime aged guys over the last 50 years. that seems to be worldwide. we have suffered a much more severe decline than any other industrial democracy. i wouldn't say that that's

because we are necessarily more globalized or we aren't necessarily more outsourced, although maybe we could prove that we are. if you take a look at other countries, and i'm thinking off the top of my head of sweden and france and canada and australia, they experience just about identical declines in their proportion of manufacturing jobs as we did over a period from like 1972 the present. and yet we are the country that has the most abysmal record with the exit of men from the labor force altogether. certainly it's logical and i think quite evident that the big structural change in manufacturing is part of this problem, but it don't think it explains why the united states ended up at the bottom of the barrel. not that part.

>> there's a couple of possibilities. there are policies that these other countries use that we don't. this is optimistic because that means there are things we could do. also note a gap between wages at the top and bottom has widened more. it's consistent with the notion wages at the bottom are so unattractive that they are not enough to get guys off the couch, right? >> absolutely. of course, measuring the impact of wages at the very lowest level in the minimum wage level gets to be a little bit more complex because of the various social benefits, trying to calculate the exact take on an effect. there's a little bit more complicated but as a general proposition, for sure. >> you show that interesting chart of the disparities among the states. is that more of a question that hypothesis?

>> here's one of the sets of ingredients i think for connecting those dots, at least to my eyes, as a rorschach test. one of the things that we know about disability benefits as opposed to some other sorts of benefits is they may tend to tie you to your locality. that's also true with snap and some other sorts of benefits. it is at least worth considering whether the nature of our social benefit programs may have had the perverse effect of helping to tether people too low job environments when they would be better served through mobility. certainly it is the case whether this social welfare anchor is actually an effect or not.

certainly it is the case that geographic mobility has plummeted in the united states over the past 35 years, and that in itself is consistent with the big increases i think in disparities between the states. >> there's nothing to stop you from taking your benefits from maine to new hampshire. it's not like, but it might be differences but the way the states administer them. >> accounts they are administered at the local level there's a certain amount of barriers to start up and so forth up there. because they are administered in a local manner. >> i suppose you could also look at russians of wages -- questions of wages at the bottom. >> sure. >> did the changes to the welfare system in the '90s, you know, all the requirements

of work and all that stuff, would that have had much impact on the behavior of these prime agent in? >> in the 1990s they wouldn't have been -- they wouldn't have been getting it anyway. it was a sort of, what would you say, it was a sort of controlled experiment which mainly involve mothers of children who didn't have, were married. >> one of the interesting things you said, it's important to point out to people, it would be nice if there were a bunch of men who decided not to work and decided to stay home and cook and clean because their wives had such good jobs. it seems to me and your book you point this out. first of all, these men who are not in the labor force, who are not even looking for work don't tend to be married anyway. perhaps because you don't make a very attractive husband if you have no job, no income. secondly, that studies show

these guys not spending more time on chores around the house or stuff. there really is the extent you can trust these, a lot of screen time. younger men on video games, older men on tv. wouldn't it be nice if stories don't hold up very well? >> of course i think it was doctor house m.d. who does everybody is a liar. but if you take a look at these surveys and you have been as your first kind of go to, the picture is pretty dispiriting. as you say, david, there's not a lot of civil society. there's not even a lot of help around the house. there is a lot of sitting and watching and what is called socializing, relaxing and leisure. one of the things which is really noteworthy about the u.s. labor market in the postwar era

is the large number of people who left the labor market for a number of years and then return successfully later on. those tens of millions of people were generally called women, and most of them i think were probably called mothers. whatever else you say about a mother who is at home, she's almost never idle. she has to be dependable. she has to be there. there are no sick days. you have to keep the schedule. all of these sorts of things come if you look at them as skills are the sorts of things that employers tend to like in their employees. we have to ask the question about what happens to the guys in this group neither in education, neither employment, education or training after a year or two after being out of the labor force. how do employers look at them and their skills?

>> so your solution largely, we want to tweak the benefit programs to create more incentive for work. you are not against trying to run a hotter economy or raising the wages of people at the bottom, but you're a little skeptical about whether that's really the bulk of the problem. is that fair? >> i think that's fair to say. mainly what i try to say at the end of this book is that it's important for people with all sorts of different policy agendas to come into the public square and to agree with one another that we need to shine a spotlight on this. we can duke it out in the world of empirical effects to see what actually works and doesn't work. but if we let this problem slip back into the shadows, it's going to certainly continue and i think we've got all sorts of reasons to worry that it is

going to give you a worse than this spent what other consequences of the getting worse or not getting any better? >> well, let's see. slow economic growth, widening wealth and income disparities, greater government dependence, bigger budget deficits, bigger debt. more pressure on families. les mojo -- social mobility. less social capital. weaker civil society. there's actually nothing good -- may be more opioid addiction. and i myself when i connect these but i think it's possible to talk a increasing political extremism in the united states. >> it's really hard for me to forget what's cause and effect here. if you lost your job, you can't get another one. you didn't look very hard. moving is kind of hard. you get discouraged. you get angry.

you may become one of your supply side stories, but it started with you lost her job. on the other hand, you have all these guys and many of whom acyclic never had a solid job who have found some way to get by mooching off of the film or whatever. and then that leads to some of these making them unattractive to employers. it's hard for me to tease out. i don't think the data gives the answer which one of these as a consequence of not having a job in which one is a cause. >> i take your point. i take your point, but this is why we need to make this a bipartisan or if you will and ominous partisan point of concern -- omni partisan -- why we can't forget about and three months or a year when the economy seems to be going tepidly well.

>> is there a question back there? wait for the mic so the tv cameras can help. be sure to tell so you are in remember it would be good to ask a question and not make a spee speech. >> thanks very much. i think this is great insight. there's some figures we've been saying, one of them showing it's not just the lowest educated but also college education, at least to males in the prime interest rate of increasing problems relocating or finding jobs. my specific question is, have you looked at, the other interesting figure we have seen is the number of jobs and even careers that the average person will go through by the time they are reaching their end of their working age life. we understand there's an increase in the number of jobs. some look at that as job mobility. others look at as insecurity. did you look at that at all in terms of how many times people

are forced to change jobs or do so willingly over the course of a career? we think it's a measure of more instability. >> in my study, i've got a chapter, chapter five, which looks at the demography of the un-working american men, mainly this group of 7 million between the ages of 25-54 were neither working or looking for work. interestingly enough, the high school dropouts account for a disproportionate share of this group, but they still only account for about one-fifth. guys of all backgrounds with some college or more, with at least a little college or maybe more than a little college account for not quite half but over 40%. so it's a nontrivial aspect of

this greater phenomenon. i think there's a fair amount of work that has been done that is suggesting actually that the churning in the labor market has been going down, not up. and that the decline in churning may actually be something that we need to be a little bit worried about. david, you may have some -- >> i think it's true that technology and globalization are changing over peoples lifetime. there are people whose jobs, they can no longer do the job they did because the job has changed. it on the macro level there is less of these people moving. changing jobs than it was. that's one of the explanations economists offer for the slowdown in productivity growth. somebody wrote in an estimate

whether you think there's a a reluctance of people who may be one satisfactory or blue-collar construction job to go work in a walmart or nursing home, that their son son, i don't know, self-respect or stigma associated, but that's part of this. >> a very good question, and i'm not sure i can answer this question as a numbers nerd. i think that we need a poet laureate or somebody like that you can get some of the humanity in this great soccer to describe this better. what i can tell you -- soccer -- look at the statistics is that only about one in seven of this, if you want to call this army of 7 million men, report that their out of the labor force because they could not find a job.

six out of seven give other reasons. a lot of the reasons are disability. i mean, david described some of the truly grim new findings about paying bills. i mean, the vision of people sitting in front of screens on pain pills all day is really pretty dispiriting. >> the gentleman in the back. the guy with the blue shirt. >> george pendleton. twtwo point question as it relas to remedies for this. it has been shown through several studies that if employers were to hire for skill as opposed to credential, they would probably be a 30% increase, particularly among underrepresented minorities in the workforce. so my question to you is

twofold. one, would you advocate possibly a discussion of amending the civil rights act of 1964 to prohibit discrimination in employment based on credentials? secondly, what point in time given your graphs do you think the trajectory of the graphs becomes a homeland security threat? >> nice, easy questions. so i'm a bit out of my depth in dealing with the civil rights act. when i think about discrimination against minorities, the first thing i think of through this study has to do with the felony background and criminal record and the overrepresentation of some minorities in this pool. i don't think that we actually know as much as we need to about why people who have a record of

some sort in the past are not in the labor force as much as i think they should be. is it because of discrimination, pure and simple and barriers? is it because people lose skills while they are in stir? is it because people tend to have trouble with the law also are the sort of people who employers tend not to look for? i think we can know a lot more about that than we do. and i think we should. if the government were to collect data on this rather than for us to rely upon a couple of surveys, we would know an awful lot more. as to when this becomes sort of a crisis that our policing authorities have to pay attention to, i would submit that your guess is at least as good as mine. things are going in a direction

which does not look at all good. larry summers in a log of his a couple of weeks ago just extrapolate the line out to the 2040s and the 20 \50{l1}s{l0}\'50{l1}s{l0}. i don't know if we can really do that. what if you do that you got a really spooky two-tier society staring you in the face. >> bob, can you raise your hand. wave your hand. >> how are these guys supporting themselves? just disability, disability programs or whatever? you know, where did they get their meals everyday? >> i've got a chapter in this book, chapter eight, which tries to get to that. i don't think i'm totally successful because i don't tnk

that the census bureau said cps statistics fully reflect the benefits of that that, that peoe run country are getting. that's not a crime. cps also wait underrepresented capital gains and things like that. as far as i could make out from looking at the income and the spinning statistics, which are done by census on the one hand and the beer of labor of statistics, consumer expenditures survey on the other hand, it's, it's to some degree moonlighting but to a very small degree moonlighting. that's not a major source of income. it's about that is government benefits, disability benefits and means tested benefits. and above that, relying upon the resources of your family, friends, girlfriends, your relatives.

when it comes to actual spending patterns, nonworking men, and that includes the unemployed, unfortunately we can't parse out the one working and the unemployed -- >> unemployed means you're looking -- >> out of a job looking for work as a poster out of a job not looking for a work. it's predominately them. they're spending patterns pattet surprisingly, are lower than the national average. interestingly enough, they are not in the bottom quintile of spending for america. they are in the next quintile, the second quintile. they are not living like kings but they're not at the bottom. who is at the bottom? single mothers, female-headed households. the guys who are in this group are more or less, ironically, in the the incomes, in that spending, the living strata of which one day longer go we might

have attributed to the working-class. >> i'm sure you would agree we have to take all these numbers with a great deal of skepticism and it's the kind of question that is probably best answered not my responses to the consumer expenditure survey, but by a much more kind of sociological, anthropological living in the community and interviewing people and -- >> i'm so glad you mentioned that. about a mile from here, back in the '60s, there was an anthropologist named elliott lebo who did a beautiful study about black washington. it has withstood the test of time and it also is a qualitative ways to get the things that will people can't get with statistics and decimal point. we need to have a whole bunch of

elliott lebo said go and give us the human dimensions of this crisis we have in america today. >> why don't we take a couple more questions? i'm going to take all three of you as it will take the questions and then nick can decide which ones he wants to answer. >> i have two very quick questions i think. when is you mention the impact that incarceration has on participation in the labor force. did you take a look at the overrepresentation of people with disabilities who are incarcerated? for example, about 40% of people are incarcerated also have a disability. so the overlap of those could be tallied as to what the story is. the second is when you look at make international comparisons,, and were doing much worse, do you take a look at the fact that in other countries people to

become unemployed have access to better job training, they have access, universal healthcare, universal access to long-term services and support for rehabilitation that can help the 19th labor force attachment. and we don't here. >> i'm going to get these three guys to ask questions. can we had the mic over here. >> i'm with the aspen institute, and a couple of comments, questions. the first in the whole supply versus demand argument, supply and away could could be read as culture. i've seen these people and other surveys that will show, that is shown women are willing to take jobs that men won't take. some of that may be wages.

women are willing to take bad jobs that men might not take, which you alluded to before. perhaps some of that can be gotten to with higher wages, but i would be interested in your thoughts to what extent this is part of a larger cultural failing mankind a problem? you talk about failing boys and schools, lower college participation. the one other question, you look at the 25-54 prime age, of course what you get to older men you are seeing increased labor force her to and i would be interested in what you make of that. >> okay, thanks. >> i'm steve powell. sino powell capital. i don't see a lot of these problems in china. going to this gentleman to

comment about enabling people to be unemployed and not look for work, supported by the families but they are also supported by the government. has there been any research on the effect of getting these men to return to the workforce when there are subsidies from the government have been reduced or cut out? >> that's a good segue into my question, because have you given any thought to what a universal basic income policy would have on this? >> those are really good questions. the first one, is a some overlp between people being incarcerated and disability, do we know? >> i argue in this book, this is something we desperately need to know about. we desperately need to know about that. >> when we talk about men who are not in the labor force, the government statistics generally don't tell people were incarcerated. it's a civilian not instituted

population. >> at this point 10 times as many people have felonies at large in society as are behind bars. >> other countries have different and often bigger social safety nets, more active labor market policies. is that one reason why they are doing better than we are? >> i think that certainly some aspects of that are involved. i think certainly you can make the case that training policies and policies in particular countries, which are involved in trying to up peoples skills and get people back into the labor market. those things i think are very much worth looking at. one difference is that it is more characteristic in european countries to have larger unemployed populations than the united states, whereas we have people who are not in the labor

force at all. many european countries tend to have a shift towards more unemployed and not in the labor force. >> do you think it's better to ask there is an advantage of having people sing themselves as unemployed who are at least going through the motions of going looking for work. >> one can make that argument. people will disagree about that but that is certainly an argument. >> is this just one more symptom of the end of man or something? >> well, i think if you take a look into the pool of un-workingmen, you do see different sorts of motivational factors, call them values, aspirations. i think it's meaningful yet such a difference with respect to family structure, with respect to people who are married or making different choices from people who are not married in very large numbers and probabilities.