Men Not At Work
Dolors & Sense
by Sanford Rose
KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—9/5/11—The nation’s employers are becoming increasingly misandrist.
They won’t hire men.
The proportion of men aged 25 to 64 without any labor-market earnings at all during the whole year now stands at 18 percent.
It has never been so high in modern economic history. Forty years ago the figure was only 6 percent.
Prime age is no longer prime time for making an honest buck.
It isn’t just the recession. It’s the so-called skills gap. Or the credentials gap.
Men who sport less than a high-school diploma are one-third less likely to be employed than 40 years ago.
And, as a group, after adjustment for inflation, they earn two-thirds less than they did in 1970.
Those who got the diploma but nothing more are a quarter less likely to be on the job and, if they can manage a job, make nearly 50 percent less than they did in 1970 in real terms.
Those with a college degree do better. They are presumed to have the skills to compete. They use computers.
They can communicate.
The problem is that there aren’t enough of them (abstracting from the current recession during which there appear to be too many of them).
The proportion of eligible young men graduating from college peaked in 1979 and has moved sideways ever since.
Not many are getting hired these days. But when employers look for new hires, they will apparently look for college-credentialed women, of whom there are far greater numbers.
The battle of the sexes in the office and even on the factory floor is thus a distaff triumph.
But it is a tragedy, not a triumph, for the nation. Absent skills, there are no jobs for men. Absent jobs, median earnings tumble. Absent earnings, families turn to excess borrowings, when these are available, as they are not now, but were in the past.
The skills gap has to be closed, even if it has to be closed only by massive government training expenditures.
It may be that the specter of unsustainable borrowings at the individual or familial level can be exorcised only by eminently sustainable borrowings (government interest rates have never been lower) at the Federal level.
Whatever it takes, we have to program prime time.
Sanford Rose
Sanford Rose, of New Jersey and Florida, served as Associate Editor of Fortune Magazine from 1968 till 1972; Vice President of Chase Manhattan Bank in 1972; Senior Editor of Fortune between 1972 and 1979; and Associate Editor, Financial Editor and Senior Columnist of American Banker newspaper between 1979 and 1991. From 1991 till 2001, Rose worked as a consultant in the banking industry and a professional ghost writer in the field of finance. He has also taught as an adjunct professor of banking at Columbia University and an adjunct instructor of economics at New York University. He states that he left gainful employment in 2001 to concentrate on gain-less investing. (A lifelong photo-phobe, Rose also claims that the head shot accompanying his Weekly Hubris columns is not his own, but belongs, instead, to a skilled woodworker residing in South Carolina.)