The Invisible Crisis

“Violent crime, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, illiteracy, joblessness—these are some of the hallmarks of what has come to be called ‘the underclass,’” Isabel Sawhill wrote in a 1989 Public Interest essay. “Everyone has a theory, but no one really knows why the social fabric of certain communities has deteriorated so badly.”

Sawhill’s words came at a turning point in the history of social policy. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, all of the enumerated rates hit disturbing highs, driven by communities of concentrated disadvantage—home of the “underclass.” The richest nation in the history of the world discovered that alongside wealth came new pathologies, ones which once-ascendant liberal meliorism seemed unable to address, and indeed was likely exacerbating. The conservative policy renaissance of the 1980s and ’90s, in turn, was largely about providing alternative approaches, particularly by reforming the government programs which, conservatives argued, were producing the underclass phenomenon in the first place.

This past is prelude to a different suite of pathologies that affect what might be called today’s underclass. Six years ago, demographer Nicholas Eberstadt threw light on the “invisible crisis” of the men who make it up. In Men Without Work, Eberstadt documented how millions of American men had quietly vanished from the workforce, instead living lives of idleness and dependency on family and the dole. Now, Eberstadt has released an update to the book, addressing the surge of labor-force dropout following the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a timely warning to both sides of the aisle as to the challenges social policy still faces.

Men Without Work is, essentially, a book about a mouthful of a statistic: the prime-age male labor force participation rate. In layman’s terms, that’s the share of working-age (i.e., 25 to 54) men who are either employed or looking for work. As Eberstadt explains, this rate has been steadily declining since the 1960s. That means millions of men who would have worked decades ago are now not only not working, but not even actively looking for work.

Drawing on government and nonprofit data, Eberstadt paints a picture of these men. They dedicate far