Tara Henley interviews political economist Nicholas Eberstadt;

The prosperity of modern America has helped conceal a catastrophe in employment collapse for prime age men. Prime working-age men — not my definition, 25 to 54 — it’s pretty self-evident why they’re called this. They’re not just important for the workforce, where they’re a main component. These are the crucial years for family formation and raising kids as well. For about two decades after the end of the Second World War, American prime male workforce participation was very, very high. Maybe 3 percent of men were not working, or looking for work. Then around the mid-1960s, something happened, and it was a big something. Because there was a retreat from the workforce, a flight from the labour market. That was almost a straight line upwards between the mid–sixties and 2016 when my first edition of Men Without Work came out. It almost looks like a straight line. It almost looks like something out of geology rather than something out of the social sciences.

Since then, this straight line has continued almost exactly in the same direction. That’s very odd. I could have almost drawn the same line back in 2016, and you could have seen it continue to this very day without altering it at all. What this means is that over three times the share of men out of work, and out of the labour force, can be seen today in America as back in the sixties. In practical terms, this means that the work rate for modern American men is at Great Depression levels. We didn’t start measuring employment seriously in the United States until the very tail end of the Great Depression, until the 1940 census. But the work rate this month for American prime age guys is lower than it was in 1940, when the unemployment rate in the country as a whole was 15 percent. And for the 21st century as a whole, for the entire 21st century, you average it out month by month, the work rate for prime age guys is substantially lower than it was in 1940. For the 21st century to date, we have had a 1937 economy for work for men, even though we live in this fantastically wealthy, productive, technologically dynamic world.

[…]

We have this amazing situation in modern America where we therefore get all of this happy talk about how low our unemployment levels are. We’re at near full employment; we’re at full employment. And at the very same time, if you actually take a look at the population numbers, for every unemployed guy — this is in 2022, this is right now — for every unemployed guy, there were over four who are neither working nor looking for work.

Audio of the full interview is here.