Nov. 16, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:57
2842 28% of Men and 40% of Women
What is currently impacting approximately four out of ten Americans - or 92 million people? Over ninety-two million Americans age sixteen and older are no longer participating in the labor force - meaning they’re not currently employed or actively searching for work. This is the highest amount of individuals opting out of employment in thirty-six years. Approximately one out of every six American men in their prime working years - 25 to 54 years old - does not have a job. Only 47% of working-age Americans have full-time jobs. Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/jobsandunemployment
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
New research has come out today that nearly 4 in 10 Americans, or 92 million, are not in the labor force, and now to some degree, at least we know the reason why.
They've simply given up and don't want to work.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the largest group of people not in the labor force are those who don't want a job.
Quite a remarkable statement on where the nation's work ethic is.
The federal job counter said that 85.9 million adults last month didn't want a job, or 93% of all adults not in the labor force.
And Pew Research has reported that almost 40% of 16-24 year olds don't want to work, which is up from 29% in 2000.
Last month, 28.5% of men said they didn't want a job.
Up from 23.9 in October 2000.
And for women, 38% don't want the job throughout the 2000s and 2010.
And then it reached 40.2% of women don't want a job last month.
So, this is really quite a remarkable situation.
I mean, I got my first job when I was 10, and I was working pretty continually since then to now, more than a few years later.
And they're talking 16 to 24.
So, by the time I was 24, I'd had 14 years experience off and on in the workforce.
And when I wasn't in the workforce, I was studying and usually having a part-time job in the workforce.
So that is a lot of experience in understanding what it is to provide economic value to someone.
Now, of course, nobody who's a teenager wants a job because you've been stuck in the government school for 10 years or more.
And so you have no economic value.
You don't understand what it is to really provide economic value.
You don't understand that job security simply means creating more value for your employer that you consume in wages.
You don't know how to defer gratification.
You don't know how to please customers.
You don't know how to negotiate.
You don't know how to even sometimes show up on time.
So all of these are pounded in through the various jobs that I had as a teenager, from painting plaques to working in a bookstore, assembling newspapers on Sunday mornings, to working in a hardware store, cleaning offices, cleaning people's carpets of dog hair, and
And, of course, the other thing that's true is when you're a teenager, generally your managers are pretty terrible because, you know, competent and good managers tend to move up in the organization pretty quick and aren't used at the human shields against the economically incompetent through no fault of their own through the system as a whole.
So you have pretty crappy jobs in pretty crappy conditions with pretty crappy managers and for relatively low pay.
One of my first jobs was working in a convenience store and I think I was making $2.40 an hour.
So the fact that young people don't want to work, I kind of understand and I think it comes from a much deeper issue and a much deeper problem.
Which is, first of all, not working has become progressively more enjoyable as time has gone along.
Because you've got Xboxes, you've got PS4, you have video on demand.
When I was a kid or when I was a teenager, if you didn't work...
You got the joys of, you know, 16-inch black and white daytime television, and that really was enough to make you go and take a job rubbing your face up against sandpaper if need be.
And, of course, there's a critical mass that happens when people don't work in that if you're the only person not working, you don't have anyone to hang out with, but a lot of your friends are in the same boat.
Then you have people to hang out with, which makes it, I guess, a lot more enjoyable.
So the sort of on-demand videos and video games and pornography and so on that's piping into people's houses make it more attractive to stay home because, for me, I worked because I needed money.
I needed money.
I've been on my own since I was 15.
I needed the money.
And I don't think that that's really the case for a lot of people anymore, that they really need the money.
They're mostly pretty comfortable in their parents' houses, and they don't know the degree to which their future job skills are decaying based upon their current lack of participation in the workforce.
Of course, the economy is a challenge.
The economy keeps taking these Muhammad Ali, Hamid Pamma blows to the neofrontal cortex and staggers and falls and then fights its way back up like an endless replay of Bruce Willis walking over glasses.
This is what the economy does.
But it's important to remember that compared to most of human history, in fact virtually all of human history, the economy and opportunities available to people in the West now are still 99.999% greater than at any time in the past.
And given how many people are not participating, I'm telling you, as a guy, I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people and hired Many people, if I see somebody in their mid-20s with a blank resume, I'm having significant reservations because I know everything that they don't know.
I also know that they don't know everything that they don't know.
So by the time I was 25, I had 15 years' experience in the workforce.
I'm not recommending that, but that was simply a reality.
And 15 years, I mean, if you want somebody to translate Japanese to English and someone shows up with no experience in Japanese, you're not going to hire them because you can't just snap your fingers and replace 15 years of experience.
So it is really important to get out into the workforce, I think, as a teenager, to get a job and to keep a job at least for a year, right?
There's only three things you need to do to get into the middle class statistically.
Finish high school.
Don't have a baby until you're married and get and keep a job for at least a year.
That is your toehold into all of the glories of the modern Western economies.
But I also think that one of the things that's really happening is it's hard to get excited about the casino on the Titanic when you're already 30% listing.
In other words, when you know that the ship doesn't have a huge amount of time to go, then it's hard to get motivated to make the bed in your cabin.
For young people to submit to the rigors and boredom and frustration Of a low-wage teenage job with a bad manager and with annoying customers sometimes, to submit to that, they must have a long-term view that they're willing to sacrifice the glorious energy of their teenage years in cutting keys and cutting glass and mixing paint, as I did in hardware stores.
Why would they do that?
Well, they would do that because they believe that there's a payoff 10 to 15 to 20 years down the road or throughout the rest of their career.
I don't think there's a sane person alive who thinks that our current system can last another 20 years, at least not anybody who's got any exposure to the facts of this.
And you can see there will be no economic recovery, a video I did a while back ago, and we'll talk about it a little bit more here.
There's no possible way, in my opinion, and with some decent facts and theories behind that opinion, that the existing system can possibly last for another 20 years.
So why would you submit to all of this if there's going to be a massive change in the system which will either go more towards tyranny or more towards freedom but the strategic inflection point the fork in the road is definitely coming up I think it was six years ago or seven years ago, I said five to 15 years.
I think we're fairly on track to that.
So why would you necessarily get involved in a difficult series of low-paying, unpleasant jobs when you don't have any particular faith that the existing system is going to be rewarding you in the long run?
What is the road to the middle class and where does it sit these days?
So I think that deep down in the littered long-term deferral of gratification part of our brains, young people in particular are not finding themselves very motivated in the same way that if you know that what is being taught in the course is not what's going to be put on the exam, you're not going to pay much attention to your course material.
I would, of course, argue that it's still very important to up your human capital, to learn some economics, to read history, to read novels, to write, to learn how to code, to learn how to use computers, to learn how to think, study philosophy.
All these things will be beneficial no matter where and how the economy goes for the most part.
So I still think it's worthwhile.
But let's have a look at some of the other facts that I think are cooking around the brains of younger people.
Who, with their...
Rich parents or rich boomers' permission are whiling away their teens and 20s not getting work and basically removing themselves from the biological reality that in order to consume, somebody or you has to produce.
If you're consuming electricity, somebody has to produce and pay for that electricity.
If you're getting your house heated, somebody has to pay for all of that.
If you have a computer, somebody has to pay.
If it's not you, it's your parents or the taxpayer if you're on welfare or getting unemployment or whatever.
These are all basic realities that are being obscured from people because everybody's burning electricity.
The future to bribe the present.
This is the nature of late-stage democracy.
So let's look at some of the other facts that I think are cooking around in people's brains about motivating themselves to do the difficult work of early careerism.
So only 47% of working-age Americans have full-time jobs.
The notes for all of this will be in the low bar of the video, the notes of the podcast.
According to the BLS, the unemployment rate for Latino Americans is 142% that of white Americans.
The unemployment rate for black Americans, 215% that of white Americans.
Black unemployment rate hasn't been this high in over five years.
Can't be ascribed to racism, as it generally is, because Asian Americans are 17% more likely to be employed than even white Americans.
Last few years are the only back-to-back years on record when the number of Americans taking food stamps has outnumbered the amount of women working full-time year-round.
One out of every four involuntary part-time workers is living below the poverty line.
Over seven million Americans are employed as involuntary part-time workers due to their hours being cut or simply being unable to find full-time employment.
And that's something to do with Obamacare as well.
One out of every ten jobs is filled by a temp agency.
36% of Americans have not saved a dime for retirement, including 69% of 18 to 29 year olds and 14% of people 65 and older.
What is going to happen to them?
When the dollar turns into its actual value of stained toilet paper.
What happens to these people if and when?
A financial emergency happens.
I think the if is sliding more and more towards the when.
There's only so much loose change you can dig out from your couch cushions.
One in three Chicagoans has less than $250 in their bank account before payday and they're not adding to any savings, of course.
Over half of all working Americans make less than $30,000 a year and almost a quarter, shockingly, make $7,400 or less a year.
Almost a quarter of working Americans make $7,400 or less A year.
And since none of those, I would assume, are in unions or in government employ, it means that a significantly higher proportion of the private sector workers are making very, very little money.
Unemployment rates for recent college graduates have increased by about 160% between 2008 and 2010.
Young people without a high school diploma had 33% unemployment in 2010.
Generally, and I'll just touch on this very briefly, it's a big topic, but increases in automation are pushing lower skilled, lower intelligence, lower experienced workers out of the marketplace.
This happened before when, in the turn of the last century, about 70-80% of Americans were involved in farming.
Now it's about 2%.
So as machinery replaced farm workers, the farm workers streamed to the Urban areas where they got involved in factories and other kinds of industrialization in the cities, and that happened gradually, relatively, but because of a variety of government interventions in the economy, now it's happening much more rapidly.
People are being priced out of the market due to regulations, health and safety codes, unionization, bureaucracy, and so on.
I mean, you start talking about $15 an hour minimum wages, And you're going to see McDonald's robots sprout out faster than weeds in a turned-about garden.
And so you really need to work to add to your skills because in Germany, so much automation has occurred in factories.
Only 10% of the price of a car is human labor.
And robots aren't unionized, don't need health and safety regulations, and don't take sick days and so on.
So to compete with automation, you need to start to learn to do that which computers cannot do.
Like philosophy for me, but it could be something else for you.
Of the 20 fastest-growing occupations in America, only four require a bachelor's degree or better, while ten don't even require a high school diploma.
Half of all college graduates two years out of school are still financially dependent on their parents.
Sixteen percent of those surveyed reported living on their own is unimportant to them.
And this is also important, too, this failure-to-launch phenomenon wherein young men and women, but focusing on the men for a moment, get out of college and don't end up Getting jobs, getting married, and so on.
And marriage has traditionally had a very civilizing effect on young men.
I had more testosterone when I was younger.
My testosterone levels went down significantly when I got married.
And then when I became a stay-at-home dad, they went down 40% more.
And there is just a civilizing effect.
Not getting married, not having a career significantly associated with increased criminality and other forms of social disruptions.
So, productivity requirements for men, you tend to get a lot more money when you get married and you tend to get a lot more money or work for a lot more money when you have kids.
And whether you want to be some sort of disposable male ATM provider is up to you, of course.
But society has a huge amount of stability built into it when the lasso of marriage and kids ropes in the wild steers of hormonally driven urban youth in particular.
So, this failure to launch, which really is no place to land economically, has a lot to do with increasing instability.
Though, of course, it is very true that the crime rate continues.
But I view that as simply deferred crime, in that we're bribing people to not be upset with the existing system by giving them just enough money to live, either through them bleeding off their parents' savings or through direct wealth transfers through the welfare state.
We're simply drugging a wound that continually gets more infected so that we don't actually deal with it.
I think we've basically just deferred crime through bribery.
So median household income and adjusted for inflation is about $53,000, which is about 7% lower than it was in 2000.
And of course, wages have stagnated or fallen for the majority of people.
And as Charles Murray talks about in Coming Apart, there is a growing divide between rich and poor.
A permanent underclass and a permanent upper class are being developed and maintained, which of course was the exact opposite of the goal of the welfare state.
But shockingly, a government program has produced the opposite of its intended effects.
So my advice to you is there are still economic opportunities out there.
Eight years ago, I quit my software entrepreneur executive career and started this conversation, which you can support at fdurl.com slash donate.
I am a donation-based life form, so if you could help out, that'd be great.
There are opportunities still out there.
You need to work hard to up your skills.
No matter what's going to happen, your Xbox skills aren't going to get you anyplace but other skills you might have.
