(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) On Thursday’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, FOX Business host Mike Rowe talked about the problem that America faces right now – a growing number of able-bodied men who are not seeking a job, according to Fox News.
He said that 7 million able-bodied men between the ages of 25 and 40 are not only not working, but are not even looking to find a job.
“That’s never happened in peacetime — ever,” Rowe said.
The “How Things Work” host mentioned the work of the economist Nick Eberstadt, which looks at the labor market after the coronavirus and the reasons why employers are having trouble getting people to enter the workforce again.
“Economists like Nick Eberstadt take a dim view of it — they’re worried, and they’re trying to inject that into the conversation at a time when we’re still looking at the unemployment number as the true harbinger of what’s really going on,” he said.
In Eberstadt’s view, the unemployment number is a “depression era artifact,” Rowe said.
“We’re looking at the wrong thing. We’re looking at not what it means to have a bunch of people unemployed, but what does it mean to have a bunch of opportunities that nobody gives a damn about?”
In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Eberstadt explained that America is facing an “unprecedented peacetime labor shortage, with employers practically begging for workers, while vast numbers of grown men and women sit on the sidelines of the economy.”
“Never has work been so readily available in modern America; never have so many been uninterested in taking it,” Eberstadt wrote.
Carlson asked Rowe what young men are doing with their free time if they are not actively looking for a job or already working somewhere.
“On average, over 2,000 hours a year on screens,” Rowe said.
“You know, four million fewer people are in the workforce today than before the lockdowns and four million more jobs have opened up. It’s almost a perfect mirror image and the reflection is kind of hideous.”
