This talk is by Nicolas Eberstadt, one of the thinkers in an actual think tank, who research and write about issues affecting our country and our society. In 2017, he published a book called Men Without Work,* about the 7 million or so working age men who have dropped out of the American workforce. This video, from 2021, is a more recent talk on this subject. For a variety of reasons, men, and a lesser number of women, have simply dropped out of the American workforce. They don't have jobs, and are not officially looking for jobs. There has been almost no research into this group of people, besides Mr. Eberstadt's book. Looking at what supporting research there is, he has found that most of these people seem to get some kind of government support to survive. In another talk, he mentioned that these men seem to spend a huge amount of time watching screens, either TV, videos on phones or computers. or video games. The working people of the U.S., through taxes and now inflation, support these people, somewhere between 7 and perhaps 10 million people or more. This is a group of men, comparable to the population of New York City or L.A., that are not working regular jobs, and no one is sure why.
Besides Nicolas Eberstadt, I seem to be one of the few other people interested in this societal issue. Here's how I became interested in this. For reasons I won't go into, I got forced out of California, and to North Carolina in 2008. I'm not from NC, my family's from Ohio originally, but my parents and my sister's family wound up living there. I was homeless when I left California, I'd been on the streets for nearly a year, unable to find work or start a viable small business, after the taxi driving industry collapsed here. I accepted an offer to stay with my parents for a while, and they flew me to NC.
I landed in the tiny town of Kernersville, NC, in the middle of November, 2008. We were a couple of months into the major collapse part of the Great Recession, roughly two months after the Lehman Brothers collapse. I moved into the spare room of my parents' tiny apartment. I could not find a job in Kernersville, and I wound up staying with my parents, not working, and living off their Social Security payments. Without realizing it, I became one of those people, one of those men, who were not working, and not looking for a traditional job. At the time, I was hoping to start a small business flipping merchandise, buying stuff at auctions, and reselling it on eBay, Craigslist, and the like. If you've ever seen the TV show "Storage Wars," or similar shows, that's what I wanted to do. I'd been buying things at storage unit auctions for 3-4 years part time, and made a little side money doing it, while I was driving a taxi in Orange County, California.
My mom and I never got along well when I was growing up, and that tradition continued in 2008-2009. So in the spring of 2009, I took off, and wound up staying in a homeless shelter in nearby Winston-Salem, NC. Initially, I was trying to find work there, thinking I had a better chance in a city of about 250,000 people then in Kernersville, a rural town of about 30,000.
Like most homeless shelters, we had to leave by 7:00 am each morning, and come back in about 6:00 pm. One evening, getting back to my bed, I noticed that 10 or 12 of the 60 guys in the shelter didn't come back in that evening. So I asked one of the other guys, "Where'd everybody go?" This black ma,n who had grown up in Winston-Salem, looked at me like I was an idiot, "It's the first of the month, they got their check. Don't you get a check?" He was serious. Not having any idea what he was talking about, I replied, "If I got a check, I wouldn't be in a homeless shelter." He just laughed.
Later, I asked a couple of other guys, and they explained that nearly every man in the shelter got a "check," Those checks, in most cases, were actually direct deposits, from either Social Security Disability, SSI, or sometimes veteran's benefits, and other government money. The guys explained to me that a bunch of the guys went out, bought drugs, picked up hookers, or maybe rented a motel room to do drugs and hookers, and didn't come back to the shelter on the first. That was simply a standard thing, that happened every month, in the "hood" of Winston-Salem, at the shelter, When I asked a bit more, they said the same thing happened in nearby Greensboro, Highpoint, the other two large cities in the "Piedmont Triad" area in central North Carolina. It happened there, and in every other large city they knew of. After the collapse of the factory jobs between the 1980's and 2000's, this had become "just the way things were."
I wound up spending about 18 months or so in two of the Winston-Salem shelters, between early 2009 and 2012. I met maybe 200 or 300 men in the shelters, and found that living off the government and "getting a check," was standard operating procedure in the poor side of Winston, and most other cities that those men had spent time in. As I met and talked to other homeless men, including some that had stayed in shelters or lived in other eastern cities, the same thing occurred everywhere. I met one man who had been moving from shelter to shelter, up and down the Eastern seaboard, for ten years. He lived for free in shelters, from New Hampshire to Georgia, as I recall, putting in the 3 to 6 months allowed at each one, then moving on. He said that, even without a check, a man could live indefinitely for free on the East Coast.
So I learned quite a bit about the "Men without work," by actually living with many of those men in homeless shelters, and being one myself, much to my dismay. I came to the conclusion that at least 2/3 of the people on Social Security Disability are scamming the system, to live free off the government. Guys often bragged about the crazy stories they told doctors, to "prove" mental illness, because mental issues were the easiest way to get Disability. At that time, 2009-2012, it usually took about 2 years to get Disability. A person would get a social worker or someone to fill out the paperwork, and pretty much always get denied at first. Then they would get a lawyer, and usually get their Disability approved on the second or third attempt. At that point, they would get a big chunk of back payments, several thousand dollars at once, $12,000 to $15,000 wasn't unusual. Then the person would get monthly checks, usually $700 to $1,100 a month, for several years, and likely for life. Then they watched TV on their 60 inch flat screen in their $600 apartment in the hood (sometimes Section 8), or played video games all day. The entire system is set up to punish people who try to go back to work. So people get "hood rich," buy the big screen, put rims on their '96 Chevy Impala, and live it up. The people who have the worst habits would eventually wind up with no place to live, often kicked out by family or roommates, and head to the homeless shelter. When the first of the month came around, 10 or 12 guys would go party, not come back to the shelter, and lose their bed. They had to stay out of the shelter for a month or two, usually, then could come back for 3 to 4 months, if they followed the rules.
One guy Winston-Salem was getting a combined payment of about $3,500 a month, at a time when $600 apartments were readily available. He would blow the money on booze, drugs, and prostitutes in 7 to 10 days, on average. Month after month. Another guy, living in a house near the shelter, got a $40,000 insurance settlement for an accident, and spent the money in a month. That was the talk of the shelter for a week, because everyone was pissed off that he managed to keep the payout quiet, and they weren't able to steal any of his money for themselves. Not everyone, of course, thought that way, but quite a few did.
The concept of going back to work somewhere simply didn't exist. There were not a lot of jobs, and the few there were paid poorly. What's crazy is that most of those men I met in Winston worked in the factories, tobacco, textile, or others, when they were still open. But the loss of those jobs, and the rise of Social Security Disability, in particular, has created a completely different lifestyle. None of the men I met thought about starting a small business, which is all that I wanted to do. But I found the culture so anti-entrepreneurial, that it seemed impossible.
On the bright side, these "Screenwatchers" have seen about every movie there is, and play a lot of video games, and are a good source of info about those subjects. I saw the same thing in Richmond, Virginia, while living homeless there for 9-10 months. This non-working lifestyle is not a North Carolina thing, or an Eastern Seaboard thing, it seems to be prevalent everywhere there was formerly a strong industrial sector that crashed decades ago.
Here in Southern California, getting on Disability is much less pervasive, in my experience among the homeless population, now having lived over 2 1/2 years on the streets since 2019. People usually have "food stamps" (EBT), and medical insurance, and often General Relief ($200+/- a month) or SSI, ($235 or so a month). But I have met very few people on Disability. I think this is one big reason, along with much milder weather, that there's a much larger visible homeless population on the West Coast. Obviously, really high rent prices are another big factor. But in the East, the "homeless' people are in apartments, trying to figure out the next big score, like getting accident settlements. Those are another major income source in the hood back East.
In my case, I did finally get a job driving a taxi in Winston in 2011-12, and lived in my taxi for the year I drove, averaging just under $200 a week in net income. I never even came close to making enough to rent an apartment. Since I was working 70-80+ hours a week, there wouldn't have been much of a point, anyhow. Like in California, I worked 7 days a week, and spent a chunk of money on a "cheap" motel room once a week. There I got a pizza, watched a few hours of TV, or movies from the library, and got one good night's sleep a week.
I quit driving a taxi shortly after my dad had a major stroke, and it was apparent he would die soon. I wound up back in Kernersville, living with my mom, after his funeral. In late 2012-2014, I applied for over 140 local jobs, and could not get hired anywhere in Kernersville. Jobs were scarce then, and you needed to know someone to get ANY job, even a Walmart job. In that culture, people hire their relatives, friends, people from church, or their friend's kids. I was unable to find ANY job from late 2012 until I left in 2018.
In 2015, I started trying to sell my Sharpie artwork, not because I had some dream to be "an artist," but rather because I could not find any way to earn money in NC. I became a working artist because I couldn't find a "real" job. I've now sold over 100 original pieces of art in six years, and I am still a "working artist," if a homeless one, as well as a prolific blogger.
* Not a paid link.
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