Over six million prime-age men are neither working nor looking for work; America's low unemployment rate hides the fact that many men have dropped out of the workforce altogether. Our workforce participation rate is on par with that seen during the Great Depression.
Why does this problem affect men so acutely? Why is it so specific to America? What are these ... Show More
Feb 2023
Jane Lasonder, "Red Alert: The Inside Story of Prostitution and Human Trafficking" (Scholten Uitgeverij BV, 2016)
We love the tradition of the Amsterdam red light district, where many women stand in the windows in their underwear. Busloads of tourists and school children come by every day to look at them. In the Netherlands, where it has been taken out of the dark and made legal, we can even ... Show More
1h 2m
Oct 2022
Kirsty Loehr, "A Short History of Queer Women" (Oneworld Publications, 2022)
Kirsty Loehr talks about her new book, A Short History of Queer Women (Oneworld Publications, 2022). Queer women have always existed – let’s put them back in the history books No, they weren't ‘just friends’! We’ve read Jane Eyre, but what about the five hundred love letters Char ... Show More
33m 4s
Nov 24
Amy Hughes, "An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
Harry Watkins was no one special. During a career that spanned four decades, this nineteenth-century actor yearned for fame but merely skirted the edges of it. He performed alongside the brightest stars, wrote scores of plays, and toured the United States and England, but he neve ... Show More
1h 4m
Apr 2023
#614 - Nicholas Eberstadt - Why Do Millions of Men Not Want to Work?
Nicholas Eberstadt is a political economist, demographer, American Enterprise Institute scholar, and an author.
More than 7 million prime working age men in America are not looking for work, and each year that number continues to grow. Given that unemployment is at a massive low, ... Show More
54m 59s
Feb 2022
Elizabeth Anderson, "Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It) (Princeton UP, 2019)
One in four American workers says their workplace is a "dictatorship." Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are-private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers' spe ... Show More
50m 1s
Nov 2021
Forward Thinking on making labor markets work smarter—for people and companies—with Beth Cobert and Byron Auguste
In this episode of the McKinsey Global Institute’s Forward Thinking podcast, Michael Chui talks to Byron Auguste and Beth Cobert whose professional life is dedicated to fostering a more skills-based labor market. Their focus is on the United States, but their diagnostic can just ... Show More
44m 34s