“Nicholas Eberstadt has become one of our highest-impact socioeconomic and demographic analysts, rivaling his American Enterprise Institute colleague Charles Murray. In Men without Work, he alerts us to a new ‘invisible national crisis.’ . . . Eberstadt is thus pointing to a fatal flaw—a sexual suicide in an American polity where women outvote men and prefer socialism and stasis over progress and prosperity, where they choose dependency on government over collaboration with husbands and family.” —George Gilder, National Review
“Nicholas Eberstadt has become one of our highest-impact socioeconomic and demographic analysts, rivaling his American Enterprise Institute colleague Charles Murray. In
Men without Work, he alerts us to a new ‘invisible national crisis.’”
"[A]n unsettling portrait not just of male unemployment, but also of lives deeply alienated from civil society." —Susan Chira,
New York Times
“The work rate for adult men has plunged 13 percentage points in a half-century. This ‘work deficit’ of ‘Great Depression–scale underutilization’ of male potential workers is the subject of Nicholas Eberstadt’s new monograph
Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis, which explores the economic and moral causes and consequences of this.” —George F. Will,
Washington Post
“Eberstadt has put his finger on what may be the most important socioeconomic question the U.S. will face over the next quarter-century.” —Lawrence Summers,
Financial Times
"Nicholas Eberstadt of the center-right American Enterprise Institute released a book,
Men Without Work, earlier this year has helped spark many man-centric conversations about labor force participation. Eberstadt argues that if you ignore differences in retirement age, American men are now less likely to work than European men, and that male labor force participation has been declining for a few generations now. This is all true." —Matthew Yglesias,
Vox
“Non-marriage and non-work are locked in a downward spiral. Eberstadt’s book is a fire bell.” —Mona Charen
, National Review
“Eberstadt is right that this is ‘America’s invisible crisis’: an enormous problem that is rarely discussed and will not go away on its own. Eberstadt has done more than anyone else to raise awareness of the issue and to sketch its contours.” — Robert VerBruggen, Washington Free Beacon
"Eberstadt’s
Men Without Work is the social-science ballast to the powerful impressionistic account offered in J. D. Vance’s bestselling
Hillbilly Elegy, the book of the year. . . . Eberstadt puts statistical meat on Vance’s rhetorical bones. His subject isn’t the unemployed but the not-employed, not men looking for work but men who have stopped looking for work. Those looking for work are counted as part of the labor force. . . . The crisis of the un-working, so crushingly depicted in Eberstadt’s remorseless charts and facts, is a spiritual disease that has been slowly building within the American body politic and is beginning to rot us from within.” —John Podhoretz,
New York Post
“‘America now is home to a vast army of jobless men who are no longer even looking for work—roughly 7 million of them age 25 to 54, the traditional prime working life,’ Mr. Eberstadt writes… . These members of the ‘Idle Army” are the “detached men’ of America, Eberstadt says. And their detachment, and their numbers, are growing. No nation can survive such a pandemic.” —
Pittsburgh Tribune