“Time-use surveys suggest [these men] are almost entirely idle,” Eberstadt wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed a few weeks ago. “Unlike in the past, the U.S. is now evidently rich enough to carry them, after a fashion,” he added.
Princeton professor Alan Krueger, a former chief economist at the Department of Labor and former chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, has taken a look at the same data — but he came away with a different conclusion.
What stood out to him is that a lot of these men say they are in considerable pain.
In a recently released draft of his paper, which he will present at a Federal Reserve conference in Boston on Friday, Krueger finds that 44 percent of male, prime-age labor force dropouts say they took pain medication the day prior — which is more than twice the rate reported by employed men.
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