The decline of the working American man has been most marked among the less educated and blacks. If you adjust official data to include men in prison or the armed forces (who are left out of the raw numbers), around 35% of 25- to 54-year-old men with no high-school diploma have no job, up from around 10% in the 1960s. Of those who finished high school but did not go to college, the fraction without work has climbed from below 5% in the 1960s to almost 25% (see chart 2). Among blacks, more than 30% overall and almost 70% of high-school dropouts have no job.
These figures are likely to improve as the economic recovery continues, but probably not by much. The pattern of the past four decades suggests a ratchet effect: the share of poorly educated men in work falls in recessions and fails to recover fully in subsequent expansions. The effect could be especially strong this time.
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