Jackson Free Press

There's a fascinating feature in Newsweek right now about the effect the recession is having on middle-class, formerly well-off white men. Here's just a chunk; what are your thoughts?

Capitalism has always been cruel to its castoffs, but those blessed with a college degree and blue-chip résumé have traditionally escaped the worst of it. In recessions past, they've kept their jobs or found new ones as easily as they might hail a cab or board the 5:15 to White Plains. But not this time.

The suits are "doing worse than they have at any time since the Great Depression," says Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute. And while economists don't have fine-grain data on the number of these men who are jobless—many, being men, would rather not admit to it—by all indications this hitherto privileged demo isn't just on its knees, it's flat on its face. Maybe permanently. Once college-educated workers hit 45, notes a post on the professional-finance blog Calculated Risk, "if they lose their job, they are toast."

The same guys who once drove BMWs, in other words, have now been downsized to BWMs: Beached White Males.
Through the first quarter of 2011, nearly 600,000 college-educated white men ages 35 to 64 were unemployed, according to previously unpublished Labor Department stats. That's more than 5 percent jobless—double the group's pre-recession rate. That might not sound bad compared with the plight of younger, less-educated workers and minorities, but it's a historic change from the last recession, when about half as many lost their oxford shirts. The number of college-educated men unemployed for at least a year is five times higher today than after the dotcom bubble. In New York City, men in the 35-to-54 kill zone have lost jobs faster than any other group, including teenage girls, according to new data from the Fiscal Policy Institute.

As if middle age isn't bad enough. The moribund metabolism. The purple pill that keeps your food down. The blue pill that keeps another part of your anatomy up. Now you can't get an effing job? Stuck in your own personal Detroit of the soul, with the grinding stress of enforced idleness. The wife who doesn't look at you quite the same way. The poignantly forgiving sons. The stain on your masculinity for becoming the bread-loser. The night sweats and dark refuge of Internet porn. The gnawing fear that this may be the beginning of a slow, shaming crawl to early Social Security.

Previous Comments

ID

163259

Comment

When I saw this quote in the Newsweek story, it certainly seems like the writer has a real ax to grind with successful white males: "It might be tempting to snark at these former fat cats suffering lean times. But when Beached White Males suffer, so do their wives and children." But then, we already knew the low opinion the writer has of white males by the quote in the portion Donna wrote: "The night sweats and dark refuge of Internet porn." Is this what the Newsweek writer thinks, that men without jobs retreat to the dark refuge of internet porn? It really feels like a lot of the writer's emotions spilled over into the story.

Author

FrankEzelle

Date

2011-04-22T14:43:31-06:00