三十年前的这个夏天，社会学家威廉·朱利叶斯·威尔逊出版了《当工作消失时》一书，他在书中将城市以黑人为主的社区的高失业率归因于经济结构的变化。保守派驳回了他的论点，反而主张问题出在糟糕的职业道德上，而这又是由一个急需改革的福利制度助长的。但随着一场新的失业危机出现——这一次波及的更多是白人、男性和农村地区——右翼的许多人物发现了他们内心深处的结构主义倾向。
Thirty years ago this summer, the sociologist William Julius Wilson published When Work Disappears, in which he attributed high unemployment in urban, largely Black neighborhoods to structural changes in the economy. Conservatives dismissed his argument, contending instead that the problem was a poor work ethic enabled by a welfare system in desperate need of reform. But as a new unemployment crisis has arisen—this time more white, male, and rural—many figures on the right have discovered their inner structuralist.
对于为什么十分之一的“黄金年龄”男性（25至54岁）处于经济非活跃状态，主流的保守派解释集中在制造业和建筑业等传统上雇佣大量无大学学历男性的行业衰退上。听起来很像威尔逊，一些评论家指责贸易政策。“他们让其他国家洗劫我们的工厂、窃取我们的工作、把我们洗劫一空，”特朗普总统曾这样评价奥巴马时代的决策者。
Prevalent conservative explanations of why one in 10 “prime age” men (25- to 54-year-olds) are economically inactive focus on the decline of industries such as manufacturing and construction that traditionally have employed many men without college degrees. Sounding a lot like Wilson, some of these commentators indict trade policy. “They let other countries raid our factories, steal our jobs, and rob us blind,” President Trump has said of Obama-era policy makers.
这种批评与美国人被迫与外来者争夺剩余残羹冷炙的指控不谋而合。“合法移民一直处于如此高的水平，这压低了工资，夺走了大量工作，”参议员汤姆·科顿曾辩称。正如《大西洋月刊》的海伦·刘易斯最近所描述的，女权运动和肯定性行动也经常被作为使职场女性化、终结了那种赋予男性意义（或许也让女性想和他们约会）的工作的力量而被援引。
This critique dovetails with charges that Americans have been forced to fight for the remaining scraps with outsiders. “Legal immigration has been at such high levels, and it’s driven down wages and taken a lot of jobs,” Senator Tom Cotton has argued. And, as The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis recently described, the women’s-rights movement and affirmative action are also frequently invoked as forces that feminized the workplace and brought an end to the kind of work that gave men meaning (and that maybe made women want to date them).
基于对男性困境的这一诊断，随之而来的是一个错误的治疗尝试：设定关税以期带回制造业工作，驱逐可能从“真正的”美国人手中“窃取”这些工作的移民，并消除据称使职场对白人男性充满敌意的DEI文化。但该诊断并不正确：“阳刚”工作依然存在，雇主也在招聘。麻烦在于找不到愿意且能够胜任这些工作的男性。
From this diagnosis of men’s woes has followed a misguided attempt at a cure: setting tariffs in the hopes of bringing back manufacturing jobs, kicking out immigrants who might “steal” these jobs from “real” Americans, and vanquishing the DEI culture that has supposedly made workplaces hostile to white men. But the diagnosis is not correct: “Manly” jobs exist and employers are hiring. The trouble lies in finding men who are willing and able to take them.
美国劳工统计局刚刚报告称，截至8月底，采矿、伐木、建筑和制造业部门共有约80万个职位空缺。这代表过去一年增加了14.8万个职位空缺，而同期全经济范围内的职位空缺增加了16万个。警察部门和其他执法机构也面临着高空缺率和招聘困难。如果问题在于以男性为主的职业缺乏工作机会，这些空缺就不会存在。
The Bureau of Labor Statistics just reported that, at the end of August, the mining, logging, construction, and manufacturing sectors had about 800,000 job openings. This represents an increase of 148,000 job openings in the past year, during which job openings across the entire economy increased by 160,000. Police departments and other law-enforcement agencies also have had high vacancy rates and difficulty filling those jobs. If the problem were a shortage of work in predominantly male occupations, these vacancies wouldn’t exist.
这些空缺职位是否每一个都提供优厚薪资、良好福利和晋升空间？肯定不是，改善所有这些方面应当会增加男性求职的意愿。但导致约670万男性退出劳动力市场的动因远不止于此。
Does every one of these open positions pay excellent wages, offer good benefits, and allow upward advancement? Surely not, and improving all of those things should increase the willingness of men to apply for work. But the dynamics that have led about 6.7 million men to drop out of the workforce go beyond that.
部分问题（姑且这么说，因为实际上这是我们现行制度的一个优点）在于，对许多人来说，退出劳动力市场并非灾难性后果。一个世纪前，不工作的男性——以及通常还有他们的妻子和儿女——处于真正绝望的境地，面临贫困、无家可归和营养不良的风险。从那时起，实际GDP增长了约20倍，联邦安全网的实力呈指数级增强。
Part of the problem (so to speak, because in fact it is a virtue of our current system) is that, for many, dropping out of the workforce is not a catastrophic outcome. A century ago, men who did not work—and frequently, their wives and children as well—were in truly desperate situations and at risk for destitution, homelessness, and malnutrition. Real GDP has increased about 20-fold since then, and the federal safety net is exponentially more robust.
在这样一个富裕的国家里，尽管不平等依然存在，但放弃工作承担的风险小得多，因而也更容易被接受。政府之外，一个非正式的安全网也在扩大：过去75年里，女性大量涌入职场，其中许多人如今正将薪水带回家养活这些男性。这并非说失业令人愉快。恰恰相反：它仍会导致更差的身心健康。但它不像过去那样残酷了。
In such a rich country, inequality notwithstanding, foregoing work incurs much less risk and hence becomes more tolerable. A further, informal safety net has expanded outside of government: Women have flooded into the workforce over the past 75 years, many of whom are now bringing home paychecks to these men. This is not to say that unemployment is congenial. Quite the opposite: It still leads to worse physical and mental health. But it is not as harsh as it once was.
更关键的因素或许是，男性在不工作的时间里都在做什么。经济学家、《没有男人的世界》一书作者尼古拉斯·埃伯施塔特对劳工统计局的《美国人时间使用调查》提出了一个耐人寻味的观察，该调查提供美国人日常活动的数据。根据布鲁金斯学会2020年的一份报告，处于劳动年龄、不在劳动力队伍中的女性每天花约六小时从事照护和其他无偿家务劳动；同龄男性则不到三小时。
The more consequential factor may be what men are doing with all of the hours that they aren’t working. The economist Nicholas Eberstadt, the author of Men Without, made an intriguing observation about the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time Use Survey, which provides data on Americans’ daily activities. According to a 2020 Brookings Institute report, prime-age women outside the labor force spend about six hours a day on caregiving and other unpaid work at home; their male counterparts spend fewer than three.
平均而言，没有工作的男性用于此类目的的时间不到一小时。这些男性把时间花在前所未有的各类价格可负担、令人上瘾的商品和服务上——包括平均每天五个半小时看电视和电影，还有更多时间用于其他屏幕活动，如观看色情内容和玩电子游戏。最近一项研究发现，18至49岁的男性中有52%拥有在线体育博彩账户。
The average man without a job devotes less than an hour to such purposes. What these men are spending time on is an unprecedented array of affordable, addictive goods and services—including an average of five-and a half hours a day watching television and movies, plus many more on other screen-based activities such as watching pornography and playing video games. One recent study found that 52 percent of men ages 18 to 49 have an online sports-betting account.
这不仅仅是屏幕消费的问题。大麻生产和销售的合法化压低了价格、提高了药效，使得大多数时间甚至一直处于亢奋状态变得廉价。在未就业、未上学或未接受其他培训的劳动年龄男性中，超过四分之一使用大麻，而且他们往往每天或几乎每天都使用。
This isn’t just about screen-based consumption. The legalization of marijuana production and sale has collapsed the price and increased the potency of the drug, making it inexpensive to be high most or all of the time. More than a quarter of working-age men who are not employed, in school, or in other training use marijuana, and they tend to consume it every day or almost every day.
这些廉价、麻醉性的娱乐不仅让空虚的时光过得更愉快，还可能正在让男性变得更不具备工作准备。大多数工作——无论是否“男性化”——都需要一定的专注能力、倾听并遵循指示的能力，以及忍受不适的能力。许多工作还要求懂得如何尊重地与女性互动。把日子花在看色情内容、赌博和吸毒上，这些技能一个都得不到提升。
These cheap, anesthetizing entertainments don’t just make empty hours fly by more enjoyably; they also may be making men less work-ready. Most jobs—manly or otherwise—require some ability to concentrate, to listen to and follow directions, and to endure discomfort. Many also require knowing how to interact respectfully with women. Days spent watching porn, gambling, and using drugs augment none of these skills. (This is the reality that Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently invoked in an ad depicting a welfare recipient as a young white man playing video games and eating junk food—prompting a number of conservative podcasters and commentators to take to their channels to condemn Sanders over what they felt was an unfair portrayal.)
（这正是萨拉·赫卡比·桑德斯最近在一则广告中所援引的现实——广告将一名福利领取者描绘成一个玩电子游戏、吃垃圾食品的年轻白人男子，这促使一些保守派播客和评论员纷纷在自己的频道上谴责桑德斯，认为这一描绘不公平。）当然，仍然可以要求男性为自己的生产力承担更多责任，但现代技术和毒品合法化确实让他们推上坡的巨石比父辈所推的重得多，也加剧了放弃、任由巨石滚回来压垮自己的诱惑。
Men of course can still be asked to take more responsibility for themselves to be productive, but modern technology and drug legalization do make the boulder that they are rolling uphill much heavier than what their fathers pushed, and exacerbate the temptation to give up and let it roll back over them.
政策制定者与其为所谓的“男性工作”缺失而焦虑，不如考虑各种能够引导男性重返职场的激励措施。简单的答案似乎是提高工资和福利。但这并不能完全解决问题：更高的工资可以吸引男性去申请工作，却无法一下子把人变成高功能的成年人。在我们随布鲁金斯学会—美国企业研究所“美国农村未来”委员会走遍全国的过程中，煤矿开采、造船和焊接等高工资（通常有工会）行业的雇主向我们讲述了令人难过的故事：许多男性无法做到定期上班，也无法做到上班时不处于毒品或酒精的影响之下。
Rather than fretting about the alleged lack of manly jobs, policy makers should consider the various incentives that could point men back toward work. The simple answer may seem to be increasing wages and benefits. But this won’t fully address the problem: Higher wages can entice men to apply for a job, but they cannot suddenly turn people into high-functioning adults. As we have traveled around the country on the Brookings Institution–American Enterprise Institute commission on the future of rural America, employers in high-wage (usually unionized) industries such as coal mining, ship building, and welding have told us sad stories about the inability of many men to show up for work regularly and not under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
美国军队近期的经历在这里颇具启发意义——军队曾经在让男性为工作以及为一般生活做好准备方面发挥过巨大作用。
The recent experience of the U.S. military, which once had a huge role in readying men for work and for life in general, is instructive here.
多年来，五角大楼在招聘新兵方面一直未能达到预期目标。为此，五角大楼官员与国会合作，大幅提高了军人的薪资，尤其是基层士兵的薪资。这一举措确实改善了招聘情况，但仍有许多申请者无法满足现有的招聘标准。为了解决这一问题，陆军为那些虽然不符合身体或学术要求、但可以通过补习课程达到标准的申请者设立了专门的培训项目。在过去两年中，所有军种的招聘工作都取得了显著进展。
After multiple years of missing recruiting targets, Pentagon officials worked with Congress to significantly increase military pay, particularly for the junior enlisted. That led to better recruiting numbers, but many who applied were not able to meet existing standards. The Army responded by creating a future-soldier-preparatory program for applicants who did not meet the physical or academic standards but could do so with a remedial course before basic training. Recruiting has improved significantly across all branches in the past two years.
不过，大多数男性可能并不会选择参军。那么，对于那些不打算参军的人来说，该怎么办呢？正如任何试图改变大量人群行为的努力一样，同时提供激励措施（“胡萝卜”与“大棒”）是至关重要的。目前，社会保障残疾保险已成为失业男性的主要福利来源，相关案件的数量急剧增加。这些福利制度或许需要做一些调整，使得申请者更难获得这些福利，从而促使他们积极寻找工作。
Most men are probably not going to join the military, so what about those who don’t? As with any effort to change the behavior of large numbers of people, offering both carrots and sticks is essential. Social Security Disability Insurance has turned into a first-resort program for jobless men, and caseloads have risen dramatically. These programs could do with some tweaking to make benefits slightly harder to qualify for and remain on, which would create more pressure to seek work.
在激励措施方面，可以扩大“劳动所得税抵免”政策的范围，让低收入且没有抚养子女责任的男性也能从中受益，从而增加他们工作的积极性。那些既剥削失业男性又降低他们就业意愿的企业也应该受到监管：我们曾经几十年没有合法体育博彩活动，现在完全可以重新禁止它；大麻也应该像烟草一样受到更严格的监管和更高的税收政策约束。
On the incentive side, the Earned Income Tax Credit could be expanded to men who are low-income, noncustodial parents to make work more attractive. The corporations that both prey heavily on unemployed men and reduce their work readiness could also be brought to heel: We lived without legal sports gambling for decades and could go back to banning it now; marijuana could be treated more like tobacco, with tighter regulation and higher taxes.
这些措施将为那些不工作的男性创造一个更加健康的生活环境。研究还表明，成长在有稳定工作的成年人身边的环境，会对下一代人的就业前景和教育抱负产生积极影响。这样做不仅有助于提升这些男性的自身价值，还能为国家带来健康、社会和经济效益。
Such measures would create a healthier environment for nonworking men. Research also suggests that growing up around adults who are employed could have positive effects on the next generation’s own employment and educational aspirations. This creates the attractive possibility of helping more men be productive not only for their sake but for the health, social, and economic benefits that would accrue to the whole country.
减少成瘾风险的公共政策改革，以及提高经济生产力激励的措施，可能有助于引导美国男性走上更有生产力的道路。但要让这些“消失的男性”重新融入社会和经济生活，可能还需要文化和制度层面的更广泛变革。在新冠疫情期间取消了常规出勤和家庭作业要求的学校，可以恢复强化有利于就业准备的更好习惯。为年轻男性做好成年生活准备的慈善组织需要志愿者和捐款支持。
Public-policy changes that reduce the risk of addiction and increase the incentives for economic productivity could help set American men onto a more productive path. But reintegrating missing men into social and economic life will likely require broader changes to culture and institutions as well. Schools that dropped demands for regular attendance and homework during the coronavirus pandemic could return to reinforcing better habits that are conducive to work-readiness. Charitable organizations that prepare young men for adult life need volunteers and donations to support them.
任何有平台与年轻男性沟通的人，都应尝试将女性日益提高的择偶标准框定为一种激励，而非怨恨的对象，激励男性成为更好的人。
And anyone who has a platform to communicate with young men should try to frame women’s rising romantic standards not as something to resent but as a stimulus to become better men.