US of EU & Its Great Resignation A Bad Joke On Us?

WSJ’s “The Underside of the ‘Great Resignation” suggests our nation’s “trend toward idleness has been years in the making … & it’s an ill omen for an increasingly EU-look alike economy & culture.” Are we witnessing the death knell of “The Great American Work Ethic”?

Yes, the newspaper notes the Covid pandemic has essentially invited MILLIONS to switch jobs to “improve their pay & life styles”; yet “millions of others appear to have quit work entirely.” For instance, the labor-force participation rate was 61.9% this past December, “1.5 points below the pre-pandemic level & barely changed since August 2020.” And, labor optimists, it argues, “are in denial” if they think the “record levels of unfilled jobs” is going to go into the black any time soon, if ever.

The author of “Men Without Work,” Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist at American Enterprise Institute, was quoted as warning that “even as draconian lockdowns were lifted in many parts of the country by fall 2020 [and] we had a pretty remarkably rapid bounce-back in the macroeconomy … millions of fewer Americans are working or seeking work,” thereby compounding the labor shortage along with the related supply chain crisis & inflating prices. But, the trend toward fewer & fewer Americans WANTING to work for whatever reason, he added, dates back decades so that “1 in 8” American men no longer work today compared to 96.9% in 1961. It’s as if “America has been overtaken by the European Union,” Mr. Eberstadt says. “This is not a bad joke.” Thirty years ago, “America’s prime-age work rate was nearly 10 percentage point above Europe’s & now Europe’s is a couple of points higher than America’s.” No, Mr. Eberstadt. This IS a bad joke, if we still have illusions about that unwoke “Protestant Work Ethhic” that helped build this nation.

Davd Soul