Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job, by Louis Uchitelle

Despite their great numbers, many of the men not working are missing from the nation’s best-known statistic on unemployment. The jobless rate is now a low 4.6 percent, yet that number excludes most of the missing men, because they have stopped looking for work and are therefore not considered officially unemployed. That makes the unemployment rate a far less useful measure of the country’s well-being than it once was. Indeed, a larger share of working-age men are not working today than at almost any point in the last half-century.

The two scariest lines in the article:

To make ends meet, Mr. Beggerow has tapped the equity in his home through a $30,000 second mortgage … Mr. Priga supports himself by borrowing against the rising value of his Los Angeles home.