“The Once and Future Worker” and “The Forgotten Americans” Review: Alienated, Angry, in Need of a Job

Getting a monthly check from Uncle Sam is not likely to renew the family or the civic foundations of working-class America. W. Bradford Wilcox reviews “The Once and Future Worker” by Oren Cass and “The Forgotten Americans” by Isabel Sawhill.

For too long, the American working class was ignored in politics and public policy. All that changed in 2016. The election served notice that the working class, especially working-class men, felt overlooked, alienated and angry and were desperate enough to try anything—even Donald Trump.

Two powerful books now tell us why. Since the 1970s, men without college degrees have seen their full-time employment fall, their real wages decline, their family income stagnate and their children’s shot at the American Dream—that is, living a better life than their parents—seemingly fade before their eyes. The thematic core of Oren Cass’s “The Once and Future Worker” and Isabel Sawhill’s “The Forgotten Americans” is that working men are losing ground in America.

One rejoinder to this grim diagnosis is that, after you factor in means-tested government programs, declines in family size and increases in the number of working women, the fate of the working class appears less dire: Indeed, its consumption levels have increased in recent years. To which Mr. Cass replies: Yes, “many people have iPhones,” but “neither readjusted data nor celebration of gadgetry does anything to improve the reality of deteriorating individual, family, and community health”—a reality that follows from the loss of decent, stable jobs, as both Mr. Cass and Ms. Sawhill note.

Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal

______________________

Mr. Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow of the Institute for Family Studies.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal