Men adrift Badly educated men in rich countries have not adapted well to trade, technology or feminism
THE ECONOMIST - MAY 2015
KIMBERLEY, a receptionist in Tallulah, thinks the local men are lazy.
“They don’t do nothin’,” she complains. This is not strictly true. Until
recently, some of them organised dog fights in a disused school
building.
Tallulah, in the Mississippi Delta, is picturesque but not
prosperous. Many of the jobs it used to have are gone. Two prisons and a
county jail provide work for a few guards but the men behind bars,
obviously, do not have jobs. Nor do many of the young men who hang
around on street corners, shooting dice and shooting the breeze. In
Madison Parish, the local county, only 47% of men of prime working age
(25-54) are working.
The men in Tallulah are typically not well educated: the local high
school’s results are poor even by Louisiana’s standards. That would have
mattered less, in the old days. A man without much book-learning could
find steady work at the mill or in the fields. But the lumber mill has
closed, and on nearby farms “jobs that used to take 100 men now take
ten,” observes Jason McGuffie, a pastor. A strong pair of hands is no
longer enough.
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