Men and boys: 10 takeaways

From my CPS discussion with Richard Reeves and Nick Eberstadt

My notes on the lunchtime CPS discussion I chaired with Richard Reeves (‘Of Boys and Men’) and the AEI’s Nicholas Eberstadt (‘Men Without Work’). Quotes are rough, not verbatim: for that you can see the video here.

1. Male worklessness: an invisible crisis

Eberstadt described the male withdrawal from work as a “crisis hiding in plain sight,” noting that in the US, “for every guy who is out of work and looking for a job, there are three who are out of work and not looking.” This long-term flight from the labour market is not just an economic concern but a cultural shift, largely ignored by policymakers and the press. I pointed out that six million people are on inactive benefits in the UK, and this figure has never been reported by any newspaper. The normalisation of mass worklessness, especially among men, is treated less like a scandal and more like background noise—despite levels now matching or exceeding Great Depression peaks. The rise in female employment, Eberstadt said, masked the decline in that of male (UK figures below).

2. The Rise of the ‘detached’ Man

Reeves and Eberstadt both emphasised that many workless men are not rearing children, studying, or volunteering. “They basically don’t do civil society,” Eberstadt said. Reeves added: “They’re not acting out — they’re checking out.” Time-use data shows screen addiction: “2,100 hours a year watching screens… as if it were a full-time job.” This passive withdrawal—rather than active protest—makes the crisis less politically visible and harder to mobilise around.

3. Masculine identity is adrift

Reeves argued that the economic rise of women, while positive, has upended traditional male roles without replacing them. “Structures of male motivation, male connection to family and work — these are being upended.” Some talk about the “declining marginal utility of men,” he said: “Ouch! But: true!” The collapse of traditional breadwinner identity has left a vacuum—one that culture, education, and politics have failed to fill.

4. Class and education drive the gap

Reeves stressed that male detachment is deeply class-stratified: “Among US men without a college degree, half say they’re not working because they’re sick or disabled. For college grads, it’s less than one in five.” In the UK and US, working-class men are much more likely to exit the labour force and cite health problems. Disability benefits have become a de facto unemployment system, further blurring the lines of labour market participation.

5. Welfare masks the problem

I noted that while today’s welfare spending in the UK has ballooned — “£60bn now, heading to £100bn” — so it is heading to a crisis. The cash is taken seriously, in a way the people, oddly, are not. Reeves credited David Willetts with the observation taht “the UK welfare system has shifted from compensating men for lack of work to compensating women for the lack of men.” Eberstadt added that in the US, “there’s no office in DC that can tell you how many people are on disability,” pointing to a broken data infrastructure. The UK is good on data, if not much else (see below).

6. Men sedated by screens - and drugs

Eberstadt and Reeves explored the “male sedation thesis”: the idea that screens, porn, video games, and marijuana have pacified a generation of disengaged men. Reeves put it bluntly: “They’re not burning stuff—they’re watching stuff…. For the first time in human history, we’ve got a vast number of disengaged men — and crime goes down. That’s just very unusual… anthropologically, historically very unusual…. “There’s somewhere for those guys to retreat to now that wasn’t available beforehe internet.”” While this may have prevented unrest, it has also entrenched passivity. “Previously, acting out got attention. Now checking out doesn’t.” It’s a form of social anaesthetic — reducing crime, but at the cost of ambition, intimacy, and civic life. I compared it to the Soma of Brave New World.

7. Deaths of despair: A male catastrophe

Eberstadt linked worklessness to the opioid crisis, citing that “since 2001, an additional 400,000 men have died from drug poisoning — the same number the US lost in WWII.” He mentioned Angus Deaton’s study in the US and warned: “These men don’t fall under poverty lines — but they live lives of misery.” Reeves confirmed that male overdose deaths have risen at twice the rate of female deaths. “Deaths of despair are now about three times higher among men.” I added that the UK signs are there too: certainly in alcohol deaths (below) with male deaths roughly twice those of women.

8. Policy paralysis and ideological taboo

Fear of backlash has paralysed discussion, said Reeves: “I was turned down by every mainstream publishing house in the US for that book. Brookings Institution [where he works] ended up publishing it: I'm very happy with the job they did with it. I kept being getting told: you will be seen as a misogynist. We can't risk this. Since then, things have improved - but this is, still, a hard conversation.” The topic is ideologically stranded: seen by some on the left as anti-feminist, and by some on the right as nostalgic or regressive. This silence has created a policy vacuum. Reeves seminal book ended up praised by Obama: I was astonished to learn the problems he had finding a publisher.

9. Rebuilding male roles

Reeves stressed that male usefulness must be explicitly affirmed, not implied: “We need to say: we need you — not just volunteers, but men.” Referencing Margaret Mead, he said: “Every known human society has rested on the learned nurturing behaviour of men. This behaviour, being learned, is rather fragile and can disappear quite quickly under circumstances that no longer teach effectively.” A failure to reconstruct meaningful male roles — at work, at home, in community — leaves men unmoored.

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10. The collapsing marriage market

Dominic Lawson asked if male detachment is linked falling birth rates and marriage rates. Eberstadt observed that surveys asking how many kids women want show a falling number: regardless of the quality of men. Reeves had a different take. Surveys showed women want a man of good earning potential, but this could be deceptive. “I think a simple interpretation of that: oh well, women just still want a male breadwinner. But a female colleague of mine said it might be more: does this guy have his act together? If you've got your act together, your earning potential is good. But also if she's in the workplace, and you're the one at home looking after the kids: you'll also do that well. I think what women are looking for is men who have got their act together. And if they feel like men haven't got their act together, of course, they don't want to have kids with them.”

The lack of such men is reshaping family life and accelerating demographic decline. That’s when I lowered the tone by bringing in Beyonce - the subject of another post.