Episode 952: Men Without Work

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Newt’s World – Episode 952: Men Without Work
Host: Newt Gingrich
Guest: Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt (Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy, AEI)
Release Date: March 7, 2026

Episode Overview

In this engaging episode, Newt Gingrich is joined by Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt to explore the staggering phenomenon of men leaving the workforce and broader demographic shifts shaping society. Drawing on Eberstadt’s updated book, Men Without Work: Post-Pandemic Edition, and his new collection, America’s Human Arithmetic, the conversation centers on the decline in labor force participation, falling birthrates globally, the changing nature of family, and the mounting sense of misery and loneliness in an age of unprecedented material wealth. Together, they probe how these quiet social transformations are reshaping America’s future.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

Dr. Eberstadt’s Fascination with Demographic Data

• Eberstadt discusses stumbling into demography as a college freshman and being captivated by the lasting impact of population trends.
  • “All of these amazing things, some of them not so pleasant to contemplate, that are hiding in plain sight…” (Dr. Eberstadt, 04:22)
• Demography’s ‘secret sauce’: population trends are surprisingly predictable over decades (05:15–05:56).

Global Birthrate Decline & Its Causes

• Dramatic drop in birth rates is not limited to developed countries—it’s occurring globally, even in poorer nations (07:12–09:23).
  • “There’s an enormous shift in mentality, an enormous shift in mindset that includes big changes in desired childbearing.” (Dr. Eberstadt, 08:37)
• Technology and changing social norms play a huge role. The proliferation of smartphones may be as impactful on behavior as the birth control pill was decades before.
  • “Our little friend the iPhone...may be having as important a technological impact as the pill did two generations ago.” (Dr. Eberstadt, 09:27)
• The world is experiencing a paradox of rising population but also unprecedented loneliness.
  • “There’s never been so many people on earth...and yet in some ways it seems like it’s never been as lonely as it is today. Isn’t that strange?” (Dr. Eberstadt, 12:50)

Shifting Family Structures, Pets as Surrogates

• Decline in childbearing is aligned with the rise of pets as “family” members.
  • “Pets are no longer always supplements to a family with children, they’re increasingly a substitute for the children…The study will be called ‘And the Pets Shall Inherit the Earth.’” (Dr. Eberstadt, 11:39)

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The Men Without Work Phenomenon

The Numbers and Their Implications (16:24–19:58)

• Roughly 7 million prime-age men (25–54) are neither working nor looking for work—a participation rate lower than at the end of the Great Depression.
  • “The work rate for Americans today is lower than it was in early 1940 at the tail end of the Great Depression. It’s kind of mind blowing.” (Dr. Eberstadt, 17:48)
• The majority are long-term dropouts, not full-time students.
• Time-use surveys: These men report little to no civic engagement, religious involvement, or household responsibilities; most of their time is spent watching screens (~2,000 hours/year), often while using daily pain medication.
  • “It’s not just like playing video games at home in the basement, it’s playing video games at home in the basement stoned. This is not a formula for human flourishing. This is a formula for misery…” (Dr. Eberstadt, 19:48)

Societal Factors in Decline (21:25-23:44)

• The trend began in the mid-1960s alongside the breakdown of the traditional family, expansion of the welfare state, a rise in crime, and large immigration waves.
• Life situation: These men are disproportionately single, less educated (but not exclusively), and native-born rather than foreign-born.
• Paradox of affluence: This crisis could only occur in a wealthy society.
  • “Some of the dysfunctions that we see today could only be financed by a society with our historically unprecedented level of affluence.” (Dr. Eberstadt, 24:11)

Exclusion of Gray Economy

• Some men earn “pin money” under the table, but this is not believed to be a major factor in the size of the drop-out population.
  • “We’re not talking about a large number of invisible people who are really working the way that we might…expect to see in Italy…” (Dr. Eberstadt, 25:08)

Gender Dynamics & Female Workforce Dropouts (29:38–32:46)

• There’s a growing parallel “women without work” problem: ~3.5 million non-working, non-job-seeking, never-married women with no children at home—half the number of men, but rising.
• Both male and female dropouts report similar patterns of daily pain medication use and screen time.
• Gender mismatch in higher education (more women graduating) may impact marriage patterns and exacerbate loneliness.
  • “If over half of the higher-educated population now going through colleges and universities are women, you can see how the arithmetic is going to look…We've got a kind of a supply and demand problem.” (Dr. Eberstadt, 32:01)

Impact of Criminal Justice System

• Explosive rise in felony convictions—estimated that 1 in 7 adult men has a felony conviction—deeply affects workforce participation and life outcomes.
  • “For every person who's in prison…there are 10 or more in society in general who've got a felony conviction in their background.” (Dr. Eberstadt, 33:57)

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Global Context and Future Possibilities

International Comparisons: Japan’s Approach (36:20–37:52)

• Despite three decades of demographic decline, Japan continues to increase employment by engaging healthy elderly populations, offering hope for coping with shrinking workforces.
  • “Its headcount has been going down for over 15 years. And last year it recorded its highest ever number of employed people…Because Japan is just about the healthiest country in the world, the longest life expectancy at birth, people who would formerly have been in retirement are economically actively engaged.” (Dr. Eberstadt, 36:34)

The Meaning of Work

• Work is not just a source of income—it’s essential for fulfillment and connection.
  • “A job isn’t just a paycheck. Work is a service to other people that helps complete you.” (Dr. Eberstadt, 38:36)
  • Reagan quote: “The best social program is a job.” (Referenced by Gingrich, 39:17)
  • “There’s something there that’s fulfilling in a way that’s kind of hard to describe to people who haven’t touched it.” (Dr. Eberstadt, 39:22)

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The Book: America’s Human Arithmetic

(40:05–41:43)

• Eberstadt’s newly released collection is designed to examine America at its 250th year, probing the paradox of great national achievement and deep dissatisfaction.
  • “No country has ever created as much wealth as we have…Despite these achievements, there’s so much dissatisfaction with America’s place in the world today…It seemed to me that it was just an extraordinary, I would say, agonizing irony to the contraposition between our national achievement… and trying to understand where's the disjuncture.” (Dr. Eberstadt, 40:39)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “There are all sorts of trends that are affecting our lives in important ways that are kind of quiet and somehow they escape us.”
  – Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt (04:22)
• “This is the mother of all social policies, this terrible, ambitious decision to recast the family for what was the world's largest population. So if it's the mother of all social policies, it's going to have the mother of all unintended consequences.”
  – Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt on China’s One Child Policy (06:17)
• “We've never been as densely populated as it is today. And yet in some ways it seems like it's never been as lonely as it is today. Isn't that strange?”
  – Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt (12:50)
• “The work rate for Americans today is lower than it was in early 1940 at the tail end of the Great Depression. It's kind of mind blowing.”
  – Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt (17:48)
• “It's not just like playing video games at home in the basement, it's playing video games at home in the basement stoned. This is not a formula for human flourishing. This is a formula for misery…”
  – Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt (19:48)
• “Some of the dysfunctions that we see today could only be financed by a society with our historically unprecedented level of affluence.”
  – Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt (24:11)
• “If over half of the higher-educated population now going through colleges and universities are women, you can see how the arithmetic is going to look…We've got a kind of a supply and demand problem.”
  – Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt (32:01)
• “For every person who's in prison in the United States, there are 10 or more in society in general who've got a felony conviction in their background.”
  – Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt (33:57)
• “A job isn’t just a paycheck. Work is a service to other people that helps complete you.”
  – Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt (38:36)
• “No country has ever created as much wealth as we have…Despite these achievements, there's so much dissatisfaction with America's place in the world today…”
  – Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt (40:39)

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Key Timestamps

• 03:41–05:56: Insights on demography and its predictive power
• 06:17–09:23: Global birthrate collapse, technology’s role
• 11:39–12:50: Rise of pets as child substitutes; paradox of loneliness
• 16:24–19:58: Men without work statistics, motivations, and social consequences
• 21:25–24:46: Societal changes since the 1960s; paradox of misery in affluence
• 29:41–32:46: Emergence of “women without work,” effects of hypergamy
• 33:57: Felony convictions and their silent impact
• 36:34–37:52: Japan as a glimpse into the demographic future
• 38:36–39:50: The deeper meaning and value of work
• 40:05–41:43: Eberstadt’s motivation behind America’s Human Arithmetic

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Conclusion

This episode delivers a deeply thoughtful discussion of the converging crises of work, family, and purpose in modern America and beyond. Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt and Newt Gingrich analyze how quiet, long-developing demographic trends and shifting values are quietly reshaping the fabric of society. Charting the surprising link between affluence and disengagement, they call for renewed research and social innovation to reconnect individuals with the dignity and fulfillment offered by work and community.

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Recommended Action:
Pick up America’s Human Arithmetic for a compelling, data-rich exploration of these urgent issues.
Learn more at AEI.org.

Transcript

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Newt Gingrich]

On this episode of Newts World. I am delighted to be talking with a good friend, somebody who's been educating me now for I think, 20 years, Dr. Nicholas Everstedt, the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He's the author of several books, including Men Without Post Pandemic Edition, which is the updated version of his landmark 2016 study, Men Without Work. And he's out with a new book now America's Human Arithmetic, Essential Essays from Nicholas Everstadt. And I have to say I do not remember ever having a conversation with Nicholas at I didn't walk away with a whole range of new ideas. I'm thrilled, Nicholas, that you're joining me.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

Thanks so much for inviting me.

[Newt Gingrich]

Before we get into this, we've never really had this discussion. How did you get into your fascination with quantitative data and with what it tells you about the world?

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

I just kind of stumbled into it like all the other great things that happened in my life. I started out, first day of college, first class in college, taking a course on population, resources and environment. And I thought that stuff was fascinating. And so I got a bug and I've never been able to shake the habit.

[Newt Gingrich]

Do you find occasionally the numbers sort of surprise you, that they lead you to conclusions you would never have reached otherwise?

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

Oh no. I mean, that's what's the fun of it, is that it's full of surprises. There are all of these amazing things, some of them not so pleasant to contemplate, that are hiding in plain sight. These things are evolving in some sort of way quietly, so that they aren't biting people, but they're changing our lives. I mean, we see an asteroid strike, we feel a pandemic, but there are all sorts of trends that are affecting our lives in important ways that are kind of quiet and somehow they escape us.

[Newt Gingrich]

There's a point that Peter Drucker made maybe a half century ago that with a lot of these kind of demographic studies, you really do know for the next 30, 40, 50 years because you see the population you have and you know about what it's going to go through.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

That's exactly right. When you try to do a forecast of what the political future is like in 25 years, I'm at sea. We know how well economic long term forecasts have worked. Heaven help us in trying to forecast technology. But the secret sauce that demographers have is that the overwhelming majority of people who are already alive here today will be alive in 10, 15, 20 years. And so you can just see what that profile looks like, compare it to today, connect the dots, and you've got some pretty useful information there.

[Newt Gingrich]

Well, and when you look at certain kinds of quantitative data, suddenly you realize, for example, the impact of the Chinese one child policy, which had a totally different effect, I think, than anybody really had thought through, in terms of having four adults now, depending on a much smaller population to take care of them.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

Absolutely. All social policies, as you know very well, have their intended outcomes and their unintended outcomes. And this is the mother of all social policies, this terrible, ambitious decision to recast the family for what was the world's largest population. So if it's the mother of all social policies, it's going to have the mother of all unintended consequences. And the Chinese people and the Chinese regime are having to live with those.

[Newt Gingrich]

Now, as I understand it, even though that was their official policy and they imposed it very ruthlessly, the actually largest drop in population patterns is Korea, because Korean women apparently have decided they don't want to have kids.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

It's remarkable what's going on in South Korea right now. Back in the 1990s, I was studying Eastern Germany right after the reunification, and my jaw dropped when I saw how low birth levels got in the initial shock. Because even though life was getting better in all sorts of ways, it was a big transition for people. There was a lot of anxiety. The birth level per woman in South Korea today, under conditions of orderly progress, no unification, no shocks, is lower than it was in Eastern Germany at its lowest point. And if you go to South Korea's capital, you're getting towards half a birth per woman per lifetime. If current levels persisted, you know that you need just over two births per woman per lifetime for a population to be stable over time. So we're seeing changes all around the world. We're seeing a birth crash in country after country after country. And I'm afraid that the demographers haven't explained it very well, but it's going to be transforming our future very soon.

[Newt Gingrich]

And as I understand it, it's mostly volitional, and that it's not because there's a virus or a problem, it's just that across the planet, people are having fewer children.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

Yes, sir. You can imagine a future where estrogen in the water or microplastics or whatever would be a constraint biologically or on our ability to have children. But the evidence so far is that there's an enormous shift in mentality, an enormous shift in mindset that includes big changes in desired childbearing. And it's not just in rich countries like USA or Switzerland or South Korea. It's in very, very poor countries. In places like Burma, Myanmar, there's been a birth crash and it doesn't seem to be because of nutrit. It's a worldwide mentality revolution.

[Newt Gingrich]

Maybe there's a profound shift in how

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

women see themselves that has to have something to do with it. Knowing that it's no longer necessary to live the way one's mother lived. There are all sorts of new options for people. I think that our little friend the iPhone, which is now saturated almost all of the world, may be having as important a technological impact as the pill did two generations ago. I can't prove that yet, but the correspondence between cell phone saturation and accelerated drops in birth rates all around the world, it's pretty thought provoking.

[Newt Gingrich]

Well, it may also lead to a whole notion of electronic neighborhoods in which, for example, young influencers aren't particularly excited about having six kids.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

Again and again, in places where I go all around the world, I see not just young people, but certainly young people sitting on street corners gazing into their iPhone. And it's almost like a Narcissus mirror. And it's almost like you're kind of jumping through a mirror into another world, which I kind of tend to think of as both at one and the same time irresistible and inferior to the real world that you're living in.

[Newt Gingrich]

But for some reason comfortable.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

Yeah, irresistible and comfortable. There's certainly been a shift in thinking about children in this particular way. All around the world you see more interest in self actualization, in self fulfillment, in convenience in various ways. I mean, these are just revealed preferences. Now, I have four children and I love them all very dearly, but one thing that they are not is convenient. And so if we are seeing a worldwide shift away from inconvenience, I think I know what that's going to do to pressures on birthrights.

[Newt Gingrich]

Well, and at the same time, we're seeing a dramatic increase, I think, in the number of pets.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

Yes, I have a study in mind which I've got the title for. I haven't done the data yet, but the study will be called and the Pets Shall Inherit the Earth. Because if you go through different neighborhoods in the US and not just the US See this also in Europe and in Asia, maybe other places as well, pets are no longer always supplements to a family with children, they're increasingly a substitute for the children. And the pets get sort of anthropomorphized by the pseudo parents or quasi parents or whatever you wish to call. There's been a whole shift over in South Korea, which mentioned South Korea earlier, where baby carriages and strollers, those companies aren't going out of business, they're just repurposing them for kittens and for puppies.

[Newt Gingrich]

Much more in Europe than in the US where you go into a restaurant and you look around and there are people who have brought their pet with them because they are part of the family. I mean, they don't go anywhere without them. People need social contact. And so in the age of the cell phone, if you're not going to have children, you can at least have a dog.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

It's a strange paradox, isn't it? There've never been so many people on earth as today. The world has never been as densely populated as it is today. And yet in some ways it seems like it's never been as lonely as it is today. Isn't that strange?

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[Newt Gingrich]

One of the reasons I was so eager to have a chance to chat with you directly is the study you just did on the number of males who aren't working but they're not unemployed. I think this is a phenomenon.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

It's a historically established fact for post war American society today. Take a look at the latest monthly jobs report. About 7 million prime age men. That's official government term for the 25 to 54 group. For pretty self evident reasons, they're in the prime of life. Seven million prime age men, roughly speaking, are workforce dropouts. They're neither working nor looking for work. And this means you add these roughly 7 million to the little over 2.5 million who are formerly unemployed who don't have a job but are looking for Them. The work rate for prime age men in America today is slightly lower than it was when we first developed this measurement for the 1940 census at the tail end of the Great Depression when the national unemployment rate was 14%. The work rate for Americans today is lower than it was in early 1940 at the Tail end of the Great Depression. It's kind of mind blowing.

[Newt Gingrich]

You're talking about people who have consciously in a sense, dropped out.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

Well, if you take a look at the 7 million, there is a small fraction that I would describe as full time students, people who have taken a semester off, if you want to put it that way, from the workforce because they're scaling up and they intend to go back. Their patterns of life are totally different from the long term dropouts. And this long term dropout group is well over 6 million. And what we see about this long term dropout group from their own self reporting I think is really pretty distressing. This isn't like therapists or anthropologists or people examining them. Every year the Department of Labor comes out with a time use survey. It asks people what they do between the time they wake up and they go to bed and how long they sleep. And they get self reported answers from the male dropouts. And you look at this stuff and you have to be very concerned. The male dropouts say that they basically don't do civil society. There's almost no worship, almost no charitable activity, almost no volunteering. They've got tons of time on their hands and they do surprisingly little work around the house, cleaning, helping out with other people in the homes. What they report doing is watching screens. They say that they're watching. We don't know what exactly or what type of screens, but they're watching stuff for about 2,000 hours a year now. 2,000 hours a year, almost like a full time job. And you add to this the additional item that is reported on one of the surveys they added as just a question. Before the pandemic, just about half of these dropout men said that they were taking pain medication every day. So it's not just like playing video games at home in the basement, it's playing video games at home in the basement. Stone, this is not a formula for human flourishing. This is a formula for misery, which

[Newt Gingrich]

sort of relates to how the culture has really found less and less capacity for optimism and joy.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

I don't think there's a lot of joy in this lifestyle. I think there's a lot of call it pain, whether it's physical pain or psychic pain or being Connected to your so called community through the false friend of the Internet. We all know that that little Greek fellow way back when Aristotle was describing a world 2,500 years ago. But when he said that US human beings are social creatures, we haven't changed that much. We need people, we need family, we need work to help fulfill us. We need our communities, we need our faith. And there are a lot of people who think that solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment when meted out by the state. But this is something like solitary confinement.

[Newt Gingrich]

What is it?

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

Because you're the historian. But when I look at these trends, I see this flight from the workforce for men for the prime age. Men seems to have begun in about the mid-60s. We don't really see any sign of this from the end of World War II until the mid-60s. So what happened starting in the mid-60s? We started to see the breakdown of the formerly traditional family. We saw that, the big expansion of the US welfare state. We saw the explosion of crime and then the pendulum of punishment, huge explosion in felonies, felonization in the United States. So big increases in immigration. Now our newcomers, our immigrants, no matter what their ethnicity or almost their educational level, they're guys. They're more likely to be in the game, they're more likely to be working than their counterpart native born Americans. So there are all sorts of things that have changed our society and the mores have clearly changed as well.

[Newt Gingrich]

Are these mostly people who are living by themselves or are they part of a household with other people?

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

That's a very good question. They're more likely to be living by themselves than guys who are in the workforce. They're much more likely to be never married than guys who are in the workforce never married. Men are way overrepresented in that pool of dropouts. They're more likely to have lower levels of education, but there's a surprisingly high proportion of people who've got some college or even college graduates. So it's not totally stratified in this way either. And they're disproportionately likely to be native born rather than foreign born.

[Newt Gingrich]

You end up with people who have been born into the wealthiest society in history with the greatest plausible range of opportunities to define any life they want. And they stop.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

This is the paradox here. This is the paradox. I mean, part of what I try to document, describe, analyze in this book, America is Human Arithmetic is this phenomenon. I don't know how one would call it. I call it, in this book, I call it the new Misery because it's not a misery that's traditional. It's not the sort of historical misery that is connected to too little income, too little food, to little health. We're rolling in money. We're awash with wealth in our society. And some of the dysfunctions that we see today could only be financed by a society with our historically unprecedented level of affluence. You couldn't afford to have 10% of guys as kind of permanent dropouts from the workforce if we had a 19th century level of wealth.

[Newt Gingrich]

And you're also not including in those people who may be in the gray economy.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

No, I'm not including gray economy. There is some of that. Of course there is some of that in the US and by definition Uncle Sam doesn't track that very well. And our statisticians don't track that very well. But my impression, and I have to say this is an impression because I have tried to look at this, is that while the male dropouts are making some money on the side, it's more like pin money than like buying second home sort of stuff. It's like enough money to go out for a nice splurge at a restaurant or maybe even if you come in with a big score, you know, going on a little trip or something. But we're not talking about a large number of invisible people who are really working the way that we might, for example, expect to see in Italy where everybody plays the tax avoid game.

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[Newt Gingrich]

I gather this is largely a male phenomenon.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

Well, it's largely a male phenomenon but not entirely a male phenomenon. We have a form of gender equality underway that we may not totally welcome right now as we speak. Labor force participation rates for prime age women in America are more or less at all time highs. And from an economic standpoint, that looks great. And it looks so great that people have ignored the little problem that's hiding in plain sight in the corner, which is the bookend to the male dropouts. There's a women without work problem that I would describe like this look at the prime age women who are neither working nor looking for work, but who also have no children at home with them under the same roof, in the same household, same family, and who are not presently married. If you look at that group, it has been growing exponentially over time. Quietly but exponentially. I talk about 7 million more or less dropout guys. When I try to do the numbers on call them the dropout girls. It's about three and a half million. It's only half as large as the guys, but let's wait and see where we are. Just like the dropout guys, this group of women, about half of them say that they're taking pain meds every day the same sort of way. They report time use patterns that are a little bit too close for comfort to what I described about the dropout men. So we're seeing this for both men and women. It's just that the men seem to be the leading indicator, if you want to put it that way.

[Newt Gingrich]

But you do have dramatically more women in college and in law school, which to me raises the question, to what extent does that exacerbate finding husbands? Because historically women married up, not down.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

I mean, I think you've put your finger on a huge question. Demographers have kind of a Greek name that makes it sound like something elicit. It's a hypergamy. You can't be arrested for that. It's like a game of musical chairs, as you indicate. And if over half of the higher educated population now going through colleges and universities are women, you can see how the arithmetic is going to look. Unless there is a big change in the social contract. We've got a kind of a supply and demand problem.

[Newt Gingrich]

I was thinking you're going to have a lot more women who will find that there's not an acceptable male for them to pay attention to.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

Part of the problem also has been the sort of the. I don't have a better way of describing this, but the male crackup over the last two generations. And obviously it's not everybody. Mostly not a Male crackup. But there are too many men for whom it has been a crackup. Not just the dropping out of the workforce. We've had an explosion of felony convictions, crime, punishment. And at this point, although the government doesn't collect these figures for reasons that I still don't understand, since we've got the first new nation and we started with a census which was pretty high tech in 1790, we want data that help us solve problems. We. But the number of felons in America is statistically invisible from the standpoint of the US Government because we don't collect that info. If you try to do back of the envelope or slightly more rigorous than back of the envelope calculations, it looks today as if one in seven adult men has a felony conviction background. And what this means is that when you look at the entire population of people who've got felony convictions, you talk a lot about mass incarceration. But for every person who's in prison in the United states, there are 10 or more in society in general who've got a felony conviction in their background. One in seven men, maybe that's got a huge impact on life trajectories after that.

[Newt Gingrich]

Do you have any idea what the overlap is between being, having been in prison and being part of this 7 million?

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

I can't tell you for sure because our information on invisible ex con America is so bad at the national level. But I do have a chapter in this latest book in America's Human Arithmetic where I take what survey data and data sets might help with this. And here's what I find. No matter what your ethnicity, no matter what your education level, you're way more likely to be a workforce dropout if you're a guy and you've been arrested than if you've never been arrested. And you're way more likely to be out of the workforce if you've been to prison than if you've only been arrested. Now, that does not tell us why this should be the case, but it looks like it's pretty for real in a sense.

[Newt Gingrich]

We ought to have a lot more serious thinking about the transition out of prison and back into a formed society.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

We want people not to be recidivists. We want them to go on the straight and narrow that paid their debt to society. We don't want them to return to a life of crime. We hope that we can unlock the human potential that former offenders have. And in the world that we're heading into, where even the United States is not guaranteed an escape from depopulation, we need all the human resources we have.

[Newt Gingrich]

Yeah, you can sort of see it coming, but you can't quite yet see how it's going to play out. Although I'm guessing in places like Japan we have some notion because they're now 20 or 30 years ahead of us.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

Japan is a fascinating example, isn't it? I mean, the Japanese are very aware of how different they are from everybody else in the world. And they, they say that they're an exception and maybe they are. One interesting thing about Japan that makes me somewhat more hopeful about how the world can deal with depopulation. As you say, Japan's traditionally defined, conventionally defined working age population has been shrinking for 30 years. Its headcount has been going down for over 15 years. And last year it recorded its highest ever number of employed people. And it sounds like a contradiction, but what it means is that labor force participation rates have been going up. And because Japan is just about the healthiest country in the world, the longest life expectancy at birth, people who would formerly have been in retirement are economically actively engaged. And there's a lot of prospect there, I think, all around the world for unlocking the value of health, especially with healthy aging.

[Newt Gingrich]

You're also suggesting, I think, that if you found a way to get Most of the 7 million back in the game and if you found a way to get people to find jobs that they want to do, I mean, I suspect you and I are both in the same boat in that neither of us will ever fully retire because what we do is our hobby, which we convince people to pay us for. So they think it's work, but in fact it's what we want to do.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

Yeah, a lot of fun.

[Newt Gingrich]

Yeah. So, I mean, in that sense, we may not have sort of a crisis of underemployment or a crisis of not having enough people to fill jobs, at least for a very long time.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

Too many men in the United States don't understand is that a job isn't just a paycheck. Work is a service to other people that helps complete you. And if you haven't been in the paid workforce, there's a whole vista that you don't understand about real self fulfillment. I can tell this to people the same way that I can tell them you don't understand what life's like if you don't have children. But there's no way that you can really explain Technicolor to people who are living in black and white.

[Newt Gingrich]

Reagan used to say that the best social program is a job being connected

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

to the workplace, being connected to society. We talk in this very narrow way about self fulfillment, but there's kind of a broader. And we get back to Aristotle or we get to the Christian classics, get to the tenets of Western civilization. But it's a question about completing yourself as a human being. There's something there that's fulfilling in a way that's kind of hard to describe to people who haven't touched it.

[Newt Gingrich]

Your book, America's Human Arithmetic, is actually a series of essays written over the past 30 years that look at what you describe as an examination of the American condition. Why did you decide to publish it now?

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

Well, 2026 seems like a pretty good year to take the temperature for our national experiments, since it's a quarter of a millennium underway. And it also seemed like a good time to take a measure of where we are because there seems to be so much dissatisfaction in our country. Distrust, lack of confidence in our institutions, anxiety. And it seemed to me that it was just an extraordinary, I would say, agonizing irony to the contraposition between our national achievement. Most powerful country that's ever existed in history. More reach than the Mongols, more reach than the Roman Empire. No country has ever created as much wealth as we have. We're $180 trillion of private net worth with a T is an unimaginable amount of money. Despite these achievements, there's so much dissatisfaction with America's place in the world today, in our own country, and trying to understand where's the disjuncture. And that's why I put together this collection of essays, because I think looking at some of these problems that have been hiding in plain sight helps us to get a better bearing on where we've gone wrong and on maybe how we can get it right again.

[Newt Gingrich]

I can encourage everybody listening to get America's Human Arithmetic because as usual, just in this one conversation, I find that I learn so much from you, and I'm stimulated to think about new ideas that you really are, I think, intellectually a national treasure. And I hope you will for a very long time, continue to think and learn and educate us. And I want to thank you for joining me. Your new book, America's Human Arithmetic, is available now on Amazon and bookstores everywhere. Our listeners can follow the work you're doing with at American Enterprise institute by visiting AEI.org and I am confident that we'll come back at some point in the near future, beg you to come back and have another conversation.

[Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt]

Thank you so much. It was so much fun for me forced me to come back.

[Newt Gingrich]

Thank you to my guest, Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt. Newts World is produced by Gingers360 and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Garnesy Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to Timothy Gingrich. 360 if you've been enjoying Newt's World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Join me on [e-mail] I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newts World.

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