Larry Summers

In a Financial Times book review, Summers examines Nicholas Eberstadt’s persuasive and important monograph, Men Without Work. Eberstadt’s book highlights that men in the US are doing considerably worse than men in the rest of the industrial world, where even countries with notoriously sclerotic labour markets and bloated welfare systems such as France, and even Greece, enjoy higher rates of prime age male labour force participation. Summers writes that Eberstadt understates the significance of what he studies by not highlighting the fact that, if current trends continue, a quarter of men between 25 and 54 will be out of work by mid-century.