by Andrew Yang
After someone is on disability, there’s a massive disincentive to work, because if you work and show that you’re able-bodied, you lose benefits. As a result, virtually no one recovers from disability. The churn rate nationally is less than 1 percent. David Autor asserts that Social Security Disability Insurance today essentially serves as unemployment insurance around the country. It’s not designed for this, but that’s what it is for hundreds of thousands of Americans.
One judge who administers disability decisions said that “if the American public knew what was going on in our system, half would be outraged and the other half would apply for benefits.”
I spoke to a friend, Tony, about his experience applying for disability. He and I grew up together playing Dungeons and Dragons on the same street. Tony is a house painter who worked previously as a musician and sound technician. He was married briefly but is now divorced. Tony finished his college degree a few years ago at a public university. He went most of his childhood without health insurance—his father was a contractor and self-employed. In 2011, he moved to western Massachusetts and received health insurance for the first time—it was free under “Romneycare” because he was considered low income.
A couple years ago, after not being able to work for a few months due to health problems, Tony was told by his therapist, “You should try to get disability.” Tony at first thought that he wouldn’t qualify because his injuries were mostly brain-related: multiple traumatic brain injuries from childhood accidents (a fall on concrete when he was nine and a crashed scooter when he was 11) and concussions from playing high school football led to impaired cognition and mood swings. He also suffered from chronic fatigue, muscle pain, depression, and chronic Lyme disease.
Tony took the therapist’s advice and went on the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) website to apply. He submitted notes from his therapist, nurse prescriber, supervising psychiatrist, primary care physician, a specialist in holistic medicine, and a specialist in infectious disease. “I had a lot of stuff that had built up in my body over the years. I sometimes think that if I’d had proper treatment as a kid I might not be disabled today.” Tony submitted the paperwork in March 2016 and was notified that he was denied benefits five months later. About 75 percent of initial claims get denied nationally. He then went online and found a local attorney who specializes in disability appeals. The lawyer worked through the appeals process on Tony’s behalf. Two months later, Tony was approved and began receiving approximately $1,200 a month. “After the lawyer took over, that was it. The money showed up in my account.” The lawyer collected about $2,700 for handling the appeal—25 percent of the disability payments that were retroactive to when Tony was deemed disabled.
Tony is currently on disability, and his first review will be after two years. “Thank God for disability. If not for disability I would have worked myself to death and died.” Tony is 42. He volunteers at a local church. “I live in western Massachusetts, which is not someplace that people think of as struggling. But it’s crazy how many people come in to church who are living in tents and on the street. People just do what they have to do to get by.”
I’m personally very glad that disability was there for Tony. For him, disability was literally a lifesaver.
J. D. Vance writes of how the people in Ohio became angry that they were working hard and scraping by while others were doing nothing and living off of government checks. He cites this resentment toward government handouts as an explanation for why regions like Ohio have become more Republican.
The numbers have grown to a point where more Americans are currently on disability than work in construction. In 2013, 56.5 percent of prime-age men 25–54 who were not in the workforce reported receiving disability payments. Though the numbers have stabilized as more people in this age group have moved into Social Security retirement, they are already way beyond what anyone intended. The fund for disability insurance recently ran out and was combined with the greater Social Security fund, which is itself scheduled to run out of money in 2034.
The fact that a program designed for a relatively small number of Americans has now become such a major lifeline for people and communities is part of the Great Displacement. We pretend that our economy is doing all right while millions of people give up and “get on the draw” or “get on the check.” It’s a $143 billion per year shock absorber for the unemployed or unemployable, whose ranks are growing all of the time. After one gets on disability, one enters a permanent shadow class of beneficiaries. Even if you start feeling better, you’re not going to risk a lifetime of benefits for a tenuous job that could disappear at any moment. And it’s likely easier to think of yourself as genuinely disabled than as someone cheating society for a monthly draw.
Many Americans, disabled or not, have some degree of health problems. If you’ve got a good job, you might ignore your hurt back or, if your job offers health insurance, have access to an affordable way to treat it and continue working. If you don’t have a job and the stress starts to mount, you can easily start to feel more infirm. This is doubly true in environments where work is mostly manual and involves a lot of wear and tear. For many, the chain of circumstances is to go from former manufacturing worker to disability recipient. The other major refuge has been retail jobs. After these jobs disappear, the ranks of the disabled will swell.
Disability illustrates the challenges of mandating the government to administer such a large-scale program. It’s essentially the worst of all worlds, as the truly disabled and needy may find themselves shut out by red tape, while the process rewards those who lawyer up and the lawyers themselves. It sends a pervasive message of “game the system and get money” and “think of yourself as incompetent and incapable of work.” It’s subject to fraud. And once you’re on, you never leave.
FOURTEEN
VIDEO GAMES AND THE (MALE) MEANING OF LIFE
Virtual worlds give back what has been scooped out of modern life… it gives us back community, a feeling of competence, and a sense of being an important person whom people depend on.
—JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL
When I was seven, my parents bought me and my brother an Atari 2600, the first mass game console. The game it came with was Asteroids. We played that game an awful lot. One night, we snuck down in the middle of the night only to discover my Dad already playing.
My brother and I loved going to local arcades and to try to make a few quarters last as long as possible. It was the perfect set of incentives: You win, you keep playing. You lose, you’re forced to stand there and watch others play, hoping that someone is forced to leave their game in the middle so you can jump in. We became very good at video games. My favorite was Street Fighter II. I memorized the Mortal Kombat fatalities to inflict graphic harm on defeated enemies. On the PC, I was hooked the first time I played Ancient Art of War when I was nine. As I got older, real-time strategy games like Warcraft and Starcraft arrived to combine efficiently building armies and settlements with defeating live opponents. My friends and I would sit next to each other in a house with several networked computers taking on strangers and talking trash.
The amount of time I spent on video games dropped dramatically after I graduated from college. I wanted to go on dates, and playing video games wasn’t helping. I developed a notion that virtual world building and real-life world building were at odds with each other. I started reading books on investing and financial statement analysis, which seemed to me to be the real-world analogue to becoming good at video games. By the time I started dabbling in games again and asked my brother-in-law to school me in Defense of the Ancients (“Dota”) over the holidays, they had leapt forward to a point where I felt old and slow. Memorizing key commands seemed beyond me.
That said, I still understand and appreciate video games on a visceral level. I even imagine that I could get into them again. They speak to a primal set of basic impulses—to world creating, skill building, achievement, violence, leadership, teamwork, speed
, efficiency, status, decision making, and accomplishment. They fall into a whole suite of things that appeal to young men in particular—to me the list would go something like gaming, the stock market, fantasy sports, gambling, basketball, science fiction/geek movies, and cryptocurrencies, most of which involve a blend of numbers and optimization. It’s a need for mastery, progress, competition, and risk.
As of last year, 22 percent of men between the ages of 21 and 30 with less than a bachelor’s degree reported not working at all in the previous year—up from only 9.5 percent in 2000. And there’s evidence that video games are a big reason why. According to a recent study based on the Census Bureau’s time-use surveys, young men without college degrees have replaced 75 percent of the time they used to spend working with time on the computer, mostly playing video games. From 2004 to 2007, young, unemployed men without college degrees were spending 3.4 hours per week playing video games. By 2011 to 2014, the average time spent per week had more than doubled to 8.6 hours.
The economists conducting the study, led by the University of Chicago’s Erik Hurst, strained to figure out whether men who were already detached were playing video games to pass the time, or whether video games were actually causing them to drop out. Evidence pointed to the latter. Their research indicated that improved technological entertainment options, primarily video games, are responsible for between 20 and 33 percent of reduced work hours. The trends are different for women, who have not seen the same increase in gaming at the expense of work hours and are more likely to return to school when out of work. For many men, however, games have gotten so good that they have made dropping out of work a more appealing option.
“When I play a game, I know if I have a few hours I will be rewarded,” said one 22-year-old who lives with his parents in Silver Spring, Maryland. “With a job, it’s always been up in the air with the amount of work I put in and the reward.” Jacob Barry, a 21-year-old in Michigan, finds it easier to get excited about playing games than his part-time job making sandwiches at a local Jimmy John’s, particularly given the sense of community he finds online. He plays up to 40 hours a week, the equivalent of a full-time job.
How exactly are these game-playing men getting by? They live with their parents. In 2000, just 35 percent of lower-skilled young men lived with family. Now, more than 50 percent of lower-skilled young men live with their parents, and as many as 67 percent of those who are unemployed do so. More U.S. men aged 18–34 are now living with their parents than with romantic partners, according to the Pew Research Center.
Video games function as extremely inexpensive entertainment on a time-use basis. After one invests in a console or computer, the marginal cost is near zero. Gamers can log hundreds or thousands of hours for the cost of one game or rental subscription. Time spent gaming is what’s known in economic terms as an “inferior good”—the poorer you are, the more of it you consume. Recent studies found that households making between $25,000 and $35,000 a year spent 92 more minutes per week online than households making $100,000 plus a year.
The image of legions of men in their parents’ basements playing video games for hours on end may seem pathetic or sad. But their satisfaction level is high. “Happiness has gone up for this group,” says Hurst, despite the high rate of unemployment. Hurst describes his findings as “staggering” and observes of his own 12-year-old son: “If it were up to him, I have no doubt he would play video games 23½ hours per day. He told me so. If we didn’t ration video games, I am not sure he would ever eat. I am positive he wouldn’t shower.”
Video games are fun and communal. Nowadays they’re also so well designed that many almost simulate jobs if a job’s progress were measured in minutes and hours instead of weeks and months. In many games, you perform a variety of mundane, repetitive tasks in order to build points or currencies or accrue items. You then use these items to make yourself more capable. You complete quests with your friends or against the computer. You experience a continuous feeling of progress and accomplishment.
As one can imagine, the problems come later. Playing video games as a pseudo-job that doesn’t pay can be fun, social, and even cool in your teens and 20s. By the time you’re in your 30s, your friends may have moved on and you become the loser shut-in who lurks around the local GameStop. “There is some evidence that these young, lower-skilled men who are happy in their 20s become much less happy in their 30s or 40s,” says Hurst. Their work skills and prospects will be limited, and competing in the workforce will be harder and harder. To the extent they ever wanted to go out and start a family, it may seem more and more unrealistic and out of reach. They are likely to stay detached, and may drift from video games to gambling, drugs, and alcohol.
Indeed, the most recent General Social Survey showed that 31 percent of working-age men who are out of the workforce admitted to illegal drug use in the past 12 months. The Annual Time Use survey in 2014 indicated high levels of time spent “attending gambling establishments,” “tobacco and drug use,” “listening to the radio,” and “arts and crafts as a hobby,” with over 8 hours per day spent on “socializing, relaxing and leisure.” The same surveys showed lower likelihood of volunteering or attending religious services than for men in the workforce, despite having considerably more time.
“Every society has a ‘bad men’ problem,” says Tyler Cowen, the economist and author of Average Is Over. He projects a future where a relative handful of high-productivity individuals create most of the value, while low-skilled people become preoccupied with cheap digital entertainment to stay happy and organize their lives.
Games have come a long way since I was a kid, and they’re about to take yet another leap forward. Virtual reality headsets are creating experiences that will take simulations to a whole new level. Digital entertainments will get better and better. The analogue and the real world will become less and less appealing. Before long, video games, virtual reality, and pornography will merge into new forms of immersive experiences that will be more and more compelling. On a pure enjoyment basis, it’s going to be hard to beat.
Imagine a 21-year-old college dropout who is not excited to make sandwiches at Jimmy John’s and prefers his gaming community.
You could say to him, “Hey, this Jimmy John’s job could go places. Sure you make $8 an hour now. But maybe if you stick with it for a few years you could become a manager. Eventually, you could make $35,000 or so if you really excel and are willing to work long and hard hours, including waking up at 5 a.m. to slice up tomatoes and cucumbers every morning, and commit to it.”
The above is possibly true. Or, the retail district around his Jimmy John’s could shrink and a management job might never open up. Or Jimmy John’s could bring in an automated system that gets rid of cashiers and front-of-house staff two years from now. Or his manager could just choose someone else.
I can’t really say that the food service job is more intellectually stimulating or social than playing video games. The main virtues seem to be that it pays money, imposes discipline, involves face-to-face contact with other real humans, and might lead somewhere. In previous eras of growth, it really might have.
I sympathize with this kid in part because I feel like the trade-offs are more difficult than most people realize. If I was given the choice between a dead-end low-end job for months on end or hanging with my friends playing video games, it would be very easy to choose the latter. The consequences are somewhat vague and “down the road.” Men imagine themselves to be kings, warriors, CEOs, athletes, ladies’ men, geniuses, soldiers, workers, achievers, and part of a band of brothers. All of these things are possible online.
Of course I believe that people should go out into the real world, get a good job, fall in love, get married, become a homeowner, have a child, be a good parent, leave the world a better place, and so on. I’ve tried to do it myself. It’s the substance of life and humanity. It requires a degree of evolution and positive social reinforcement—particularly trying to be a good parent.
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But this version of achievement is not going to be sustainable for more and more Americans. The jobs are going to lead nowhere and then disappear. There will be very limited social reinforcement. The incentives to stay immersed in the virtual world will rise as the world outside gets harder and less welcoming. Billions of dollars will be spent facilitating their immersion.
A number of my guy friends have gotten divorced in their thirties and forties. Others have become detached from society. Male dysfunction tends to take on an air of nihilism and dropping out. The world and relationships take work. You gird yourself for the workplace in a suit of armor. If you ever take it off and stop working, you get swept away.
Many men have within us the man-child who’s still in that basement. The fortunate among us have left him behind, but we understand his appeal all too well. He’s still there waiting—ready to take over in case our lives fall apart.
FIFTEEN
THE SHAPE WE’RE IN/DISINTEGRATION
The progress of a few fortunate decades can too easily be swept away by a few years of trouble.
—RYAN AVENT
The challenges of job loss and technological unemployment are among the most significant faced by our society in history. They are even more daunting than any external enemy because both the enemy and the victims are hard to identify. When a few hundred workers get replaced or a plant closes, the people around them notice and the community suffers. But to the rest of us, each closing is seen as part of economic progress.
The challenges are magnified because American society is not in great shape right now. There are a number of trends that are going to make managing the transition to a new economy all the more difficult:
