Unseen

So. Here's a question. Let's presume for a moment that the lives of men between the ages of who are neither working, looking for work or in school are marked by "anomie, alienation, or even despair." Is this because they don't have to find work in order to live, or is it because they've given up on looking?

I was wandering around the web, when I found an article on the American Enterprise Institute's website that billed itself as "a cautionary on universal basic income." Given this, and how I opened this posting, you may be able to guess what the overall theme of the article was. To be sure, the American Enterprise Institute is a conservative think tank, and the article was borrowed from the Institute for Family Studies, which is another conservative think tank, yet I was still somewhat surprised that no effort was being made to understand which was the chicken and which was the egg here. Because it's actually of no small importance to the central point of the article. Maybe. The article claims that the "detachment of more men from paid employment" runs the risk of depleting the United States' "social capital." But one would presume that the unemployed, more or less by definition are also detached from paid employment, yet somehow, their efforts to find work protected them from the supposed deleterious effects of not working.

One of the interesting connections the article makes is between not being employed or in schooling and drug use. "According to a 2017 study by Alan Krueger, almost half of NILF men reported taking some form of pain medication every day." The blog post's authors take this and conclude: "The rhythms of life for a great many of the prime-age men in America currently disengaged with the world of work is defined not simply by days and nights sitting in front of screens—but sitting in front of screens while numbed or stoned." But are these guys really trying to escape "anomie, alienation, or even despair"? Or are they actually disabled people using medications to manage their symptoms, or people who have been pushed out of the labor force by an addiction (itself possibly brought on by poor injury management)? The more I read the piece, the more it seemed to make assumptions that it didn't bother to explain. And I found myself asking again and again: "Wait... how did you establish this link?"

And perhaps this is why partisans have so much difficulty speaking to one another. The American Enterprise Institute is a conservative think tank, and I think that it expects everyone who randomly drops in to read their articles and blog posts is also a conservative, and makes the same assumptions about the world that they do. I can't say that any of the conclusions drawn by the article are incorrect; but the problem is I don't know enough about the thought processes to say anything about them at all. It all starts to come across as having been pulled out of thin air somewhere along the way. And I wonder if the authors realized that. But more importantly, it prompted me to wonder if I realize it when I do it? Do I blithely make assumptions and then presume that my audience makes those same assumptions and so gloss over topics that I should be taking the time to explain? (Or at least link to sources.) Or am I blind to the ways that I am blind?