Interesting. It seems there are two results here, probably independent. Note that the article talks both about "men" in the context of employment and "middle-aged white men without college degrees" in the context of mortality: it sounds like the explanations for these two statistics are quite different (and in particular, the first result about "men" is primarily influenced by non-white men).

The book it's reviewing concludes that the work rate for men in the US is falling because of mass incarceration primarily being targeted at African-American men, and because of laws that make it anywhere from hard to impossible for convicted felons to re-enter the workforce upon serving their sentence. The author of that post has bolded this passage in quoting from the book:

> As we shall see, a single variable – having a criminal record – is a key missing piece in explaining why work rates and [labor force participation rates] have collapsed much more dramatically in America than other affluent Western societies over the past two generations. This single variable also helps explain why the collapse has been so much greater for American men than women and why it has been so much more dramatic for African American men and men with low educational attainment than for other prime-age men in the United States.

Other sources (e.g., The New Jim Crow) argue that mass incarceration is an intentional policy aimed at keeping black people out of public life as the Jim Crow laws did in the past, which explains this claim from the top of the blog post: "... the great majority of them have not only dropped out of the workforce, they have also dropped out from any commitments or responsibilities to society." (I am partway through reading The New Jim Crow, and it does also mention that economic / technological changes have resulted in a much poorer job market for urban workers over the last half-century or so.)

So, if the joblessness rates are including men who can't work because they're literally in jail, and men who can't find a job because of their criminal record, it seems like there's an obvious explanation here - the number of men in those categories has gone up sharply since 1948.

However, the blog post makes another claim sourced from The Economist that for people aged 45-54, white men in the US without a college degree, in particular, have had their mortality rates rise when the mortality rates of all 45-54-year-olds in several other rich countries have fallen. (I think. It's not very clear what groups are being compared.) This is very interesting and seems like a serious problem, but it seems likely to be entirely unrelated to the previous, given the conclusions, and I'd also like to see this un-broken by race/education/age/gender in the US, and broken by those factors in other countries.

I don't have a good idea what would explain this, but it does occur to me that at the time that the people in this graph were considering getting a college degree, college was shifting towards being expected of all Americans who could attend it. (See, e.g., the uptick in the first chart in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_... ). So if this is just a proxy for "family wealth," I am relatively unsurprised to hear that mortality at age 50ish is correlated with how rich a family you were born into.