Here's the section that I think answers your question:

> Who’s paying for this? Well, again, if we look at government numbers, it looks like it’s friends and family, meaning girlfriends, other family members, and Uncle Sam. Disability insurance programs pay some benefits for more than half of these unworking men, it seems. Disability benefits do not provide a princely income, let’s be clear about that, but they do allow for an alternative to life in the working world, which is exactly the opposite of the original, and I think quite noble, intention of disability programs, which is to provide for people who couldn’t take care of themselves, couldn’t work.

In fact you might expect there to be more people on disability in 1960, seeing as WWII ended only 15 years before that (PTSD, etc). I suppose that those people simply couldn't get onto disability back then though.

It's like lot of people have simply lost hope.

The difference is that modern jobs aren't worth it. No pay, no discretion to make decisions, and your entire management chain feels like they're in the same boat.

Working for a small company where you're treated with respect and given a chance to grow or flexibility or whatever is one thing.

Working for a soulless corporate chain that consistently underschedules so that you're overworked and then writes you up if you want to go see your sick/dying relative is soul draining.

Working for a corporation that refuses to give you a consistent schedule but expects you to come in on your day off to cover someone else is soul draining.

Working for a corporation who will schedule you for 36 hours even though they're short workers because otherwise they might have to actually give you some garbage-tier healthcare is soul draining.

   >The difference is that modern jobs aren't worth it.

For all of these people complaining about "jobs these days" I would love to hear what period of history they think had it easier.

That does sound like a problem. If this really is a dire problem, then let's start by forcibly disappropriating multi-generational landlords and people with trust funds of their inherited wealth, thereby forcing them to work. If that doesn't free up enough laborers to keep the machine humming, then we can start thinking about carrots and sticks for the ppors.

(I'm not justifying or excusing disability fraud, just explaining what's been happening.)

https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

> There's no diagnosis called disability. You don't go to the doctor and the doctor says, "We've run the tests and it looks like you have disability." It's squishy enough that you can end up with one person with high blood pressure who is labeled disabled and another who is not.

A portion of it is government benefits, but he attributes the majority of it to being taken care of by girlfriends, family members, etc.

I have a lot of sympathy but at some point you have the draw the line between someone needing help and a leech.

Overall this is a very sad state. The author describes it as a train class for a death of despair, which feels accurate. This is far more than an economic issue.

"But the 1984 change “substantially liberalized the disability screening program,” according to economists David Autor of MIT and Duggan in their extensive review of the program. The reforms shifted screening rules from a list of specific impairments to a process that put more weight on an applicant’s reported pain or discomfort, even in the absence of a clear medical diagnosis. In addition, workers could qualify if they had multiple conditions that affected their ability to work, even if none of the conditions was disabling on its own.

Not surprisingly, more and more workers were awarded disability benefits based on ailments that relied more on patient self-reporting and that often were not easily diagnosed independently. For example, “musculoskeletal and connective tissue” problems, which includes back pain, accounted for just 17 percent of new enrollees in 1981, but 33 percent in 2010. The share of awarded benefits based on mental disorders — ranging from schizophrenia to mood disorders such as depression and bipolar disorder — climbed from 10 percent in 1981 to 21 percent in 2010. Mood disorders alone now account for 15 percent of all workers currently on disability.

Another driving force, Autor and Duggan found, is the fact that the value of disability benefits relative to wages has risen “substantially” since the late 1970s, because of the way initial benefits are calculated. That’s particularly true at the lower end of the income spectrum. When the value of SSDI benefits and the value of the Medicare benefits that SSDI enrollees qualify for are combined, the share of income replaced by the disability program climbed from 68 percent in 1984 to 86 percent in 2002 among lowerincome men aged 50-61. A possible indicator of the effect this has had, Autor and Duggan note, is that “the increase in [SSDI] enrollment during the last two decades was largest for those without a high school degree.”

https://www.lexissecuritiesmosaic.com/gateway/FEDRES/SPEECHE...

Yes throughout all of human history you had to do some sort of labor to not die, I'm not disputing that. However until very, very recently you weren't forced to sell your labor to survive.

The current state of needing to sell your labor to survive is unprecedented even in relatively modern time. During the great depression roughly a quarter of Americans worked on farms, a century prior to that virtually all Americans did. During the great depression not nearly as much of our individual survival had been commodified: nearly every family could hunt, farm, create clothing they needed, maintain their home, and cook their food (something surprisingly many people cannot do any more).

The commodification of nearly all aspects of our material lives means today we are much more dependent on Capitalists than ever before in history.

I think for the average person the tradeoff has been very positive - look at life expectancy and health outcomes from any point in history versus today. Just look at the incidence of famine in Europe historically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#Europe

For sure there are philosophical, etc. questions that come up - but they are decidedly higher on Maslow's hierarchy than basic survival. If the old state of things were so appealing - people have the option to go back and start their own farm. Almost nobody does.

The fact that people glorify (or wear rose colored glasses about) how things were in the past is just exemplary of the bubble we are all living in.

The real distinction has nothing to do with how pleasant life is but the fundamental stability of society. For nearly all of human history since agriculture there has been a ruling class which survives through the exploitation of the labor class, but for most of the history there was an asymmetric dependance between ruling classes and labor class: ruling classes where absolutely dependent on labor class, but the inverse was not true.

This is healthier for a society, not because of any high moral vision, but simply because the collapse of the ruling class does not mean the fundamental destruction of everyone. Peasants know how to till the land with or without a king.

Today when have an unprecedented interdependence of the two classes. For example this is fundamentally incorrect:

> people have the option to go back and start their own farm.

A select few individuals do have this option, but all of society cannot return to an agrarian system because we do not have the resources for a population of our scale to live off the land without the massive industrial system required to maintain modern agriculture. Billions of people would die in this case.

This interdependence is particularly troubling due to the inherent nature of the ruling class to seek to exploit the labor class. Though it is to the short term advantage of the capitalist class, in the long run it threatens all of industrial civilization. We are quite literally seeing the consequences of this right now.

I don't think this is accurate. We are much less likely to suffer famine than they were (also epidemics, despite recent events). We are much less likely to suffer war. We are much less likely to suffer a neighboring warlord taking our stuff, including the food we need for the winter. And so on.

Viewed from a high enough level, the society may have been stable. Stability wasn't really a characteristic of life at the individual or family level, though.

But I get your point that initially there were still people -- in the USA -- surviving by owning their own farm not selling their labor, and that this number has continued to decrease. But yes, I think that's precisely the nature of modern capitalism, to decrease this number. (and the number was initially much higher in the USA than, say, Europe, largely because non-elite immigrant settlers were able to avail themselves of "available" land, something not available to the otherwise "working classes" in Europe...)

In any event, it would be suprising if today most of these non-working men were supporting themselves by subsistence farming and foraging/hunting, indeed.

> During the great depression roughly a quarter of Americans worked on farms, a century prior to that virtually all Americans did

We need to be careful about being slippery with these categories though. Some of those people who "worked on farms" historically were, in fact, selling their labor -- and from GP, "working for starvation wages that don't allow them to build savings" in pretty dire conditions. And prior to 1865, many of the people in the USA who "worked on farms" were enslaved in forced labor, which is not in fact "selling your labor", but it's of course worse in all respects.

According to the article, everything from government checks to money from spouses/friends. One would have to assume some criminals are included as well, but I'd guess there aren't too many statistics covering people's illegal side gigs.