As for the unemployment crisis among the underclass, you can pick your root causes. Conservatives blame bad attitudes and a rotten work ethic (and correctly point out that in Britain, industrious Poles will work harder for less than the natives will). Liberals blame a lack of jobs in the post-industrial economy. Both sides are right. What neither side will say is that uncomfortably large numbers of young men have neither the attitude nor the aptitude for the jobs that are on offer, and no amount of education will make it so.
Back in the ’70s, a friend of mine taught working-class kids in Britain for a while. “What do we need to learn this for, Miss?” they would ask. They didn’t see the point. As soon as they turned 16 they planned to quit and get a job in the factory. Today the factories are gone, and the coal mines are too. The modern economy cannot absorb the kind of people who are most suited to these jobs. They are, quite simply, surplus to requirements.
This is nothing new in the history of the world – only in the history of our world. A surplus of unemployable, disruptive young males has often been the norm. Karl Marx described such people as “vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, brothel-keepers, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars.” (He was referring to 19th-century France.) Society had different ways of dealing with the problem. Many of these men would go to war as cannon fodder. Some would go to sea, or be transported to Australia. The more ambitious ones would strike out for the new world. Today we need another way. But no one has a clue what it might be.