The men in Tallulah are typically not well educated: the local high school’s results are poor even by Louisiana’s standards. That would have mattered less, in the old days. A man without much book-learning could find steady work at the mill or in the fields. But the lumber mill has closed, and on nearby farms “jobs that used to take 100 men now take ten,” observes Jason McGuffie, a pastor. A strong pair of hands is no longer enough.
The article is excellent, but difficult to cleanly excerpt. It deals with the changing (more bluntly: imploding) job market for blue-collar labor, and its consequences for both men and women. For example, women on average are becoming more educated than men, and educated women are less willing to marry down the socioeconomic ladder. This generates an excess supply of uneducated men relative to uneducated women, i.e., a shrinking blue-collar dating pool.
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