I have said this for two decades, and it’s brought me more trouble than it was worth. I would rather not have to see it. I would rather the country I hired people in, and raised daughters in, had kept its standards. It did not. So when the argument turns to artificial intelligence, and to whether America should chase superintelligence at all, I am not interested in the polite version. I have already explained the economic case more than once. The real story is ruder than that, and it starts at my own kitchen table.
People don’t like AI because it doesn’t flatter them. A robot does not call in because a hamster died. A model does not clock out at 5:02 and have the car in the driveway before the second hand clears the twelve. A line that runs on automation does not need a bereavement policy for every emotional weather system that blows through a shift. That is offensive to a culture that has spent thirty years teaching people that their feelings are a form of production. I have employed thousands of people. I have watched the applicant pool’s quality fall in real time. I am not guessing.
The Boy from England and the Standard Nobody Wanted to Hear
I have two daughters. When they were teenagers, I looked around Butler County, and then around the wider American teenage market, and I said something I have repeated as recently as a few weeks ago. The boys being produced in the United States were not good enough for my daughters. Not the polite version of “not a fit.” Not good enough. Bad mouths. Bad sexual manners. Parents who had taught them the wrong things on purpose, or by neglect, which is the same thing as leaving the television on. I was not willing to hand eighteen years of work to that.
One of my daughters married a young man from England. He had manners. He had a work ethic you could see at fourteen and fifteen. His parents and ours coordinated supervised trips. He flew over. For the first couple of years, we put him up in a hotel. We picked him up in the morning. We drove them to the movies. We drove them to whatever else teenagers do when somebody is actually watching. Heavily supervised. The whole thing. They dated like that for years. Five years before they even kissed. That was my idea of how this was supposed to go, and I will not apologize for it.
He has been her husband for well over a decade, fourteen or fifteen years. He became an American citizen. He is a good young man. Our families are close. His father came with us on the camper, traveled with us, went to Put-in-Bay. We were coordinating this when their sons were fourteen and fifteen. It worked. It has been a traditional life. That is what I wanted for my kids. I did something like it for both daughters. It worked cleanly for one of them. I will take the win.
I caught ridicule for it. A father hosting supervised dates for a boy who flew in from another country did not match the local script. The script was that American boys were entitled to a shot because they were nearby and breathing. I did not accept the script. Suppose Lee Greenwood had wanted to date one of my daughters, I still would have wanted to see the manners. Patriotism is not a character reference. A flag on the truck is not a substitute for how you treat a young woman whose father spent eighteen years building her into a person rather than a hole. That last sentence is the one that gets people angry. Good. The anger is the confession.
What the Dating Market Was Already Telling Me About the Labor Market
I looked at my daughters’ friends and at the boys around them, and I was more right than I wanted to be. Sex was too easy. Porn had done what porn does, which is train a boy to treat a girl as a clip. Addiction was common and shrugged at. The language was garbage. The expectations were garbage. Schools had a hand in it. Parents had a hand in it. MTV and the shows that replaced MTV had a hand in it. A culture that cannot produce a boy willing to wait five years for a kiss won’t produce a man who will stay on a precision job until the work is done.
President Trump understands more of this, and so do Steve Bannon and the War Room crowd; Trump saw the raw material on The Apprentice. He wrote the books. Politically, the quiet part is hard to say out loud because it insults the audience. I will say it. I had daughters. The boys were not suitable. They were not good enough. A father is allowed to have that standard. An employer is allowed to have the same standard. A country that wants a gross domestic product will need the same standard, whether it admits it or not.
The marriage numbers have caught up to what I saw in the driveway. In 2024, half of American adults were not currently married. Among adults 18 to 29, 84 percent were unmarried. Among adults 30 to 39, 48 percent were unmarried, more than triple the 1960 share. Only about 20 percent of 25-year-old men have ever married, against roughly 75 percent in 1967. Lyman Stone’s projection, that something like a third of today’s teenagers may never marry by 45, is not a mood. It is the dating market I already priced in. [1][2]
David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson showed years ago that when young men’s earnings and employment fall, marriage falls with them, idleness rises, and more children end up in poor single-parent homes. They were measuring trade shocks. I was measuring manners. Same wreck, different instrument panel. [3]
The Arithmetic of a Country That Still Wants to Build Things
People hear “low unemployment” and think the labor market is a full parking lot. It is not. In August 2026, the civilian noninstitutional population was about 275 million. The labor force was about 170 million. The participation rate was 61.6 percent. Men 20 and over were participating at 69.4 percent. That is not a country in which every able body is on a line. [4]
Male participation has been falling for most of my adult life. It was about 87 percent in 1948. It was about 75 percent in 2000. It is about 68 percent now. The drop is sharpest among men 16 to 24. Prime-age men, 25 to 54, look healthier on a chart, near 89 percent, until you notice that more than one in ten of them are neither working nor looking. Nicholas Eberstadt has been writing about those men for a decade. The round number that keeps coming back is nearly seven million prime-age men off the economy. Among U.S.-born prime-age men, the share not in the labor force rose from about 4 percent in 1960 to 11.2 percent by April 2025. For those without a bachelor’s degree, it was 14.8 percent. [5][6][7]
I have said, roughly, that of 250 or 300 million people, you might have something like 100 million who can actually do industrial work. The official labor force is larger than that. The slice that can do high-mix, high-tolerance, show-up-every-day work is not. I have hired into that slice. I hosted a SpaceX event and had to get my own head around robotics, because even the hand-craft end of serious aerospace work doesn’t have a deep bench of people who can do it. The employees are not out there in the numbers the drawings assume. A robot does not solve taste. It does solve the empty chair.
Schools That Work Like a Public Toilet
Public education, as I have seen it, works like a public toilet. Everybody uses it. Nobody cleans it. Garbage in, garbage out, and then a diploma on top so the garbage can apply for a job.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress results released in 2025, from tests of 2024 seniors, put 12th-grade reading at the worst level in three decades. About a third of those seniors lacked basic reading skills. Nearly half were below basic in math, which means trouble with the sort of percentage problem a shipping clerk used to do on a pad. Only about a third were leaving high school with the reading and math for college-level work. Margaret Spellings called it an economic emergency. She was being polite. [8]
The adult figures are worse, because they are the people already out of the building. On the 2023 Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, the share of 16-to-24-year-olds at the lowest literacy levels rose from 16 percent in 2017 to 25 percent. That is about five million young adults who can follow a short text but cannot analyze a long one. More of them held diplomas than in 2017. The paper improved. The skill did not. Across working-age adults, the share at the lowest literacy level rose from 19 percent to 28 percent. Numeracy low performers rose from 29 percent to 34 percent. The United States sits below the international average in numeracy. [9][10]
I don’t need a chart to know the college experience hasn’t been cranking out people who walk into a plant or a courthouse and do good work. My wife comes home and says the same thing I hear from people who hire attorneys and prosecutors. There are not enough good ones. The courthouse has the same problem as the machine shop. The pipeline is thin because the formation was thin. Churches emptied of the basic teaching. Schools filled up with everything else. Twenty years of that and you do not get a workforce. You get a cohort that is not qualified to marry, not obviously qualified to raise a child, and only loosely qualified to hold a job. I am not interested in the hurt feelings attached to that sentence. I poured heart and soul into my kids. A lot of people out there are not worthy of the work that went into a serious daughter. An employer who has moved people through real jobs has the same right to say it about a shift.
The 32-Hour Week and the Cult of Going Home Early
I was always the man who frowned on the clock-watchers. People who would not stay. People who were in the car and out of the parking lot before you could look up and see 5:00. A progressive culture has taken that instinct and tried to make it policy.
On September 8, 2026, Bernie Sanders and Mark Takano reintroduced the Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act. It would lower the overtime threshold from 40 hours down to 32, with no loss of pay, in steps. The AFL-CIO is for it. So are the UAW, SEIU, UFCW, and others. Sanders argues that AI and robotics will raise productivity, and that the gain should be taken as time off rather than as output. [11]
I understand the politics of that argument. I do not accept its economics for a country that intends to stay ahead of China. Productivity that is cashed out as a shorter week, on top of a workforce that already struggles to fill a full one, is not a dividend. It is a surrender. The same political current that wants the 32-hour week spent a generation arguing that the government should pay people to stay home. Video games were not a secret. They were the plan. You cannot keep up with a rival that is installing robots if your domestic reform agenda is fewer hours, more process, and a medical report every time somebody skins a knuckle.
Unions do not like Elon Musk, and they are open about it. Tesla’s plants run on robotics. That is not a moral failure. That is what you do when the alternative is a union model in which a small injury becomes an incident report, the incident report becomes an insurance hit, the insurance hit eats the margin, and the margin was the only thing paying for the next hire. I have watched that movie. Robotics is how you refuse to cast it.
Walmart, the Rally, and the Lawsuit That Replaced It
My wife is loyal to Walmart. When we were raising the kids, it was stocked, the prices were honest, and the place worked. She still likes to go. I go where the stuff is. If Walmart doesn’t have it, I don’t have a sentimental objection to leaving.
Walmart used to rally people at the start of a shift. The company pushed greeters, sourcing, and the idea that workers should be better at the end of the day than at the beginning. Then the progressive lawsuits and the union drives arrived. A company does not have to vote a union in to catch the disease. It only has to spend enough years defending itself from one. The habits change. You stop asking who is good. In a lot of places you are not allowed to say “good” without a lawyer in the room. Standards become disparate impact. Disparate impact becomes a settlement. The settlement becomes the new handbook.
I have told my wife the plain version. Walmart does not have the employees it used to have. Kmart already showed one ending of that story. You cannot recruit what the schools did not make, and you cannot test for what the courts will not let you name. The aisles tell on the culture. So does the parking lot at 5:02.
China Is Not Confused About Any of This
China is not trying to talk America out of automation because China is worried about our feelings. China is automating as fast as its factories can take the machines. The International Federation of Robotics reported that China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024, 54 percent of global demand, a record. The operational stock hit 2,027,000. It doubled in three years. Domestic Chinese robot makers took 57 percent of their home market. And remember, China has over 1 billion people in it, and they are automating wherever possible. Asia took 74 percent of new factory-robot deployments in 2024. Europe took 16 percent. The Americas took 9 percent. [12]
Beijing has also poured state money into the software side. Stanford’s AI Index puts state-initiated Chinese investment funds at about $184 billion into AI firms from 2000 to 2023, and Xi has told the apparatus to add tax breaks, contracts, financing, and infrastructure on top of that. In the first half of 2026, Chinese investment in information services, the bucket official statistics credit to AI, was up 19.2 percent. Their own youth unemployment, students excluded, was 18.9 percent in August. They are automating anyway. [13]
That is the tell. A rival with a fifth of its young people out of work is still buying the machines. The media campaign aimed at American companies, the one that treats every AI lab as a jobs villain, is not a labor policy. It is a delay. Slow the United States down. Protect the slug, as I have put it, the applicant covered in tattoos and piercings who wants thirty hours and a speech about work/life balance. China will take the productivity gap and cash it as industrial power. I have no interest in helping them. Get young people in America playing video games instead of producing product.
I have said I do not agree with the president on this point. A lot of people around him, and a lot of people in the Glenn Beck audience, want superintelligence treated as a threat to be slowed. If you want an economy that works, you had better get AI, or superintelligence, or whatever name clears the politics, into the work. The people are not standing there ready. Trump knows there are not a hundred million employees you can sit in a chair and point at a build. The machine does not complain, does not need a remote-work negotiation, and does not open a bereavement case when the pet dies.
Twenty Years to Grow a Better Cohort, If We Start Now
If we started this year, with the babies in the nursery, we are about twenty years from a cohort that could be reasonably good again. That assumes we actually change the inputs. Church. Rules. Fathers who will say no. Mothers who will back the no. Schools that teach reading and math instead of passing the toilet paper down the row. I am not optimistic about the institutions. I am insistent about the timeline.
Go back and watch the old films. The Wizard of Oz was 1939, every cell hand-painted, a country that still assumed competence was normal. I am not romantic about the Depression. I am clear-eyed about the people. The baseline manners, literacy, and willingness to be supervised were higher than what walks into an interview now. We let that fall. We can grow it back. We cannot grow it back by next quarter.
So the gap has to be covered. That is what automation is for. That is what AI is for. Not as a replacement for the best people I have ever hired. As a supplement for a corrupted workforce that is not ready for the basics of life, let alone for a competitive industrial policy. Three generations have been hit. The damage is intellectual and moral. A man who cannot be trusted with a daughter cannot be assumed ready for a clean room work environment.
Biblical Formation Is Not a Side Issue
I have told my wife this until she is tired of it. There are not enough good people to staff the work she sees, the legal work, the ordinary institutional work. The fix is not another HR module. People have to get back to church and back to basic teaching, because the last twenty years of young people, as a cohort, have been trash for the jobs and the marriages a country needs. Individuals escape that. I married one of my daughters to a man who escaped it, and he had to cross an ocean to do it. The cohort did not escape it.
AI does not preach. It also does not undo a sermon. What it can do is hold output up while a serious culture tries to form human beings again. Biblical scholarship, rules, agency, the old expectation that a man governs himself before he governs a shift. That is the long repair. Superintelligence is the bridge. China would prefer we argue about the bridge until the repair is irrelevant.
I am allowed to have high standards as a father, as an employer, and as a man who has lived in the same county long enough to watch the decline without a consultant’s chart. Low standards were sold as kindness. The kindness produced a country that cannot fill its own lines, cannot fill its own aisles, and cannot fill its own dating pool with men a serious father will hand a daughter to. AI offends that arrangement. Good. Be offended. The machine will make the shift. The rest of us have twenty or thirty years to remember how to make people who can.
Notes
1. Hannah N. Smith, “Unmarried Adulthood: More than a Century of Change, 1900–2024,” Family Profile No. 8, 2026, National Center for Family & Marriage Research, Bowling Green State University. In 2024, half of U.S. adults were unmarried; 84 percent of adults 18–29 and 48 percent of adults 30–39 were unmarried.
2. Lyman Stone, “1 in 3: A Record Share of Young Adults Will Never Marry,” Institute for Family Studies, February 2024. About 20 percent of 25-year-old men had ever married, against about 75 percent in 1967; about 60 percent of 35-year-old men had ever married, against about 90 percent in 1980.
3. David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men,” AER: Insights 1, no. 2 (2019): 161–178.
4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation, August 2026, Table A-1. Civilian noninstitutional population 275.4 million; labor force 169.8 million; participation rate 61.6 percent; men 20 and over participation rate 69.4 percent.
5. American Institute for Boys and Men, “What’s really going on with men and work? Seven facts,” May 2026. Male labor-force participation from about 87 percent in 1948 to 68 percent; from 75 percent in 2000 to 68 percent; prime-age men from 92 percent to 89 percent since 2000; men 16–24 from 69 percent to 57 percent.
6. Nicholas Eberstadt, summarized in “Time for ‘Shock Therapy’ — How to Get Our 7 Million Dropout Men Back to Work,” American Enterprise Institute, April 2025. Nearly seven million prime-age men are neither working nor looking.
7. Steven A. Camarota, “Working-Age, but Not Working, 1960 to 2025,” Center for Immigration Studies, November 2025. U.S.-born prime-age men not in the labor force: 4 percent in 1960, 11.2 percent in April 2025; 14.8 percent among those without a bachelor’s degree.
8. Dana Goldstein, “12th Grade Reading Skills Hit a New Low,” New York Times, September 9, 2025, reporting National Assessment of Educational Progress results. About a third of 12th graders are below basic in reading; nearly half are below basic in math; about a third are prepared for college-level work. Margaret Spellings, Bipartisan Policy Center, called the decline an economic emergency.
9. National Center for Education Statistics and the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, 2023 results, released December 2024. U.S. adult literacy low performers rose from 19 percent in 2017 to 28 percent in 2023; numeracy low performers rose from 29 percent to 34 percent. Young-adult figures: American Institutes for Research analysis, share of 16-to-24-year-olds at the lowest literacy levels from 16 percent to 25 percent, about five million people.
10. Sharon Bonney, Coalition on Adult Basic Education, quoted in reporting on the PIAAC release: more than 20 percent of young adults with a high-school diploma lack skills commensurate with it.
11. Office of Senator Bernie Sanders, “Sanders, Takano Reintroduce Bill to Move Toward 32-Hour Workweek,” September 8, 2026. Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act; endorsements include AFL-CIO, UAW, SEIU, UFCW, National Nurses United.
12. International Federation of Robotics, World Robotics 2025, press release, September 25, 2025. China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024 (54 percent of global demand); operational stock 2,027,000; domestic manufacturers’ home-market share 57 percent. Global new deployments: Asia 74 percent, Europe 16 percent, Americas 9 percent.
13. Li Yuan, “In China, A.I. Is Moving Forward While the Economy Lags Behind,” New York Times, September 20, 2026. Stanford AI Index estimate of $184 billion in state-initiated fund deployment into AI firms, 2000–2023; information-services investment up 19.2 percent in the first half of 2026; youth unemployment, students excluded, 18.9 percent in August.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Autor, Dorn, and Hanson, AER: Insights (2019). Eberstadt, Men Without Work (Templeton, 2016). Camarota, Center for Immigration Studies (November 2025). American Institute for Boys and Men, “Seven facts” (May 2026). NAEP via Goldstein, New York Times, September 9, 2025. PIAAC / NCES release, December 10, 2024. NCFMR Family Profile No. 8 (2026). Stone, Institute for Family Studies (February 2024). Sanders/Takano Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act, September 8, 2026. International Federation of Robotics, World Robotics 2025. Li Yuan, New York Times, September 20, 2026. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation, August 2026.
For the longer shelf: Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind; Charles Murray, Coming Apart; Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex; Kay Hymowitz, Manning Up; Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; the Bradford Wilcox file at the Institute for Family Studies. Read Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men against Regnerus, not instead of him.
Rich Hoffman
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About the Author: Rich Hoffman
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
