Would work toward what end?

Courtesy the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, you can calculate the ratio of employed persons to persons over the age of 16 for the following commuter belts. The national mean is 0.60.

champaign: 0.648
springfield: 0.645
st louis: 0.633
davenport: 0.622
kankakee: 0.601
rockford: 0.584
cape girardeau: 0.578
peoria: 0.522
carbondale-marion: 0.519

About 2.4% of the national population were SSI recipients at the end of 2020. In Illinois, the mean was 2.0%. Counties exceeding the national mean were as follows:

Alexander: 5.2%
Pulaski: 4.4%
Saline: 4.3%
Gallatin: 4%
Hardin: 4%
Vermilion: 3.4%
Union: 3.4%
Franklin: 3.3%
Marion: 3.3%
Massac: 3.2%
Macon: 3%
White: 2.9%
Jackson: 2.9%
St. Clair: 2.8%
Greene: 2.8%
Peoria: 2.7%
Cook: 2.7%
Richland: 2.6%
Winnebago: 2.6%
Knox: 2.5%
Morgan: 2.5%

I’m seeing room for improvement, not some ghastly social crisis. And I’m not seeing why you’d advocate policies which discourage outmigration.

Or maybe the problem is that our economy, society, and culture tell large numbers of people that they aren’t needed. Not content with hollowing out our inner cities, we do the same for large stretches of the country. Europe has the same problems as America, but the problems aren’t as serious, perhaps because of economic necessity, or intact social structures, or cultural identity, or ethnic homogeneity, or religious belief, or political and civic organizations, or government policies that restrain or offset the dynamic.

From what I’ve seen of Larry Summers (a lot of it comes from the movie the Social Network), I see him more as part of the problem, rather than as part of the solution. Harvard and MIT aren’t going to provide meaning to most people’s lives. More likely they do the opposite, to the surrounding society if not to insiders. It’s also not surprising that an economist from a family of economists has trouble with things non-economic. I also doubt the answer is political in any right/left sense. Different societies have different ways of generating meaning. We don’t seem to be doing that good at any of them.

I retired back to the family farm in 2005 and ran a plant nursery for several years in downstate Illinois, an area where unemployment and drug addiction were so bad it was hard to believe it existed in the US. Schools had failed and a huge underclass was basically illiterate. The local prison was full of illiterate drug pushers. The lower class people who were living a somewhat normal life were almost all on some sort of disability for claims that would never have passed during my youth in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The others were trapped by illiteracy and lack of funds to travel to find work. Their hopelessness is something I never expected to see in the US.

Illinois has been destroyed by its Blue Cities and by sending its small factories offshore. During my youth most of my friends parents were factory workers and lived happy middle class lives. They owned their homes, had cars and boats and took vacations. Schools produced literate graduates.

I moved to rural Texas south of Houston in 2014. It is a paradise compared to downstate Illinois. It is very much like my downstate Illinois was in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Inner city Houston is a Blue cesspool of Democrat corruption and mismanagement, surrounded by Red suburbs of middle class peace and prosperity.

The only way I can see to improve areas like current downstate Illinois is a basic income. I don’t agree with Andrew Yang on all his examples, but I think this would work.

Also needed is a total abandonment of the K-12 public school monopoly and replacement with individual student educational endowments. An amazingly large numbers of high school graduates struggle to read. Homeschoolers should be paid for successful results from individual student educational endowments. Homeschooling pods would see explosive growth and provide adequate coverage, and this reform could happen almost instantly.

“There is some social phenomenon which I suspect explains non work, non marriage, deaths of despair, general alienation and, I suspect, the rise of reactionary populism. It should be a major task of social science to understand it.”

The problem may be tied to our society’s prosperity, and that makes problem and solution hard to separate.

I’m not entirely sure what “reactionary populism” is supposed to mean, but I wouldn’t assume that it is part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

In San Francisco, the prevailing wisdom of those responsible for “handling” the homeless problem there actually believe that homelessness CAUSES drug addiction. So there is an effort there to find homes for those living on the street, which, in the view of the SF “experts” should cure the drug problem.
At one time, you would expect to read this sort of stuff in MAD Magazine.

Here’s what I think; if each homeless person was given 3 million $$$ in cash, tax free, most of them would spend it on drugs, trash their new living quarters and be back on the street within a year or so.
The poverty experts in SF would then say, “well, we should have given each homeless person 5 million $$$$.

In “Life At The Bottom,” by Theodore Dalrymple, he studied the native born, white underclass in England. By omitting blacks, Indians, Pakistanis, and other immigrant groups from his study, he eliminated the variables of ethnicity and race.
In short, he found the white underclass there suffered from the same social pathologies prevalent in the inner cities of the USA; drug addiction, broken families, high crime rates, poorly educated students, etc.
Government policies to help the poor never worked as intended.

“Most of those not working say they don’t want to work; there are two vacancies for every unemployed person; all countries have structural change but the US stands out. Demand side economics won’t fix this problem.”

“There is some social phenomenon which I suspect explains non work, non marriage, deaths of despair, general alienation and, I suspect, the rise of reactionary populism. It should be a major task of social science to understand it.”

https://twitter.com/LHSummers/status/1572433427365826565

Ah… the old; “From each according to their ability (income & assets) to each according to their need.”

I have encountered a number of slackers over the years. People who pretended to do a job but did as little as humanly possible. These programs are perfect for them. But the moral hazard is that some who aren’t slackers may decide to quit being fleeced by the government and join the slackers on the dole. Thus, creating a shortage of workers. Hmm. will machines take up the slack?

Even without a guaranteed income a labor shortage has developed post pandemic. It seems that many boomers have taken early retirement, some housewives have decided they would rather stay home than work, some young slackers are living on the dole and/or their parents, and many otherwise employable people have fallen into addiction and homelessness. The result has been a fall in the labor force. Everywhere I go locally, there are help wanted signs. Fast food places are hurting. They’re paying more and getting fewer employees. I fear a lot of businesses are going to fail as we sink into recession because they can’t stay open. Then where are the taxes going to come from to pay the guaranteed income? It’s a terrible idea and always has been.