Rising Number of Men Don’t Want to Work
Story by Suzanne Blake, Newsweek, 5/24/24
EDITORIAL:
The majority of our members are men who want to drop off the statistical radar. Many of our members definitely in many of those camps. They still work but only about 10 percent of my capacity at least when it comes to mental work with clients. They physically work – with a large home, yard, and several cars it’s a lot of management.
We think they have shifted focus a bit. They consider their household their business venture and instead of focusing solely on the financial aspects of getting more digits on a screen they’re investing in their children and their environment and trying to give opportunities that will propel them forward.
So they haven’t technically stopped working, but have exited the traditional workforce that would be reported in these statistics because they have opted out of the various reporting mechanisms used to drive such statistics such as 941 and the like.
The 60’s phrase:
“Tune in, turn on, and drop out”
. . .describes our approach to to freedom, at least from a legal perspective.
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American men are opting out of the workforce at unforeseen rates.
For many, it’s not an issue of not being able to find a job. They have simply opted out altogether. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found only 89 percent of working age men have a job or are actively looking for work. In 1950, that number was at 97 percent.
While the early 1950s saw around 96 percent of working age American men between the ages of 25 and 54 working full or part-time jobs, that proportion has now moved to just 86 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And as fewer men financially support themselves, there are long-reaching economic and societal implications, experts say.
“The U.S. has a major issue of prime-age men giving up and permanently exiting the labor force,” Robin Brooks, a senior fellow policy research firm the Brookings Institution and the former chief economist at IIF, wrote on X, formerly Twitter this week.
“What’s striking about this is that it doesn’t get talked about at all, not in the mainstream media and not by economists, even though this obviously feeds political radicalization.”
What Caused The Drop?
Several factors may be at play for men’s declining participation in the workforce.
Recessions often bring down the workforce participation rate, and often the numbers never quite recover.
The 2008 Great Recession saw male employment decline from 88 to just 80.6 percent, and the rate has never been able to get higher than 86.7 percent since then. The pandemic saw a similar if not slightly different fate for men’s work. After dropping to 78 percent in 2020, male workforce participation has essentially recovered to pre-pandemic times now but still remains far below the times of the 1950s.
A larger factor may be men’s declining participation in higher education. While women historically were excluded from universities, they now outpace men at college roughly 60 to 40 percent.
And for those without a college degree, unemployment is far more likely. Those with only a high school diploma have an unemployment rate of 3.9 percent compared to just 2.2 percent of those who achieved a bachelor’s degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston linked a drop in self esteem related to the jobs on the market as a possible factor.
The drop in men in the workforce has been largely concentrated among non-college educated men, and it’s these men who face a significant decline in earnings.
Over the timespan of 1980 and 2019, non-college-educated men’s median weekly earnings went down 17 percent after inflation, while college-educated men saw earnings rise by 20 percent.