Young and middle-aged American men are less likely to be working now than at any time in U.S. history. The official labor force participation rate for prime-aged men fell from 97.1% in 1960 to 88.6% in 2022 (averaged through November), using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey. This decline can be put into deeper historical context using data from the decennial census, which shows a drop from 96.7% in 1910 to 93.5% in 1950, preceding the steeper subsequent fall (Figure 1) from 1960 to the present.
The trend has gotten a great deal of attention among policy scholars and academics, but the fundamental causes are often muddled. With a few exceptions, scholars have downplayed the important role of physical and mental health and ignored how rising stresses on familial life may be leading to health problems in adulthood. As I argue below, health is critical to understanding labor force participation, and family well-being is likely to be a core component. …
Adults who grew up in married households had an adversity index that was 0.47 standard deviations lower than those who did not, and as has been widely noted, younger adults are less likely to have been raised by married parents. Along these lines, men born in the 1980s and 1990s had much higher adversity scores than those born in earlier years.
Childhood adversity is strongly related to current health, and adversity, parental marriage, and health are all strongly related to labor force participation. The causal effects cannot be precisely estimated from surveys such as these, but the associations suggest that labor force participation could be notably higher by preventing health problems or helping men cope with them. Consistent with this potential link, Carol Graham and Sergio Pinto have found that prime-aged men who are out of the labor force have particularly low subjective well-being and optimism.
(Via Memeorandum)
[We have spent the last several decades dismantling the nuclear-family model. Now we’re beginning to grasp the damage that these policies have done to society at large. The biggest lesson is that nihilism for the sake of faddish taste is an insane path for any society to follow. — Ed]
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