Labor Force Participation Rate by Age and Education

So where do these men live? What are they doing all day?

The answer to the first question seems to be that more of them are living at home. For the first time since at least the 1940s, young men are more likely to be living with their parents than with romantic partners. In 2014, 35 percent of young men between 18 and 34 lived with their parents, compared to just 28 percent who lived with a spouse. It's not the cost of college or the weight of student loans alone that is forcing young people to stay home. Young adults without a high-school or college degree are far more likely to live with their parents. For young black men, this trend is hardly new; even in 1980, they were more likely to live with their parents than with a spouse or girlfriend.

As for what they’re doing all day, Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, is now conducting research that suggests that non-college men who aren’t in the labor market are spending a considerable amount of their time in front of screens. Here is how Hurst explained his preliminary findings in a “Faculty Spotlight” profile on the University of Chicago’s website, as noted by the economist Tyler Cowen on his blog:

In the 2000s, employment rates for young men with less than a four-year degree dropped sharply – more than in any other group. We have determined that, in general, they are not going back to school or switching careers, so what are they doing with their time? The hours that they are not working have been replaced almost one for one with leisure time. Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games. [Emphasis mine]

Detached from the labor force, with neither a college degree nor a steady job, these men have little income. But the technological revolution in media and entertainment of the last few decades has made it cheaper than ever to divert oneself on a phone, computer, television, or video-game console. Leisure is cheap enough that it apparently doesn’t require a steady W-2 or 1099 to have fun.

And they are having fun, Hurst emphasized. “Happiness surveys actually indicate that they [are] quite content compared to their peers,” he told UChicago. In the short run, not working doesn’t seem to make men miserable at all.

Cheap and abundant entertainment anesthetizes less-skilled and less-educated young men in the present. But in the long run, it cuts them off from the same things that provide meaning in middle age, according to psychological and longitudinal studies —a career, a family, and a sense of accomplishment. The problem is that these 20-year-olds will eventually be 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds, and although young men who don’t go to college might appear happy now, those same satisfaction studies suggest that they will be much less happy in their 30s and 40s—less likely to get married, and more likely to be in poverty.