Out of Sight

The devastating drop in employment for American men over the past two generations presents us with something of a dog-not-barking question. How can so many millions be absent from payrolls with so little consequent sociopolitical upheaval?

Two big postwar changes in the American labor market suggest the answer. The first was the epochal transformation in the nature of women’s work. Before World War II, the exclusive economic activity for the overwhelming majority of American women was unpaid labor at home. Today, the overwhelming majority of women — including those with relatively young children — engage in at least some remunerated employment. And this long upsurge of employment for women has effectively disguised the steady decline in work for men, both by generating new sources of household income and by replacing men who once held jobs.

Second, for complex historical reasons, a caste of men has arisen that finds it socially acceptable and financially possible to scrape by in an employment-free existence. Not only are these men not actively looking for work, but for the past two decades only a small minority of them have reported they are out of the labor force because they cannot find jobs (the classic definition of a “discouraged worker”). Thus, in effect, this flight from work has been possible to ignore because it has ostensibly been voluntary.

Until roughly the outbreak of World War II, the overwhelming majority of conform working-age men in the United States were either working a paid job or looking for one. There was no third way for healthy, able-bodied males. In our America, by contrast, the taxonomy of employment includes a third category: neither working nor seeking work.

The rise of the unworking American man underscores the deeply antiquated and misleading nature of our primary measure of labor-market health: the unemployment rate. By that hoary yardstick, the employment situation for prime-age men in 2015 and early 2016 looks pretty good. But the unemployment rate, which calculates the percentage of people in the labor force who are without work but seeking jobs, was devised in an age in which mass withdrawal of working-age men from the labor force was inconceivable.

Between 1965 and 2015, the number of prime-age men neither working nor looking for work grew more than three times faster than the number in the workforce. Indeed, the economically inactive have come to eclipse the unemployed as the main category of men without jobs. By 2015, in any given month, there were on average three “unworking” prime-age men for each prime-age man out of work but looking for a job. At no point in the past two decades — not even during the Great Recession — have the unemployed exceeded the economically inactive among American prime-age men.

America’s declining male labor-force participation rate is not typical of modern Westernized societies. While there has been some decline in the postwar prime male labor-force participation rate in all of them, the flight from work has been more extreme in America than in almost any other economically advanced democracy. Today, America is 22nd out of 23 in prime-age male labor-force participation, underperformed only by Italy.