As of August 2024, 13.7 percent of prime age men were not working, compared to just 7.2 percent in 1954.

The long term decline in labor force participation by so-called prime age men is a tremendous worry for our society, for our economy, and probably also for our political system.

There's a surplus of prime age workers who could be working and aren't.

And that's this puzzling problem.

The unemployment rate for prime age working men sat at 3.4 percent in August 2024.

This number primarily includes those who are unemployed and looking for a job.

But about 10.5 percent of men in their prime working years, or roughly 6.8 million men nationwide, are neither working nor looking for employment, compared to just 2.5 percent in 1954.

What's surprising is it's not a COVID phenomenon.

It's not a recession phenomenon.

And for every prime age man who is unemployed and looking for a job, there are more than three, and some years four, who are neither working nor looking for work.

So what's driving men out of the workforce?

And if left unchecked, what impact will it have on the U.S. economy?

Nearly half of prime age men out of the workforce cited obsolete skills, lack of education and training, poor work record or security issues as a reason preventing them from work.

Education is a very important predictor of a prime age man's odds of being out of the labor force.

The big impacts are on the non-college educated groups on their ability to enter and stay in the labor market.

Men who are not college educated leave the workforce at higher rates than men who are.

At the same time, fewer younger men have been enrolling in college over the past decade.

If you look at the geography of where the most prime age men out of the labor force are in particular, they tend to be in places that have experienced manufacturing declines.

They used to graduate with a high school education and have good, stable jobs.

They weren't glamorous jobs.

They were, you know, automobile factories, sometimes mines, other manufacturing jobs.

But they were respected, they were stable and they could support a family.

Since then, due to technology driven growth, a little bit due to Chinese competition, you've had a lot of manufacturing firms and the places where they were located that, you know, that were one horse towns become ghost lands, right?

Wages could also be a contributing factor.

Median annual wages for men with a high school diploma have fallen from just over $57,600 in 1973 to $45,000 in 2023, adjusted for inflation.

At the same time, wages for those with a bachelor's degree or more have increased by about $6,300 during the same period.

This decline in earnings led to a 44 percent growth in the exit rate of men without a college degree from the workforce between 1980 and 2019.

I think honestly, status plays more of a role than wages.

As I said before, you had a manufacturing job.

It was respected.

You were part of a community, breadwinner for your family.

You had organizations like unions or rotary clubs that surrounded your job and that's gone.

In general, men without children are also less likely to participate in the workforce compared to men with children, especially men without education or training after high school.

What we have seen is a huge rise in the proportion of prime age men who've never been married and a very, very significant decline in the proportion who are currently married and have kids at home.

And those two trends track closely with the big changes that we've seen about male attachment in the labor force.

Correlation isn't always causation, but looking at that correspondence is real important, I think.

Meanwhile, 57 percent of the roughly 10 percent of men not looking for work said their physical or mental health was the main reason for not being employed.

With 55 percent citing a disability, serious illness and or receiving disability benefits.

The whole question about the health and the mental health of male workforce dropouts is an extremely important and I think concerning one.

Distressing proportion of the men who are out of the workforce say they're using pain medications every day.

A 2017 research paper estimates that an increase in opioid prescription between 1999 to 2015 led to about 43 percent of the decline in men's labor force participation rate during that period.

So then you have to ask, what sort of pain are we talking about?

Are we talking about physical pain?

Are we talking about metaphysical pain?

There's an enormous amount of depression, mental health challenges that men in this grouping face.

Some of this is a chicken and egg question.

Did you drop out because you were feeling sad or are you sad because you dropped out and you're living on the couch?

Unemployment is really terrible for people's well-being.

Often people adapt to all kinds of negative shocks, losing a kid, being widowed, whatever, and eventually kind of come back.

But long term unemployment is one of the worst things in terms of that.

So what you have is a kind of scarring effect.

And it's worse for men because their identity is much more wrapped up in their role as a worker.

Men's declining workforce participation could potentially leave a lasting impact on the American economy.

It means slower growth of the economy, obviously.

It means bigger wealth gaps within our society.

It certainly will have an impact on our productivity and probably already is.

The U.S. has been experiencing a severe shortage in labor, still missing 1.7 million Americans from the workforce compared to February 2020.

The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that U.S. GDP could have been $296 to $442 billion higher in 2023 if the country had been able to fill its job vacancies.

However, some experts suggest the impacts of men leaving or never entering the workforce could be more sector specific.

You need young men coming in wanting to replace those people going out.

And so men have primarily been in more manual labor, more blue-skilled and skilled trades.

If they're older and they're leaving into retirement and there's not as many young men coming in, both because of declining cohort sizes, but moving in a we're going to be losing that sector of productivity.

Despite a steep rise in federal funding, the infrastructure sector hasn't been able to find enough workers, with the construction workforce shortage surpassing half a million in 2024.

We are a little concerned about the impact that inflation is going to have and has had on the movement of infrastructure dollars into the actual productive activity.

Having a shortage of men in construction is going to raise a problem.

The trend could have a dire sociopolitical impact as well.

It'll get worse in ways that we would not like.

I mean, I think it would lead to more premature deaths.

And but it will also likely lead to radicalization and polarization because this is a frustrated, left behind group with no options.

There are problems that government can address and problems that government can't address.

One of the first functions that beats out policy is economic growth.

You have a strong economy, you're going to have increased wage structure and it's going to bring people back into the market.

More than a quarter of prime age men not looking for work cited insufficient pay as a reason preventing them from work.

And nearly half said competitive pay, salary, compensation and or bonuses was a very important factor when considering whether to enter or return to the workforce.

For the young, better training, skills training, better post some form of post high school education, encouraging that maybe even subsidizing that.

I think part of the mental youth mental health crisis has to do with what's next.

What I'm going to do?

What am I going to do?

Are there any stable jobs?

I can't afford college.

All those questions all come together.

And so models that help them kind of give them a jumpstart can be really effective ways of intervening.

They're actually now really promising programs in high schools which teach kids financial literacy.

They teach them about equitable entrepreneurship.

They teach them about how do you foster better mental health as part of the workplace.

And it seems to inspire kids to go on to college, right, because they sort of see a pathway where they didn't see it before.

Twenty nine percent of men out of the labor force said that training and educational programs was another important factor in considering a return to the workforce.

Having the type of commitment from the employer to train and retain and offer upward mobility for workers, I think, would be very important.

Trying to figure out more about career pathways in the labor market and not just the education side.

So how is it that someone moves from first job, next job, the best job?

How do we help people understand and navigate?

Nearly a quarter of working Americans said they weren't satisfied with their growth opportunities in the workplace, compared to other OECD countries that on average spend 0.1 percent of their GDP on training their workers.

The U.S. spent only 0.03 percent of their GDP on job training in 2022.

Older age groups, it's tougher.

You know, you're probably not going to get these guys to retrain, but you can get there a lot of programs that have largely been pioneered in the UK much more than here.

But we're starting to pick up on them that literally just try and reboot community activities.

They get these isolated people in despair out of their houses.

It can make a difference.

Social programs like disability benefits spark contentious debate.

It's very controversial.

People have very strong opinions about this.

While we don't know why it is happening, we can be pretty clear that the social welfare programs are helping and the disability programs are helping to finance this situation in a way that was never originally intended.

A 2018 analysis by the Joint Economic Committee found that 64 percent of prime age men who aren't working were receiving some sort of government assistance.

So the one benefit that they rely heavily on is disability insurance.

One, because they often are unable to work if they have a physical injury or high levels of addiction or whatever.

But it also provides health insurance, which is huge.

Very much against the initial intentions of the founders of the program.

They've ended up with a perverse situation that too often subsidizes or even incentivizes helplessness and long term dependence.

If we thought about a system in which we had a work first principle where the incentives were for getting the training and then showing up at the job and then staying at the job, I think we'd be in a lot better place than we are today.

However, some experts remain doubtful about whether altering the benefits program will lead to meaningful results.

I think until we deal with a deeper problem of ill health, ill mental health, these guys aren't going to respond to incentives.

Everybody is responsible for their, you know, for their brothers.

Everybody's responsible for their neighbors and their friends.

And we ourselves as citizens can help to shine a spotlight on this.

It shouldn't be America's invisible problem.

And the more that we talk about it, the more that we pay attention to it, the closer we get to turning this around.