One headline that gathered a lot of attention in the early covid days was that women had to leave the workforce.
But this fact, as alarming and culturally sensitive and triggering as it may be, overshadowed one huge, even alarming fact about employment and the employment pool.
And that fact is that prime age male workers have been disappearing since the 1980s.
There are some alarming truths here that are at play and might answer the questions your HR departments are asking.
But there are three key points as to why so many of these men, who, historically, have made up a huge swath of the working population are disappearing, or worse, have disappeared from the workforce altogether.
1. They Don't Need To
As we said in the last episode, the baby boomer generation created the wealthiest economy that has ever existed, ever. And, as we’ll talk about in another episode, those baby boomer didn’t exactly create enough people to replace themselves, or worse, even split their enormous pile of wealth among.
So what effect did this have on the following generation, and in particular, the following generation of prime male workers?
Let’s back up a minute to get the big picture.
The maximum earning years for households are between ages 45 and 54. For boomers, this would have spanned the years of 1991 to 2018 with the peak occurring somewhere between 2002 to 2007.
Boomers’ children would have been in their early 20s to mid 30s in that time frame.
What this means is that as boomer parents flourished in their peak earnings years, their adult children did not technically need to work in order to ease the drain on the household. The dual-income- earning parents were already making enough money. In fact, millennials are expected to inherit an estimated $68 trillion from their boomer parents by 2030, which will make them the wealthiest generation in history.
The abundance of boomer wealth also moderated the need and motivation for millennials to move out of the nest. In 2014, for the first time since 1880, more men 25-34 years old were living with their parents than with a spouse. For 25–29-year-olds, that percentage was an astounding 25%.
When thousands of men don’t get a job or leave Mom and Dad’s, the shockwaves are personal, not just national or economic. Men who delay getting a job also delay critical life milestones such as marriage, children, and home-ownership. According to the Census Bureau, the average age of marriage for men has moved from 23 years old in 1960 to 30 years old in 2019. As for having kids, the vast majority of men are postponing children to their 30s with the average of first time fathers hitting 31, up from 27 in the early 1970s. The average age to purchase a first home went from 28 in the 70s and 80s to 34 years old as of 2020, while the median age soared from 31 years old in 1980 to age 47.
Sidenote: A common explanation for millennials’ delay in buying a first home is the $1.7 trillion in student loan debt shared by approximately 44.7 million borrowers. Debt is indeed a ball and chain for many young Americans (and let’s not forget that the median inflation-adjusted price of homes ballooned by 39% between 1970 and 2019). But the fact remains: the LFPR itself for millennial men is plunging.
2. Prescription Opioid Abuse
Another factor stealing men away from the labor market over the past two decades is prescription opioid abuse. Opioids are used by many for legitimate pain management, but the US has been overrun with addiction, as evidenced by the fact that some 90 Americans die every day from opioid overdose. It is manifestly impossible to sort between abusers and legitimate users in the statistics below; nevertheless, considering that nearly 30% of patients misuse their prescriptions, we can use the following numbers to conclude that opioid abuse is a major culprit in siphoning men off the labor force.
The opioid conflagration began around the turn of the millennium. From 1999 to 2010, US sales of opioid painkillers quadrupled. In fact, in 2012, there were enough opioid prescriptions for every single American adult to have their own bottle of pills, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And as the use of painkillers skyrocketed, the misuse was not far behind. In 2019, an estimated 9.7 million Americans age 12 or older misused prescription painkillers.
The consequences of opioid abuse aren’t just hospitalizations and tragic deaths, but also a huge decline in labor force participation—particularly among prime-age men. In an extensive 2019 study, researchers Dionissi Aliprantis and Mark E. Schweitzer discovered a strong link between opioid prescription rate and labor force participation for both men and women.
For prime-age men in particular, a 10% higher prescription rate in a particular region was associated with a 0.15-0.45% decrease in the LFPR. In fact, the study estimated that in certain US counties, solving the opioid epidemic would increase the LFPR for prime-age males by over 4 percentage points.
A 2018 study by the American Action Forum discovered that the spike in opioid use between 1999 and 2015 (256% increase per capita) caused the national LFPR for prime-age men to drop by 1.4 percentage points. This accounts for a full 40% of the decline in LFPR for prime-age men during the same time frame. In raw numbers, this decline means that in 2015 alone, a staggering 860,000 prime-age men were absent from the labor force due to opioids.
3. Video Games
The final point in this episode may have been walked out before you a couple of time. And it isn’t the purpose of this episode to talk about whether things are currently better or overall worse than they have been historically.
For instance, we won’t answer the question here, today about whether it was overall a good thing that boomers created so much wealth at the sacrifice of other things such a work-life balance and family happiness among other things. However, the wealth they did create created a lifestyle that has enabled millennials to start questioning the status quo.
With boomers’ wealth creating an affluent life for large numbers of the following generation, their children’s attitude towards work naturally shifted. It would have been highly difficult to resist. Enabled by significant wealth, millennials could afford not to work—or to work significantly less than their parents. We will examine this attitude shift for prime-age men in two areas: the drift away from full-time work towards part-time work, and the huge increase in hours spent playing video games.
A notable trend in the past decade (2009-2020) is the flight of prime-age men to part-time work.
One of the initial reasons that significant numbers of men moved into part-time work around 2009 was that they were forced to. The Great Recession of 2008 erased 4.5 million largely full-time jobs from the male-dominant construction and manufacturing industries. Many of the only available jobs were in restaurants or retail establishments, where average
weekly hours are typically part-time even in a healthy economy. Thus, huge numbers of prime-age men opted for these 20- to 30-hr/week jobs simply because there was nothing else at the time.
The problem is that even as the US recovered from the recession and unemployment rates sank to their lowest levels in 50 years, prime-age men didn’t race to return to full-time work. As the following chart demonstrates, the number of prime-age men willingly opting for a part-time job jumped from 6 million in 2007 to nearly 8 million in 2019.
But why have so many young men chosen to not work so many long grueling hours anymore?
Well – this is going to trigger some of you but, well, it’s might be, according to the data, video games.
According to NBER research, the decrease in hours worked for men ages 21-30 exactly mirrored the increase in video game hours played. On average, males ages 21-30 worked over 200 fewer hours in 2015 than they did in 2000 (a 12% decline). They simultaneously upped their leisure hours, 75% of which were spent playing video and computer games. Many of these men do not have a bachelor’s degree, and the data shows they are postponing marriage, child rearing and home buying until their 30s.
Think what you want to about the reasons these things happened. Be upset if you want to. The fact is less men are in the workforce today than they have ever been. A better and more significant question is, if men are not working like they used to …
Who will fill their spot? Women? Children? Immigrants?
What about a new generation of men?
If you hang your hat on the idea that this was just a bad bunch. A group of sour grapes and the next generation will be better – then you’re mistaken.
You’re mistaken, not because the next generation are better or worse, but because they don’t exist.
