Can education ease America’s ‘men without work’ crisis?

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America is in the grip of a historic crisis that, despite its manifest importance, somehow managed to remain more or less invisible for decades: the collapse of work for adult men, and the retreat from the world of work by growing numbers of men of conventional working age. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “work rates” were actually somewhat lower for American men at the end of 2018 than they had been in 1939. In other words, Depression-style work rates are still characteristic today for the American male. Unlike the Great Depression, however, today’s work crisis is not an unemployment crisis. Only a small fraction of today’s workless men are actually looking for employment. Instead, we have witnessed a mass exodus of men from the workforce altogether. At time of writing, some 7 million civilian noninstitutional men between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four (“prime working age”) were neither working nor looking for work—four times as many as were formally unemployed. And while employment trends are certainly problematic nowadays for women, too, both the duration and the magnitude of the work crisis have been far more acute for men.

Among economists and policy analysts who have examined these unsettling trends, the general consensus is that declining male workforce participation in modern America is mainly explained by structural economic change, which has caused an especially dramatic drop in jobs for less-educated workers. Exemplifying this received wisdom is the Council of Economic Advisers’ 2016 report on declining male labor force participation rates (or LFPRs). As that study put it:

The fall in participation for prime-age men has largely been
concentrated among those with a high school degree or
less. . . . Reductions in labor supply—in other words, primeage men choosing not to work for a given set of labor market
conditions—explain relatively little of the long-run trend. . . .
In contrast, reductions in the demand for labor, especially
for lower-skilled men, appear to be an important component
of the decline in prime-age male labor force participation.