Missing Men 🇺🇸

Why are Middle-Aged Men Missing from the Labor Market? (NY TImes)

Men ages 35 to 44 are staging a lackluster rebound from pandemic job loss, despite a strong economy.

Various explanations have been offered:

• Criminal records
• Opioids
• Video games
• The decline of the nuclear family stunting life prospects.

It struck me that 35-44 corresponds with child-rearing age. And even though middle-aged fathers and non-fathers are disengaging from the workforce evenly, one theory stood out to me:

The pandemic has probably also slowed America’s already-weak family formation, giving single or childless men less of an incentive to settle into steady jobs...

This proposes a reverse causality. Rather than the common-sense knowledge that men without good jobs are barred from marriage, instead poor marriage and family-supporting prospects obviate the need for jobs.

From Ariel Binder's paper:

... the trend decline in labor-force participation by noncollege men has, to some extent, occurred as part of a long-run shift in marriage market equilibrium. As such men’s comparative advantage and bargaining power within the household economy declined, so did their incentives to build careers. The causal evidence presented here is consistent with sociological accounts of the declining viability of the breadwinner identity among less-educated men and struggles to replace this paradigm with other productive modes (Cherlin, 2014; Edin et al., 2019).

The extremely tradition-minded may read that and call to roll back laws and trends that made it easier for women to receive fairer treatment in work and divorce. 

Thankfully, the paper does not propose that, and I find it absurd that half of society should be disempowered to goad a minority into employment ...

... that they may not need to support families they do not have.

Reddit posts surrounding the article suggest that far more commenters are happy with minimalist, dependent-free, early retirements, than have turned into seething incels.

If indeed this is a case where desires have been adjusted to suit circumstances, there may be nothing to remedy. Rather than wring our hands that middle-aged men are locked out of marriage and labour markets, we could instead be glad that they can thrive outside both.