Workforce participation among “prime age” men in the U.S. and Maine has been decreasing in a concerning trend.
“The US has a major issue of prime-age men giving up and permanently exiting the labor force. What’s striking about this is that it doesn’t get talked about at all – not in the mainstream media and not by economists – even though this obviously feeds political radicalization,” said Robin Brooks, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, on X.
Information compiled by the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), shows that workforce participation among males in the 25-54 “prime” age group, has been declining slowly, but consistently, since at least the 1950s.
Although there have been jumps upward, and dramatic dropoffs, such as the significant increase in unemployment when the nation was shut down in 2020 during the COVID-19 outbreak, an overall view of the data shows a relatively consistent downward trend.
August 1958 saw the highest percentage of prime age males in the workforce within the past 69 years, with 97.8 percent working, meaning less than three percent of prime age males were unemployed.
By March 2024, that number had decreased significantly, with only 89.2 percent of prime age men working.
Throughout the majority of the 2000s, the prime age workforce participation saw a slow decline with occasional upticks, followed by a much faster downward trend after 2008 during the recession which ravaged the U.S. economy that year.
During the 2010s, the participation rate stayed in the 88 percent range, except when it hit 87.9 for one month in April 2014.
Following the low numbers throughout the majority of the 2010s, the rate eventually recovered to 89.5 percent in March 2019.
After that brief recovery, which never came close to reaching the rates of the early 2000s or before, the number took a dramatic dip during 2020.
After the drastic drop during the 2020 COVID lockdowns, the participation rate recovered, and reached above the rates for the majority of the 2010s, but nevertheless remains significantly lower than it was in earlier decades.
Maine saw a similar decline, with data showing a significant drop in participation in the prime age groups since 2000, the earliest year that Maine collected the information.
Maine’s data was broken down differently than the national information, with smaller splits in age group, compiling it by 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, and 55-64.
In 2000, all three of the prime age groups had significantly higher participation rates than the same groups in 2023.
The 25-34 range had the highest rates, with 95.1 percent participation, significantly higher than 2023’s 89.2 percent participation.
The other prime age groups saw similar declines, with the most drastic coming in the 45-54 range, where participation saw a drop from 87.2 percent to 78.4 percent.
While the prime ages saw a decline in employment, older men, in the 55-64 range, kept working at a much higher rate, with 72.8 percent working in 2023 compared with only 63.4, suggesting that the 2023 economy has required men to work later in life at a much higher rate.
A March report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) showed that the decline was most pronounced among men without college degrees, and provided a variety of potential explanations for that decline, citing various economists.
The CRS cited the decline in “real”, inflation adjusted, wages in jobs which do not require a college degree as a factor.
One study viewed by the CRS suggested that the decreased participation was influenced by increases in Social Security’s disability insurance programs, which would have allowed more men to remain out of the workforce after suffering work related injuries.
A Princeton University study claims that opioid abuse significantly increases the number of prime age men who remain unemployed.
That study discovered a significant decrease in workforce participation in counties where doctors prescribed opioids at a higher rate, finding a likely link between drug abuse and the failure of prime age men to participate in a workforce.
The CRS also attributed the decline among non-college educated men to increasing numbers of them having criminal records, making it more difficult for them to find jobs, and also pointed to the disproportionate number of failed marriages among less educated men, as a possible factor.
The Maine Wire reached out to Brooks, asking his opinion on the cause of the decline.
Brooks mentioned the prevalence of video games as a possible cause, with more men than women dedicating time to video games, with men choosing to game rather than go to work.
He did not believe, however, that video games are the root cause; they could not account for the decline beginning before video gaming proliferated.
Brooks believes that a real root cause is despair among men.
“A big part of the story is that these are people who have given up, and are kind of forgotten, and a big challenge for policy remains how to bring them back into the labor force and then back into jobs,” said Brooks, speaking to The Maine Wire.
The problem particularly affects men, while women have seen an increase in workforce participation.
According to the CRS report, the percentage of prime age women in the workforce recently hit an all-time high, with an annual rate of 77.4 percent in 2023.
That marks a dramatic increase from under 50 percent before the 1970s, when many more women were stay-at-home wives and mothers, rather than entering the workforce.
If the data includes both genders, the numbers show a significant increase in participation among prime age Americans during the same time period, increasing from 67 percent in March 1955 to 83.4 percent participation in March 2024.
