One is an amateur filmmaker and stay-at-home-dad whose wife is an executive at a financial services firm. Another founded two technology companies and is taking some time out after selling each for millions of dollars. The third supports himself with proceeds from investments. Each of these men is a friend of mine. Viewed as economic statistics, however, they have two other things in common. First, each is wealthier than is typical for men in their early 30s. Second, each is part of a growing population that many experts think are undergoing an existential crisis: men who are in the prime of their working lives, but who neither have a job nor want one.
Many view the co-existence of these two economic characteristics as, if not a paradox, a cause for concern. Indeed, a number of observers, from Left-leaning policy wonks like Larry Summers and Richard Reeves to Right-leaning US senators such as Josh Hawley, appear terrified of its implications. In March, for instance, as the Nasdaq soared to new records, the rate of prime-age labour force participation fell for men, despite rising for the population as a whole. So, what’s driving this, and how is it remaking the relations between the sexes at a time of escalating gender conflict?
Here, my friends could spare the social-policy establishment some man hours: they are a microcosm of a cause-and-effect relationship that ties together two trends. Among the surest ways to cause people to work less is to make them wealthier. When you have wealth — accumulated money and assets — you can afford to rely less on income from paychecks. “A larger bribe,” as one Harvard professor puts it, “will be required to convince a wealthier person to enter the labour market.” And a defining characteristic of the US economy in the 21st century has been an explosion in household wealth. In 1999, on average, the American household had $661,000 (in 2023 prices). By 2023, this had exploded to an average of $1.15 million. By historical standards, this is a mammoth gain: in the four decades before 1999, the increase in average household wealth was just $358,000.
Much of this wealth, it turns out, has accrued to men. “Although the gender income gap has narrowed,” according to a 2022 publication by Harvard’s Angela Lee, “the gender wealth gap has widened from the mid-Nineties to the mid-2010s.” The numbers are stark. “Women’s median wealth as a percentage of men’s median wealth dropped from 90% in the mid-Nineties,” Lee reports, “to 60% in the mid-2010s.” Why was this? The straightforward answer is that men were probably bigger asset-holders to begin with, and have historically tended to earn more money from their jobs and to work longer hours than women. Financial markets also reward bigger risks with bigger rate of return and, on average, men have tended to make riskier investments.
Other sources of wealth data tell the same story as Lee’s study. According to the US Census Bureau, the average man aged 25-54 who’s left the labour force now reports 21% more in income from investments than one with a job. The surprise, then, would be if America’s men were not choosing to work less.
So deeply has this trend become entrenched that it appears in one of the oldest and easiest to measure vectors of privilege: height. A population’s average height is a barometer of its economic status: it is economics’ equivalent to psychology’s “the body keeps the score”. The skeletons of the mummified elite in ancient Egypt are, on average, 3.6 inches longer than those of its commoners. The aristocrats of late-18th century Germany were 5.2 inches taller, on average, than its peasants. Data from the 20th century confirm this isn’t down to genetics. When South Korea grew rich while North Korea fell into the abyss, despite sharing a genetic pool, men in the south became three inches taller.
In terms of average height, America’s non-working men were once the commoners to its working pharaohs. For all intents and purposes, they are now eye-to-eye. In 2017, America’s prime-age men out of the labour force were 0.1 inches taller, on average, than those with jobs. This was the first time since the relevant CDC data begin in 1976 that they could look down on the working men. Back then, America’s prime-age men with jobs were 0.7 inches taller. That difference trended up until 1985, peaking at 0.9 inches before dropping back towards the convergence that prevails today.
Such biological analysis might suggest a wholesale economic revolution for American men. But, despite all the fretting about the number of drop-outs and a crisis of masculinity, this isn’t a society-wide issue. It is barely in the double-digits: the percentage of prime-age men who have left America’s labour force now sits at only 11%, up from 5% in October 1975. And this is because this isn’t a story about the male population, but about a sub-population of men: a class we might call the petit-aristocracy.
Like the aristocrats of the pre-industrial world, this group’s economic existence relies on assets. In this case, they were produced during the 21st century’s wealth explosion. And this species of aristocrat is petit not in height, but in consumption. Many maintain relatively modest lifestyles to be able to live without a steady paycheck. Some will work jobs for brief spells, however, if necessary. Their ephemeral imprint in the jobs numbers has even led to “in-and-out” becoming a term of America’s labour economics jargon as well as its fast food.
Though currently small, like America’s gross wealth and the number of people who own part of it, this petit-aristocracy is set to grow. Neither the dot-com bubble nor even a financial crisis changed the upward trend in the US wealth-to-income ratio that started around 1999. Because modern assets are not finite like land, today’s petit-aristocracy can grow its ranks in a way that land-based aristocracies couldn’t. Nor is the decision to drop out of the labour force purely a function of wealth. The allure of leisure relative to work matters, too. And if past is prologue, improvements in leisure technologies, such as video games, will increase leisure’s allure in ways that appeal particularly to men.
Where does this leave America’s women? Thanks to the liberating effects of household technology and changing gender norms, a “quiet revolution” has taken place, to the point where women now almost outnumber men in the workplace. And their readiness to work is what has facilitated men’s exit (without women, the gross national product would have collapsed). But they do not enjoy the same benefits of this position that men did in the 20th century. Women lack the financial power over men, now wealthy, that men once had over women, when gender norms locked women out of the labour market. And as they take over the job market that men are vacating, they’re not finding that jobs pave a path to happiness. “Female well-being appears to be compromised (or male well-being enhanced),” according to one representative study, “by high female involvement in gainful employment”.
The effect of this is to tee-up a clash of biblical proportions between men, women and norms about work. In Genesis, as humanity’s original punishment, God effectively hands the labour market over to Adam, and condemns Eve to live in the household. At least some men and women have long wanted to escape each of these settings. Now, each finally can. But will humanity’s technological and financial escape leave anybody, men or women, happier than they were in the divine prison? It’s unclear.
As Oscar Wilde said, there are two tragedies in life. One is not getting what you want. The other is getting what you want. The challenge is that the social norms about the importance of work that increasingly satisfy men or women increasingly dissatisfy the other. Men out of the force would benefit from norms that facilitate their finding of purpose, identity, and flourishing, without jobs. The ancient Greeks, who viewed the enablement of leisure as the purpose of work, offer examples. And the obsession of manosphere activists with the Stoics, who lived before Christianity dominated the Western mind, is revealing in this regard. Women, meanwhile, would benefit from the social veneration of paid jobs associated with Weber’s Protestant Ethic. After all, abandoning the Protestant Ethic now, once women have finally entered the labour force, would be devaluing a social currency as soon as women start to acquire it.
This is the economic backdrop that today’s gender wars are playing out against. Men, despite growing wealthier, feel increasingly alienated by a society that still views a job as an admission ticket to polite society. Women, despite breaking ground in the labour market, sense that their gains have failed to turn into the lives of empowerment that they expected them to. What comes next is unclear — but it will certainly open a new chapter in the social history of Adam and Eve’s descendants.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/