The share of American men in the labor force has fallen for decades. Once near 86 percent in the years after World War II, male participation for those 16 and older stood at just 69.5 percent in May 2026, according to Fortune. Prime-age men, those 25 to 54, have seen their rates drop from 98 percent in the mid-1950s to around 89 percent today. Millions sit on the sidelines. The trend worries economists. It drags on growth. It strains public budgets. And it signals deeper shifts in how men see work.
Explanations abound. Some blame technology that displaced routine jobs. Others point to opioid use, video games, or generous disability benefits. A new study adds a different angle. It traces the decline back to childhood. Boys who watch men around them earn low wages or face high unemployment form lasting doubts about the value of working. Those doubts follow them into adulthood. They choose not to enter the labor market at the same rates as previous generations.
Remy Levin and Daniela Vidart, economists at the University of Connecticut, lay out the case in a June 2026 NBER working paper. Their title captures a common complaint: “Nobody Wants to Work Anymore.” The authors show that men’s beliefs about returns to work are shaped by lifetime experiences of the aggregate male labor market. The effects persist even for those who move across state lines. They prove stronger when men observe outcomes for others of the same race. And they are driven primarily by formative childhood years.
“Our findings suggest that experience effects can turn short-run declines in labor demand into long-run declines in labor supply,” Levin and Vidart write. They add that it is the labor market environment men grow up in, more than what they observe as adults, that shapes their later participation. This points to the formative years as the critical window for belief formation about returns to work.
The mechanism is straightforward yet powerful. Short-term economic shocks in a community create visible hardship among adult men. Boys absorb those signals. They adjust their expectations downward. Decades later, as prime-age workers, they participate less. The pattern holds after controlling for current conditions such as unemployment or inflation. Data from the Survey of Consumer Expectations further links these lifetime experiences to direct measures of labor market beliefs.
But childhood exposure is only part of the story. Other research highlights structural pressures that reinforce the trend. A 2025 Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco working paper by Leila Bengali, Mary C. Daly, Evgeniya A. Duzhak and Cindy Zhao examines prime-age male non-participation across generations. Non-participation rose from 2.9 percent in the 1950s to 10.9 percent by 2023. In 1960, one in 35 prime-age men stood outside the labor force. By 2023 the figure was one in nine.
The San Francisco Fed team decomposes the rise into push and pull factors. Push factors limit opportunities. Skills mismatch tops the list. As manufacturing jobs vanished and technology favored higher skills, less-educated men found fewer suitable roles. Real wages for men with only a high school diploma fell sharply. The Boston Fed’s Pinghui Wu estimated that rising wage inequality accounted for about half the increase in exits among non-college men, a finding echoed across multiple analyses.
Pull factors draw men out for other reasons. Prolonged education and caretaking responsibilities stand out. Millennials in particular show higher rates of continued schooling and time spent on family duties. Disability also plays a large role. By recent years, roughly 38 percent of non-participating prime-age men cited health or disability as the main reason, according to the San Francisco Fed analysis.
These forces interact. A boy grows up in a place where factory closures have left men idle or underpaid. He sees limited upside in traditional work. He may extend his schooling to avoid the same fate. Or he may later opt for caretaking roles that previous generations filled differently. The result compounds. Each cohort enters adulthood with weaker labor-force attachment than the last.
Brookings Institution analysis from July 2025 reinforces the generational view. Prime-age male labor force participation stands at 89.2 percent, down from a post-pandemic peak. Young men born in the late 1990s participate at age 25 at rates 9 percentage points below those born 45 years earlier. Women in the same cohorts show the opposite pattern, with higher participation. The divergence has widened the overall gender gap in new ways.
And the economic costs mount. Fewer men working means slower labor-force growth. It reduces potential output. Tax revenues suffer. Reliance on public assistance rises. Families with children face greater strain when fathers stay out of the workforce. The San Francisco Fed paper notes that the trend hits vulnerable households hardest and contributes to higher government benefit spending.
Earlier work reached similar conclusions on wages. A 2016 White House Council of Economic Advisers report tied falling prime-age male participation to declining demand for less-skilled labor. Real wages for less-educated men dropped even as those for college graduates rose. When the returns to work appear low, more men step aside. That 2016 analysis estimated the phenomenon explained a sizable share of the long-term decline.
Recent data shows the trend continues. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for 2025 and 2026 confirm prime-age male participation has not regained pre-pandemic highs in a sustained way. Projections from the Hiring Lab at Indeed suggest further softening ahead, driven partly by demographic shifts and persistent gaps for younger men without college degrees.
Levin and Vidart’s contribution stands out for its focus on belief formation. Their evidence from cross-state movers is particularly compelling. Men carry childhood impressions with them. A boy from a depressed Rust Belt town who relocates to a booming Sun Belt city still shows lower participation years later if his early years featured weak male labor outcomes. The effect is twice as strong within racial groups, suggesting that boys pay closest attention to men who look like them.
But. The paper does not claim this explains everything. Skills gaps, health issues, family roles and policy incentives all matter. What it does show is that early impressions harden into durable expectations. Once formed, those expectations resist quick reversal by current economic conditions. A tight labor market today may not pull in men who long ago decided the gamble wasn’t worth it.
So what might change the trajectory? The economists suggest policymakers consider how to shape expectations early. Programs that expose boys to successful male role models in stable jobs could matter. Efforts to rebuild labor demand in communities that lost it decades ago might break the cycle for the next generation. Retraining for displaced workers remains essential, yet it may prove insufficient if beliefs formed in childhood already point away from work.
The San Francisco Fed authors reach parallel conclusions. No single fix exists. Addressing skills mismatch through education and training helps. Supporting caretaking through better child care options could draw some men back. Reforming disability insurance to encourage work where possible is another lever. Yet they stress that generational patterns have deep roots. Reversing them will take time and coordinated action.
Critics have offered other explanations over the years. Some emphasize the rise of video games and digital entertainment as a competing pull for young men’s time. Others highlight the opioid epidemic’s devastation in certain communities. The Great Recession left scars on cohorts entering the labor market at the wrong moment. The COVID-19 period accelerated exits for some while prompting reevaluations of work-life balance.
Those factors surely play roles. Yet the new evidence on childhood experiences offers a unifying thread. Many of those shocks, from deindustrialization to recession, first registered in boys’ lives as observations of struggling fathers, uncles and neighbors. The impressions stuck. They help explain why male participation continued to drift lower even during periods of rising real wages in the 1990s or strong job markets in the late 2010s.
Economists have long studied how early-life conditions affect later outcomes in education, health and earnings. This line of research applies the same logic to labor supply itself. Beliefs about work are not formed in a vacuum. They emerge from what children see and hear. In communities where steady employment for men became rarer, the next generation internalized the change.
The pattern appears across racial lines but with different intensities. Black men have consistently shown higher non-participation rates, a fact noted in both the NBER and San Francisco Fed papers. Levin and Vidart find the childhood experience effect is particularly pronounced within racial categories. White men respond most to the wage trajectories of other white men. Black men appear influenced by both Black and white male labor market conditions.
This nuance matters for policy. Targeted interventions in high-poverty or formerly industrial areas could yield outsized returns if they alter the signals boys receive. Apprenticeship programs that pair young males with employed mentors offer one model. Expanded career and technical education in high schools is another. The goal is not just skills. It is also to demonstrate that work pays and brings status.
Challenges remain. The manufacturing jobs that once provided stable paths for non-college men are not returning in the same numbers. Service-sector roles often pay less and carry different social weight. Automation and artificial intelligence threaten further displacement. Without deliberate efforts to create quality opportunities and reshape perceptions, the downward drift in male participation may continue.
Recent analyses from the Commonsense Institute and Bipartisan Policy Center echo these concerns. They document millions of prime-age men detached from work, with sizable shares citing obsolete skills or poor work history. Nearly half of non-participating prime-age men point to lack of necessary skills or education as barriers. That statistic suggests room for effective intervention if programs can reach men before discouragement sets in permanently.
Yet the childhood channel identified by Levin and Vidart implies prevention may prove more powerful than cure. By the time men reach their 30s with entrenched low expectations, pulling them back becomes harder. Investing in the environments where today’s boys grow up could pay dividends two decades from now.
The U.S. economy has adapted to many structural changes before. Female labor force participation rose dramatically in the second half of the 20th century, offsetting some of the male decline. That offset now appears limited. Women’s participation has stabilized near historic highs. Further gains will prove difficult without major shifts in child care or workplace norms.
Demographics add pressure. An aging population already pushes overall participation lower. If male rates continue to slide, labor shortages could intensify. Wage pressures in certain sectors may rise. Productivity growth might disappoint. The stakes extend beyond statistics. They touch family stability, community vitality and national economic strength.
Levin put it plainly in remarks tied to the paper’s release. The long-run decline in male labor force participation ranks among the most puzzling trends in the U.S. economy. Their work suggests beliefs, formed early and rooted in real observations, form a central part of the puzzle.
Other researchers agree the phenomenon deserves urgent attention. The San Francisco Fed team concludes that both push and pull factors matter, with skills mismatch, caretaking and extended education leading the way. Their generational comparisons show the problem is not fading. Each cohort of men displays higher non-participation than the last at similar ages.
So the evidence accumulates. Childhood matters. Wages observed in formative years matter. The visible struggles of men in a boy’s world leave marks that last. Short-term labor market shocks echo across decades. And the cumulative effect has left millions of men on the margins, with consequences that reach far beyond any single recession or policy debate.
Reversing the trend will require more than tighter labor markets or modest training programs. It demands attention to how the next generation of boys perceives work. It calls for rebuilding credible pathways to stable employment in communities long left behind. And it asks economists and policymakers to treat beliefs and expectations as economic variables every bit as real as wages or unemployment rates.
The numbers have been falling for 70 years. The latest research indicates they need not fall forever. But changing course means understanding not just why men leave the workforce, but why some never fully enter it in the first place. The answer, it turns out, may lie in what they saw as children.
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