Employment’s Decline, for Men of All Ages

Men who graduated from high school between 1982 and 1986 were victims of bad timing. They entered their prime working years during a period of slow growth. By January 1994, only 83.3 percent of men 25 to 29 years old were working.

A decade later, the same thing happened. Men who graduated from high school between 1992 and 1996 entered their prime working years as the roaring 1990s were coming to an end. In January 2004, the government once again reported that only 83.3 percent of men between 25 and 29 were working.

But the two groups grew older in very different periods, and their experiences diverged. The ’80s graduates got to enjoy the 1990s. The ’90s graduates landed in a second recession. The chart below compares the employment experience of men born since 1949, banded into five-year cohorts. The groups are compared at the same ages, rather than in the same years. Employment rates in the recession year of 2009 are highlighted for each of the age cohorts.1

Source: Author’s analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

There is a growing body of research suggesting that the sharp drop in the share of Americans with jobs is largely a result of demographic changes, like an aging work force. This chart is a reminder that the full story must be more complex.

It is necessary to understand why men now between the ages of 35 and 39 are so much less likely to have jobs than men in that bracket a decade earlier. As the chart shows, the same thing is true at every age level, most prominently for the youngest workers. Employment rates have increased modestly in the five years since January 2009, but they uniformly remain lower than for earlier cohorts.

The obvious explanation, of course, is that no one is willing to hire them.

The chart certainly does not imply that work force participation among the men who entered the work force in the 1990s or 2000s will ever equal participation among those who entered in the 1970s or the 1980s. Participation was in decline before the recession, and the slow recovery appears to be rendering a temporary problem increasingly permanent. The Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that the stigma and erosion of skills associated with long-term unemployment are preventing a growing number of people from returning to work.

The chart is perhaps nothing more than a reminder of what could have been.

(1) A few words on methodology: The chart compares the employment-to-population ratio in January for men in each five-year cohort with the same measure at five-year intervals going back to 1979. For the group that turned 25 between 1974 and 1978, for example, the employment rates are shown for January 1979, January 1984, January 1989 and so forth. The rates are not five-year averages. The data is not limited to high school graduates.