Why are so many men opting out of the labor force?

It’s a big week for labor market data: there’s the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, private payrolls, and the federal jobs report. But before the employment floodgates open, it’s worth looking at a group of workers who have stepped back from the labor force: prime-aged men.

Men between the ages of 25 and 54 — who half a century ago were almost all a part of the labor force — are participating significantly less today.

For more on why they've opted out, “Marketplace Morning Report” host Kimberly Adams talked to Remy Levin, a professor of behavioral economics at the University of Connecticut and co-author of a study titled, "Nobody Wants to Work Anymore: Lifetime Labor Market Experience and the Decline of Male Labor Force Participation in the U.S.” Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kimberly Adams: Big picture, what has been going on when it comes to so-called “prime-age men” and the labor force in recent decades?

Remy Levin: The big story is just a continuous decline over the last 50 years or so. So, you know, in the 1960s or in 1970, about 95% of prime-aged men — that's men between 25 and 54 — were in the labor force. They participated in the labor force — either they had jobs or they were looking for jobs. And then by 2015, that number had gone down to about 88%. It doesn't sound like a ton, but that's millions and millions of men who are not in the labor force and are not looking for jobs. And it's one of these grand trends that we've been trying to explain for quite a while in the economics profession.

Adams: What makes this particular group different, if anything?

Levin: I think it's quite notable that it used to be almost universally employed, and then those numbers have gone down. So, this kind of feature where you had a population that worked almost universally and then has had this long run and consistent decline through good and bad times. Even though other populations have not necessarily gone through that, that's really the striking pattern here.

Adams: It also feels like these men feel like they have an option of whether or not to enter the labor market in a way that maybe people didn't have in the past.

Levin: Let me emphasize that of course, there are many drivers of this. Our paper is not the only one, but there's other work on this that essentially talks about the generosity of the social safety net and the changes in payments for disability, which allow one to survive if you're not working.

But then also, if there are changes in norms around how acceptable it is to not work or how acceptable it is to stay with your parents, for instance, then it might make it easier to not work as well. Of course, when we think of this as economists, we think of men, or really anybody, weighing both sides of this ledger and the decisions that they make being driven by both of these factors, and so of course, it's going to be both how easy it is or convenient it is to not work, and what you believe you will get or what you can actually get from working.

Adams: So, for young men in particular right now, when they're looking out at the labor force, what does the current economy and labor force that they see in front of them mean for their own feelings about whether or not they want to enter the labor market?

Levin: One way to think about what's going on in the economy — but also in the global economy as a whole — is that we're going through a process of structural transformation that's akin to or even exceeding the Industrial Revolution.

So, all of this new technology is coming in, and there's a huge amount of uncertainty about what that is going to mean for the labor market. I think a lot of young men are looking at this and looking at the kinds of messages and the kinds of environments that their peers and their elders are facing and forming beliefs based on that about whether it's worth it to work or not.

If young men just go on the internet and they see that the expectation is that there's not going to be any jobs. That's a little bit of a self-reinforcing prophecy, right? What's the point of pursuing a job if you think that they're not going to exist?