The economic challenges facing men without college degrees

Well, there are no simple answers in social science or economics. I sometimes feel it's a bit like, you know, the Groucho Marx quote about, well, these are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others.

Richard Reeves is president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. And Richard says to answer this question about the change in men's wages depends on the answer to other questions, like what span of years are being compared and what ages are you looking at

over the age of 16, prime age men, which distressingly is defined as 25 to 54.

How old are you?

I'm 55. I know. You just I am literally no longer prime age according to maybe I'm subprime. Thank you. And then perhaps, like nerdiest of all, you can decide how to adjust for inflation.

So do you use a common measure like the consumer price index or something else?

And so all of those different decisions, which men by age, which starting year and which measure of inflation can have massive differences in the story you want to tell.

For Richard, the story he wants us to focus on is one he argues has been ignored and overlooked in elite circles, the economic and social challenges facing men, particularly men without college degrees. Richard wrote about this in his 2022 book of boys and why the Modern male is struggling, why it matters and what to do about. He says the potential solutions involve economic policy, but just as important, a major cultural shift in how we see the roles of man. Today's episode is an interview with Richard Reeves. He was on the show a while back, but there was a lot of great stuff we did not have time for in the episode. So this version today is one that our NPR supporters got to hear in a bonus episode. It was one of our most popular bonus episodes of the year, and today we're excited to share it with everybody. This is the kind of thing we love sharing for NPR listeners. You can learn more and sign up@plus.NPR.org so here it is, my conversation with Richard Reaves. We circled back to the question we started with at the very top, are men earning more now than they used to? Well, Richard Reeves, I have an assignment for you. I have no prior desire to show it going up or down. I just want to see what your best estimate is. So what assumptions would you use and what do you find?

You want the truth, that's what you're saying?

Whatever's closest to that, yeah. Is that naive of me?

No, it's not naive of you. And actually. But it's about sort of truthfulness. And so what that means is just being really clear what assumptions you've made when you're making these claims. And so I like to use 1979 as a starting year because I think that wages can change a lot over a few years. You've even seen that pre and post pandemic. And as it turns out, we have really good statistics on wages starting in 1979. That was a year when we actually changed some of the way we measured wages. Right. And so anything before 1979 you have to treat with a little bit of caution. The second thing I would do is I'm going to say I'm going to look at men over the age of 25 and the reason I'm going to do that is because there's a lot of men in education. If you're working at 17, that's very different. But I'm not going to arbitrarily cut it off at 54. And that's not just because I'm 55, it's because actually I think a lot of men are working much longer than that. So I'm going to go 25 plus. And then what I'm crucially going to do is I'm going to do it by education level. Because the real story here is it depends which men you're asking about. And so if I make all of those assumptions, what I find is that from 1979 to 2023, the wages of men with a four year college degree have gone up by 38%. The wages of men with some college or an associate's degree has gone up by just 3%.

Basically stagnation, given how long it was.

Basically flat. The wages of men with a high school degree has dropped by 7% and the wages of men with less than a high school degree has dropped by 11%. Now, important caveat here, there are fewer men in those last categories than there were in 1979. So the numbers affected by those are different. So the overall story is of a class gap. Men with a four year college degree have seen healthy wage growth over the last few decades. But for men without a four year college degree, wages have been at best flat. And for many of those, gone down.

You talked about the assumptions around inflation. What assumptions around inflation are you using in those Numbers.

So we're using a measure of inflation called pce, which is the personal consumption expenditure measure. There are all kinds of others, cpi. And then you can adjust cpi, Consumer Price Index, you can adjust those for all kinds of different things too. But there is pretty broad consensus now among labor market economists that the PCE is the best deflator for wages. It's the one that really most accurately captures what we're trying to get at here, which is what's the buying power of your paycheck? And PCE is the best for that. CPI is not very good for that and tends to actually give a gloomier picture of wage growth.

Is that because CPI doesn't adjust for, let's say apples go up in price, oranges go down in price. It can't for the fact that I'm going to go for the cheaper oranges.

Correct. We're in a full nerd out now. So this is our happy place. Right? Which is exactly right. One of the things the PC does is it allows for what economists call substitution effects. And it just says that it recognizes that in the real world, if something becomes one fruit, to use apples in your example, becomes incredibly expensive. But pears are cheap. People will just buy pears, and they're not really very much worse off as a result. And so you can substitute across a whole range of different goods and the PCE takes that into account. And so if you're trying to get at like, what's a reasonable basket of goods, a reasonable quality of life that I can buy with my wages, allowing for some of those substitution effects, PCE actually is a better figure.

Okay, so basically what I'm hearing from you is stagnation at best for men without a four year college degree. What's behind this?

Well, the huge changes in the economy that we've seen, of course mean that like many of the jobs that some of those men without a college degree would have gotten would have been in areas like manufacturing, steel, mining, etc. Which actually paid pretty well, even though they didn't have high educational requirements because they were physically demanding, quite risky, et cetera. But also, to be honest, it's partly because in many cases those were industries from which many others were excluded. Particularly if you were a white man, you actually had access to some of these decently paid jobs. But one of the reasons they were perhaps paid even better than they would have been in a fully free market is because women were typically not welcomed into those professions. But very often workers of color weren't either. And of course very Strongly unionized, and then of course, free trade. And so we've seen a lot of these, you know, a lot of competition from abroad, meaning that the jobs that were previously able to be done, especially by men with relatively low levels of education, have either come down in their wages because of, to some extent, the good news of fairer competition from women and workers of color, but also from the competition that you've seen from abroad. And so I think one of the things that's really difficult about this moment is that many men, especially if they're from lower income households, they're worse off than their fathers were in terms of wages. And I'm reasonably convinced that very often that's the comparison that people are drawing, that there is a sense of everything's relative and the question is relative to what? And I think for a lot of people, they do have this intuitive sense that they're comparing themselves to how their parents were doing. And maybe even there's a bit of gender to that too, which is that guys are going to compare themselves to how their fathers did, especially if their fathers didn't have more education than them. And I think a hard fact of American economic life now, and maybe American political life too, is that there are a lot of guys out there who are actually poorer than their dads, even though they've got at least as much education as their dads had. And I think psychologically that does have quite a big impact on people. So even if it's happened for good reasons as well as bad reasons, it doesn't change the fact that it's quite hard to be downwardly mobile. It's quite hard to be poorer than your parents.

Now this gets to a related topic, which is perhaps the households might actually be as well or even better off than the previous generation because the woman, if there is a man and a woman in the household, the woman might be offsetting that stagnating or even declining

wage that has happened. I mean, that's the only reason why many of these households have not actually why household income hasn't dropped more than at least women's increased earnings. And employment has held up working class households in a way that they would have been plummeting otherwise.

And I get the sense that while social change has moved for a lot of us, where some people are agnostic, whether it's a man earning or the woman earnings, a lot of men out there believe they should be the main provider of the household. And when they cannot be, that's a real psychological toll for them.

Yeah, I think One of the really difficult cultural disconnects right now is the fact that many, many fewer men today are able to fill this role of the economic provider, the main economic provider. And that's for a very good reason as well as a bad reason. Now, the good reason is just because obviously many, many women are much more economically independent. Now, again, to use 79 as a good base year for this, in 1979, 13% of women earned more than the median man.

Wow.

It's small minority, typical man. Now it's 40% of women. So that's not 50%, 40%. Still not at equality. But a world where almost half of women earn more than the median man is a very different world to one where only 13% of women did. The wage distributions of men and women now look much more similar today than they did before. That's obviously great news from a gender perspective, but at the same time, huge increase in class gaps. And the cultural question you raise is the central one, which is okay, and have we updated our view about the role of men as quickly as we've changed the economy around them? And the answer is no. And it's particularly true for working class men. And so if you look at the survey evidence, it suggests that the men and women who most strongly hold the view that men should be able to be the main provider are the men and the women for whom that is least likely to be true. In other words, it's among those with less education who hold that view. So there's a certain cultural tragedy there, which is that the men who are most attached to this idea of their role as an economic provider are the ones who are now least able to provide it. And so that, that I think, does create this issue of the sense of failure among men. And one of the reasons why I think class really matters here is that men with four year college degrees and above, we're not only better off economically than in previous generations, we've probably also got many more ways to identify ourselves that are outside of our purely economic role. So we're much more involved as fathers, for example, we may have a broader sense of the contribution we're making to our family. And I think what that means is, and I'll risk offending a lot of people when I say that I think part of the problem right now is that people who wonder, what's all this stuff about men struggling? What are we talking about? They're probably people who are in quite elite and well educated circles where men are actually not struggling, but those are not the men we should be worried about.

Yeah, it's really interesting because yeah, you do look at the CEO who are overwhelmingly men. You look at a lot of these elite professions which often have men in very powerful positions, but that's not necessarily what we're talking about here, which is the majority of men who actually don't have a four year college degree.

Right. The inability to see properly across class lines has made too many elite Americans blind to the gendered nature of a lot of what's happening now, especially to kind of men with less economic power. Working class men, but also black men too, and Hispanic men much less likely to be in that college educated group right now. And so I'm afraid to say that I think that the kind of fogging up of the glasses that's caused by the separation of the affluent and elite Americans has led them to be skeptical of any claim that any men might be struggling.

So we've talked a lot about wages and earnings. What about how much men are working? What are the long term trends there?

The basic trend here is that male labor force participation, the men being in the labor force, it's gone down, it's gone up for women, as you'd expect and hope. But again, there's a pretty big class story here. And so if we use the same sort of years, 1979 to 2023 that we used earlier, you can see again with this huge education gap. So men with a college degree are actually still at a 93% employment rate, but men without a college degree, it's drops to 81.

And how much of this is including retirees, people in education or people taking care of others?

That's a great question. So again, what I'm doing, I'm using these are men who are 25 plus since 1979. And so what you've seen is decline for men, but a much bigger decline. So it's like one in five men without a four year college degree are now out of the labor force where it was only one in 10 in 1979. But the reasons why they're not in the labor force are also very different. So again, it's not just what's the level because I was out of the labor force for a few years, but that's because I was looking after my kids.

Yeah, that's not a sign of social decay.

No. Very few people hopefully would have thought that was a horrible mistake for me to actually raise my own kids for a few years. And it goes huge class gaps here. So when men like me with four year college degree are not in the labor force. The most common reason that they give for that is that they're actually getting more education. And the next most common reason is that they're actually early retired because they've got enough money to do that.

Okay, that's nice.

And the third is because they're taking care of their family. But if you look at men without a four year college degree, so you're working class men, half of them say the reason they're not in the labor force, they're not even looking for work. This is not unemployed. Again to be clear here, half of them say it's because they're sick or disabled. That's the single biggest reason why they wouldn't be there. And a pretty small number say it's because they're taking care. It's like just about 1 in 10 say it's taking care of family. And so when we look at what's happening to men and labor force participation, it's very important not just to ask are men in the labor force? But to ask why aren't they in the labor force if they're not? And again, the class gap here shows pretty strongly that it tends to be sort of health problems that are causing working class men to not be in the labor force. And we've seen a significant rise in problems with drugs, substance abuse, et cetera, as well as other forms of mental health problems.

What are some possible solutions here?

Well, of course we can try and help those men do better in the labor market. And that's partly about making sure on the demand side. So infrastructure investment, for example, hugely help working class men. But also on the other side, on the supply side, thinking about much better access to vocational training and learning. I think one of the big problems we've got in the US is four year college degree is not the right path for many people and especially perhaps for many men. But we woefully underinvest in the alternatives. We lag at the bottom of the league table of advanced economies for apprenticeships, for example, vocational training, trade schools. That's all very important too.

Now revitalizing manufacturing and the pathways that lead to more heavy industries like construction and others is one possible solution. The economy is shifting towards a more service sector based economy though. Is there something here about reducing stigma or encouraging more men into industries that traditionally may not have had as many men in it?

Yeah, we've had a lot of emphasis on women into STEM jobs, science, technology, engineering and math. And I'm very interested in getting more men into what I call heal jobs, that's health education, more administrative jobs and those that require more literacy. And one of the things that worries me most is that it's not just that there aren't very many men in those traditionally female occupations, like nursing, like teaching, broader healthcare, social work, et cetera. It's that there are fewer and fewer men with every passing year. So they're becoming more gendered than they were over time. And so in teaching, for example, the share of K12 teachers that are male has dropped from 33% in the 80s to 23% today. The share of mental health professionals who are male has halved since the 1980s. Nursing has gone up a little bit. Actually, a lot of those men are migrant. They've come from other countries to do that. But nursing's drifted up to about 13% now. But as a general proposition, the occupations that were already quite female have skewed even more female. And so we've actually done a pretty good job of getting more women into traditionally male jobs. We've done a lousy job of helping men into more female jobs such that they've actually gone down. And that's a triple tragedy in my view, because these are growth fields. Healthcare especially is a growth field. So there are jobs.

As the population ages, there is definitely going to be more health care.

There are jobs there for men, even in some cases for men who don't particularly have very high levels of starting education. So there are jobs. Secondly, we have labor shortages in a lot of those areas. We need more workers in those areas. And so it is bad for the professions that we don't have more men. It's not a good idea to try and solve a labor shortage with only half the labor force, which is what we're doing in those areas. And thirdly, if they're sort of outward facing more people oriented positions, I think it's just bad to have an underrepresentation of any group, including of men. Like if your dad is in a care home and needs help going to the bathroom, maybe he would prefer a guy to help him with that. If your son needs some mental health care, maybe you would like the option, depending on the issue he's facing, to talk to a counselor who's male as well as of course, the other way around. And so I think that for all kinds of reasons, the cratering share of men in predominantly female professions is very bad news economically, but also culturally. But I would say, I would even go broader than that and say we've actually got to get beyond a world where we are so narrowly defining the contribution of men in terms of the size of their paycheck. Of course, we want men to do better in terms of their paychecks, and women, too. But it's incredibly important that we find ways, through policy and through culture, to signal to men, you matter as a dad, not just as a breadwinner. You matter as a member of your community. You matter as a volunteer, as a church usher, as a Scout leader, as a coach. And so your role as a man in modern society can no longer be and should no longer be narrowly defined. Economically important, though, that remains. It has to be more broadly defined in terms of what you're bringing to the tribe, the family, the community. Our tribe still needs you, even if it's in a different and new way. And that's a much bigger challenge than just economic policy. That's a cultural shift that we are only partway through. And I think our failure to complete that shift to a broader and more positive definition of masculinity that breaks free of that narrow frame. I hope what we're experiencing now is the birth pangs of a new and broader masculinity. If we don't get this right, it could be the beginning of a reaction. And I think how we treat what's happening right now will determine which way we go.

You're the author of the Book of Boys and why the Modern Male Is Struggling, why It Matters, and what to do about it. What's been the response? And do you think the conversation has turned at all since you published that?

Yeah, well, I actually struggled to get a publisher for that book. It was published in 2022. I couldn't really. Yeah, I struggled to get it published, and I'd published before, so that was surprising and honestly, a bit humiliating. I then published with the Brookings Institution Press, who'd published me before, and I think the book has landed about as well as one could hope. I'm very pleased to see it on Barack Obama's 2024 reading list, for example. That was a pleasant surprise. I would say that the awareness that people have that there are some real problems facing many of our boys and men was already there. It was just a bit below the surface. I think what many people felt they needed was permission to just talk about these issues in a way that wouldn't betray their other commitments, in this case, in particular to women and girls. And the reason I was warned against even writing about this subject, let alone talking to you about it and others in the media, is precisely because everyone said if you talk about the problems of boys and men, everyone will think you're a frothing at the mouth conservative. But I said, well, that's the very definition of a vicious cycle. If you basically say the only people allowed to talk about boys and men's issues are frothing at the mouth conservatives, you can't really complain that they're the only people talking about it. You've just ceded that ground to them. And I pride myself on being incredibly boring. I have boring charts, boring books. The book is quite boring. My publisher will not thank me for saying this. And actually the think tank I run now, our internal motto is keep it boring. To which my son said, well, you're the man for that job, dad.

Good lengthy debates about inflation deflators, I hope.

I mean, we are super boring. And I mean that in quite a serious sense, which is that, like, there's too much frothy discussion about what's happened to boys and men and not enough hard facts and not enough just good faith, well intentioned, non zero sum treatment of it. And that's my mission now. And it turns out that there are actually lots of people that want to talk about the problems of boys and men, because the problems of boys and men are not the confections of reactionary manosphere figures. They're real. And if you don't deal with real problems, they don't go away. They turn into grievances. The way to deal with that is not to wonder why some men might feel some grievance about the way the elite institutions, including the government, have dealt with them. It is to stop it from becoming a grievance in the first place by simply addressing it, acknowledging it, and then addressing it without in any way backing away from your commitments to continue to push for women's rights. It's not a choice. We can do both.

Thanks to Richard Reeves for speaking with me, and as always, thank you for being a Planet Money plus listener. Your ongoing support is one of the best ways to keep our work going. We'll be back with another bonus episode in a couple of weeks. I'm Darren woods and this is npr.