A 2019 study by the University of Michigan stated that "the labor-force participation rate of prime-age
American men has decreased in a near-continuous fashion from 97.2% in 1960 to 88.2% in 2015—a cumulative decline of 9 percentage points. Considering that the population of prime-age men in 2015 was around 61.4 million, the secular decline in participation implies a cumulative loss of 5.53 million men from the prime-age workforce."
However, they found that the declining rate of labor force participation (LFP) by young men was not significantly influenced by going on welfare (though this did affect older men) or by declining inflation-adjusted wages (the wages have declined but there's no causal connection with LFP).
They also found that there was "little evidence that average skill levels in the high-school-dropout and high-school-graduate populations declined" between those born around 1960 and those born around 1980, even though LFP had declined during the intervening 20 years.
What they did find was that declining LFP among less-educated young men seemed to be connected to two things:
1. increased rates of women entering the labor market between 1970 and 2015 and competing against less-educated men for unskilled jobs, particularly in manufacturing, and
2. men are getting married later.
The authors of the study pointed to #2 in particular as an under-appreciated driver of reductions in young male LFP. They found that starting a family was a significant incentive for young men to obtain steady employment, so as men in this age cohort became less likely over the decades to be married, it became less important to them to move out of their parents' house. When they did get married, they delayed having kids for longer, which allowed a greater proportion of non-working men to live off their spouse's income.
To quote from the study:
Quote:
As of 2015, only white high school graduates above age 35 were married a majority of the time... While parental co-residence was a rare event in 1970, by 2015 over 25% of whites and 40% of blacks aged 25–34 lived with a parent... Previous work has associated marriage with a decline in irresponsible male behavior, such as crime and excessive drug and alcohol use... Male participation in the labor force may also be a socially responsible activity that, like the avoidance of pathological behaviors, is intertwined with stable marriage. To the extent that the gains from marriage depend on male earnings, married men face an additional incentive to find and maintain a job. Indeed, the securing of gainful employment may even be
stipulated by men’s (explicit or implicit) marital contracts with their wives.
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Link to the study if you want more info:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7745920/