Men are leaving work more than work is leaving men.
Men are leaving work more than work is leaving men.
I n the latest jobs report, which documents the month of July, the headline rate of prime-age (25-54) male-labor-force participation increased. But don’t be misled: America’s men, like characters in the 1999 film Fight Club, continue to grow disillusioned with work.
In their retreating desire to work, men distinguished themselves from women. In July, relative to the month before, the number of men not in the labor force because they don’t want a job increased by 122,000. That contrasts the number of women who are out of the labor force because they don’t want a job, which fell by 12,000. America’s swelling ranks of those who don’t have jobs and don’t want them is not a tale of everyone. It’s a tale of men.
Among those who’d been out of the labor force but wanted jobs, sometimes called “discouraged workers,” men fared better than women. In July, relative to the month before, the number of men who were out of the labor force but wanted a job fell by 342,000. For women, that number fell by 304,000. Men who actually wanted jobs found them faster than women.
This month’s jobs report, then, has something to suggest about the well-documented downtrend in the labor-market outcomes of the American male. It suggests that these trends arise because men are choosing to leave work behind, not because work is leaving men behind. The reason why a growing number of men are making that choice then becomes the question. And if you’re a supporter of free-market principles and capitalism, there is no self-evident answer.
If the pages of Playboy magazine are any indication, men have been fantasizing about liberation from the “bondage of breadwinning” since at least the 1960s. In the 1990s, that fantasy took the form of blockbuster films like Fight Club. Many of Fight Club’s members, all men, ultimately quit their jobs to live off of the proceeds that its leader, Tyler Durden, secures by blackmailing a corporate executive. This fantasy is not new. What’s new is the number of men who are actually living it out. If Tyler Durden were real, his latest recruits would be among the 122,000 men entering the category of out-of-the-labor force — and don’t want a job.
Did these 122,000 men merely exercise individual choice in a free market, or did they do something that capitalism’s supporters should be worried about? The last scene in Fight Club offers food for thought. It shows an attempted detonation of capitalism: A bomb explodes that wipes out all debt records. That bomb is fiction. But America’s men, this latest jobs report confirms, are leaving the labor force like they’re members of the Fight Club. If that is a bomb, it is real. Can capitalism, then, survive Tyler Durden’s labor market? Time will tell.