Adam Gurri has written a terrific, provocative, and convincing post. His basic point is that when we compare a young man of the present to a young man twenty years in the past, it is easy to see why the latter might be less willing to make a strenuous effort to increase his earning potential in the future, or indeed to participate in the labor force at all. Why? Well, a young man in the present has many other fairly attractive things to do with his time at relatively low cost: video games, cable television, web videos, etc. And his parents are in a better position to subsidize him now than they might have been in past eras. In the past, however, a similarly situated young man would be far more likely to be bored if he didn’t actually engage with other people in the wider world. Parents of that generation would be less likely to tolerate his idleness, or to be in an economic position to indulge it. Gurri suggests that these dynamics contribute to the sharp deterioration in male labor force participation.

One obvious puzzle is this: why are women faring better than men in this new landscape? It could be that women are, for whatever reason, more resistant to the charms of electronic entertainment, and that they are less likely to want to rely heavily on their parents for economic support. Or to put this differently, women may find relying on their parents for economic support to be more emotionally costly. These are casual generalizations, and I imagine that there are many equally or more plausible interpretations.