Millions of prime-age Americans no longer working or seeking jobs

Millions of Americans are neither working nor looking for work, with economists warning that a growing number of prime-age men and women are dropping out of the workforce despite being healthy and of working age.

The broad category of people “not in the labor force” (NILF) includes all Americans aged 16 and over who are not currently employed, including retirees and students. While retirees make up the largest share of the group, economists are increasingly focused on the number of otherwise working-age Americans who have stopped seeking employment.

Leading labor economist Nicholas Eberstadt told the New York Post that the data reveals a particularly troubling trend among men.

“We’ve got a big problem…with the flight from work of prime-age men. And what’s been carrying the overall prime-age labor force participation has been the strong involvement of women, not men,” said Eberstadt, who holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.

Around 5.3 million people, or about 5% of the NILF population, are classified as discouraged workers or have stopped looking for employment. Meanwhile, up to 22% of Americans outside the labor force — more than 23.3 million people — are receiving long-term illness, disability or other benefits.

That figure is higher than the number of Americans over 16 enrolled in full-time education, estimated at between 16% and 18% of the population.

Retirees account for up to half of the NILF population, reflecting the large number of Baby Boomers who have reached retirement age. Around 45% are people who retired at the traditional age of 65 or later, while an estimated 3% to 5% retired early.

Despite the record number of people outside the workforce, the share of Americans participating in the labor market fell to 59% in June, its lowest level since September 2021, when the US economy was emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Eberstadt estimates that around 7 million men aged 25 to 54 are outside the labor force. The trend is also increasingly affecting women.

“There are about 3.5 million women who are kind of like the doppelgangers to this,” he said.

“There’s a growing group of dropout women who are neither working nor looking for work, have no children under the same roof with them, and no husband present.”

Eberstadt said population aging alone did not explain the trend, noting that workforce participation has been increasing in some other aging societies, including Europe and Japan.

“These are the healthiest, best educated Americans that have ever lived on the planet,” Eberstadt said.

He attributed part of the problem to a complex network of disability programs, which he said created gaps in oversight and made it difficult to determine how many people receive benefits from multiple programs.

Eberstadt also rejected calls for universal basic income as artificial intelligence threatens to disrupt white-collar employment.

“But I would not like to see a guaranteed income, a UBI. Because I look at how men who are neither working nor looking for work say that they are spending their days now. And it is very depressing to see what they say they are doing. And I wouldn’t like us to be buying more of that,” he said.

“They are not engaged in civil society, not helping out around the house, not getting out of the house. Spending 2,000 hours a year in front of a screen. That’s a great warm-up act for becoming a statistic in deaths of despair,” he said.

By Sabina Mammadli