Trends: Reduced Earnings for Men in America
For the past century, a good job was a ticket to the middle class. Hitched to the locomotive of rapid economic growth, the wages of the typical worker seemed to go in only one direction: up. From 1950 to 1970, the average earnings of male workers increased by about 25 percent each decade. And these gains were not concentrated among some lucky few. Rather, earnings rose for most workers, and almost every prime-aged male (ages 25-64) worked.
Over the past 40 years, a period in which U.S. GDP per capita more than doubled after adjusting for inflation, the annual earnings of the median prime-aged male has actually fallen by 28 percent. Indeed, males at the middle of the wage distribution now earn about the same as their counterparts in the 1950s! This decline reflects both stagnant wages for men on the job, and the fact that, compared with 1969, three times as many men of working age don’t work at all.
Starting in the early 1970s, however, the median wage diverged from the average, and the median (adjusted for inflation) has been stagnant ever since. Even when men who work less than full time are excluded, the median wage has been going nowhere.
For some groups, the story is much worse. The earnings of the median male high-school dropout who works full time have declined by 38 percent, while the earnings of the median male with only a high-school degree have fallen by 26 percent.
Actually, even these numbers hide the depth of the decline, since they are based only on men who are working. But between 1960 and 2009, the share of men without any formal labor-market earnings rose from 6 percent to 18 percent. What’s more, the percentage of men working full time has decreased from 83 percent to 66 percent over the same period. According to the Census’ Current Population Survey, the largest contributors to rising nonemployment can be categorized, in order of importance, as “ill or disabled,” “unable to find work,” “retired,” “homemaker,” “in school” and “institutionalized” (mostly in prisons).
Surely, the most astonishing statistic to be gleaned from the trend data is the deterioration in the market outcomes for men with less than a high school education. The median earnings of all men in this category have declined by 66 percent [not a misprint]. At the same time, this group has experienced a 23 percentage point decline in the probability of having any labor-market earnings. Roughly 10 percentage points of the 23 percentage points is attributable to the fact that more men are reporting disabilities, even though work in physically demanding jobs has been declining for many decades. Men with just a high school diploma did only marginally better. Their wages declined by 47 percent and their participation in the labor force fell by 18 percentage points.
Your “propaganda of the left” jab is not worthy of a good FReeper. There is no reason to hurl insults just because I have experience different from yours, and because I speak from personal experience instead of theory and internet links like you do.
I tell the truth as I see it. I would hope you do, too. The main difference between us is that I am polite about it.
You sound sadly bitter.