Why can’t some men see a way forward?

Millions of American men, especially those without a four-year degree, have stopped looking for work altogether. That’s not because jobs vanished, but because they stopped meaning what they used to.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, prime-age male labor force participation stood at 96.5 percent in 1950, fell to 93.4 percent by 1990, and reached 89.1 percent in 2019. Participation recovered following the pandemic, although it remains well below its historical highs. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute shows that more than six million prime-age American men, ages 25 to 54, are neither working nor looking for work.

Australian psychiatrist Tanveer Ahmed has a name for what he sees in his consulting room among these men. Borrowing a term coined by Jerome Frank, a Johns Hopkins psychiatrist, he calls it “demoralization.” Demoralized men are not depressed in the clinical sense. They can still enjoy things, still function when motivated, still complete tasks that interest them. What they lack is a felt sense that effort connects to a future worth reaching.

Ahmed’s clinical observation lines up with Eberstadt’s numbers with unsettling precision. Eberstadt found that prime-age men outside the labor force spent close to eight hours a day on leisure in 2014, five of those hours in front of a screen. That is not idleness in the old sense of empty time. It is a full schedule, just not one built around work.

The Gallup scientist Shane Lopez offered another vocabulary for what Ahmed is describing. In “Making Hope Happen,” Lopez argued that hope is not a mood but a skill, built from three specific components: a goal; agency, or the belief that one can reach that goal; and pathways thinking, or the ability to chart a course toward it, especially when the obvious one is blocked.

In this framework, a demoralized man hasn’t necessarily lost his goals. What he has lost is agency (the sense that effort connects to outcome) and pathways thinking (the capacity to find another way in when the first one closes). That’s a more precise claim than saying these men have given up, and it points toward a more precise kind of help for them.

A recent AIBM-supported study on men without college degrees, “Nobody to Call,” illuminates this trend. Interviewing thirty men without degrees, the authors find a slow drift rather than a single break: men losing touch with mentors, peers, and community institutions in the years after high school. They often blame themselves for a disconnection that had more to do with vanished structure than personal failure.

Part of what has changed, Ahmed argues, is that work now competes with other sources of dignity that didn’t exist in the same form. For example, a disability diagnosis or a mental health label can carry real material support and a form of social standing that a low-wage job cannot always match.

He’s careful to say this isn’t primarily a story of fraud or laziness. It’s a story of status, which, unlike material wealth, isn’t something everyone can have more of at once. When the alternative to working stops carrying the shame it once did, and when it comes with a check attached, the calculation genuinely shifts for someone comparing a demanding job to an available diagnosis.

The other change is what fills the hours that nonparticipation used to cost. Streaming, gaming, food delivery, and online relationships have narrowed the gap between working and not working in ways that would have been unrecognizable a generation ago. None of this fully replaces what work provides. But it lowers the immediate penalty enough that the discomfort that used to push people back toward a job, even a bad one, has weakened.

This dynamic shows up with striking clarity in one of Eberstadt’s own findings. In 2015, prime-age men who had dropped out of high school showed a twenty-five-percentage-point gap in labor force participation depending on where they were born. Foreign-born high school dropouts worked at rates far above their native-born counterparts, doing the same low-wage, entry-level jobs in the same labor markets.

Limited access to benefits may make paid work more necessary for migrants. Differences in criminal records, which can impede hiring, and marriage, which is associated with higher participation, may also help explain the gap.

But Ahmed’s Australian clinical observations suggest a possible additional role for expectations about work. For a newly arrived migrant, a low-wage job is a visible first rung on a career ladder. It’s worth the loss of status because the direction is up compared to wherever the person started.

A native-born man often measures himself against a different reference point. For example, this might include a father’s job, an earlier and more prosperous version of the same local economy, or a status hierarchy that now includes options that didn’t exist. Against that reference point, the identical job can read as evidence he is stuck rather than starting. Same wage, same task: very different meaning.

Lopez’s third component, pathways thinking—the ability to generate an alternative route when the obvious one is blocked—is where the migrant and the native-born dropout most often part ways. A rung on a career ladder only functions as a rung if the person standing on it can see other rungs above it. A recent immigrant typically has that reference point built into the act of migration itself. Choosing to migrate is already an act of pathways thinking, a demonstration that an alternative route exists and can be found.

Ahmed himself has heard the counterargument, which he associates with Vice President JD Vance among others, that reducing immigration would force wages up enough to draw native-born workers back into these jobs. He’s skeptical it’s only about wages. He argues that status shapes the decision to work as much as pay does. He further notes that even the tight labor markets of recent years have not restored participation to its historical highs.

Both sides likely capture part of the truth. Higher wages could shift the calculation for some workers at the margin. But the twenty-five-point gap discussed above predates recent immigration policy changes by a decade, which suggests wages are not the whole story.

This matters for policy because it undercuts the assumption that a tight labor market will solve the problem on its own. Eberstadt has shown that the long-run decline in prime-age male participation has continued through strong and weak labor markets alike. He’s also discussed tariff and industrial policy meant to lure men back into manufacturing. He believes that such approaches are likely to fail, because the men who have left work aren’t waiting for a better factory job to reappear. They have, in a real sense, stopped waiting.

Eberstadt’s own research points toward one lever that does appear to matter for closing this gap. Native-born men with more education show higher labor force participation than those without it, even within the same demographic groups. Education, in his account, is not simply a credential. It is one of the few reliable predictors of whether a man stays attached to the labor market.

None of this argues against building better entry-level pathways. It argues that pathway design must be paired with something it usually isn’t: a serious effort to address the status and belonging half of the equation.

Here are six ideas on what education and training policymakers, employers, and communities can do to advance this effort.

• Integrate labor force data with disability and mental health benefit data. States and federal agencies currently track workforce participation, disability enrollment, and mental health diagnosis rates largely in separate systems. Combining them would let policymakers see where benefit design and workforce disengagement are moving together, rather than debating the trend in the abstract.
• Redesign benefit cliffs so that early connection to work isn’t penalized. Programs often force a person to choose between disability support and a part-time job, with no bridge between the two. That pushes people toward the more stable option even when they’re capable of more. Some states have piloted graduated structures for cash assistance, food assistance, and childcare subsidies, phasing support down gradually rather than cutting it off at a fixed income line. On the disability side, though, federal authority to test similar alternatives has expired and hasn’t been renewed. That’s a gap worth closing.
• Make the next rung up on the career ladder visible. Employers and workforce programs should build entry-level roles with explicit, near-term promotion paths. This includes efforts like stackable credentials tied to a specific next job rather than a vague promise of advancement. A worker who can see the second and third rungs is far more likely to value the first.
• Fund relationship-heavy transitions to work, not just skills programs. More work-based learning should be built around mentorship rather than transactions. Apprenticeships and work-based learning succeed most reliably when they pair a young person with an adult mentor who expects something of them, not simply when they teach a technical skill.
• Expand employer-sponsored earn-and-learn pathways aimed at native-born men without degrees. Eberstadt’s education finding suggests this population benefits disproportionately from structured career routes. These combine paid work with credentialing, rather than asking them to leave the workforce to retrain.
• Invest in the civic infrastructure that gives men status outside of work and a diagnosis. Trade associations, sports leagues, faith communities, trade unions, and volunteer fire departments have historically done quiet work conferring belonging and responsibility on men who might otherwise drift. Many of these institutions have weakened in the same decades that male labor force participation declined. This grows social wealth.

A growing number of men have found reasons—some economic, most not—to opt out of a labor market that no longer reliably confers the dignity it once did. Addressing that will take more than better jobs. It will take a renewed seriousness, among policymakers and communities alike, about what makes a job worth taking in the first place, and about the institutions, relationships, and expectations that used to make that answer obvious.

The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Institute for Boys and Men.

Bruno Manno

Bruno V. Manno is a senior advisor at the Progressive Policy Institute and a former U.S. assistant secretary of education for policy. He can be reached on LinkedIn.