Why One Third of Working-Aged American Men Don’t Work

Sharing is caring!

Men’s ministry leaders often validate the need for men’s ministry by listing various maladaptive male social indicators that plague American society, such as men making up the vast majority of prisoners, gang members, rapists, mass murderers, drug addicts, homeless people, child abusers, and partner abusers. Usually we point out that only forty percent of college students are men, over twenty percent of all children in America grow up in a home with no father, and people who are addicted to online pornography and gaming are overwhelmingly male.

But there is one statistic about men that I recently came across that I had never heard before, and it really caught my attention: fully one third of all working aged American men who can work don’t work. Wow! One out of every three men eschew work .

It hasn’t always been this way, of course. Back in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, over 85 percent of capable American men worked in gainful employment. But since then there has been a long and steady decline until today, only sixty-seven percent of working age men actually work.

In his article in Yahoo Finance on this topic, Andy Serwer asks how is it possible for almost one third of all adult men in America to survive without working. He comes up with the following answers:

• Unemployment Insurance
• Early retirement, disability, pensions, and lawsuits
• Savings, trading stocks, and bitcoin
• Working for cash, aka, the underground economy
• Living off family members
• Illegal work
• Living off the land

To this list I add the following additional two ways adult men can live without working:

• Begging – on any given night in America an average of 500,000 people are living on the street. 70% of these are men, or 350,000.
• Incarceration – over 2 million men are in jails and prisons in the U.S., more than any other country in the world.

But the real question is not how one third of all men survive without working, but why this trend of men not working is happening in the first place.

The simple answer I give to that question, which in fact is the answer men’s ministry leaders give to the rise in all types of maladaptive male behavior, is that it is caused by the marginalization of Christianity in American culture.

Note, for example, in the graph above that the trend in men disengaging with productive work began in the mid twentieth century and continues to this day. Now compare that graph with the graph from the Pew Research Center below showing weekly church attendance by various age groups from 1940 to 2015. It shows that church attendance, except for those sixty and over, also began declining in the middle of the twentieth century and continues to this day.

Of course, correlation is not causation. But no social scientist that I know of has come up with any other sufficient answer as to why the trends of men opting out of productive work, along with other maladaptive male behaviors, started in the middle of the twentieth century and are increasingly common, let alone how those trends can be reversed.

Perhaps we should do a survey to find the participation rate of working age Christian men in the labor force. Given that Christians believe that all work is ultimately an opportunity to serve God, and that someday we will give an account to God for how we do our work, my guess is that the percentage of Christian men who work will be significantly higher than non-Christian men.

This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.

Since 2003 New Commandment Men’s Ministries has helped hundreds of churches throughout North America and around the world recruit teams of men who permanently adopt widows, single moms and fatherless children in their congregations for the purpose of donating two hours of service to them one Saturday morning each month. We accomplish this with a free training site called New Commandment Men’s Ministry Learn how to mobilize your men’s ministry to meet every pressing need in your church at newcommandment.org.

_______________________________________________________________

Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom

and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.

_______________________________________________________________