“If the increasing wage gap between high and low earners directly or indirectly affects men’s aggregate labor supply, wage inequality might have carried wider implications to the economy than previously believed,” Wu wrote.
https://fortune.com/2022/12/07/men-dropping-out-work-force-status-study/
I'm going to call bullshit. I'm going to think that these guys don't give a shit about 'social standing' (if they did they would have gone to college) which is part of the reason they are dropping out.
While I think that the article misses (which is what most articles of this type miss), is that the jobs that these non-college going men are doing and dropping out from are usually incredibly physically demanding. Like as in more than likely in violation of OSHA standards levels of physically demanding. In the past, the only thing that made these jobs doable was the increased paycheck.
Now though, with office jobs, fast food, and retail paying about the same if abit less, most of these guys are going to go work there, go part time on a night shift gas station or go chop trees under the table and not pay taxes (this is the big one). There's no longer any actual reward for hard physical labor in a manufacturing context, so why bother? Why break your body when you can just do alot less? And this is besides the point that alot of these guys bodies are fucked from this kind of labor already.
That's kind of what this article is about. They said social standing is tied to how much they are making relative to everyone else. And non college educated men saw wages decreased while college educated men and all women saw it increase
So people don't want to do back breaking labor for shit pay that's worse than what everyone else makes
Except nowhere in the article do they explicitly say that. In fact they don't even imply the 'back breaking labor part'. I had to explicitly state it because it's what I've actually seen.
Instead this article is subtle dumb shit that implies that non-college men are dropping out of the work force because they can't handle women making as much as them, which is something I have rarely, if ever, encountered in that age demographic outside of incredibly conservative circles, most of whom still wouldn't quit because of that issue, they would just bitch about it.
It does not say they can't handle women making more, it says people quit when their wages fall relative to others, including college educated men
It mentions women once to say that they have seen a pay increase regardless of education status.
I did add the back breaking work part since you were talking about hard physical labor. The article does not say what jobs the non-college educated men were doing but some of those jobs with declining wages would be like that
except you're competing against college kids for those jobs and they have the advantage
Not really, college kids have all kinds of scheduling issues and are notorious for showing up to work late and/or drunk. If you have a decent resume with consistent work experience, as an older white man, you'll out-compete college kids any day.
If you have a felony, drug or attendance issues, it's a harder sell.