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An optometry student administers a vision test to a patient at a mobile dental and medical clinic on October 7, 2023 in Grundy, Virginia. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
Working-class Men Are Not Okay
Working-class American men are getting lonelier and sicker and their lives are shortening. It’s not just a sad state of affairs. It’s a full-blown crisis that demands policy solutions.
An optometry student administers a vision test to a patient at a mobile dental and medical clinic on October 7, 2023 in Grundy, Virginia. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
Sometimes I think about the fifty-year-old man living in my mom’s garage.
Todd is an affable giant, his red beard and long hair giving him the air of a medieval Viking. But his life is far from a fairy tale. Since his divorce years ago, he’s floated between housing situations and minimum-wage jobs. At present, he cooks at a charming but dumpy diner that serves a local central Illinois delicacy known as the “horseshoe.” Because he only nets minimum wage, he has difficulty paying off debt and making ends meet as the cost of living increases. He doesn’t have health insurance, and his nagging physical ailments are worsening.
My brother, his former boss, took him in as an emergency measure to keep him off the streets. A year later, he’s still sleeping on a couch in the garage with little hope of a more independent arrangement.
Stories like Todd’s of life at the margins aren’t uncommon. Last month, the American Institute for Boys and Men published a study examining the state of working-class men in America, and its findings are bleak. The report offers a troubling snapshot of the issues afflicting them, including stagnant wages, dwindling job prospects, declining health, and shortened lifespans.
A wide swath of American men continue to thrive on the top perches of society. The C-suites are full of them. They’re wealthy, have access to capital and power, are relatively healthy and receive quality healthcare, are more likely than working-class men to be married with stable families, and have robust social networks. But what this study and others like it make increasingly evident is that the number of men at the bottom tier of society is growing, and life at the bottom is getting worse.
Who’s Working Class?
According to the American Institute for Boys and Men, Todd is among the 64 percent of American men considered working class. Like many in social sciences, the researchers use the four-year college degree to measure class disparities. That metric may not be perfectly accurate, as plenty of college-educated people work for their wages under bosses and managers, not always for high pay or in excellent conditions. Nevertheless, the education metric remains useful in forming a general impression, telling a straightforward if simplified story of the divide between the haves and have-nots in postindustrial America.
Using the college degree metric, the working class is less white and female than the rest of the population. Slightly more than half of the working class is white, compared to 64 percent of the college-educated and professional-managerial class. Among racial groups, Latino and black men of prime working age (twenty-five to fifty-four) are more likely to be working class, at 81 percent and 77 percent, respectively, compared to 59 percent of white men and 35 percent of Asian men.
Meanwhile, the educational attainment rates of men and women have nearly reversed over the last four decades. In the 1980s, women were likelier to be without a college degree. As of 2022, 64 percent of men have no college degree, compared with 57 percent of women.
College education may not be identical to class position, but it sure tells us a lot about it. The weekly earnings of college-educated men are now nearly double those of non-college-educated men: $1,553 to $852, barely a fraction higher than working-class wages in 1979 when adjusted for inflation. For women, the disparity is similar: $667 to $1,194. A gender pay gap still exists at all ranks. But the most striking wage gap in America is the education wage gap.
Sick, Alone, Dying
Working-class men don’t just earn less; they live less. Their average lifespan is shorter than those of both women of their own class position and men of a higher class. Women still outlive men at the top of the class hierarchy, but the disparity is far wider at the bottom. One of the most startling outcomes of the study is the finding that working-class men between the ages of thirty-five and forty-four are roughly seven times more likely to die than college-educated women of the same age.
Their shortened lifespans owe in part to what researchers Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the authors of the 2020 book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, labeled “deaths of despair,” which include drug poisoning, alcoholism, and suicide. Working-class men are also more than twice as likely to die at work as all the other groups combined, a risk exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. They are at higher risk of several of the fifteen leading causes of death, including cardiovascular disease and cancer — and they are four times less likely to have health insurance.
For working-class men, the problem isn’t just dying younger but also experiencing a lower quality of life. The primary issue is loneliness and isolation. According to the study, working-class men are marrying less, having fewer kids, and less likely to have close friends than their college-educated peers. They’re dropping out of social obligations and even work itself. Work participation keeps shrinking, with black men seeing a steady decline from 79 percent employment in 1979 to 74 percent in 2023. White working-class men have seen the most significant drop over the last forty years, with their employment rate dropping from 91 percent to 82 percent. Over half of unemployed working-class men say they aren’t working due to illness or disability, compared to 18 percent of college-educated men.
Richard V. Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, which conducted the study, concludes that these problems have reached full-blown crisis levels. He writes, “America is losing too many men. Not on the battlefield but in our hospitals and our homes.”
What can be done? The recent boomlet of working-class sector jobs under the Joe Biden administration was a positive step, but wages are now trending in the wrong direction.
Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump has sufficient policy plans to address the interlocking crises of working-class men. On the one hand, you have Trump, who likes to pander to working men but whose policies disproportionately benefit the rich. Then there’s Harris, who appears to have backed away from the ambitious programs of Bidenomics in favor of nibbling at the edges, touting instead a slew of tax credits for “entrepreneurs.”
In the meantime, for people like Todd, America’s class divide is beginning to look like an unbridgeable chasm.
