The Economics of Male Loneliness

In the decades following World War II, nearly every single man in America over the age of 25 was actively engaged in society. 98% had full-time careers, and 70% of American men were both married and homeowners by their mid-30s. The United States was experiencing unprecedented levels of wealth and prosperity, and young men were reaping the benefits of it.

But starting in the early '70s, things began to change. New zoning laws, tax incentives, and rampant inflation began to destroy the communities, job opportunities, and culture that had provided economic and social stability to a generation before. And like canaries in an economic coal mine, young men began to drop out of society at worse and worse rates in every following decade.

Fast forward to the 2020s, and there are now 7.5 million working-age men who are not participating in society. They are not entering the full-time workforce. They are not receiving a formal education. And they are not dating, having kids, or even making friends at anywhere near the same rate they used to a few decades ago. Heck, a lot of them aren't even paying their own bills.

But to anyone who follows market news, that might sound odd because, on paper, the United States has never been doing better economically. Productivity is at an all-time high. Unemployment is at a historic low. And modern technology has given us endless new ways to make money and meet new people. How could there possibly be a "quote unquote" male loneliness epidemic when all of the official data seem to suggest that there isn't?

Well, this is where things get interesting. Because in theory, it should be a problem that one in every nine working-age men are not participating in society. If the economics of this problem were not extremely profitable, everyone from stock market investors to pickup truck manufacturers are becoming incredibly rich off today's system. At the same time that this system has left millions of Americans, and young men especially, in a state of invisible crisis, which puts corporate and political leaders in a sticky situation because the data show that we are headed towards an economic and social collapse if things are not changed in the near future as this problem continues to grow and spreads beyond young men. But people are making so much money off of this problem right now that none of them dare try to hit the brakes.

In fact, our own job market data is intentionally designed to ignore people who have dropped out of the workforce. Oh, that reminds me. So, for those who are new to the channel, welcome. Before YouTube, I spent the past 8 years researching, consulting, and teaching about the job market in a bunch of different professional roles. And the dirty truth of our official unemployment rate is that it doesn't actually track all of the people who are unemployed. It tracks people who recently became unemployed and are in the process of landing a new job. So, for example, if you lose your job and you go more than 4 weeks without applying to a new one, then you don't count as unemployed. Instead, you get labeled as "marginally attached to the workforce" and are removed from the data. And if you lose your job and you give up on finding a new one, then you don't count as unemployed either. Instead, you are labeled as a "discouraged worker" and are removed from the data. And if you lose your job and find yourself doing part-time or gig work, even if you're only mowing lawns for 2 hours every week, then you don't count as unemployed either. Instead, you are labeled as "part-time for economic reasons" and once again removed from the data.

And so, this is where those 7 million men who have dropped out of society are. If we counted all of them in the official rate, then unemployment in the US would almost immediately double to just over 8%, which would send shareholders into a panic, immediately crash the stock market, and dropkick the United States into a major recession faster than you can say the words "K-shaped economy." And this is a huge part of why male loneliness is such an invisible issue because every time it gets worse, the unemployment data gets better. I kid you not, from February to March of this year, the unemployment rate in America actually went down because so many people recently got laid off in tech and gave up on finding a new job. But I digress.

This issue goes far beyond whether or not a man has a full-time job in his late 20s. Beyond being invisible in the data, male loneliness is also largely hidden from our eyes because we quite literally never see the men who are suffering from it. They haven't just dropped out of the workforce. They've also dropped out of the dating pool. They've dropped out of schools, and they've dropped out of public spaces like churches and bars. In other words, they've dropped out of places that play a huge role in how much social capital somebody has. And over the long term, that's an even bigger deal than whether or not you have a good job.

And look, I know that social capital is not a straightforward idea. Even the Wikipedia page for it says that it's too technical for most readers to understand. But this is where we get the biggest insights on how economics is directly driving the problem of male loneliness in the United States today. From 2017 to 2022, the US Congress Joint Economic Committee launched a massive project to track how social capital is being driven up or down in certain regions of the United States and what exactly was causing it. They looked at trends in everything from child-rearing to volunteerism to workforce participation to even how many young women were fleeing a county due to economic conditions. And the results were striking.

Literally everything about a community got worse in places where young men were less educated, made less money, and were less involved in the dating market. Demographics did not matter. Political affiliation did not matter. Religion did not matter. In fact, Utah and Colorado, two neighboring states, both managed to rank extremely high in terms of social capital, despite those two states being complete opposites in every cultural sense. Utah is one of the most religious states in America. Colorado is one of the least. Utah is extremely white. Colorado is diverse. Utah is pretty conservative. Colorado is pretty liberal, generally speaking. But what ties these two states together is that their economies are almost exactly the same. Both Utah and Colorado have diversified job markets that are oriented towards highly educated workers, which are centered around urban corridors as opposed to suburban offices and are supported by strong lifestyle amenities. And all of that makes young men in those states more likely to have a college degree, more likely to make a high salary in an urban center, which they can commute in and out of by train, and more likely to be both physically and socially active in their personal lives and therefore less likely to be isolated.

And when you look at the parts of the country where male loneliness is the worst, we start to see some clear economic patterns. First and foremost, lonely men tend to live in places where job opportunities are narrow. For example, in communities that are only supported by agriculture, transportation, and extraction. Even if men in those communities have jobs, and even high-paying jobs that don't require a college degree at that, they are still going to be isolated from women because over 90% of workers in those communities are men. And because the women who grow up in those communities tend to leave the second they graduate from high school, which is an economic force that drives male loneliness.

We also find that male loneliness is a big problem in sprawling suburbs where men don't have easy access to public transportation or "third places." Back before the 1970s, American communities were designed in such a way that made it incredibly easy to get jobs and meet new people. Around every train depot, railway companies and state governments would intentionally fund the creation of things like cathedrals, opera houses, dance halls, and multi-story mixed-use commercial buildings that young men could work in during the day and then sleep in at night, allowing them to go to nearby taverns and dance halls during their time off to woo young women whom they would then get married to and then eventually move into a single-family household built on a residential grid that extended 5 miles down the road, but was still connected to their workplace via electric street cars. That was normal life in America from the 1890s through the 1960s.

But virtually all of that went away when "reconomic" and neoliberal tax codes were changed to no longer uplift the general population, but to instead support homeowners, business owners, and really anyone else who already owned assets, making it more expensive with each passing decade for new young men to purchase assets of their own. Because wages stopped being aligned with worker productivity. Because companies received massive tax breaks if they manufactured products overseas and then reim-ported them. And because Americans' new obsession with suburbanism and convenience allowed politicians to bulldoze historic buildings to replace electric street cars with personal vehicles and pass new laws that allowed CEOs to pocket even bigger shares of their company's productivity gains, which stagnated wages, eliminated pensions, and destroyed the workers' unions that used to play a big role in regulating prices. And ironically enough, for this video, used to be a place where a lot of young men would make friends and hang out with people.

And this is why male loneliness is so incredibly profitable. Because the less empowered young men are to influence the policies that support young people, the more money that those who are already wealthy make. But here's the thing, none of those problems are really all that new. By the 1990s, the job market was already screwed. Gen Xers and millennials alike also never had access to things like pension plans, labor unions, or wages that outpaced inflation.

But something did happen during the 21st century that made the problems affecting male loneliness a million times worse. And that is the very device that you are using to watch this video. And believe it or not, I am not talking about things like dopamine addiction or even, let's just say, adult content. In fact, the evidence that those things play any meaningful role in male loneliness is a lot weaker than you might expect. No, what technology did to young men over the past 20 years was even larger and more nefarious than that. And that was to spread a false promise to young men that technical skills and internet access alone could make them rich without needing any real education, status, or patience. That the tech sector was finally going to turn the American economy into a fair meritocracy where anyone could win. And that all young men had to do was #learntocode. And that someday soon they too would be drowning in money and women. No college, networking, or compound interest required.

And while a small handful of men did become rich this way, especially men who already had rich parents, millions of other young men were convinced to buy into ideas that turned out to either be financial scams or dead-end careers. First, it was the overvaluation of dot-com companies, which ended in one of America's worst stock market crashes. Next, it was affiliate marketing and SEO gurus who went under once market saturation killed their margins. Then it was day trading and forex forums that convinced young men to quit their jobs and start trading stocks, only for most of them to go broke. And then after the housing crisis, it became the digital nomad who convinced young men to drop out of school, sell all of their belongings, and try to get rich by dropshipping from a beach resort in Costa Rica. Almost all of whom also went broke. And then it became cryptocurrency speculation and NFTs, which bombed so horribly that famous people try to pretend that it never even happened. And nowadays, young men are being victimized by things like sports betting, prediction markets, and AI startups that use the hype of a new technology to convince companies to sell their products when they haven't even been able to deliver a real return on investment yet.

And again, this is why male loneliness is so incredibly profitable because the only way you can get rich off these cycles is by convincing millions of economically desperate people to buy into it. And it just so happens that the United States has a few million economically desperate young men lying around because changes over the past 50 years have disincentivized them from engaging in careers, social life, or college. And unfortunately, business leaders kind of need young men to stay out of those arenas so that they can keep supporting new hype cycles and don't create new competition in the market. Which is a big part of why CEOs get so anti-college online, for example, despite the fact that they themselves went and secretly send their own kids to the top Ivy League schools.

So, let's talk about college because this is one of the biggest forces driving male loneliness amongst young Gen Z men today. Starting in the 1970s, women began rapidly enrolling at universities in the United States. Part of this was the fact that in 1972, colleges were no longer allowed to limit the amount of women enrolled in their schools, which made admissions more fair and merit-based and therefore gave education access to women who always wanted to go but weren't allowed. But another big part of this was the fact that manufacturing and union jobs were disappearing, and women realized that they simply could not depend on young men anymore in order to secure their financial futures. So off to college and the workforce they went. By 1980, the amount of women in schools was equal to that of men. And in the 46 years since, women have continued to outnumber men at colleges. As of 2024, there are now six women for every four men in higher education, a gap that is only expected to grow dramatically over the next few years.

So what does this have to do with male loneliness? Well, everything. Young adult men not enrolling in schools is creating a triple whammy of isolation: one part social, two parts economic. For starters, 28% of couples actually get married in college, which isn't a majority by any means, but that's still one in every three to four women who meet their husbands at university. And so, if a young man doesn't go to college, then he's simply missing out on a big chunk of the dating market. Not to mention a chunk of the dating market that doesn't really care about your money or status yet because you're both in an in-between period. When my wife and I started dating, I was making $8 an hour and was living in a dorm room with seven other dudes. But that didn't matter because we were both broke 21-year-old college students.

And this is where that second part of the triple whammy kicks in. Once people turn 34 years old, the socioeconomic gap between those with and without a college degree starts to grow almost exponentially. And because women have been earning more college degrees over the past several decades, they're now starting to earn more money than men their own age in cities all around the country. And so, if a young man wants to be successful in dating before his mid-30s, then he kind of has to either move to a big city or enroll in a traditional university as a young adult because that's where the girls are. But this is not a dating advice video. This is an economics video.

And the third part of that triple whammy is where things get the most unsettling. From a labor cost perspective, young men who don't have any formal education, industry connections, or personal resources backing them up are a surprisingly valuable resource to businesses in the United States today. Because business leaders know that one of the most effective ways for them to maximize profits and therefore keep shareholders happy is by reducing salaries. Some companies do this by replacing their technical workers with new technologies and then desperately praying that that delivers a positive return on investment. Other CEOs do this by spouting some BS about there being a "skills gap" in the US, which there isn't, and then replacing a bunch of their corporate staff with H-1B workers. And then other CEOs, especially in tech, go online and try to claim that college is a scam so that they can then remove the degree requirements from their job listings to justify hiring cheaper, undereducated workers as opposed to highly educated software engineers who historically demanded six-figure salaries. And tech companies aren't even trying to hide that they do this anymore.

Fortunately though, the tech sector is only like 6% of the total US labor force. So, there are still plenty of good careers out there where ambitious and educated young men can make a lot of money without having to constantly worry about layoffs. But again, this is not a career advice video. This is a video about why male loneliness is so ridiculously profitable. Because lonely men aren't just good for crypto, they're also good for car manufacturers, social media platforms, supplement companies, and even "tradife" influencers.

For starters, the masculine self-help space online is big business. And it's a business that I am arguably a part of as somebody who analyzes the job market and then talks about it online. And while there are certainly YouTubers, coaches, and products out there that genuinely want to help young men become the best versions of themselves, there are also a lot of online creators who want to trap young men in dysfunctional thinking so that they'll never truly get better and will always be a paying customer. For example, a lot of finance influencers actively lie about how the majority of people become millionaires in the United States. According to some of the best surveys that we have, American millionaires are nearly three times more educated than the general population, with half of them having at least a master's degree or PhD. Also, 70% of American millionaires are not entrepreneurs and are instead employees who work in stable careers like law, medicine, and even teaching. And 90% of millionaires are married with very few of them ever getting a divorce. And so whenever a finance influencer goes online and tells somebody that they need to drop out of school, start a business, and reject dating women as necessary steps to becoming rich, they are actively lying about the landscape of wealth in the United States today, which then sets young men up for failure and ensures that they will always be a customer who needs financial self-help advice.

And the same goes for "looks maxers," "red pillers," and "alpha male" creators. They start out by giving you some small nugget of truth, which is that yes, women tend to be attracted to things like chiseled jaw lines and six-pack abs. But then they boldface a lie about literally everything else, which ends up making the young men who listen to them insufferable to be around, which then sabotages their relationships with women, makes them even more lonely and frustrated, and again makes them a return customer for life because the advice sounds good, but just doesn't work.

And this is a big part of why some people online argue that male loneliness doesn't exist. Or if it does, that it's an entirely self-inflicted problem for men who are chronically online. And while there is statistically some small truth to that, this issue goes well beyond social media. A lot of consumer products make their money off of men who want to feel better about themselves by trying to artificially inflate their status. Rolex watches, Cybertrucks, tactical outdoor gear, lifted pickup trucks, etc. There are cheaper, better-looking, and better-performing versions of all of these products. Like, I live out in the rural Rocky Mountains, and literally all of my outdoor gear are cheap and reliable construction tools that I got from hardware stores. My car is a 2008 midsize SUV, and I would not be caught dead eating an MRE when I have access to things like a fishing pole and a cast iron pan. But a lot of the economy where I live is supported by admittedly super jacked, insecure men who come out here with $1,000 worth of gear to take selfies of themselves in front of a mountain to post online and feel like a real man. And honestly, that's fine. But it is depressing to see just how many men spend a small fortune to come and do outdoorsy stuff here in Utah and Colorado. Not because that cost was necessary, but because they fell victim to status marketing. It's the same reason why 75% of people who own a pickup truck never do anything that requires the capabilities of a pickup truck.

And look, it's not like any of these consumer products are actively causing male loneliness or even making it that much worse. Companies have simply identified that a subset of the population has an unmet psychological need and that unhappy men tend to fill the void with things like watches, cars, and puffy jackets from Patagonia. At the end of the day, young men are just one of the most susceptible populations to economic backsliding. And so as certain regions of the country continue to decay, as tax structures cause wealth inequality to grow, and as certain industries like tech start to become unstable, young men are the first to feel the pain of those changes. And unfortunately, politicians, economists, and business leaders know that this is going on, but refuse to do anything about it.

Remember that congressional analysis on social capital that I mentioned earlier? As it turns out, that project was spearheaded by Senator Mike Lee from Utah, who was one of the first to sound the alarm on how young men needed more access to things like education, better wages, and more affordable housing in order to restore the American dream to this country. But as soon as he got bought out by billionaires and corporate interests, he began to change his tune and instead started promoting all of the policies that caused male loneliness to become such an epidemic in the first place. Because after all, male loneliness is just too profitable of a problem for the people in charge to actually bother solving.