The message has apparently gone out among conservatives to start focusing on out-of-work young men in order to make cuts to Medicaid (Allysia Finley, Mike Johnson), with the idea being that if we make it so that these men cannot see the doctor when they get sick, this will cause them to become employed.
On its face, this seems implausible. After all, man cannot live on doctor visits alone. But also, in most advanced nations, everyone can see the doctor when they get sick, and yet their employment rates do not seem to suffer as a result. Of course, to even make these points is to indulge something that is not sincere in the least. The unbroken conservative desire to cut the welfare state is not really motivated by concern for welfare recipients but rather by concern for others who they think are more deserving of the share of the national income and consumption that welfare beneficiaries currently receive. Makers and takers. Producers and parasites. And so on.
But the discourse did make me curious about what the current employment situation of young men actually is. I was especially interested to know how much the monthly data about the number of young men who are not in the labor force obscures month-to-month movements of individuals between different labor force statuses. Just because each month might show that 30 percent of young men are not in the labor force, that does not mean it is the same men each month. And if it is not, then that suggests that these individuals are not lazily opting out of work.
To probe this question, I grabbed twenty-four months of data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) covering January 2023 to December 2024.
The way the CPS works is that an individual is surveyed for four consecutive months, not surveyed for the next eight months, and then surveyed again for four consecutive months. This 4-8-4 pattern means that individuals are surveyed eight times total and it is possible to track them across the…
Auteur: Matt Bruenig
