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 eight months they are surveyed.

I narrowed the twenty-four months of data down to men between the ages of twenty and twenty-five who were surveyed eight times across this period. From there, the first thing I did was look to see what percent were employed, unemployed, or not in the labor force during each sample month.

Calculated this way, I find that on a typical month, 68 percent of these men are employed, 5 percent are unemployed and searching for work, while 26 percent are not in the labor force.

One in four young men not being in the labor force can seem alarming, but we can also check to see how many of those individuals were in school, which gives us this next graph.After accounting for college students, the percentage of young men who are not in the labor force in a given month drops from 26 percent to 10 percent.

From here, we can check to see how many individuals who were not in the labor force (and not in school) in the first month they were sampled became employed in one of the subsequent seven months.

By month five in the sample, which represents one year after an individual was first sampled, nearly 30 percent had become employed. By month eight, it had ticked up to 33 percent. So, of the approximately 10 percent of young men who are not in the labor force and not in school at any given time, one-third will become employed within twelve to sixteen months.

This leaves us with about 6 to 7 percent of young men who are not in the labor force in a long-term way. Some of those individuals are simply disabled or face other kinds of legitimate employment challenges. I’m sure at least some others are jobless gamers who live at home, the Hikikomori of America.

But the idea that this is some kind of societal epidemic requiring the cutting of Medicaid from a vast swath of the population is pretty ridiculous, even if cutting Medicaid would somehow flush these people into the labor force, which it would not do.