American men have lost their work ethic and increasingly feel entitled to a comfortable life without applying themselves, according to Wilbur Ross, who served throughout Donald Trump’s first term.
Ross, the Wall Street investor once dubbed the “king of bankruptcy”, said younger generations have been “coddled” by growing up in a wealthy society, weakening the drive to work that underpinned previous generations and threatening long-term economic growth.
“It used to be that the mantra for any young person was work hard and you can make progress and do better than your parents did,” Ross said. “It never occurred to anyone to not work, at least not anyone I knew. There’s been a whole change in that.”
He argued that a combination of state benefits and parental prosperity had created a sense of entitlement. “I think all these [benefits] programmes, and also the relative prosperity of the current generation’s parents, have created a feeling that they’re entitled to a nice lifestyle, independently of whether they perform any kind of meaningful work,” he said.
“If you’re an able-bodied person who’s not willing to even seek a job, why should you prosper?”
Overall labour force participation among Americans aged 25 to 54, the so-called prime-age workforce, fell sharply during the pandemic but has since recovered to 83.8 per cent, one of the highest levels in nearly a quarter of a century. However, Ross and other economists say that headline figure masks a profound long-term shift among men.
Prime-age male participation has been in structural decline since the 1960s, even as female participation has surged to record levels. The divergence is especially pronounced among younger workers.
Analysis by the Brookings Institution shows that labour force participation among 25-year-old men has fallen in every successive generation since 1969. For men born in the late 1990s, participation at that age stands at about 84 per cent, down from 93 per cent for those born roughly 45 years earlier.
By contrast, participation among women of the same age has climbed steadily, rising from 66.3 per cent to 76.6 per cent over the same period.
Ross said the trend among men was particularly damaging for economic prospects. “I think there are a lot of men who just don’t want to work that hard,” he said.
Workforce participation, he added, was one of the three critical drivers of economic growth. “One is growth in the population of working-age people — that’s something you have no control over in the near term. The other two are productivity and workforce participation. And of the two, for the moment, workforce participation is probably the more important.”
Economists have pointed to several factors behind the decline in male participation, including the loss of industrial jobs, the rise of service-sector roles traditionally dominated by women, higher incarceration rates leaving many men with criminal records, the expansion of disability benefits, and persistent weaknesses in education and skills training.
Together, they warn, these forces risk leaving a growing cohort of men disengaged from work — with long-term consequences for productivity, public finances and social cohesion.
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Men have lost their work ethic, says Trump’s former commerce secretary