After much talk of an economic slowdown, February brought reassuring headlines. The official unemployment rate had fallen as another 130,000 jobs were added to the US economy, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is good news, but it is not the whole story. The official unemployment rate counts only people actively looking for work – it does not capture those who would like a job but have stopped searching. The official unemployment rate is so narrow that it hides long-term changes in the economy. In fact, things are far worse than the official figures suggest.

This matters for more than just economists. We tend to treat employment statistics as dry indicators that exist in spreadsheets and quarterly results. In practice, labor markets shape our culture: our politics, dating, faith, status and beliefs. If you want to explain the sense of anxiety and drift that exists in American culture, employment is an important place to start.

Take the labor force participation rate, which tracks the proportion of the population that is in work. That figure reveals that effective employment has been decreasing since at least 2000. More than one third of Americans are out of work, the highest rate since the late 1970s. This is partially because boomers are retiring, and there’s a lot of them, but also because working-age men are dropping out of the workforce. If you look at participation rates alone, there has been no recovery from the 2008 crash and only a modest return since the vast Covid layoffs, with a consistent decline since then.

This fall in the proportion of workers has happened at the same time as a steady rise in education. The majority of the working-age population, 55 percent, has some form of degree. They are better educated yet more people are out of work. This has weakened wages and hiring premiums. Traditionally, college graduates had an advantage in employment. This trend has flipped, with recent college graduates having a higher unemployment rate than average workers.

If you want to explain the anxiety that exists in American culture, employment is a good place to start

Associate and bachelor’s holders are especially vulnerable, as they often exist in a type of credential limbo: not only is it difficult to get a stable, salaried job, but low-wage, high-turnover industries are reluctant to hire them. Surprisingly, many of the majors with the highest unemployment rates are in supposedly safe STEM fields – physics (7.8 percent), computer engineering (7.5 percent), computer science (6.1 percent) and chemistry (6.1 percent). Another important long-term trend is the widening educational gap between men and women, which is seen across every racial group in America. There is now a 10 percent gap between men and women aged 25 to 34 with bachelor’s degrees. This gap is widening. The difference in graduate enrollment is higher still, with men at 39 percent and women at 61 percent. Credential inflation puts these women with postgraduate degrees at a significant advantage over men with bachelor’s.

This trend can probably explain the growing liberal vs conservative political divide between men and women. The Democrats have become the party of well-educated women and the Republicans that of high school-educated men. There is now a massive gender gap in political identification among Gen Z, with women at +19 percent Democrat and men at +18 percent Republican. Facile analyses blame broadcasters and manosphere influencers, but this ignores the basic realities of the economy.

Hillary vs Trump was an almost archetypal battle on this terrain – the extremely well-credentialed professional woman against the vulgar, domineering new-money man. This dynamic, where professional women identify with the Democrats and working-class men identify with right-wing populism, is a structural effect of these gaps in achievement, not any kind of ideological failing on the part of either gender.

What are the real-world effects of all this data? Endless job applications that go nowhere. Absurd requirements for entry-level positions. Reduction of wage premium for a degree, especially associate and bachelor’s. Taking part-time work that pays just below Affordable Care Act thresholds. Having a primary job in addition to a secondary and side hustles. More people living with their parents until later ages. Severely delayed milestone achievements such as renting your first apartment, buying your first house, getting married, having kids. If you want to see where America is headed, look at Japan or South Korea.

Traditionally, large numbers of idle and discontented young men have been a major problem for social stability. This is the demographic most likely to cause serious problems, including gang and even revolutionary violence. Unemployed and underemployed graduates have a panoply of online subcultures to commiserate with them. There are virtual communities for every disposition: from anti-work and anti-capitalism to financial speculation and crypto-gambling. You can create a side hustle or narrate crafts projects on TikTok, obsessively follow current events and breaking news on X or go full NEET/doomer/MGTOW on 4Chan. For the mass of the young, male and workless, there’s always somewhere to scroll and troll.

When the young have no hope of owning a home or forming a family, what follows is escapism, nostalgia and political radicalization. This manifests itself in the many disparate phenomena we see today. Everything from the return to traditional Catholicism to identification with niche sexual orientations can be explained by boredom and joblessness. Heavily online groups give idle hands something to do and people to do it with. At their worst, these micro-communities develop borderline abusive dynamics which keep people isolated and trapped.

None of the economic trends described here show any sign of abating. If anything, despite the jobs numbers, structural worklessness seems to be picking up. The ubiquity of smartphones and the explosion of dopamine distractions blunts some of the effects. But these same distractions are creating a class of underemployed, over-credentialed men with time, grievance and little stake in the system.