Macro Roundup

There has been a sharp uptick in the number of men working as stay-at-home parents. Almost 5% of stay-at-home parents are men, compared to about 1% in the mid-1990s.

“…[The Census Bureau defines stay-at-home males] as husbands in opposite-sex marriages with children under 15 who specifically say they’re not working so that they can care for family and whose wives are either working or looking for work. Under those terms, men accounted this year for 5% of the one-fifth of US families with a stay-at-home parent, up from about 1% in the mid-’90s and representing 239,000 fathers. According to a broader analysis by the Pew Research Center—which expands the pool to include any father of a child under 18 who hasn’t been working, regardless of reason or marital status, and also incorporates men in same-sex relationships—the number of stay-at-home dads had swelled to about 2.1M by 2021, equal to 18% of all stay-at-home parents, up from 10% in 1989….”

Jordan Yadoo, “More Men Are Staying Out of the Workforce to Care for Kids,” Bloomberg, November 29, 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-29/more-men-ditch-jobs-to-become-stay-at-home-dads-and-care-for-kids?sref=U3dOGIDF

More Men Are Staying Out of the Workforce to Care for Kids

For Ryan Burdick, the incessant questions about when he plans to go back to work have gotten old. So has the “Mr. Mom” label.

Still, the 38-year-old father of two says he has no regrets about his decision 10 years ago to step away from his burgeoning career as a commercial pilot to care for his children full time. “My joke forever has been, ‘I’m retired,’ when people ask me what I do,” says Burdick, whose wife, Stephanie, 36, is a physician at a hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

“I still get emails all the time from companies trying to get me to come back and fly,” he says, adding that while he occasionally misses the work, he doesn’t plan on returning anytime soon. Sons Walter, 10, and George, 7, are his focus.

Burdick’s wife was working as a resident when the couple realized that the nanny they’d just hired couldn’t cope with the demands of their on-call jobs. After reviewing other child-care options, the couple decided it would make more sense for Ryan to assume care and household responsibilities. The setup has enabled Stephanie to advance much faster in her profession, which has eased the financial strain of living on one income. “My career potential is much higher because he stays home,” she says.

The slow slide in the labor force participation rate of American men in their prime working years—defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as ages 25 to 54—has perplexed economists and policymakers, who have attributed the decline to a number of factors including shrinking payrolls in manufacturing and other traditionally male-dominated sectors, along with lagging educational attainment by men.

Some 88.5% of prime-age men were either working or looking for work last month. That’s down more than 9 percentage points from around the time the BLS began tracking the data in the 1950s. Meanwhile, the rate of workforce engagement for women has more than doubled, from about one-third of the population back then to 77% in the late 1990s; it has since leveled out. The phenomenon has been extensively chronicled in books with such fatalistic titles as The End of Men and The Boy Crisis.

Men dropping out of the workforce to assume caregiving responsibilities have played a comparatively small role in the overall trend, but the numbers have been climbing and, by at least one measure, may have hit a record last year.

Often-cited government data may be underestimating the size of the cohort, because the census defines the category narrowly, as husbands in opposite-sex marriages with children under 15 who specifically say they’re not working so that they can care for family, and whose wives are either working or looking for work. Under those terms, men accounted this year for 5% of the one-fifth of US families with a stay-at-home parent, up from about 1% in the mid-’90s and representing 239,000 fathers.

According to a broader analysis by the Pew Research Center—which expands the pool to include any father of a child under 18 who hasn’t been working, regardless of reason or marital status, and also incorporates men in same-sex relationships—the number of stay-at-home dads had swelled to about 2.1 million by 2021, equal to 18% of all stay-at-home parents, up from 10% in 1989.

In the Pew study, 23% said the reason they had exited the labor force was to care for children, as opposed to job loss (13%), disability (34%), or being in school or retired (20%). That’s up from just 4% who cited caregiving in 1989, according to Pew.

Some men transition into full-time parenting after being laid off or becoming disabled, and may cite those instead of caregiving as reasons they aren’t working, because of lingering societal stigma, says Arielle Kuperberg, an associate professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who’s conducted her own review of federal statistics.

Kuperberg found a record 15.2% of fathers of children under 18 were not working last year, up from 14% in 2019 and less than 8% in 1980. Many men may be “functionally stay-at-home parents, even though that’s not the reason they would give on a survey,” she says.

Cultural norms on masculinity, work and family have been slow to evolve, according to Richard Reeves, the author of the new book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. “We’ve recast motherhood and what it means to be a mom in such a way that moms can be breadwinners, too, now,” says Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “But we haven’t recast fatherhood in such a way as to make it easier for men, both culturally and practically and economically, to become more hands-on fathers.”

Burdick concurs. “The world isn’t really built for stay-at-home dads,” he says, noting, among other impediments, the lack of diaper-changing stations in men’s bathrooms. School administrators routinely call his wife with questions and in emergencies, even though he’s listed as the primary contact.

The large-scale disruption in families’ work and school schedules caused by the pandemic forced a new division of labor in many households. Men 18 years and older spent an average of 1.91 hours a day caring for and helping household members in 2021, according to BLS data. That compares with 2.39 hours for women, but is up from 1.62 hours in 2019 and 1.67 hours in 2003, when the BLS began tracking the figures. It’s too soon to tell whether this represents a more permanent shift in gender roles.

In that regard, a more important driver of change has been the divergence in the evolution of earnings dynamics for men and women. Almost a third of women who were married or co-habiting were contributing at least half of the couple’s total earnings in 2017, up from 25% in 2000 and just 13% in 1980, according to a Pew report.

“All those years of higher-education enrollments going up for women have now started to bear fruit,” says Jennifer Glass, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who published a report last year on the increase in female breadwinners. “They have jobs that are more stable, that provide health insurance, that are unlikely to go away during a recession.”

She notes that, historically, women who were the main source of household income were mainly unmarried, divorced or widowed. In more recent decades, the increase in breadwinning mothers has been among partnered women. Their in-demand skills in fields such as health care and education have boosted their earning power, which contrasts with the “slide in inflation-adjusted earnings” among their male counterparts, a trend attributable in part to downsizing amid increased corporate mergers and the growth of contract work.

This disparity in earning potential is what helped push Jason Mitchell to take on the role of full-time parent in 2014. At the time, Mitchell was an adjunct professor of English composition at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, while his wife had a Ph.D. and a better-paid tenure-track position in information systems at the university’s business school.

The couple juggled their teaching schedules as best they could after the birth of their first child. That no longer worked with the arrival of baby No. 2. “We were sort of like two ships passing in the night,” recalls Mitchell, 40, who now cares for a brood of four, ages 4 to 11. “Honestly, my English job was not going to be sufficient to cover child-care costs for more than one kid.”

The pandemic drove up America’s already high child-care costs by causing many day-care centers to close while also triggering an exodus of staff seeking higher-paying jobs. In a recent survey, 58% of families said they would spend upward of $10,000 on child care this year, compared with the 45% who said they’d spent at least that much in 2019.

Even once his youngest starts going to school full time, Mitchell says he doesn’t see himself returning to work, “only because there’s so much to do” managing the home and coordinating the schedules of four children.

He considers himself lucky. “I thought I would miss teaching, and I do sometimes,” he says. “But it sort of pales in comparison to being able to watch the children grow and spend as much time with them as I get to.”

Of course most American families don’t have the luxury of living on a single income. Kristopher Park, 34, resigned last year from his job with the state of Delaware as an intake processor for food benefits and other government-assistance programs upon realizing, after comparing options, that his roughly $1,000 biweekly paychecks wouldn’t cover the $2,500 monthly cost of day care for his sons, now 5 and 2.

It made more sense for his wife, Nicole, 32, to accept a $50,000-a-year job as an accountant with the Wilmington Housing Authority and to care for the kids (their third, a daughter, was born in October) than route all of his earnings to a nanny or day care, he says, lamenting the lack of affordable choices.

Although he’s committed to full-time caregiving for the time being, Park uses his spare hours to develop his skills in computer programming and 3D modeling, hoping this will open the doors to better-paying jobs that would make working outside the home worthwhile. “The reality is, with her income alone, we have basically no buffer in the event of an emergency,” he says.

The rise in child-care expenses mirrors an increase in elder-care costs. Out-of-pocket expenses for elders increased 41% from 2009 to 2019. The number of elder-care workers, like the number of child-care providers, remains stubbornly below its pre-pandemic level.

The dearth of affordable options is what motivated Mario Matthews to move in 2020 from Los Angeles to his native Oklahoma City to care for his 60-year-old mother, Kathy Grant, who’d been diagnosed two years before with early onset dementia.

“Some days she remembers her name, other days she doesn’t,” says Matthews, 42, who left his job as a server at celebrity hotspots such as Beauty & Essex and Soho House after Grant’s waning independence and depleted savings effectively pushed her out of the $5,000-a-month assisted living facility where she’d been residing.

Grant can no longer eat or get dressed without assistance. She speaks in patterns, rather than sentences, says Matthews, and is now gripped by a fear of falling down, even when moving about her home. “I have seen it in her eyes,” he says of her anxiety, noting that she now requires sedation for routine checkups at the dentist and eye doctor.

Men accounted for almost 39% of family-care providers in 2020, up from 27% in 1997, according to AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving. “We see more men are self-identifying as caregivers than they did before, perhaps underscoring the culture shift that is taking place around caregiving, who provides it and who is comfortable talking about it,” says Fawn Cothran, a research director at the NAC.

Some 9% of caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia gave up working entirely last year, figures from the Alzheimer’s Association and the NAC show. Some 18% went from full- to part-time work or cut back hours.

Matthews considered looking for a 9-5 job after he moved to Oklahoma City, but quickly determined that his wages would go entirely to cover the cost of a nurse. He says that in many ways he prefers to look after his mother himself than having to screen potential caregivers. Although Kathy has lost many of her abilities, she responds positively to music and lights up when Matthews dances around or makes funny faces. “It is very fun to see her laugh,” he says.

For some families, caregiving responsibilities shift, with men and women trading places and dipping in and out of the workforce for different stretches of time.

About 70% of American mothers can expect to be the primary breadwinner in their household for at least one year before their first child turns 18, according to a recent study by Glass, the professor in Austin. The average time such mothers can expect to spend as primary earners is about six years, her research showed.

Having one parent at home was always a priority for Andrew Molitor and Meg Bartelt, who chose the town of Bellingham, Washington, in part for its more manageable expenses. “The cost of living is not low, but it’s not San Francisco and it’s not Brooklyn,” says Andrew, 56, who left his $150,000 a year software engineering job at Hewlett-Packard in 2016 to swap caregiving responsibilities with Meg, who was eager to start her own financial-planning firm after years of dipping in and out of part-time work. “If you have one reasonably good job, and you happen to have a cushion of cash to fall back on like we did, then you can actually make this work. You can have that kind of 1950s Leave It to Beaver lifestyle here.”

Leave It to Beaver has a modern twist, with Andrew doing the dishes and tending to daughters Alice, 13, and Beatrice, 9, while Meg works out of a detached office at the back of their property. Marriage counseling, which the couple began before swapping roles, has been key to their success, says Meg: “We went, not because we were on the brink of divorce, but because we wanted to be able to communicate more effectively, comfortably and lovingly with one another.”

Andrew describes their decision-making and child rearing as “a steady process of negotiation and renegotiation,” and says he has no misgivings about leaving his corporate job behind, despite some challenges at the beginning. “After about two years of more or less continual meltdowns, hysteria and freak-out, I kind of got the hang of it.”

Krugman suggests that wage growth for lower-income families has more than offset inflation, even accounting for their higher food and energy consumption, “The labor economist Arindrajit Dube has estimated hourly wage changes — by decile rather than quartile — over a longer period since the beginning of the pandemic recession. He finds that real wages for the bottom 40 percent of workers have increased. Lower-income families spend a higher than average share of their income on food and energy, which are also the categories that have seen the most inflation recently. My rough calculations suggest that even when you take these food and energy costs into account, lower-income families have done better, not worse, than others, at least in terms of inflation’s effects. But it does lessen that difference somewhat.”

Paul Krugman, “Does Inflation Disproportionately Hurt the Poor?” Krugman Wonks Out, November 29, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/29/opinion/inflation-poor-income-inequality.html

Does Inflation Disproportionately Hurt the Poor?

The central economic debate in the United States right now is how aggressive the Federal Reserve should be in its effort to reduce inflation. Few economists are arguing against the need for higher interest rates to reduce demand, but there are trade-offs, at least in the near term. If monetary policy is too tight, we may have an unnecessary recession; if it’s not tight enough, inflation will persist, and maybe get entrenched in people’s expectations, so it will become harder to reduce later.

Also, there’s a question of where to stop: Even some economists who have been relatively hawkish, like Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, have been arguing that getting inflation back down to 3 percent, rather than the current target of 2 percent, would be good enough.

To a large extent, we’re talking here about balancing risks. But how you weigh these risks depends in part on how bad you think inflation really is. And one argument I’ve been seeing a lot lately is that inflation is bad because it falls especially heavily on households with low incomes.

But is that claim correct? It sounds as if it should be true. And it’s all too easy to find scenes of uneven hardship in today’s America, with the 1 percent or even the upper middle class still living the good life while low-wage workers desperately seek help from food banks.

Inequality, however, isn’t something that just happened in the past two years; you could have found such scenes any time over the past few decades, even when inflation was low. And to the extent that low-income families are facing more hardship than they did a year ago, much of that can be attributed to the expiration of pandemic-era aid, especially the expanded Child Tax Credit.

So what can we say about the effects of inflation, specifically, on low-income families? What the data seem to say is that such families have actually been hurt less than families with higher incomes. True, as I’ll explain in a minute, there’s an asterisk on this conclusion, because not everyone faces the same rate of inflation. But there’s also an asterisk on this asterisk.

First, let’s note a key fact about the past two years: This era of surging inflation has also been an era of very tight labor markets. And tight labor markets typically lead to wage compression — that is, bigger wage increases at the bottom than at the top.

You can see this phenomenon clearly in data from the Atlanta Fed’s wage growth tracker, which among other things calculates annual hourly wage growth by quartile — quarters of the wage distribution:

As you can see, recent wage growth has been consistently faster for lower quartiles. Over the past year hourly wages for the first, or lowest, quartile have almost kept up with inflation, while falling well short of inflation for better-paid workers.

The labor economist Arindrajit Dube has estimated hourly wage changes — by decile rather than quartile — over a longer period, since the beginning of the pandemic recession. He finds that real wages for the bottom 40 percent of workers have actually increased:

A somewhat different measure comes from Realtime Inequality, run by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, which estimates changes in real factor income. Unlike hourly wage estimates, these numbers are affected by changes in employment and the number of hours worked; they also include nonwage income such as the profits of business owners and returns on investment. But they tell much the same story, of significant gains for the bottom half of the income distribution since January 2021:

It’s true that the top 10 percent has also done well, probably reflecting higher profits. But again, lower-paid workers seem to have done relatively well in the face of inflation.

So is the idea that inflation especially hurts low-income families a myth? Well, as I mentioned, there’s an asterisk here. We normally measure inflation using the Consumer Price Index, which tracks the cost of the goods and services purchased by the average family. But lower-income families spend a higher than average share of their income on food and energy, which are also the categories that have seen the most inflation recently:

My rough calculations suggest that even when you take these food and energy costs into account, lower-income families have done better, not worse, than others, at least in terms of inflation’s effects. But it does lessen that difference somewhat.

And there is, as I also suggested, an asterisk on the asterisk. What we’re really arguing about is U.S. policy — and the exceptional rise in food and energy prices is neither a result of U.S. policy nor likely to be much affected by American policy going forward. Put it this way: If you want to blame the president for high food prices, the president you should be blaming is named Vladimir Putin.

None of this says that the Fed shouldn’t be trying to reduce inflation. But you shouldn’t invoke the plight of the poor as a reason for tight money. If anything, tight money, by leading to more slack in labor markets and therefore more unemployment, will disproportionately hurt lower-wage workers.

2021 saw a record 48,953 gun deaths or 15 fatalities per 100,000 people. Black men aged 20-24 suffered 142 firearm homicides per 100,000 people in 2021, a 74% increase since 2014, “…A record 48,953 deaths in the US, or about 15 fatalities per 100,000 people, were caused by guns last year, said the analysis published Tuesday in the journal JAMA Network Open. Since 1990, rates of gun-related homicide have been highest among Black men aged 20 to 24, the analysis said, with 142 fatalities per 100,000 people in this group in 2021—a 74% increase since 2014. Homicide rates are as much as 23 times higher among Black men, and as much as nearly four times higher among Hispanic men than among white men, the analysis said. Gun fatality rates from suicide were highest among white men aged 80 to 84 years, at 47 fatalities per 100,000 people in this group in 2021—a 41% increase since 2007, the analysis showed….”

Dominique Mosbergen, “Gun Death Rate Nears Three-Decade High, With Men at Most Risk,” Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/gun-death-rate-nears-three-decade-high-with-men-at-most-risk-11669749562

Gun Death Rate Nears Three-Decade High, With Men at Most Risk

The rate of gun deaths in the U.S. reached a 28-year high in 2021 after sharp increases in homicides of Black men and suicides among white men, an analysis of federal data showed.

A record 48,953 deaths in the U.S., or about 15 fatalities per 100,000 people, were caused by guns last year, said the analysis published Tuesday in the journal JAMA Network Open. Gun deaths declined in the 1990s, but have been rising steadily over the past decade and skyrocketed during the Covid-19 pandemic, said researchers who conducted the analysis.

Gun-related deaths of women and children have risen, the analysis said, but men remain far more likely to die from guns.

“The disparities are so marked,” said Chris Rees, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Emory University School of Medicine.

Dr. Rees and his colleagues analyzed U.S. firearm fatality rates from 1990 to 2021 using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 1.1 million people in the U.S. have died from guns since 1990, the analysis showed.

“The magnitude of the numbers are incomprehensible,“ said Eric Fleegler, a study co-author and an associate professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Since 1990, rates of gun-related homicide have been highest among Black men aged 20 to 24, the analysis said, with 142 fatalities per 100,000 people in this group in 2021—a 74% increase since 2014. Homicide rates are as much as 23 times higher among Black men and as much as nearly four times higher among Hispanic men than among white men, the analysis said.

Gun fatality rates from suicide were highest among white men aged 80 to 84 years, at 47 fatalities per 100,000 people in this group in 2021—a 41% increase since 2007, the analysis showed.

Men remain far more likely than women to die from guns, but firearm deaths among women have increased more than 70% since 2010, the study said. More suicides and homicides among some groups drove the rate higher among women, Dr. Rees said.

“The trend of increasing firearm fatalities unfortunately crosses all sexes,” Dr. Rees said.

Since the 1990s, the geographical distribution of firearm deaths has shifted, with gun death rates decreasing in the Western U.S. and increasing in the Southern U.S., researchers said.

Dr. Rees said the analysis, published soon after mass shootings in Virginia and Colorado, doesn’t answer why firearm deaths are increasing. But it does demonstrate that some groups are at higher risk from gun violence that policy changes could help mitigate, he said.

“For certain populations that are at higher risk of suicide, more suicide-prevention programs can be targeted at them,” he said. “For groups with higher rates of firearm-related homicide, there are certain programs like violence prevention, firearm-buyback programs and safe storage.”