It has become one of the Great Questions of Our Age: Why have so many prime-age American men dropped out of the labor force? The percentage of American men ages 25 through 54 who are neither working nor looking for work has been growing for decades. In September, it was 11.4 percent -- which is down from the all-time peak of 12.1 percent in October 2013, but still almost quadruple the level of the early 1960s.
I wrote last week about Nicholas Eberstadt's new book on this topic, which looks into several possible explanations but puts the biggest emphasis on what Eberstadt calls the "incarceration explosion" of the 1980s and 1990s. On Friday, Bloomberg Businessweek's Peter Coy reported on new research by Princeton University economist Alan Krueger that explored another possibility -- maybe men have given up on working or looking for work because they really don't feel good.
