by Jay Rogers
The American work ethic was never simply about making money. It was a moral code: work hard, keep your word, master a skill, provide for your family, and leave the next generation better off. Alexis de Tocqueville observed it firsthand in the 1830s, noting that in democratic America “everybody works, and work opens a way to everything,” a sharp contrast to European aristocracies where idleness carried prestige. America became the land of opportunity by fusing that culture with liberty, property rights, open markets, and an unusual respect for ordinary labor. The man who built things, drove routes, and came home dirty was not a lesser citizen. He was the point.
I started working when I was twelve. In New England, that means you follow the seasons: mowing lawns in summer, raking leaves in fall, shoveling driveways in winter. All cash. All informal. Nobody asked for a resume. You showed up, you worked, and you got paid. Before I set foot in a college classroom, I’d been a busboy, a barback, a gas station attendant, a mailroom clerk, and a locker room attendant. None of those jobs was glamorous. All of them taught me something money can’t buy: what it means to earn your own way. That ethic now feels like a relic.
As of August 2026, 89.2 percent of American men ages 25 to 54 were either employed or actively looking for work. That sounds healthy until you flip the number: roughly one in nine prime-age men was entirely outside the labor force, not unemployed in the technical sense but gone. They weren’t counted because they’d stopped looking. The Bureau of Labor Statistics calls this labor force nonparticipation. That’s a clinical phrase for a social reality with consequences that extend well beyond any spreadsheet. Compare it to 2005, when the participation rate sat at 90.5 percent. The drop looks modest in percentage terms. In bodies, it represents millions of men who’ve exited the economy and haven’t come back.
The causes are multiple, and each deserves a clear account. BLS data show illness or disability as the most frequently cited reason among prime-age men outside the labor force. The opioid crisis sits at the center of that category. Princeton economist Alan Krueger found that opioid prescription rates could explain roughly 20 percent of the decline in male labor-force participation between 2000 and 2015, with men in high-prescription counties showing the sharpest drop-off. That’s not laziness. That’s a public health catastrophe that our political class spent two decades either ignoring or making worse.
Pain pills alone don’t account for it. The manufacturing base that anchored working-class male identity has been evaporating for decades. U.S. manufacturing employment peaked at 19.6 million jobs in June 1979 and has shed roughly 6.7 million positions since, most concentrated in the occupations men without four-year degrees historically filled. Those jobs paid enough to support a family, buy a house, and retire with something. Many replacements require credentials these men don’t have or pay wages that don’t compare. A man who spent fifteen years running a CNC machine doesn’t easily pivot to a home health aide position, and the economics rarely pencil out the same way when he does.
Then there’s the question most Washington dinner parties prefer to avoid: where did the jobs go, and who is doing them now? The National Academies of Sciences concluded that immigration’s aggregate wage effects concentrate adversely on workers without high-school diplomas and on prior immigrants, precisely the men most likely to be competing for the same positions. The Congressional Budget Office confirmed that the recent immigration surge slows growth in average compensation per hour through 2031, with less-educated workers bearing the steepest short-term impact. Call it what it is: arithmetic. You can believe immigration has long-run benefits, and the data support that view, while also acknowledging that the workers absorbing the near-term cost are the ones least positioned to absorb it.
There is a line that deserves to be said plainly: saying Americans won’t do a job is usually shorthand for saying Americans won’t do it at the wage an employer prefers to offer. That’s a business-model choice, not a labor-supply fact. A serious country would require employers to document the recruitment effort, pay a market-clearing wage, invest in training, and demonstrate that no domestic worker was displaced before issuing a guest-worker visa. We haven’t done that. We’ve subsidized cheap labor and then acted puzzled when the displaced workers showed up in the BLS nonparticipation tables.
Work is not just income for men, especially men without college degrees. A Brookings Institution analysis found that declining male earnings explain roughly 27 percent of the fall in marriage rates since 1980. The Little League coaches, the volunteer firefighters, and the men who showed up for neighborhood things—those roles flowed from the stability that steady work provided. When the jobs went, so did the marriages and the community engagement. Richard Reeves documented this in Of Boys and Men: the crisis is civic and psychological as much as economic, and its costs fall on everyone.
Rush had it right in 1974 when they wrote Working Man—a song about a guy who gets up at seven, punches in at nine, and asks nothing except the chance to earn his living. That bargain has been broken, and we should be clear about who broke it: deindustrialization nobody managed, opioid overprescribing nobody stopped, immigration policy designed around employer convenience and reliable voters rather than worker welfare, and a credentialing culture that treats anyone without a four-year degree as a failed version of someone else. Tocqueville warned that democratic honor codes exist to protect the community from collective inactivity. We’ve spent forty years constructing a system that makes inactivity the rational individual response. Reversing that requires more than a rhetorical commitment to the working class; it requires deliberate policy that makes working worth it again.
Start with the credentials problem. Vocational education and employer-linked apprenticeships should be treated as legitimate career paths, not consolation prizes. Urban Institute research found that registered apprentices see earnings increase 49 percent in the year after completion, outpacing comparable workers by more than three to one. No four-year degree required, no six-figure student loan balance, and no credential that becomes obsolete in a shifting economy. Mike Rowe has made this case longer and more persistently than most elected officials, and he’s right. His mikeroweWORKS Foundation has put millions of dollars toward trade scholarships and has spent years pushing back against the cultural assumption that a welder or an electrician is somehow less than a college graduate. When a television host does a more effective job advocating for the American worker than the entire Department of Labor, something has gone seriously wrong in Washington.
The policy list writes itself once you stop pretending the market will self-correct. Reform occupational licensing regimes that create arbitrary barriers for people trying to re-enter the workforce. Require guest-worker programs to document a genuine domestic labor shortage before issuing visas. Merge addiction treatment, job training, and placement into a single coordinated system rather than parallel bureaucracies that rarely communicate. Hold employers accountable for the wage theft and worker misclassification practices that systematically bypass domestic workers. None of these are novel ideas. The fact that most remain unimplemented tells you something about whose interests Congress has actually been serving.
There are early signs that capital is responding to a different set of signals. Since January 2025, the Trump administration has secured trillions in new domestic investment commitments—Apple at $600 billion, TSMC at $100 billion for chip fabrication, Hyundai building a $5.8 billion steel plant in Louisiana, and Micron committing $200 billion to advanced memory manufacturing. These are factory floors, not ribbon-cuttings, and the scale is genuinely significant. Whether those commitments translate into durable, family-wage jobs will depend on execution, coherent trade policy, and the training pipelines described above. After four decades of watching the manufacturing base hollow out, the momentum matters. Capital is flowing back. The harder question is whether the workers who need those jobs most are positioned to fill them, or whether credential gaps and workforce atrophy leave us importing the skilled labor to operate the plants we just built and making the same mistake twice.
I mowed my first lawn for $5. That $5 taught me more about self-reliance than most graduate seminars manage to convey. The work ethic Tocqueville admired—the moral code that labor is honored, that work opens a way to everything—didn’t die on its own. It was crowded out by policy choices made by people who never had to live with the consequences. The working man isn’t gone. He’s been sidelined. It’s past time to bring him back.
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Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
