Did Boomers Work the Most?

Surely these avocado toast loving degenerate millennials work less!

There are a lot of misconceptions about who works and doesn’t in the US. I’ve written before in response to questions like “where did all the workers go?” that assumes people are working less today. You can read here: they aren’t. I’ve also made a TikTok about who works more, Americans or Europeans. You can watch here: it depends on how you measure.

Today I’ll talk about another misconception—which is the hardest working generation. I’ve mostly heard this as “Millennials don’t want to work” but occasionally hear things like, “Boomers worked more than any other generation.”

And there’s the perennial, “nobody wants to work anymore!”

Who Works

The share of people who are working or looking for work is the labor force participation rate. It excludes retirees, students, stay at home moms, individuals who are disabled, or anyone that isn’t working and isn’t trying to.

We can and do measure labor force participation among groups, by age, education, marital status, presence of children, state, gender, and countless others. And there’s some general things we know:

• the more education you have, the more likely you are to be in the labor force

• men have and have always had higher participation than women

• of women, those with children under 6 have the lowest participation of any mom-kid combination

• labor force participation falls during recessions when the labor market is bad; a lot of people who have lost their jobs or were looking for one give up for a while because there are so few available

• labor force participation rises to new heights when the labor market is really tight, like it is right now, as people who haven’t typically or consistently worked get drawn in by more opportunities and higher wages

Who is in a Generation

Baby Boomers are the only officially defined generation. Individuals born between 1946-1964 were given this epithet by the Census and Population Reference Bureaus because they were born during a period of elevated birthrates. Every other generation, before or after the Boomers, is made up by marketers, writers, PR firms, ad salesmen, and others. Tom Brokaw, for example, named The Greatest Generation in his book in 1998, when the members of that generation were mostly dead.

So comparing Boomer work history is a bit of a challenge since we are making up the later generations. One way to do it is to mimic the length of the Boom (18 years) and just move forward. So Gen X (so named after a book that came out in the early 90s) would be 1965-1983, and Millennials 1984-2002. But in cultural discussion, Millennials “graduated high school in the new century” so they should start by 1982, and digital natives correspond to the internet in 1996 and blah blah blah blah.

I’m going to follow popular notions of generations and make the Millennials 1980-1996. But the two years on the back and front end don’t matter much, as you’ll see.

The Youth At Work

I’m going to look at the labor force participation of individuals 25-34 years old. The Bureau of Labor Statistics produces historical national estimates in 10-year age bands and they are more replicable and reliable than if I went and made them myself. Also, I start at 25 because if you looked younger, Millennials would definitely work less because they went to college more.

Here’s the share of 25-34 year olds working, since 1948 when the data series began:

Youth labor force participation in the US has two eras. The first era, from 1948-1990 is a period of sustained growth. Labor force participation just goes up, from 64% in 1948 to around 84% in 1990. The second era, from 1990 to today, is the recession era. The share of young people working dips in every recession and then slowly recovers.

The first dip is in the early 1990s, corresponding to the 1990-1991 recession—participation falls and then recovers, reaching 85%. The second dip is the early 2000s, corresponding to the dot com burst and 2001 recession. The recovery from that recession was slow, the next recession came fast on its heels, and it was a truly terrible downturn. I’ve said before and will repeat often: the Great Recession earned its title. It spans nearly three years of job loss, from 2007-2009, and it takes nearly a decade for participation to recover. The most recent recession is the most dramatic looking—the steep plunge in 2020—but again participation recovered, reaching around 84% again.

These two eras suggest that the peak labor force participation for youth is around 84-85%.

And the hardest working goes to…

I want to compare two cohorts at similar ages, to do that I’ll take the historical series above and chop it in to pieces so you can compare the time periods when Boomers were young to when Millennials were young. In this graph, the y-axis corresponds with the age of the oldest member of the generation, and I pull all the years in which the generation has anyone 25-34 years old. For Boomers (in gold), this spans 1971-1998.

Here’s the Boomers at work when they were young:

Youth labor force participation rose as the Boomers aged into it, starting around 70% in 1971, reaching 80% by 1980, rising to about 84%, where it remains until they fully age out of it. The Boomers increased labor force participation.

So how about Millennials?

Millennial labor force participation at corresponding ages of the oldest member is shown below (in grey). Instead of 1971-1998, the Millennial window is 2005-2023.

Their participation didn’t rise like the Boomers did, because it started much higher, around 84%. Once the Boomers “catch up,” in a sesnse, the two generations’ participation is dead even, with the exception of the pandemic and its recovery. They work the same amount.

In sum: Millennials are working now just as much as Boomers did when they were younger.

And for good measure, here’s Xers. Same thing, showing them from the first year the oldest one turns 25 (1990) and the year the last one turns 34 (2013).

It’s another dead heat! The fluctuations correspond to recessions, not effort or laziness.

So no generation gets the prize of being the hardest working. Wah wah.

But also, gender.

Whenever we talk about labor force participation, we almost always need to talk about men and women separately. Culturally we may like to yardstick out the work ethic of various age groups, but economically the age story of the past 70 years is much less interesting than the gender story.

Here’s 25-34 year old labor force participation from 1948-2023, again, with men in blue, women in red, and the total cohort in black. Men’s labor force participation has been falling almost as long as we’ve measured it. Women’s labor force participation has been rising—it peaked in 2000, fell in the recessions that followed, and then reached new highs just before and after the pandemic.

So if we go back to the staggered generational chart that shows the different cohorts stacked by age rather than year, we can look at men and women from each generation separately:

Men of each generation work less, women of each generation (mostly) work more. Although Xer and Millennial women had relatively even participation, Millennial women are starting to pull away. That could change with a recession, the continued increase in child care costs, or other factors.

Looking at participation by gender reveals much more about the economy than participation across generations. Generations are constructed, mostly artificially, and while character assignations of the youth or the old are fun, they don’t reflect economic realities, barriers, or breakthroughs.

But those things are very obvious when looking by gender. The decline in men’s labor force participation is a reflection of industrial shifts in the economy that reduced career opportunities for men without a college degree. Reduced in the sense that there are fewer of them, and they pay relatively worse.

The rise is women’s labor force participation is a reflection of cultural shifts towards work and family that increased career opportunities for women of any education. And women’s pay—starting so low in the 1950s when they were legally allowed to be paid less—has only been relatively rising, drawing more people in.

The barriers women and men face now are very different from each other and from the the barriers of the 1950s. Generational comparisons are fun, but rarely substantive.

Verdict: no prize awarded.