Let me start with the chart:

Median pre-tax earnings of men ages 25-29 rose 24 percent ($10,800) from 1973 to 2024, and median post-tax compensation rose 40 percent ($15,500). The gains from 1989 to 2024 were 42 percent ($16,300) and 46 percent ($17,000).

A few years ago (2022), I wrote a report arguing that while fewer families are pursuing the traditional sole-breadwinner model than in the past, and while single parenthood has increased over the past 50 years, the problem is not that men have become less marriageable economically. I defined different marriageability thresholds related to the earnings of young sole-breadwinning married fathers in the past. The analyses showed that young men’s marriageability, at worst, was no lower in 2020 than in 1980. It was sometimes modestly lower than its peak in 1969 or 1973, but usually higher than in the early 1960s. I argued that rising affluence was the main reason that more women work today, fewer parents marry or stay married, and men work less and at less remunerative jobs.

Assessing long-run trends in earnings involves a number of important methodological choices. Since publishing the marriageability paper, I have conducted several deep analyses looking more narrowly at some of these options. In 2024, I reviewed how well conventional price indexes measure inflation. Based on research by academic and government economists over several decades, I concluded (like many others) that these price indexes tend to overstate inflation. That means that analyses like my marriageability study that adjust nominal earnings for inflation using a conventional price index tend to understate earnings growth over time.

My 2024 paper used the quantitative evidence from this research on price indexes to create a “More Accurate Consumer Price Index,” or “MACPI.” Relative to much of the past literature, my resulting adjustment was somewhat conservative; using other estimates of bias would have shown an even slower rise in prices than the MACPI indicates. I showed the implications for a variety of long-term economic trends of using the MACPI instead of other popular price indexes. I subsequently validated the MACPI by comparing objective trends in and levels of absolute mobility to subjective perceptions. The objective absolute mobility results were more consistent with subjective perceptions when using the MACPI to adjust for inflation than they were using the PCEPI.

In my marriageability paper, I had used the personal consumption expenditures price index (PCEPI). In the 2024 paper, I found that, relying on the PCEPI, the median earnings of men who worked full-time, year-round rose by 11 percent between 1973 and 2023. However, using the MACPI, earnings rose 38 percent.

In 2025, I conducted a more extensive analysis of men’s and women’s median earnings over fifty years. This study paid particularly close attention to two methodological issues. First, I explored how to address non-workers and workers who only work part of the year. Much of this non-work or part-year work is voluntary (retirement, e.g.) or involves circumstances not closely related to transitory economic conditions (such as enrollment in school or serious disability). Because median earnings trends can be affected by changes in the prevalence of these circumstances, handling them in an appropriate manner is vital to producing meaningful earnings trends.

In my marriageability paper, which looked only at young men, I had included nearly all non-workers and workers, excluding only those who were in school and worked less than the entire year. The alternative that I considered was to exclude all non-workers. In the 2025 paper, I found that from 1973 to 2023, among men ages 15 and older, median earnings fell by 18 percent ($6,500) if all non-workers were included but rose by 20 percent ($9,100) if only workers were included. (These estimates used the PCEPI.)

To obtain more meaningful results, the 2025 paper estimated trends for a subset of the sample who I could link to earnings records from a year earlier or a year later. I looked at trends after (1) swapping in non-workers’ full-year earnings in an adjacent year (where available) if their non-work was not due to economic conditions, (2) excluding the remaining non-workers and part-year earners except those whose status was due to economic conditions or their health or disability, and (3) excluding a number of disabled non-workers who would have been so even in 1973. A compromise choice that did not rely on linked records was to look at trends for all year-round workers (including part-time workers), which closely tracked the trend using my more complicated subsample. The median for this group rose by 13 percent from 1973 to 2023 ($7,300), again, using the PCEPI.

The second methodological issue I considered in my 2025 paper involved different ways to measure earnings or compensation. I included analyses in which I added three forms of pre-tax earnings to my measure. The first component added was the value of nonwage benefits provided by employers to their workers. (Employers are indifferent to the forms that total compensation to employees takes.) The second addition involved the payroll taxes ostensibly paid by employers but widely assumed by economists to come out of employee pay. (Again, employers are indifferent to the forms that total compensation takes.) The third addition was the share of the corporate income tax that similarly comes out of employee pay. (Because of the tax, both workers and investors receive less than they otherwise would.)

Using the MACPI, I found that median pre-tax compensation, so defined, rose by 46 percent ($23,200) among year-round male workers from 1973 to 2023. The conventional pre-tax earnings measure rose 40 percent ($17,900). In the marriageability paper, I had included measures of pre-tax earnings, pre-tax compensation, post-tax earnings, and post-tax compensation, but I did not include employees’ share of corporate income tax in their pre-tax earnings.

Given this reassessment of key measurement choices since the publication of my marriageability paper, and given that a few more years of data have become available in the interim, I am in the process of updating that paper. Here, I preview the findings by including revised and extended results for the paper’s Figure 5, which showed trends in the median earnings and compensation of 25- to 29-year-old men from 1962 to 2020. (The fully revised paper will be published later this year.)

The original Figure 5 showed that the median pre-tax earnings of young men fell 9 percent from 1969 to 2019 (both business cycle peaks), while median post-tax compensation was flat. I didn’t report estimates from 1973 to 2019, but those ranged from a drop of 3 percent to a decline of 13 percent. As already noted, these estimates used the PCEPI to adjust for inflation, excluded only students who worked less than the full year, and did not include as pre-tax earnings the share of the corporate income tax paid by employees.

What do the updated numbers show? I use 1973 as my starting year because I was unable to reliably extend the MACPI further back in time. My estimates that try to replicate the numbers in the original paper now range from a drop of 12 percent from 1973 to 2019 to an increase of 2 percent. (It’s possible the underlying data from IPUMS have changed slightly since 2022, and the PCEPI values have changed slightly. Small modifications to my code might have also made a difference.) From 1973 to 2024, they range from a 6 percent drop to a 6 percent increase.

Note that even these estimates are not really evidence of 50 years of stagnation. Instead, there was a period of decline that ended 35 years ago, followed by a period of gains. From 1973 to 1989 (both business cycle peaks), median earnings fell 13 to 19 percent, while they rose 15 to 22 percent from 1989 to 2024 ($6,800 to $9,100 in 2024 dollars).

In my original paper, my sample included men who were 26 to 30 years old when they were interviewed, meaning that they were 25 to 29 years old one year earlier, which was the calendar year for which men were to report their earnings. Because men were generally interviewed between February and April, most of them would have been 26 to 30 years old at the end of the previous year. In the intervening years since my original marriageability paper, I decided it made more sense to look at men who were 25 to 29 years old when interviewed, most of whom would have been 25 to 29 at the end of the previous calendar year. The median change in earnings in this case ranges from a drop of 1 percent to an increase of 12 percent. I’ll stick with this group for the remainder of the analyses.

The first major improvement we’ll consider is the switch from the PCEPI to the MACPI. This change makes a big difference. Now pre-tax earnings (not including corporate income taxes, employer payroll taxes, or nonwage benefits) rise 23 percent from 1973 to 2024 ($9,200). Median post-tax compensation rises 36 percent ($12,700).

Second, if we also switch to all year-round workers, the increase from 1973 to 2024 is 24 percent for pre-tax earnings ($10,800) and 40 percent for post-tax compensation ($15,500).

Finally, the addition of the employee’s share of corporate income taxes to pre-tax compensation turns out not to make any meaningful difference. From 1973 to 2024, median pre-tax compensation excluding the employee’s share of corporate income taxes rose by 33 percent, or $16,600. If we add in corporate taxes, the increase is 32 percent, or $16,300.

The figure at the top of this post updates Figure 5 from my original paper. It leaves corporate income taxes out of pre-tax earnings and pre-tax compensation but uses the MACPI instead of the PCEPI, looks at full-year workers instead of everyone but non-working or part-year students, and looks at men 25 to 29 years old in the survey year instead of men 26 to 30 years old.

Note that these estimates continue to show that the median earnings of young men declined from 1973 to 1989 (by 4 to 13 percent). However, that period of decline is 35 years in the past. From 1989 to 2024, median earnings rose between 42 and 46 percent. That amounted to an additional $19,800 in pre-tax compensation and $17,000 in post-tax compensation.

It seems difficult to characterize the past 35 years as one of “stagnation” for young men. What accounts for the perception that they are not doing well? First, many observers have interpreted the decline in men’s labor force participation as a failure of the labor market to provide opportunities to less-skilled men. However, the evidence is more consistent with rising affluence affording men more opportunities to voluntarily take time out of the workforce (including through more accessible and more generous disability benefits).

Second, the decline in marriage (another effect of rising affluence) has hurt the ability of men and women to pay down debt, save, and afford a downpayment on a home. Third, falling marriage and fertility and increased work among women have reduced the burdens on men to maximize their earnings in order to bear the responsibilities of breadwinning. This lessened responsibility, in turn, has reduced men’s incentives to invest in their human capital.

Finally, people feel better about their own circumstances than the mood of economic declensionism would suggest. Americans have a view of how others are doing that is inaccurately negative as an empirical matter. Fully 70 to 75 percent of Americans near the age of 40 believe that they have higher real income than their parents did at the same age, and roughly the same share actually do. These misperceptions are likely to do with the negativity of media accounts as well as incentives on the part of elected officials, foundations, researchers, and advocates to emphasize problems in need of fixing.

We do have problems in need of fixing, of course. But we would do well to recognize that they are less about the economy or economic policy failing us and more about how the individual choices we have made as the nation has grown richer have altered the economic, social, and political landscape.