Are We Ignoring a Generation of Struggling Young Men?
For the first time, men past retirement age are earning more than men aged 25–34
In this episode of the Missing Middle Podcast, hosts Sabrina Maddeaux andMike Moffatt discuss a surprising trend in Canada: for the first time, men past retirement age are earning more than men aged 25–34. They dive into the data behind this shift, exploring how seniors’ incomes have doubled since the 1970s through pensions, investments, and government transfers, while younger men’s wages have stagnated despite inflation and rising living costs.
The conversation also looks at the broader implications for society, including intergenerational inequality, the rising costs of housing and childcare, and the economic struggles faced by young men today. Sabrina and Mike discuss why these issues have been largely ignored, the societal risks of leaving a generation behind, and what this means for Canadian policy and the future of young workers.
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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, which has been lightly edited.
Sabrina Maddeaux: I saw a piece that you recently published on the Missing Middle Substack, which we’ll link to in the show notes, which showed that for the first time in recorded history, men past retirement age make more money than those between the ages of 25 and 34. Can you walk us through what exactly that data shows?
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. I’d be happy to. I’m going to go through some of the wonky details first, or else we’re going to get a lot of questions in the comments section. And if I miss anything, feel free to add to the comments section.
First, we’re looking at Canada. We’re looking at after-tax income, and we are adjusting for inflation. Those are the common questions that people will ask. We just look at men. It’s not that what’s happened to women’s income isn’t interesting. That’s in a separate follow-up piece, but we decided to look at them differently just because the trends were a little bit different.
We’re looking at average incomes. So the average does get skewed a little bit by high-income earners. That’s actually a really important part of the story. So what we’re looking at is income from all sources. Not just how much you earn at a job, but how much you collect from your investments? How much are government transfers, such as a CPP or welfare or so on?
Now, for senior men, it’s really good news that their incomes have doubled since the 1970s. During my lifetime, after accounting for inflation, the income of seniors has doubled.
For young men between the ages of 25 and 34, the news is less positive. Incomes are actually down since the 1970s in real terms and virtually unchanged over the last 25 years. So if we go back to 1977, the best year, the year of my birth, younger men made $36,000 more on average than seniors. By 2023, seniors are making $1,000 more than younger men.
Overall, we have a disconnect where it used to be that there was this massive gap between the income of seniors and the income of younger people, with younger people earning more. Now, not only has that gap closed, but seniors are earning more than men between the ages of 25 and 34.
Sabrina Maddeaux: Which is just wild to me, considering that when you look at our tax system and the way government supports work, it’s the incomes of younger people funnelling up to the wealthier older ones, but more on that later.
First, let’s start the conversation by looking at the data for older men. You show that between 1977 and 2023, the average income of a man over the age of 64 more than doubled from $30,000 to$ 61,000. That’s accounting for inflation. So where is this extra money coming from?
Mike Moffatt: So some of it is employment. We’ve seen in some places the end of mandatory retirements. We do see seniors working past the age of 65, but it’s only a relatively small number. In 1977, they were earning about $6,000 on average from employment income, and most seniors were earning zero. That’s now up to about $13,000. That’s close to doubled.
The biggest increase is in investment in private pension income. That’s income from your RRSP, or maybe you have a company pension or something like that. That has more than doubled. It used to be $11,000, and now it’s $28,000. It’s also very skewed, where you have 20%, 30%, 40% of seniors earning a lot of money from either their investments or their company pensions or so on.
The next one, I think, really speaks to you, is government transfer, something that you’ve talked about a lot in your pieces in the Toronto Star and other places. So these are things like OAS, GIS, Canada Pension Plan, and so on.
The average senior earns about $20,000 from these. In 1977, it was less than $13,000. That’s more than a $7,000 increase, and again, that’s after accounting for inflation. So overall, income from every single source for seniors has gone up and gone up quite a bit.
I would say that it’s a very good thing that incomes have gone up for older men. Just to be clear about this piece, we should want everyone in our society to do well. So the issue isn’t that one group is doing well, it’s that other groups are not. In my view, the real issue is that the income for younger men is lower today than it was during the 1970s.
So this is a bit of an aside, but while I have you here, and I’ve already teed up your Toronto Star pieces, I have to ask, you’ve written a lot about OAS in recent months, but how is the program design helping contribute to intergenerational inequality? What are your concerns? And does seeing this data change any of those concerns?
Sabrina Maddeaux: Right. It’s a huge ballooning expense in the government budget that really is extracting wealth from younger workers who, as you said, are doing worse than before and really putting it in the hands of, often, very wealthy seniors and retirees who are doing better than generations before them. Of course, there should be support for seniors who truly are struggling with the cost of living or with poverty, but part of the issue with our system is that these transfers that were initially meant to keep seniors out of poverty and provide a basic quality of life are now really padding luxury retirement lifestyles.
For example, younger taxpayers are sending $18,000 a year to retired couples who have $182,000 a year in income. That’s where the clawback starts for couples of that age. And at the same time, families with kids have their benefits reduced once household incomes hit $81,000 a year. Seniors are less likely to be poor and more likely to own a lot of very inflated assets at this point.
It’s also key that you don’t pay into OAS the same way you do with CPP; it’s paid with general revenues. OAS also costs taxpayers $42 billion more than a decade ago, and that’s only going to get worse as the population gets older.
Reforms are needed here because we can’t be extracting dollars from our youth when they’re not making enough money to afford groceries or housing or to have children, and then transferring that up to wealthy seniors. It’s simply not sustainable.
In your data, the story for seniors was that everything is up. Government transfers and employment income were each up around $7,000, and investment and pension income have increased by over $10,000. What’s the breakdown for younger men?
Mike Moffatt: So for seniors, we see that they’re getting income from a variety of different sources, some of them are working, some of them it’s pension income, investment income. For younger men, 90% of their income comes from employment, which makes sense; they’re not retired, they don’t have a pension yet and so on. Since 1977, the average employment income for this cohort of men is down $7,000 after inflation.
Over the last 48 years, I can say as a 48-year-old, that’s a very long time - this cohort has not gotten a raise and is, in fact, making less money than they did during the era of disco.
Now, investment income has nearly doubled for this group. And that sounds like amazing news, but your average 25 to 34-year-old only gets about $2,000 a year from investment income, and that’s up from $1,000 in 1977. So it’s great that that’s gone up, but it’s a doubling of a very, very small base. It shouldn’t be surprising that your average 30-year-old guy isn’t earning a lot of investment income.
Now, government transfers, one of your favourite topics at the Toronto Star, are up for younger men. They’re up $6, and to be clear about it, I don’t mean $6,000 or $600 or $60. In 1977, adjusted for inflation, the average man between 25 and 34 got $2,864. Today it’s $2,870, so yeah, it’s up, but it’s up six bucks.
So unlike seniors who have received greater OAS, greater GIS, increases in CPP well past inflation, there really hasn’t been anything new for younger men. It’s the same sort of social support that we had 40 or 50 years ago.
We need to recognize that, yes, we’ve adjusted for inflation, but housing - our favourite topic - it’s more expensive than it was in 1977, even when taking into account general inflation and even when taking into account higher interest rates. In a very real purchasing power sense, things have gotten a lot worse for those cohorts.
We do see, in 1977, more single-earner families buying a house. Today, you have a lot more couples, you have a lot more dual-income families, so that cushions the blow somewhat. But at the same time, it also means that you need two incomes in order to buy a house, whereas, at least for some people in some geographies in 1977 Canada, you could do that on a single income.
Sabrina Maddeaux: And that’s key because we talk about how these numbers are inflation-adjusted, but in terms of the key costs that young families are paying, housing has soared way beyond inflation.
I would say childcare costs too, not just in terms of the hard costs of what someone pays for daycare or afterschool programs, but in terms of - before you would have one parent working and one parent could stay home, but now you need that dual income to pay for the housing to begin with. So, then you’re forced into more child care costs. That basic standard that you have to meet to be able to have a certain quality of life, or even have children, has risen so much, even beyond the inflation rate.
Now, we’ve also had a lot of tech progress since the 1970s, and we know our GDP is a lot higher than it used to be, but with all that progress, it seems almost impossible that wages could have gone down for any group. Why did it go down for younger men?
Mike Moffatt: So we don’t get into the piece, but there’s a lot of great research on this. It was kind of a core focus of mine when I worked for the federal government back in 2017. Part of it is the decline in so-called male jobs.
Growing up in London, Ontario, there were people my dad’s age who didn’t finish high school but got a great union job at Ford Talbotville assembling Crown Victoria’s. Those days are gone. You can’t leave school at grade 11 and get a union job in a factory like you could in the 1960s and early 1970s. That’s a function of both trade and automation. A lot of those jobs, if you weren’t replaced by overseas competition, you were probably replaced by a robot.
They’re often starting families later instead of graduating from school at 21 or 22, getting a job and starting a family; now you might not be leaving your grad program until you’re 28 or 29. Then earning a few bucks, then starting a family. This has societal ramifications. I think part of it is just a shift in focus on policy, that the baby boomers have always been the largest cohort in Canada. If you look at this kind of policy over time, it follows their evolution.
One of the questions I often get is, “Why did governments care so much about housing policy in the 1970s and not today?” It’s like, “Well, the 1970s were when all the baby boomers were leaving mom and dad’s and getting their first apartment or their first home.” That was a larger part of government spending. Now that they’re getting older, predominantly, where the extra dollars go is into health care and OAS and so on.
Demographics matter, and we have this huge demographic bubble that has shifted policy for the last 60 to 70 years. I believe that absolutely plays a role here.
A lot of our discussion here is focused on older men and policy that way. I find that a little bit easier to talk about, maybe because I’m closer to that cohort.
I always find it uncomfortable talking about the economic struggles of young men, because I always worry that I’m going to come across as a hardcore men’s rights activist. That’s not a vibe I particularly want, so I’m always a little hesitant to go into these discussions.
There really does seem to be a taboo in discussing these issues, something Scott Galloway has talked about while promoting his new book: Notes on Being a Man. However, I feel it’s a real problem, and I’m trying to get over my own discomfort. I also believe that we’re not going to solve this issue, or any other issue, unless we acknowledge it. Do you agree with me and Scott? Is there is a reluctance to address this subject? And if so, where do you think this reluctance comes from?
Sabrina Maddeaux: Absolutely agree. There’s a reluctance and a taboo, although we’re seeing that change a little bit now. And a lot of it goes back to, well, for one thing, young men did very well economically for a long time.
I think the first layer is that a lot of politicians, even media figures, are out of touch. They don’t get the struggles of young people in general, and they even less get the struggles of young men.
When we really saw the DEI movement and “woke politics” become the trend over the last 10 years, what that did was really, especially on the left, separate people into the privileged and the not privileged, the oppressed and the oppressors. Those are very black and white categories, and once you’re in one, there’s no room for nuance or any movement. Young men got put into the category of the oppressors and the privileged.
Even though there historically have been nuances to that, now that they’re struggling so much and their needs have been abandoned, and policies were enacted that were actually discriminatory towards them when it came to employment, which has exacerbated the problem even more.
There’s this lingering fear of being labelled a men’s rights activist - as if that’s a terrible thing - or being cancelled if you acknowledge that young men are struggling. It’s become taboo. But we need young men to succeed in society. We need all young people to succeed in society.
Historically, any country that has a population of unemployed, disenfranchised, disillusioned young men who can’t start families or participate in the economic system spells disaster in many ways. It’s something that we do need to pay attention to.
I do want to say on the flip side, as this conversation has become more mainstream, I do think there’s a movement of both media and some politicians who are trying to take advantage of what young men are feeling. They’re trying to tap into those emotions. They’re saying, “I’m the only saviour for you.” Because young men don’t really have anywhere productive to put their energies, and they rightfully lost faith in institutions that have abandoned and left them behind. They might not be in the workforce, and they might be socially isolated; they’re susceptible to some more radical ideas or even people who want to take advantage of them for their own political or career gain.
So I think we have to be wary of that as well and find a way to bring young men back into the conversation and policymaking in a way that’s healthy and actually going to benefit them and not people with ulterior motives. Does that track at all with what you’ve been seeing?
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. I really worry about what a society of disenfranchised young men looks like. I think the history of the last 250 years has shown that when there are a lot of idle, unemployed, angry young men, it doesn’t end well for society. I really worry about this as well.
So that’s part of why I’m trying to get over my own discomfort with these issues and actually address them, because I worry that there’s a vacuum. If good-natured people are unafraid to discuss them, that creates a vacuum for the worst actors in society to provide solutions, and I would like to avoid that.
Sabrina Maddeaux: Me too. Well, we’ll definitely keep talking about those issues here.
Thank you, everyone, for watching and listening and to our amazing producer, Meredith Martin.
Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about Ford Talbotville, please send us an email to [email protected].
Sabrina Maddeaux: And we’ll see you next time.
Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:
What Happened to the Young Middle-Class Man?
How Do Young Men See the World? We Asked Them.
This podcast is funded by the Neptis Foundation
Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative
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