Climate change and the rise of adult male dropouts

Climate change and the rise of adult male dropouts Masahiro Yoshida from Waseda University’s Department of Political Science and Economics explores the link between global warming and male labor force participation. The Earth has become the hottest planet on record. Global temperature increase has been unprecedented for two millennia, (1) since the late 19th century. Temperatures have steadily risen since the 1970s and accelerated further after 2000. In July 2023, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres announced, “The era of global warming has ended. The era of global boiling has arrived.” This project proposes a new hypothesis suggesting that climate change, particularly the rising temperatures since 2000, has contributed to a significant decline in the labor force participation rate (LFPR) of adult males – a trend that is widely observed in developed countries, but is most pronounced in the United States.