5 ms·
Badly educated men have not adapted well to trade, technology or feminism (2015)
- csours 9y agoPoorly educated or badly educated? Badly educated would indicate that the education is based on incorrect facts or processes. Poorly educated would indicate that there may not be enough education, etc.
- bognition 9y agoDepending on where we are talking about both are a real problem (at least in the United States)
- thrownblown 9y agoPaying attention is a skill that needs to be taught in school. It's hardly the fault of the student if the schools don't engage and challenge them. The American education system fed me lie after lie after lie. All public schools teach lies, some even don't even pretend and teach creationism.
- quirkot 9y agoI am reminded of my chemistry professor's lament. "I can't count how many students I've failed for not knowing things that were later proven to be untrue"
- thrownblown 9y agoYou had a chemistry classes in a public school? You're lucky. No English teacher would write that sentence.
- Nihilartikel 9y agoI can understand the spirit and frustration of the lament, but it presents the hazard of the unhelpful and fallacious interpretation that "I might as well not teach them any of this in the first place since some of it might end up just being wrong!" Science is not about always being right. It is about knowing and building upon the best knowledge available, while maintaining the intellectual humility and curiosity to continually challenge the best available knowledge and revise it towards a measurably better state. That is how the mountain is climbed.
- markwaldron 9y agoYou state that the education system taught you lies, and then generalize that all public schools teach lies. Did you attend every public school in the nation?
- thrownblown 9y agoI attended a great public high school staffed by a faculty that, for the most part, actually cared about the people they raised into their community. Some of them had good intentions with their lies (Creationists), but they're still lies. Regardless, it was overflowing with lies. Especially history.
- SaintGhurka 9y agoWould you mind identifying where? And when you went to school where they were teaching creationism? I hate to challenge you on that, but really, where is this actually done in the US?
- thrownblown 9y agoHuntland TN.
- ams6110 9y agoThe real problem is that public education for the last few decades has been focused on the college-bound student. If your background, family financial status, or academic record indicate that you are not going to college, you are a non-entity (possible exception if you are athletically gifted). If you are not college-bound you get no real attention or guidance. You are not taught about entrepreneurship, trades, or other options that might be good for you. You are not taught about managing money, personal finance, the traps of high-interest credit debt, or anything else practical. It's assumed you'll put in your time and "graduate" (or simply drop out), get some menial job, and that's your life. Nobody spares ten seconds of thought on you if you are not college-bound.
- devonkim 9y agoPaying attention is something that some students frequently have doing because their home life is so terrible and "teaching it" is already a problem. Students in many underserved communities come to school having trouble sleeping or eating, and this destroys performance in school. Most teachers overwhelmed with behavioral problems while trying to teach completely nonsensical curriculums established by non-educators simply punish these students with in school suspension or detention which further ostracizes these students that are oftentimes already picked on by peers. Blaming schools entirely for root causes sometimes stemming from students coming from bad home lives is nonsensical just as much as it is to remove blame from students for their individual performance. Our most often cited statistics simply don't do a good job of decoupling social factors of aggregate academic achievement from the variables schools themselves do control.
- Afforess 9y agoBadly. Education processes are not built around learning, nor around meta-learning (learning how to learn new information). Education is still built largely around _retaining_, testing, and hoarding knowledge, without interest in discovery or the processes that created knowledge. This medieval mindset holds back much of the education system. A larger essay on many of the problems and sources of these problems: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-speech/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-...
- samirillian 9y agoBut I don't think that was the author's intention. Uneducated would have sufficed.
- Afforess 9y agoI don't think undereducation is correct here. You could spend 50 years re-experiencing K-12 education in America and that will not earn you skills that are simply not taught there.
- samirillian 9y agoYeah, but then the premise is just a tautology: education that doesn't teach you what we consider important is a bad education. I mean, it's a lot of energy to spend thinking about a such a poorly-conceived essay. Or is it badly conceived?
- ams6110 9y agoI do think it's badly, particularly if you are not a college-bound student. If you're not going to college, you are a write-off in today's public education system.
- cpr 9y ago<< The dead hand of male domination is a problem for women, for society as a whole—and for men like those of Tallulah. >> Nothing like leading the argument...
- trendia 9y agoI hoped reading this would provide insight, but instead it only offered some random eassywriter's disdain of people different from him/herself.
- krath94 9y agoWelcome to 2017 America.
- killjoywashere 9y agoI believe the staff of The Economist is sourced primarily from Great Britain, and since they refuse to add bylines, it's impossible to know where this author is actually from.
- cookiecaper 9y agoYeah, it's very disappointing to see a stalwart like The Economist descend into publishing this type of drivel. It starts at the conclusions it wishes to make and works backwards. I don't think this passes the quality muster to cross the threshold of HN's political relevance/interest barrier.
- justinzollars 9y agoI work with a dude who is 50 from Michigan. It's amazing to hear stories of what an American lifestyle in the 70's and 80's was like. With 40,000 income he could buy a house, a vacation house in northern Michigan, a boat and two great vacations a year. Its hard to admit standards of living are decreasing. There is def a lot of blame to go around. I agree one should not be disdainful of people who are different. This red team vs blue team logic is getting us no where.
- MaxfordAndSons 9y agoThis article is NOT "the red team vs blue team logic", it's data driven, dispassionate reporting, which gp is projecting partisan bias because they just don't like the conclusions it's finding.
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- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- programminggeek 9y agoIf it makes you feel any better millennials haven't adapted well either.
- ergothus 9y agoI find the topic interesting, but the article looks to be doing a lot of guessing causation from results. I.e. In low-skilled jobs that are projected to have growth, women are more represented than men. It then wanders around different topics - effects on heterosexual relationship when "eligible" members of one sex are in low supply, etc. But I was most interested in that initial argument, and it wasn't given much support. " Everywhere you look in Tallulah there are women working: in the motels that cater to passing truckers, in the restaurants that serve all-you-can-eat catfish buffets, in shops, clinics and local government offices. But though unskilled men might do some of those jobs, they are unlikely to want them or to be picked for them." In my mind, there's a big difference between "not wanting" and "wanting but not getting", but the article lumps those together. All in all, a great article for raising some theories, and the facts offered point out some questions we might not have had, but precious little evidence of any particular answers, just evidence to shoot down a few theories (and those disproven theories aren't covered). Not to say I think the article's suggestions are WRONG...I just don't have any reasons from the article to think they are right.
- arcanus 9y agoI largely agree. It lost me greatly when it stated, > Few women in rich countries now need a man’s support to raise a family. (They might want it, but they don’t need it.) I'm a man, and my wife is back to work after giving birth to our child. Raising a family seems to be a massively two person job. I have absolutely no idea how anyone can manage it alone and keep their sanity and not neglect their job and child. Blanket statements such as this (instead of asking if single family homes might be resulting in worse outcomes for children) are where the article appeared to have an agenda.
- arkh 9y ago> I have absolutely no idea how anyone can manage it alone Not alone. The State (so, everyone paying taxes) is always here to help single parents.
- llamataboot 9y ago
- empath75 9y agoThis was from Oct 2016, btw.
- danielparks 9y agoThanks. I was kind of surprised about how articulate President Trump was. It would be nice if that were noted somewhere on the page (maybe it is on the desktop site — I'm on mobile).
- Klockan 9y agoActually it was from May 2015, you just looked at the last comment.
- mk303 9y agoClickbait or should I say hatebait article. Its sad how the economist has become just another garbage clickbait site staffed by incompetent writers more focused on social division then actual economics.
- triangleman 9y agoHow many karma points do you need before you can start voting down stories?
- cookiecaper 9y agoYou can't downvote stories. You can only flag them. I'm not sure where the karma threshold is. I flagged this one, though. :)
- krath94 9y ago"Although there is no reason in theory why men could not become nurses or care-home assistants, few do." This is true, but why is it that the shortage of women in technology fields is attributed to them not being accepted or even forced out? Maybe this isn't the general attitude, but I have certainly heard people say that woman aren't in tech as much because they feel unwelcome, whereas when talking about men in those other fields, it's because "they don't want to."
- douche 9y agoNo good ever comes out of going down this rabbit hole.
- coldtea 9y agoYeah, god forbid people say anything that goes against the assumptions of du jour, which should be permanently set in stone...
- douche 9y agoI mean, we have this conversation thread like every third day. I'm not sure that there's anything left to be said that hasn't been beaten into the ground, over, and over, and over. Nobody is convincing anybody, we'll just yell at each other for a while. Maybe that makes some people happy.
- circlefavshape 9y agoI've seen lots of yelling, but no actual conversation.
- reitanqild 9y agoI mean, we have this conversation thread like every third day. Which means many here find it interesting. I'm not sure that there's anything left to be said that hasn't been beaten into the ground, over, and over, and over. Not true IMO. The fact that you still don't see any nuance here should tell us that this is still an important discussion. Many of us men has experienced being systematically and officially discriminated against during school. Note: I am not saying girls aren't discriminated against. I actually think they have it worse (I have seen some of it and it was ugly). I'm just saying this discussion really lacks nuance.
- dualogy 9y ago> Badly educated men have not adapted well to trade, technology or feminism Surprise! "Education" is the tool to adapt us descendants of egalitarian (gender and otherwise), fraternalistic, communal, polygamous, nomadic ice-age hunters to settled agricultural civilization, aka "trade, technology, feminism"
- mtgx 9y agoThen free public college would be nice, wouldn't it?
- cookiecaper 9y agoNo, because the same complaints are equally applicable to the highly literate MA holders that serve coffee and fast food. The "uneducated men" in this article have the advantage of not being saddled with 50k in debt, and they probably end up getting paid more with jobs like groundskeeper and forklift operator. Making college free would remove that advantage and loop it back onto the group that is already positioned to get themselves into college.
- strictnein 9y ago"Free"
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jimmywanger 9y agoWhat an awful article. It says in one breath that women are already better adapted to the modern world than men are, and in the next, says that "things still need to be done". You can't have it both ways. Pick one thesis and stay with it. I also like how women are still portrayed as victims in this article, even though they have better jobs and better careers than men do. Like I said, pick one.
- brink 9y agoThis system of educational one-upmanship where someone will try to discredit others due to their formal education rather than logical fallacies in their argument just comes off as inaccurate and pretentious to me.
- bneumann 9y ago"Some 95% of Fortune 500 CEOs are male, as are 98% of the self-made billionaires on the Forbes rich list and 93% of the world’s heads of government..." It CAN'T be related to women's desires or choices: men and women are IDENTICAL! again, "And those old stereotypes are deeply ingrained in the minds of the men they marginalise; they no more see jobs centred on serving or caring as their sort of thing than society does..." It CAN'T be related to men's desires or choices: men and women are IDENTICAL! Are we ready yet to consider that men and women, while EQUAL, may not be IDENTICAL?????
- _pmf_ 9y agoA lot of research seems to be going towards what men do wrong. Doing the same "research" on women and generalizing it similarly would of course be considered deeply sexist and misogynist.
- panglott 9y agoIt's a little unclear in the article why unemployment should lead to this family structure of single mothers having kids with three different fathers (US family law strongly favors motherly custodyy), until this: "For many men in Tallulah, the greatest obstacle to finding a job is that they have already fallen foul of the law. ...And here the falling fortunes of working-class men do further damage. In 1960, among never-married American adults aged 25-34, there were 139 men with jobs for every 100 women, with or without jobs. ...By 2012 there were only 91 employed men for every 100 women in this group. ...Even a small imbalance can have big effects. Imagine a simplified “mating market” consisting of ten men and ten women, all heterosexual. Everyone pairs up. Now take one man away. One woman is doomed to be single, so she may opt to poach another woman’s partner. A chain reaction ensues: all the women are suddenly less secure in their relationships. Some of the men, by contrast, become tempted to play the field rather than settle down. In most rich countries the supply of eligible blue-collar men does not match demand. Among black Americans, thanks to mass incarceration, it does not come close. For every 100 African-American women aged 25-54 who are not behind bars, there are only 83 men of the same age at liberty." Even more reason for "ban the box" https://www.vox.com/2015/11/2/9660282/obama-ban-the-box https://www.vox.com/2015/11/2/9660282/obama-ban-the-box
- nwatson 9y agoSomething Obama and the Koch brothers can agree on: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/koch-industries-brothers-criminal-history-job-applicants-ban-the-box-117382 http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/koch-industries-brothe...
- lhnz 9y ago> It is inevitable that more men will earn less > than their female partners in years to come. > To pull their weight, they will have to do > more at home. Will this actually work though? Anecdotally, women seem less interested in partnering with men who make less money than them no matter what other benefits they provide. I rarely hear of men breaking up with women because they weren't "ambitious enough" or weren't "their equals" however I hear this fairly frequently from women. Hopefully as more women become the economic winners of their families they will fully accept the position of being the bread-winner instead of continuing to search for men that will 'be their equal' or outperform them. Until that happens men are going to continue to feel pressure to live up to outdated patriarchal ideals, with both winners and losers.
- padseeker 9y agoApparently this story has been flagged. Why?
- cyphunk 9y agoan answer to this would be nice. I could imagine some valid reasons but considering where we are (a place generally sensistive to things that could be considered "male-bashing") one does wonder.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- root_axis 9y agoBecause users flagged it. Why did various individuals flag it? You'll have to ask them on an individual basis, but it's clear based on the comments that some view the article as inflammatory. I'd bet there are also quite a few that flag anything explicitly discussing gender or politics if it doesn't involve a tech company.
- mathieutd 9y agoGood question. This is very puzzling.
- swang 9y agoit is really interesting the automatic assumption of people in this thread, considering i'm guessing most didn't read past the first story about low-income men not finding work. perhaps the use of the word feminism enforces an opinion right away regardless of what the article says.
- zeteo 9y agoTallulah, LA is 77% African American [1]. I'm surprised The Economist would publish this kind of victim-blaming about a very marginalized community: > men like those of Tallulah [...] lack the resources of training, of imagination and of opportunity to adapt to the new demands > poorly educated men are often much worse at things such as showing up on time and being pleasant to customers > criminality, alas, remains an option for men of all skill sets [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallulah,_Louisiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallulah,_Louisiana
- jankedeen 9y agoWar. These are the men who are missing out on the great civilized purge of useless, direction-less, education-less, baby dads. Not practicable anymore. There is no great enemy, the military services don't want these problem children. Our direction is unsustainable but nobody likes this particular historical necessity.
- cJ0th 9y ago> In “The End of Men”, a good book with a somewhat excessive title, Hanna Rosin notes that of the 30 occupations expected to grow fastest in America in the coming years, women dominate 20, including nursing, accounting, child care and food preparation. What would happen if accounting falls prey to automation in the coming years? Would many former female accountants be willing to become nurses or to prepare food for a living? Well, we don't know. I just find it toxic to look at this topic at the men vs women level even though many of the men described in the article probably are idiots. Who gets labeled what highly depends on circumstances a single actor can not really influence. These problems are structural and they only exist because society as a whole fails to make sure that every human being finds a productive place in it. Take the guy mentioned in the article who sold small amounts of Marijuana, for instance. In the state he's living, it's illegal and thus he gets labeled a criminal. In another state he could work at a legal Marijuana shop just like others work in food preparation. In one state selling Marijuana makes you a dumb criminal, in a different state you get congratulated for your ability to adapt because you've picked a fast growing occupation.
- enoughisenough 9y agotrade, technology or feminism Easiest game of "one of these things is not like the other" ever! I also love the ham-fisted implication that "feminism" is a positive thing that "educated" men should aspire to. I'm sure all the well read people on here who don't brainlessly follow herd mentality and question the status quo will think for themselves. I'm sure the HN "community" isn't a bunch of back patting glorified redditors. Downvote away you point slaves.
- Anthony-G 9y agoI found the article to be insightful and interesting in how it used broad strokes to tie together the social changes (feminism, the welfare state, the contraceptive pill, class and gender differences in attitudes to counselling) and economic changes, (mechanisation, globalisation, the decline of industry, lower pay for unskilled labour) and how these changes impact on well-being (both individual happiness and successful relationships). The article also highlighted that class is just as relevant as gender: “the fact that the highest rungs have male feet all over them is scant comfort for the men at the bottom”.
- I_am_neo 9y agoUse of Badly is aweful grammer, use poorly instead
- lamontcg 9y ago> If you want to be a truck driver, you need at least an eighth-grade education to handle the paperwork, she observes; Until the computers do all the truck driving, then you'll need a college degree to program/repair them.