25 ms·

Education and Men without Work

192 points by mighty-fine 7y ago

Miner49er 7y ago
> but they nevertheless suggest that changes in family structure had a powerful and adverse impact on male work rates and labor-force participation rates... This article seems to assume that changes in family structures are a cause of men not working. I see no mention that it could actually be an effect of that. Who's gonna want to marry (let alone have kids with) a man who is unemployed and isn't even looking for work?
- tathougies 7y ago
  No one marries middle aged men. Well... that's hyperbole. Historically, most men would marry in their 20s. This article says that middle aged men have given up working. Those some men could have been ambitious (or ambitious enough) 20 somethings who -- due to cultural changes -- never quite married and settled down. That is to say, it is not entirely clear that an apathy problem among old men is the cause of declining marriage rates, given that most people marry well before the age of the men in the article.
- ameister14 7y ago
  >Needless to say, the relationship between family structure and prime-age male labor-force participation is complex, with causation arrows pointing both ways. Yet on balance, the net effect of such changes appears to have been a withdrawal of male labor from the workforce — a "supply-side effect," and a major one.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  Who's gonna want to marry (let alone have kids with) a man who is unemployed and isn't even looking for work? This betrays your unfamiliarity with the segment of population under question. As it turns out, lots of women will readily have kids with those men. Along with the growth of single-man household, we observe growth of single never married women with children. See for example "Promises I Can Keep" (https://www.amazon.com/Promises-Can-Keep-Motherhood-Marriage/dp/0520241134 https://www.amazon.com/Promises-Can-Keep-Motherhood-Marriage...) and "Doing the Best I Can" (https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Best-Can-Fatherhood-Inner/dp/0520274067/ref=pd_cp_14_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=E0X6WP0P7S5V7EJ8C5Z9 https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Best-Can-Fatherhood-Inner/dp/05...) for some sociological view of realities about the lives of people this discussion revolves around.
- remarkEon 7y ago
  It's an endogenous effect.
mc32 7y ago
>”The fall in participation for prime-age men has largely been concentrated among those with a high school degree or less... …” What would a high school diploma or 2 year college give them that would enable them to get higher skilled jobs? I’d be inclined to think that rather than needing “GE” (general Ed) they need vocational type trading that focuses on making them skilled in a particular area (no, not coding). That might have to be complemented with a few other skills that allow them to integrate into the workforce (what it means to be dependable, how to add value, etc., rather than “show up” which is half of it, but not all of it).
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  “What would a high school diploma or 2 year college give them that would enable them to get higher skilled jobs?” When I look at programming jobs you pretty much need a college degree to even get a company to talk to you. I wouldn’t be too surprised if there were other jobs where having 2 years of college or a high school degree is required to be even considered. There may be exceptions but in general there is a trend for employers to require certain education levels if it makes sense or not.
  - goldenManatee 7y ago
    There’s the employer expectations, but I would also bring up access to capital for launching entrepreneurial endeavors - for this category of guys and people in general. We need to target how we can encourage more small business.
  - wccrawford 7y ago
    I disagree. What you need to get your first programming job is some kind of evidence that you will be able to do the job. That might be a piece of paper from a college, but it could also be a portfolio, which is how many novice programmers get started. I actually believed what you're saying and paid for college for a couple years. When I got my first job, it turns out they didn't even care about my degree. All that mattered was that I was better than the other applicants. 1 applicant in particular had a much better resume, but I blew him out of the water on a set of BrainBench tests that the company paid for. At my current company, we mostly hire self-taught programmers because they're consistently the ones that show the most promise. Of course, at Google or Apple, this might be different, and the competition is going to be much more fierce.
tathougies 7y ago
The article is long on detail and short on suggestions (which is understandable). However, the suggestions it does make are not obviously going to work. The men illustrated in the article do not seem incapable of work, but rather disinterested. Vocational training isn't going to fix the fact that the government benefits the article cited allows the men to stay at home playing video games all day. Most people (but especially men, given the propensity of the male psyche to become dependent on dopamine) would rather take the short term thrill of continuous dopamine hits provided by video games than working to make a living. Who can really blame them? For the vast majority of history, the main impetus for men to seek status of any kind is to impress women and provide a legacy for families. As the article mentions, men who are cut off from each of these simply stop participating in the kinds of behavior that make modern society possible. Enabled by the preponderance of easily accessible government money, drugs, etc, these men, lacking any legacy or dependents to speak of, would rather bide their time hedonistically. Some, realizing their situation, choose not to bide their time at all (look at the rise of middle aged male suicides). Unfortunately, the two causes the article cites (dissolution of family structure and rise of single male households) are unaddressed. This is understandable as even mentioning these problems in high society today would be frowned upon. The article admits this, but, the writer, being part of the same society he's criticizing, falls into the same trap.
- duxup 7y ago
  > the fact that the government benefits the article cited allows the men to stay at home playing video games all day Is that actually the case? The article takes issue with the narrative that supply and demand are involved ... but I don't think this article proves this idea that folks are enjoying government benefits and that results in them not working. The article certainly mentions it, but is pretty short on evidence. Plenty of US states have been cutting benefits, and they're not seeing people go back to work.
  - rpiguy 7y ago
    Disability is a federal benefit (not state) and according to the article a whopping 2/3 of these men are on at least 1 federal disability benefit. Furthermore, 1/2 of the men take prescription pain medication daily. The government benefits certainly make it easier to not work, but the article does pain to say that correlation is not causation - it is a multi-factor phenomenon. Government benefits may enable the behavior but it isn't a cause. What really had my brain going is why is this not the case in the Western Europe? Social benefits are just as generous and marriage rates are lower than in the United States. According to the article in the US marriage and children were the strongest statistical differentiator between men who stop seeking work and those that do. All I could come up with is that in the US it is the pain medication and the fact that it is easier to isolate yourself and hole up in your home.
dx87 7y ago
It's interesting to see the contrast in discussion with other posts that talk about how we need to get rid of useless jobs. Those posts normally talk about how we need to make it so it's possible to just live off government benefits instead of spending our lives working, meanwhile this submission calls it a national crisis when men are leaving the workforce and choosing to live off of government benefits. I don't think people choosing to leave the workforce is necessarily a bad thing, but there should be a way for them to find a sense of purpose or community, if that's what they desire.
- non-entity 7y ago
  I'm not going to go into detail because it will inevitably lead to a pointless flame war, but HN seems to flip flop politically between threads that deal with primary economic issues and threads that have more of a social focus
supernova87a 7y ago
As unpopular it may be to say such a politically incorrect thing (admitting this is a generalization, and all the caveats that come with it) -- Men generally have the biological need to go do and wander and discover things. I don't know whether it's hormones or what. Debate all you like elsewhere (I'm not trying to debate that point here). My point is that when they don't get an outlet to do this, they cause trouble. Idle hands are the tools of the devil. They get in trouble, they cause trouble. They create things, but also get into trouble. And a society that doesn't provide outlets for working-aged males to go out and do things is inviting trouble. What I observe about the US is that we are making the cost of employing people so high that we have no incremental way to put people at the low end of the skills ladder (or at the high end of aging out) to even minimal use -- and the only way to get even a low level purpose in life is to be employed by a company that goes through very constrained legal and regulatory calculus to employ someone. In other countries, people who are unemployed can: -- Be community volunteers next to government workers to augment local capabilities -- Be ticket takers on buses, trains -- Be part time informal labor / delivery people -- Be "shop minders" who aren't fully employees but help when needed All these things for even a paltry wage, but purpose in life. In other countries, you notice immediately the presence of such people. But we in the US have foreclosed the ability for people to fill these roles. I guess the last time we did this was with the WPA. The very rules we have in place to protect people (and claimed benefit of workplace standards, etc) prevent many at the bottom from being useful. It's to our societal peril, as we can see lately.
- aklemm 7y ago
  It's not obvious to me that your assessment is even close to accurate, so it would help to know more about which countries you've observed and also where can we find data on this topic. My observation would be more like: there are less regulated and less bountiful countries, and there are more regulated and more bountiful countries, but I don't know of less regulated more bountiful countries.
- empath75 7y ago
  > Men generally have the biological need to go do and wander and discover things. I don't know whether it's hormones or what. Debate all you like elsewhere (I'm not trying to debate that point here). What an obnoxious thing to do. You know you're stating a controversial opinion, or you wouldn't have said that. You don't get to set the rules of conversation like that.
throwaway55554 7y ago
> Among economists and policy analysts who have examined these unsettling trends, the general consensus is that declining male workforce participation in modern America is mainly a structural, demand-driven problem — a matter of evaporating local jobs, and especially jobs requiring limited skills, in an increasingly dynamic and globalized marketplace. Basically these are the men would have traditionally "built stuff"; factory workers, etc. We don't have any factories anymore. >If this assessment is more or less correct, it would be hard to overstate the importance of education and training as instruments for addressing our "men without work" crisis. How would that help? We don't have jobs for them. And the few that maybe could find work, well, those jobs will soon enough be automated away. > Third, there is America's curiously poor prime-age male labor-force participation-rate performance in comparison with other affluent never-communist democracies. Between 1965 and 2015, U.S. levels fell faster and sank lower than in any comparable country, with the exception of Italy (where official employment figures notoriously neglect "unofficial" work income). Yet America's race to the bottom in prime-age male labor-force participation is not readily explained by lackluster economic growth (which could also be called sluggish demand). In America (USA) you ARE your job; it defines you. The American Way is to be hard working and self sufficient. If you can't do that, there are tremendous psychological effects. You can't blame these men for giving up. We need to accept that this is the way forward and stop treating people who don't work like leaches. We need to retrain society that there will be plenty of able bodied people without work and society will need to take care of them.
- leereeves 7y ago
  > We don't have any factories anymore. Factories still exist, they're just in other countries. And in China alone, they employ 100 million people.
  - jbay808 7y ago
    I don't think the parent meant otherwise. Or are you suggesting that Americans looking for unskilled factory work can just move to China and get a job? Aside from the cost and language barrier and family ties and other challenges of relocating, I think legal barriers alone (visa issues, work permits) would make that hard. It's already hard enough even for highly skilled professionals to get work permits in another country.
Merrill 7y ago
This story really needs another graph showing "NOT-IN-LABOR FORCE RATES FOR WOMEN AGES 25-54; 1965 TO 2019". See https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/images/hipple-fig6.png https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/images/hipple-fig6.png It appears that the non-participation rate for women is about twice as high as for men.
- andonisus 7y ago
  What does this have to do with men?
  - Miner49er 7y ago
    It provides some missing context.
  - downerending 7y ago
    One should always ask "compared to what?". Is this a male-specific phenomenon, or is it actually happening to all? (perhaps with females lagging by a few years) The answer matters if you're trying to solve the problem.
    - ameister14 7y ago
      >One should always ask "compared to what?". Is this a male-specific phenomenon, or is it actually happening to all? (perhaps with females lagging by a few years) The linked article does ask this - it's less helpful to use women as a counter though, as for a very long time they have had drastically different labor participation rates. The article uses men in different circumstances to illustrate their points
- scarejunba 7y ago
  So the current prevailing theory is that the guys are getting high and playing video games? What's the current prevailing theory for the girls? Doing unformalized work that doesn't show up in the stats? Also playing games and doing drugs?
jka 7y ago
Something to highlight in this article is the prevalence of pain medication use among the out-of-work population: "Apart from the small fraction (around 13% in 2015) of prime-age male non-workers who are adult students, the remainder report spending many of their waking hours watching and playing on screens — over 2,000 hours per year on average. Almost half of these non-working men report taking pain medication on any given day (which should raise a red flag for those worried about the opioid crisis)" The watching and playing on screens isn't ideal (2000h/y == 40h/wk on average -- which doesn't seem to leave a ton of room for a base level of healthy exercise and socialization) - but at least it is relatively harmless. But that half of these folks would take pain medication on a daily basis seems staggering. The author seems to correlate this abuse with the availability of opioids via Medical and Medicare. That does seem like a problem. However, reading further into the blog of the quoted author[0], that writer (who visited many affected areas during their research) attributes it to the private sector pushing opioids heavily. Personally it seems fairer to attribute most of the cause to the private industry which made the painkillers popular and mainstream, as opposed to Medicare and Medicaid, which functioning as desired should be making all healthcare more accessible (with the unfortunate inclusion of opioids as a dangerous subset of that). [0] - http://samquinones.com/reporters-blog/2016/11/21/donald-trump-opiates-america/ http://samquinones.com/reporters-blog/2016/11/21/donald-trum...
durnygbur 7y ago
Talking from the perspective of an EU country, the salary deductions on employment contract for a single person are brutal and exceeding 40% of the gross salary, while public institutions treat young single native male as their worst enemy. Enormous successes simply don't happen over here, no point engaging in a startup and risking the mental health. The dating market is... well enough was said already by now. Once achieving housing and certain financial comfort, why should one bother with employment?
puggo 7y ago
Self-checkout cash registers. Amazon. AI. When public assistance is more profitable than entry level jobs (and the maintenance of those jobs, gas, etc). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dZ_lvDgevk&t=11s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dZ_lvDgevk&t=11s
wayoutthere 7y ago
I think male socialization has left many men poorly-equipped to deal with the modern workplace. Prior to the information age, the primary challenges in the workplace were physical or motivational. So an attitude of "be tough and work through the hard times" was effective and allowed you to earn a living. Boorish behavior was tolerated or even celebrated as "male bonding". But as women entered more professions, that behavior became divisive. In the modern workplace, the primary challenges are emotional, and I don't think a lot of men have the tools to deal with them. Many men never had to learn how to deal with anxiety, fear, uncertainty or anger. Bad behavior from men was tolerated or even celebrated until recently. What worked to get them where they are is no longer appropriate going forward. So it's no wonder more men are opting out of work altogether because they feel they are in a no-win situation. You see a lot of this in "incel" communities where many self-deprecatingly refer to themselves as "neets" (no employment, education or training). To be clear here, I'm not blaming men as this is a societal problem. It does not affect all or even most men. This is part of the "toxic" aspect of "toxic masculinity" -- it harms men just as much as it harms women, only in different ways. It is possible to undo, but it takes years of therapy and a commitment to "be better" in the face of misleading signals that say you don't have to change / compromise.
- at_a_remove 7y ago
  What male socialization? Who are our teachers in the United States? Over three-quarters are women, less than a quarter men. And given that recent studies indicate that women teachers tend to rate boys (unfairly) lower than girls for the same performance, that's women's socialization teaching boys how to behave in schools. Societally? Go on, search to see what doodles Google made for Father's Day. Which parent seems to have the final say in the courts? Again, we seem to default to Mother Knows Best. What about relationships? US society seems to have ceded the ground entirely to Venus. So very, very many "men are stupid" posts on Twitter and it does not seem to have an end in sight. Men's clubs? Legislated away wherever possible, on the grounds that it granted men an unfair business advantage. Meanwhile, an organization set up for women in business and creating a co-working space for them had members complain that men are showing up, with a startling lack of self-awareness. Perhaps this is female socialization not working for boys and men.
CptFribble 7y ago
I don't see why this is such a surprise, most people hate working. I thought it was almost a truism that people work for retirement, i.e. the point in their life when they have enough saved to stop working and just relax and travel or fish or whatever. If there's a way to skip 30 years of working at a job you hate and just start now, most people would take that option. This is the basic problem with basic income, although I still think it's important and necessary, we're going to have to undertake a huge cultural shift and accept a large XX% of the populace just sitting around, vaping and playing video games all day. Not everyone is built to seek out the constant struggle of self-improvement.
- xupybd 7y ago
  The problem is balancing two parts of human nature. People like to be rewarded for their effort, some people get horribly depressed without this. The other is that people get their happiness from their wealth relative to those around them. It doesn't seem to matter how much wealth people have if inequality is high. How do you build a system that rewards the hard working but limits inequality while allowing some not to work? And how do you do this in such a way that self regulates. Those who choose to work will gain power and influence. If those start to resent those that don't work conditions will likely worsen for the non working.
  - cmdshiftf4 7y ago
    Seize the means of production and ensure a ruling government whose core is utilitarianism, comrade xupybd.
    - xupybd 7y ago
      I think the seize the means of production can be done. The ensure a ruling government whose core is utilitarianism is the tricky part.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  we're going to have to undertake a huge cultural shift and accept a large XX% of the populace just sitting around, vaping and playing video games all day I don't think most people care too much about that. Unlike communist states which forced people to work, even if the job was bullshit, this is a free country, and if someone wants to sit around doing nothing useful all day, they are perfectly welcome to do so. What the people do care about though is when the government takes their money that they earned through their work and gives it to people who sit all day vaping and playing video games, so that they can keep enjoying their leisurely lifestyle. This is blatant unfairness, being punished for working and rewarded for not working.
aazaa 7y ago
> According to the latest monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, "work rates" for American men in October 2019 stood very close to their 1939 levels, as reported in the 1940 U.S. Census. Despite some improvement since the end of the Great Recession, Great Depression-style work rates are still characteristic today for the American male, both for those of "prime working age" (defined as ages 25 to 54) and for the broader 20 to 64 group. The premise of this article is based on this statistic. Oddly enough, no definition of "work rate" is given. After some quick searching, I didn't find anything accessible, either. This may be significant. Is a full-time "investor" included in the count? What about a programmer working on a startup? What about some other kind of self-employed contractor? There are many ways a person might not show up in a tally called "work rate." Many (all?) of them have become a lot easier to pull off over the last 20 years.
- theflyinghorse 7y ago
  > Investor, entrepreneur, contractor Those would be all self employed wouldn't they? I am more interested to know how much engage in shadow economy to sustain themselves
- alfromspace 7y ago
  Labor force participation rate. It says in the article.
  - aazaa 7y ago
    Sure, but how is that measured and what does it exclude?
    - sdinsn 7y ago
      participation rate = (employed + actively seeking work population) / (non-prison population of age 16-64)
tmux314 7y ago
There's a very weird "let them eat cake" attitude in this thread which I find distressing. The study reports on the millions of working age men in the US who are essentially too depressed and face too many obstacles to search for work. Instead, they're spending their days staying inside, getting high, and playing video games. They essentially have little to no chance to pursue romantic relationships. Many of them eventually take their own lives. Perhaps some are enjoying their "hedonistic" lifestyles, but likely most have totally given up on life, much like the Japanese hikikomori. It's not healthy mentally or physically. But it seems like as long as people treat these men as "losers" who deserve their fate, the more this problem will grow.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  As far as I can tell, men have always been treated this way, in all societies: accomplish or disappear. The difference now is that automation is rendering the hill insurmountable.
  - indigochill 7y ago
    >The difference now is that automation is rendering the hill insurmountable. I would say "the difference now is that the failing educational system is rendering the hill insurmountable." Automation is just tools. Reasonably able people can learn to use tools. But they need the means to do so affordably and effectively. Our system of education, however, is largely stuck two generations back and not up to the task of preparing people for the fast-moving world we're now in. And this isn't even the fact that textbooks are out-of-date before they see print, or that greedy publishers keep educational materials locked behind arbitrarily high paywalls. The problem is deeper: people are not taught how to learn, and are in fact taught to fear learning because learning means judgement. They are not taught the joy of self-motivated learning which gives them the drive to keep actively learning on their own, which I believe is becoming an increasingly crucial trait to succeed at work.
    - chongli 7y ago
      the difference now is that the failing educational system is rendering the hill insurmountable. As an aspiring educator, it's becoming increasingly obvious to me that society expects teachers to be miracle-workers, to motivate children so they study really hard and get into a good college. Yet we don't expect the same from parents. Parents are spending less and less time with their kids, while the demands for education are growing more and more intensive. My grandfather got his first job after finishing the eighth grade. He worked for over five decades and raised six kids together with my grandmother, who was a homemaker her entire life. Both he and grandma grew up on farms with two-digit numbers of children in the family. Everyone worked from a young age and learned to provide for the household, boys and girls alike. Nowadays, we expect kids to spend a quarter of their lives or more in school. We expect them to work extremely hard and compete for a spot in a top rated school. We give them no real responsibilities apart from academics. No, cleaning your bedroom or mowing the lawn are not real responsibilities the way milking the cows or making preserves from the garden produce were for my grandparents. If you don't clean your room, nobody will go hungry. Life was much harder, physically speaking, for most people from my grandparents' generation and earlier, stretching back into antiquity. It was not harder to find purpose in life, however. Nature and the struggle to survive together with your family and community was enough for most people to feel fulfilled. Today it's the complete opposite on both accounts. Extremely easy to survive with all of the benefits, cheap food and clean water, electricity and heating available. Finding meaning amid so much plenty, on the other hand, is a monumental task.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
TurkishPoptart 7y ago
>Even after controlling for age, ethnicity, and education, married men are decidedly more likely to be in the workforce than men who have never married. This "marriage effect" is so powerful that married prime-age male high-school dropouts generate labor-force participation rates in the same league as their never-married, college-graduate peers. Analogous but somewhat less powerful effects are seen when we drill deeper into family life: Irrespective of marital status, education, and ethnicity, a prime-age man is more likely to be in the workforce if he lives in the same home as children under the age of 18, regardless of his race or education. This is pretty damn interesting but not all that surprising. For those whom the institution of marriage is still relevant (and those lucky enough to find a partner), getting up and going to work everyday is not a huge problem.
- freepor 7y ago
  Yeah, most men work because people depend on them. I don't like my job but I show up at work because what the hell else would I do? I have two kids who need food and a roof over their head.
  - ntsplnkv2 7y ago
    Isn't this why most people (incl. women) work? We work because we want to pay for food/water/shelter. Then past that we work for things that we want.
    - freepor 7y ago
      I mean clearly some people work for other reasons. Tom Brady still wants to play football at age 43 after achieving enough for two separate Hall of Fame careers. Meg Whitman is CEO of a new company even though her net worth is over $5 billion. They are doing it for other reasons.
      - ntsplnkv2 7y ago
        Yes, that is why I said "past that, we do it for things we want." In those cases, they are doing it for things they want to do. My point is it's not just a male phenomenon.
moretai 7y ago
Perhaps television fucked my head up too much, but shouldn't a society where women have equal pay, get rid of all this animal hierarchy bullshit and find someone they actually connect with? Is the divorce rate still 50%? Is all of this just to spit out a child?
freepor 7y ago
I thought that government benefits in the US were shite? I can understand why European men might opt-out but I thought that you were basically dooming yourself to homelessness without a job in America. How are these men living?
- tathougies 7y ago
  Government benefits in the US are not shit, at all. They are very generous if you qualify. The issue is qualifying, or lying to do so.
  - freepor 7y ago
    Hm, then I suspect that soon enough those benefits will go the way of the LL Bean return policy.
    - kevingadd 7y ago
      Historically the benefits are either narrowed in eligibility or more constraints are added. For example, while you can call federal disability benefits "generous" there are lots of nasty constraints that make them awful regardless - while your disability benefit may be "generous" you're forbidden from having much in the way of savings and your "net worth" for that calculation often includes things like a retirement account from work you did while you were still healthy. (Yes, really) Means-testing and carve-outs like that to catch "cheaters" are a common way to eat away at benefits in the US, and politicians are actively adding more stuff like that to food assistance and other programs currently. Means-testing is especially effective here because a "reasonable" limit can be set with the knowledge that the limit will cease to be reasonable after 5-25 years of inflation and expense increases because lawmakers will never, ever raise the limit.
- refurb 7y ago
  I laugh when people make comments like “except in places like the US that don’t have a social safety net”. A majority of the US federal budget is entitlement spending. And that doesn’t include state spending either.
thrower123 7y ago
This is the reality of what Basic Income will look like for most. It may still be a net positive, for the fraction that has enough internal gumption to self-direct into a fulfilling avenue - but many, many people will drink and drug themselves to death idly.
r0pchainer 7y ago
I am trying to figure out when people will realize that a society without healthy men taking charge and pushing forward is a dying society. It's even more obvious when we see other countries whose feminization of men has actually led to the decline of their population. Reading the sterile, cerebral responses here is a bit disconcerting, but expected given the participating audience, because "smart" people assume that our mind is remotely capable of understanding the balance behind what pushes analog, real life forward. Populations grow and prosper when their men are ALLOWED to be motivated to go out there and kick some ass. Whether it's money, women, etc... our reward centers operate on concrete, tangible stuff. It does NOT feel motivated by the premise of peace and longevity. This is great for low-testosterone men who are more than happy to abide by the rules for a little crumb of bread and some monthly semi-erect action. For fuck's sake, stop being so goddamn cerebral. I am extremely cerebral, I write and sell exploits for popular software and perform red team operations for a living. Yes, I can reason my way through shit, but nobody realizes that the human brain is a naive, finite reasoning machine operating within a narrow framework of a seemingly infinite reality. Anyway, I lift, I eat right, I get laid frequently, I stay away from marriage, I work hard, REALLY hard, and I get the rewards that I expect, I'm happy and I'm fucking killing it. A huge part of my dopamine production is because I make a ton of money, I get laid frequently, and I face physical challenges in the form of lifting/exercise. We've been so cerebral and over-engineering society recently, we are literally killing ourselves as we delude ourselves into thinking we can engineer a 100% peaceful, civilized society of healthy individuals. We exist in an analog world, life is about survival. If for one second you think you can escape nature's law, you are deluded. The law of nature doesn't throw you in a prison cell when you break its rules due to misunderstanding, it throws you in a state of deep depression, disjoint from reality, unmotivated to the point of eventually taking your own life. This is what happens when you over-govern a man. When you tell him "society only needs a small percentage of men." Do you really think we're going to escape the "animalistic" bullshit? Keep dreaming buddy. Our minds live in nature, and nature does not live in our minds. We tried, with different iterations of religions, to find a good compromise by encouraging women to be chaste and men to be respectable, but we've let one side of this equation slip tremendously. But that story is for a different day. We need to realize what's going on and loosen the strap around men's nuts. Most of them aren't capable of flipping everyone off and using your resources to your advantage. In fact, the majority of men probably CAN'T, but we can't kill the dream, we need to encourage this behavior to truly make groundbreaking advancements. You don't innovate and move forward when you over-govern. You don't move forward when you make Gods of weak individuals and protect them at all costs. This is how you serenade a society into a peaceful, purposeless, pillful depression. Wake the fuck up! I 100% expect this to be downvoted, but I hope I've reached at least one other person to wake up and break out of the system.
alexashka 7y ago
It's just corporatocracy [0] and it's inevitable effects. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy
- pmarreck 7y ago
  https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/when-to-use-its-vs-its https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/when-to-use-it...
youdontknowtho 7y ago
I'm going to say something crazy, and it's cool if you disagree if you don't call me names or kick me in the shin. Pay people to go to school. At least for a while. Why not?
- majos 7y ago
  “Why not” ideas seem hard to sell to governments populated by agents finding hard to allocate resources to their own preferred causes.
rocqua 7y ago
I've only skimmed the article, but nowhere does it seem to compare men to the overall population. As it stands, these distressing trends could hold for everyone, which makes the focus on men needless. Did I miss something here? Does anyone know whether these trends are unique to men? Because if (and that is a big if) this is not unique to men, that would be some horrible cherry picking / manipulative statistics. Regardless though, the data on unmarried non-immigrant men is really disturbing. If it extends to unmarried non-immigrant women, that would harm the narrative of the article, but still present a very big problem. In general I would expect that married people have lower labour participation, because there is a partner to pick up the slack. In general, living with two people should be cheaper per person than living alone.
- TristanDaCunha 7y ago
  I think the article takes as a given that men's labour participation is tanking, while women's isn't. For most of the audience, this will be common knowledge. Here is a graph about female participation: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.NE.ZS?locations=US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.NE.ZS?lo...
  - rocqua 7y ago
    But do we see the same disparity between immigration and marital status for women? The issue raised here isn't (I think) that labour participation is shifting away from men. It's that _men_ have some specific issues. If those same issues are present in women, we need to have a different discussion.
    - TristanDaCunha 7y ago
      Okay, thanks for the clarification. I do understand why the article hasn't touched upon this, since it's just an attempt to diagnose the pattern seen in the overall male subpopulation, which is not seen in the overall female subpopulation. But I agree it could be interesting to look there too.
ahoy 7y ago
National Affairs is a publication of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. It's important to keep in mind their ideology when reading anything they publish.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
TomMckenny 7y ago
Benefits are much more generous and much easier to get in countries with much higher worker participation. And they have the same video games in other countries too. And marriage does not cause entry in the workforce, participation in the workforce is what makes marriage partners more interested. Reduction in benefits has not and is no increasing work participation. There was not spike in worker participation in the 90s when massive "reform" was undertaken. There is no increased work force participation from the cut backs being done now or in recent years. Yet loosening of work safety regulations would certainly be expected to increase disabilities for manual laborers. So the best conclusion is that the supposed cheaters aren't. Also, if those not participating in the work force are merely enjoying life on theses supposed benefits, one would not expect the already high and ever increasing suicide rate in this sector. The author's ideology entails denying calls for higher wages by diverting what is clearly a demand/wage problem[1] into a culture war issue. [1] I'm guessing the author is a fan of Adam Smith where lack of participation is _always_ caused by under pricing. Apparently the author is willing to accept pretty thin evidence to drop Smith when that theory might benefit labor.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Welfare reform was always bullshit. It was a compromise where the Democrats got some added benefits and changes, and the Republicans got the ability to cut off traditional welfare and transition people to Social Security Disability This pushed the costs off the states’ books and the federal budget, and made the costs a problem for social security. It backfired as it created a permanent underclass and drove up Medicaid utilization and costs.
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > Welfare reform was always bullshit. ... This pushed the costs off the states’ books and the federal budget, and made the costs a problem for social security. It backfired as it created a permanent underclass and drove up Medicaid utilization and costs. I'm not entirely sure this is a bad result. Driving down welfare costs may indeed drive up medicaid costs, but this seems like a decent trade. Rather than giving people a check, give them health insurance and support for them to get their own job. Give people the minimum necessary to keep their dignity (basic housing, public education, foodstamps, basic healthcare), and if they want more give them opportunities to grab it.
okareaman 7y ago
My impression is that young people are just catching up with Bucky: “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ― Buckminster Fuller
belorn 7y ago
There is a large double standard applied here that a man who don't work is checking out of society, but a woman who does the same is a productive citizen since she can produce babies. We wanted and most of us still want equality in the work force with both women and men equality responsible to earn their place in society. The bread winner model is cultural obsolete, even through we still behave, and given many comments here on HN, still think in those terms. A mans role culturally remain to support his children and their mother. If he doesn't do this then we declare them as checking out from society, become hikikomori, an drug addict and hedonistically waster of time. Increased rates of depression and suicides only reinforce our belief that men must fulfill their role or they will only harm themselves and others. So let me make a suggestion. Maybe it is time to change the culture.
elfexec 7y ago
> Unfortunately, the two causes the article cites (dissolution of family structure and rise of single male households) are unaddressed. It's unaddressed because it's the journalist class and their kind that has waged a war against family, gender roles, gender itself and males. At least since the 90s as far as I remember, the predominant message in media is fathers are bad, males are bad and family is bad. Media has discouraged men and women from getting married, having children, encouraged divorce, abortion, etc. When a nation's media pushes nonsense like "toxic masculinity", isn't it about time to declare the media the enemy of the nation? But what's interesting is that the media are just propaganda of the elites. The elites decide the media campaigns and trends which transform and socially engineer society. The question is why? After all most of these elites and many of these journalists are males themselves. One solution is the diversification of the elites, media and society in general. Not in superficial aspects like race, gender, etc, but ideology, thought and values. Seems like there is a lot of incest within the elite/media class. They all seem to think alike and that's not a good thing. Also, these attacks on men are also ultimately attacks on women as well. Ignoring the fact that half of a woman's genetic history comes from a man ( their father ), the attacks on men ultimately harm their future prospects of a husband, family and kids. And their future hopes of happiness. Men's suicide is increasing and women's happiness has been plummeting. https://www.nber.org/papers/w14969 https://www.nber.org/papers/w14969 Add to that the below replacement birth rate of american born women, you'd think there was a crisis in america. But we can't really discuss the real issues here because it's verboten.
- notfromhere 7y ago
  The inability to understand what toxic masculinity actually is, is so very telling
  - tathougies 7y ago
    What a vapid, empty response. I would be ashamed to write something so mindless in response to a well thought out comment. It would make me feel as if I'm resorting to cliche rather than engaging in an intelligent conversation. The commenter is absolutely right that the media is obsessed with articles on toxic masculinity. This is perhaps not a bad thing in and of itself, but media space is limited, and journalists often harp on toxic masculinity to the exclusion of all else. You'd be hard pressed to find a major journalist or sociologist who would be willing to even point out which traditionally male behaviors are not toxic. That and the implicit taboo about criticizing any part of modern womanhood by the media makes it seem as if men (and white people for that matter -- and I am not white so dont play that game with me) are the only class whose toxic traits are written about so openly. The number of articles published praising women for what would previously have been grave vices dwarves the number of articles written that even dare to broach the topic of there being any goodness in traditional masculine roles, which for better or worse, it is clear men are attracted towards.
bostonvaulter2 7y ago
I can't help but think that we need a serious national discussion about this. I feel that this issue is just going to get worse, because there simply aren't enough well paying jobs to go around, especially on the lower end of the skills market (remember that only ~1/3 of the US population graduated from college). In my opinion, this is why we need a president that understands and deeply cares about this problem. This is why I am fully supporting Andrew Yang in his presidential bid. He understands the state we're in and has accepted the reality that all these jobs are not coming back and we need to start working on solutions now. But please don't take my word for it and instead look into him yourself, his Iowa Press interview is a great start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DahyKQccudQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DahyKQccudQ
alex_young 7y ago
This is a wonderful example of how to lie with statistics. Look at the first graph [0]. Super scary up and to the right line that appears to show our labor force being destroyed over time with no link to economic conditions. But wait. Look at the scale. This data represents a 6% change over 50 years. Very weak sauce. Why trust a paper that starts off by deceiving people in such a base way? [0] https://www.nationalaffairs.com/storage/app/media/Winter%202020/Eberstadt%20Charts-Tables/xeberstadtchart1small.jpg.pagespeed.ic.24sadX9bfY.webp https://www.nationalaffairs.com/storage/app/media/Winter%202...
- alex_young 7y ago
  Why the downvotes? It would be great to hear why my observation is incorrect if you disagree.
raydev 7y ago
> Disability benefits are never lavish, but, together with eligibility for additional benefits unlocked by disability enrollment and with resources from family and friends, they can and clearly do provide the basis for a viable work-free existence for many millions of prime-working-age men today. This really bugs me because I think the author has an opinion that is revealed when they say "viable." The focus is on the bare minimum benefits instead of the awful job prospects for those at the bottom. Unlivable minimum wage paired with jobs that only offer part-time employment, with wild, unpredictable shift schedules. No health benefits or any notable discounts on food or clothing or anything. These people live in areas where it's untenable to live without a car. So they end up paying more in car maintenance to drive to a job that pays them less and less. Gov't benefits that disappear the moment they get a job, which put them in a worse position than if they'd just stayed unemployed. Benefits they might need to pay back to the government. Of course people opt out. Good for them. But don't for a moment think that they're actually happy about this.
danans 7y ago
> Teachers must be not only teachers, but surrogate parents, secular confessors, makeshift therapists, boot-camp drill instructors, financial advisers, de facto cops on the beat, even truant officers or dress-rehearsal probation officers. Little wonder they cannot accomplish all these missions — much less the more modest but hardly trivial duty of inculcating academic excellence. This x 1000. We need to these issues before they get to the classroom.
75dvtwin 7y ago
I will make a guess for the causeses (that I stole from somebody smarter Tucker Carlson [1]), and if they sound plausible, also will offer solutions. a) The reason for "... Instead we have witnessed a mass exodus of men from the workforce altogether. ..." Is that man are looking for work that allows them to earn more than women, that would likely (or like) to date. Women are not likely to marry/create family with man that earns (or has less earning potential) less than them. Just as simple as that -- reasons may be deeply cultural, biological or whatever... but I believe this is to be true. Solution: De-urbanization/ De-metropolization of work opportunities. Basically more gov tech, fin tech, bio tech, and other 'high-margin' business need to spread across a given country (UK, or US or whatever). That spread will create a number of supporting job opportunities as well, that will equalize the earning potential opportunities, lower cost of living averages, create more 'geographically attractive cultural centers' and so on. That (lowering cost of living, lowering barriers of entry into sustainable jobs, with less competition), in turn, will lower the barriers of entry into economic stability -- which is a requirement for a modern family core. It is, actually, desirable, that one-person-income should be enough for a family of 4 (two parents and two children). Whether parents choose that or both work, simulatenously, is up to them. Stable family creates purpose and emotional stability, necessary for healthy work ethics. --- With that said, 3 other important fed gov initiatives that will be needed a) affordable, not necessarily free, but truly affordable health care b) 4-day / 6 hour work week as a 'encouraged' standard. c) equitable divorce model where man are treated using same criteria as woman (including for not just financial separation, but children custody as well). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgvpxE_WKxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgvpxE_WKxw
Paul-ish 7y ago
Is child rearing and changing gender norms a factor here?

192 points by mighty-fine 7y ago

> but they nevertheless suggest that changes in family structure had a powerful and adverse impact on male work rates and labor-force participation rates... This article seems to assume that changes in family structures are a cause of men not working. I see no mention that it could actually be an effect of that. Who's gonna want to marry (let alone have kids with) a man who is unemployed and isn't even looking for work?

tathougies 7y ago
No one marries middle aged men. Well... that's hyperbole. Historically, most men would marry in their 20s. This article says that middle aged men have given up working. Those some men could have been ambitious (or ambitious enough) 20 somethings who -- due to cultural changes -- never quite married and settled down. That is to say, it is not entirely clear that an apathy problem among old men is the cause of declining marriage rates, given that most people marry well before the age of the men in the article.
ameister14 7y ago
>Needless to say, the relationship between family structure and prime-age male labor-force participation is complex, with causation arrows pointing both ways. Yet on balance, the net effect of such changes appears to have been a withdrawal of male labor from the workforce — a "supply-side effect," and a major one.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
xyzzyz 7y ago
Who's gonna want to marry (let alone have kids with) a man who is unemployed and isn't even looking for work? This betrays your unfamiliarity with the segment of population under question. As it turns out, lots of women will readily have kids with those men. Along with the growth of single-man household, we observe growth of single never married women with children. See for example "Promises I Can Keep" (https://www.amazon.com/Promises-Can-Keep-Motherhood-Marriage/dp/0520241134 https://www.amazon.com/Promises-Can-Keep-Motherhood-Marriage...) and "Doing the Best I Can" (https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Best-Can-Fatherhood-Inner/dp/0520274067/ref=pd_cp_14_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=E0X6WP0P7S5V7EJ8C5Z9 https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Best-Can-Fatherhood-Inner/dp/05...) for some sociological view of realities about the lives of people this discussion revolves around.
remarkEon 7y ago
It's an endogenous effect.

mc32 7y ago

>”The fall in participation for prime-age men has largely been concentrated among those with a high school degree or less... …” What would a high school diploma or 2 year college give them that would enable them to get higher skilled jobs? I’d be inclined to think that rather than needing “GE” (general Ed) they need vocational type trading that focuses on making them skilled in a particular area (no, not coding). That might have to be complemented with a few other skills that allow them to integrate into the workforce (what it means to be dependable, how to add value, etc., rather than “show up” which is half of it, but not all of it).

Ididntdothis 7y ago
“What would a high school diploma or 2 year college give them that would enable them to get higher skilled jobs?” When I look at programming jobs you pretty much need a college degree to even get a company to talk to you. I wouldn’t be too surprised if there were other jobs where having 2 years of college or a high school degree is required to be even considered. There may be exceptions but in general there is a trend for employers to require certain education levels if it makes sense or not.
- goldenManatee 7y ago
  There’s the employer expectations, but I would also bring up access to capital for launching entrepreneurial endeavors - for this category of guys and people in general. We need to target how we can encourage more small business.
- wccrawford 7y ago
  I disagree. What you need to get your first programming job is some kind of evidence that you will be able to do the job. That might be a piece of paper from a college, but it could also be a portfolio, which is how many novice programmers get started. I actually believed what you're saying and paid for college for a couple years. When I got my first job, it turns out they didn't even care about my degree. All that mattered was that I was better than the other applicants. 1 applicant in particular had a much better resume, but I blew him out of the water on a set of BrainBench tests that the company paid for. At my current company, we mostly hire self-taught programmers because they're consistently the ones that show the most promise. Of course, at Google or Apple, this might be different, and the competition is going to be much more fierce.

tathougies 7y ago

The article is long on detail and short on suggestions (which is understandable). However, the suggestions it does make are not obviously going to work. The men illustrated in the article do not seem incapable of work, but rather disinterested. Vocational training isn't going to fix the fact that the government benefits the article cited allows the men to stay at home playing video games all day. Most people (but especially men, given the propensity of the male psyche to become dependent on dopamine) would rather take the short term thrill of continuous dopamine hits provided by video games than working to make a living. Who can really blame them? For the vast majority of history, the main impetus for men to seek status of any kind is to impress women and provide a legacy for families. As the article mentions, men who are cut off from each of these simply stop participating in the kinds of behavior that make modern society possible. Enabled by the preponderance of easily accessible government money, drugs, etc, these men, lacking any legacy or dependents to speak of, would rather bide their time hedonistically. Some, realizing their situation, choose not to bide their time at all (look at the rise of middle aged male suicides). Unfortunately, the two causes the article cites (dissolution of family structure and rise of single male households) are unaddressed. This is understandable as even mentioning these problems in high society today would be frowned upon. The article admits this, but, the writer, being part of the same society he's criticizing, falls into the same trap.

duxup 7y ago
> the fact that the government benefits the article cited allows the men to stay at home playing video games all day Is that actually the case? The article takes issue with the narrative that supply and demand are involved ... but I don't think this article proves this idea that folks are enjoying government benefits and that results in them not working. The article certainly mentions it, but is pretty short on evidence. Plenty of US states have been cutting benefits, and they're not seeing people go back to work.
- rpiguy 7y ago
  Disability is a federal benefit (not state) and according to the article a whopping 2/3 of these men are on at least 1 federal disability benefit. Furthermore, 1/2 of the men take prescription pain medication daily. The government benefits certainly make it easier to not work, but the article does pain to say that correlation is not causation - it is a multi-factor phenomenon. Government benefits may enable the behavior but it isn't a cause. What really had my brain going is why is this not the case in the Western Europe? Social benefits are just as generous and marriage rates are lower than in the United States. According to the article in the US marriage and children were the strongest statistical differentiator between men who stop seeking work and those that do. All I could come up with is that in the US it is the pain medication and the fact that it is easier to isolate yourself and hole up in your home.

dx87 7y ago

It's interesting to see the contrast in discussion with other posts that talk about how we need to get rid of useless jobs. Those posts normally talk about how we need to make it so it's possible to just live off government benefits instead of spending our lives working, meanwhile this submission calls it a national crisis when men are leaving the workforce and choosing to live off of government benefits. I don't think people choosing to leave the workforce is necessarily a bad thing, but there should be a way for them to find a sense of purpose or community, if that's what they desire.

non-entity 7y ago
I'm not going to go into detail because it will inevitably lead to a pointless flame war, but HN seems to flip flop politically between threads that deal with primary economic issues and threads that have more of a social focus

supernova87a 7y ago

As unpopular it may be to say such a politically incorrect thing (admitting this is a generalization, and all the caveats that come with it) -- Men generally have the biological need to go do and wander and discover things. I don't know whether it's hormones or what. Debate all you like elsewhere (I'm not trying to debate that point here). My point is that when they don't get an outlet to do this, they cause trouble. Idle hands are the tools of the devil. They get in trouble, they cause trouble. They create things, but also get into trouble. And a society that doesn't provide outlets for working-aged males to go out and do things is inviting trouble. What I observe about the US is that we are making the cost of employing people so high that we have no incremental way to put people at the low end of the skills ladder (or at the high end of aging out) to even minimal use -- and the only way to get even a low level purpose in life is to be employed by a company that goes through very constrained legal and regulatory calculus to employ someone. In other countries, people who are unemployed can: -- Be community volunteers next to government workers to augment local capabilities -- Be ticket takers on buses, trains -- Be part time informal labor / delivery people -- Be "shop minders" who aren't fully employees but help when needed All these things for even a paltry wage, but purpose in life. In other countries, you notice immediately the presence of such people. But we in the US have foreclosed the ability for people to fill these roles. I guess the last time we did this was with the WPA. The very rules we have in place to protect people (and claimed benefit of workplace standards, etc) prevent many at the bottom from being useful. It's to our societal peril, as we can see lately.

aklemm 7y ago
It's not obvious to me that your assessment is even close to accurate, so it would help to know more about which countries you've observed and also where can we find data on this topic. My observation would be more like: there are less regulated and less bountiful countries, and there are more regulated and more bountiful countries, but I don't know of less regulated more bountiful countries.
empath75 7y ago
> Men generally have the biological need to go do and wander and discover things. I don't know whether it's hormones or what. Debate all you like elsewhere (I'm not trying to debate that point here). What an obnoxious thing to do. You know you're stating a controversial opinion, or you wouldn't have said that. You don't get to set the rules of conversation like that.

throwaway55554 7y ago

> Among economists and policy analysts who have examined these unsettling trends, the general consensus is that declining male workforce participation in modern America is mainly a structural, demand-driven problem — a matter of evaporating local jobs, and especially jobs requiring limited skills, in an increasingly dynamic and globalized marketplace. Basically these are the men would have traditionally "built stuff"; factory workers, etc. We don't have any factories anymore. >If this assessment is more or less correct, it would be hard to overstate the importance of education and training as instruments for addressing our "men without work" crisis. How would that help? We don't have jobs for them. And the few that maybe could find work, well, those jobs will soon enough be automated away. > Third, there is America's curiously poor prime-age male labor-force participation-rate performance in comparison with other affluent never-communist democracies. Between 1965 and 2015, U.S. levels fell faster and sank lower than in any comparable country, with the exception of Italy (where official employment figures notoriously neglect "unofficial" work income). Yet America's race to the bottom in prime-age male labor-force participation is not readily explained by lackluster economic growth (which could also be called sluggish demand). In America (USA) you ARE your job; it defines you. The American Way is to be hard working and self sufficient. If you can't do that, there are tremendous psychological effects. You can't blame these men for giving up. We need to accept that this is the way forward and stop treating people who don't work like leaches. We need to retrain society that there will be plenty of able bodied people without work and society will need to take care of them.

leereeves 7y ago
> We don't have any factories anymore. Factories still exist, they're just in other countries. And in China alone, they employ 100 million people.
- jbay808 7y ago
  I don't think the parent meant otherwise. Or are you suggesting that Americans looking for unskilled factory work can just move to China and get a job? Aside from the cost and language barrier and family ties and other challenges of relocating, I think legal barriers alone (visa issues, work permits) would make that hard. It's already hard enough even for highly skilled professionals to get work permits in another country.

Merrill 7y ago

This story really needs another graph showing "NOT-IN-LABOR FORCE RATES FOR WOMEN AGES 25-54; 1965 TO 2019". See https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/images/hipple-fig6.png https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/images/hipple-fig6.png It appears that the non-participation rate for women is about twice as high as for men.

andonisus 7y ago
What does this have to do with men?
- Miner49er 7y ago
  It provides some missing context.
- downerending 7y ago
  One should always ask "compared to what?". Is this a male-specific phenomenon, or is it actually happening to all? (perhaps with females lagging by a few years) The answer matters if you're trying to solve the problem.
  - ameister14 7y ago
    >One should always ask "compared to what?". Is this a male-specific phenomenon, or is it actually happening to all? (perhaps with females lagging by a few years) The linked article does ask this - it's less helpful to use women as a counter though, as for a very long time they have had drastically different labor participation rates. The article uses men in different circumstances to illustrate their points
scarejunba 7y ago
So the current prevailing theory is that the guys are getting high and playing video games? What's the current prevailing theory for the girls? Doing unformalized work that doesn't show up in the stats? Also playing games and doing drugs?

jka 7y ago

Something to highlight in this article is the prevalence of pain medication use among the out-of-work population: "Apart from the small fraction (around 13% in 2015) of prime-age male non-workers who are adult students, the remainder report spending many of their waking hours watching and playing on screens — over 2,000 hours per year on average. Almost half of these non-working men report taking pain medication on any given day (which should raise a red flag for those worried about the opioid crisis)" The watching and playing on screens isn't ideal (2000h/y == 40h/wk on average -- which doesn't seem to leave a ton of room for a base level of healthy exercise and socialization) - but at least it is relatively harmless. But that half of these folks would take pain medication on a daily basis seems staggering. The author seems to correlate this abuse with the availability of opioids via Medical and Medicare. That does seem like a problem. However, reading further into the blog of the quoted author[0], that writer (who visited many affected areas during their research) attributes it to the private sector pushing opioids heavily. Personally it seems fairer to attribute most of the cause to the private industry which made the painkillers popular and mainstream, as opposed to Medicare and Medicaid, which functioning as desired should be making all healthcare more accessible (with the unfortunate inclusion of opioids as a dangerous subset of that). [0] - http://samquinones.com/reporters-blog/2016/11/21/donald-trump-opiates-america/ http://samquinones.com/reporters-blog/2016/11/21/donald-trum...

durnygbur 7y ago

Talking from the perspective of an EU country, the salary deductions on employment contract for a single person are brutal and exceeding 40% of the gross salary, while public institutions treat young single native male as their worst enemy. Enormous successes simply don't happen over here, no point engaging in a startup and risking the mental health. The dating market is... well enough was said already by now. Once achieving housing and certain financial comfort, why should one bother with employment?

puggo 7y ago

Self-checkout cash registers. Amazon. AI. When public assistance is more profitable than entry level jobs (and the maintenance of those jobs, gas, etc). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dZ_lvDgevk&t=11s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dZ_lvDgevk&t=11s

wayoutthere 7y ago

I think male socialization has left many men poorly-equipped to deal with the modern workplace. Prior to the information age, the primary challenges in the workplace were physical or motivational. So an attitude of "be tough and work through the hard times" was effective and allowed you to earn a living. Boorish behavior was tolerated or even celebrated as "male bonding". But as women entered more professions, that behavior became divisive. In the modern workplace, the primary challenges are emotional, and I don't think a lot of men have the tools to deal with them. Many men never had to learn how to deal with anxiety, fear, uncertainty or anger. Bad behavior from men was tolerated or even celebrated until recently. What worked to get them where they are is no longer appropriate going forward. So it's no wonder more men are opting out of work altogether because they feel they are in a no-win situation. You see a lot of this in "incel" communities where many self-deprecatingly refer to themselves as "neets" (no employment, education or training). To be clear here, I'm not blaming men as this is a societal problem. It does not affect all or even most men. This is part of the "toxic" aspect of "toxic masculinity" -- it harms men just as much as it harms women, only in different ways. It is possible to undo, but it takes years of therapy and a commitment to "be better" in the face of misleading signals that say you don't have to change / compromise.

at_a_remove 7y ago
What male socialization? Who are our teachers in the United States? Over three-quarters are women, less than a quarter men. And given that recent studies indicate that women teachers tend to rate boys (unfairly) lower than girls for the same performance, that's women's socialization teaching boys how to behave in schools. Societally? Go on, search to see what doodles Google made for Father's Day. Which parent seems to have the final say in the courts? Again, we seem to default to Mother Knows Best. What about relationships? US society seems to have ceded the ground entirely to Venus. So very, very many "men are stupid" posts on Twitter and it does not seem to have an end in sight. Men's clubs? Legislated away wherever possible, on the grounds that it granted men an unfair business advantage. Meanwhile, an organization set up for women in business and creating a co-working space for them had members complain that men are showing up, with a startling lack of self-awareness. Perhaps this is female socialization not working for boys and men.

CptFribble 7y ago

I don't see why this is such a surprise, most people hate working. I thought it was almost a truism that people work for retirement, i.e. the point in their life when they have enough saved to stop working and just relax and travel or fish or whatever. If there's a way to skip 30 years of working at a job you hate and just start now, most people would take that option. This is the basic problem with basic income, although I still think it's important and necessary, we're going to have to undertake a huge cultural shift and accept a large XX% of the populace just sitting around, vaping and playing video games all day. Not everyone is built to seek out the constant struggle of self-improvement.

xupybd 7y ago
The problem is balancing two parts of human nature. People like to be rewarded for their effort, some people get horribly depressed without this. The other is that people get their happiness from their wealth relative to those around them. It doesn't seem to matter how much wealth people have if inequality is high. How do you build a system that rewards the hard working but limits inequality while allowing some not to work? And how do you do this in such a way that self regulates. Those who choose to work will gain power and influence. If those start to resent those that don't work conditions will likely worsen for the non working.
- cmdshiftf4 7y ago
  Seize the means of production and ensure a ruling government whose core is utilitarianism, comrade xupybd.
  - xupybd 7y ago
    I think the seize the means of production can be done. The ensure a ruling government whose core is utilitarianism is the tricky part.
xyzzyz 7y ago
we're going to have to undertake a huge cultural shift and accept a large XX% of the populace just sitting around, vaping and playing video games all day I don't think most people care too much about that. Unlike communist states which forced people to work, even if the job was bullshit, this is a free country, and if someone wants to sit around doing nothing useful all day, they are perfectly welcome to do so. What the people do care about though is when the government takes their money that they earned through their work and gives it to people who sit all day vaping and playing video games, so that they can keep enjoying their leisurely lifestyle. This is blatant unfairness, being punished for working and rewarded for not working.

aazaa 7y ago

> According to the latest monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, "work rates" for American men in October 2019 stood very close to their 1939 levels, as reported in the 1940 U.S. Census. Despite some improvement since the end of the Great Recession, Great Depression-style work rates are still characteristic today for the American male, both for those of "prime working age" (defined as ages 25 to 54) and for the broader 20 to 64 group. The premise of this article is based on this statistic. Oddly enough, no definition of "work rate" is given. After some quick searching, I didn't find anything accessible, either. This may be significant. Is a full-time "investor" included in the count? What about a programmer working on a startup? What about some other kind of self-employed contractor? There are many ways a person might not show up in a tally called "work rate." Many (all?) of them have become a lot easier to pull off over the last 20 years.

theflyinghorse 7y ago
> Investor, entrepreneur, contractor Those would be all self employed wouldn't they? I am more interested to know how much engage in shadow economy to sustain themselves
alfromspace 7y ago
Labor force participation rate. It says in the article.
- aazaa 7y ago
  Sure, but how is that measured and what does it exclude?
  - sdinsn 7y ago
    participation rate = (employed + actively seeking work population) / (non-prison population of age 16-64)

tmux314 7y ago

There's a very weird "let them eat cake" attitude in this thread which I find distressing. The study reports on the millions of working age men in the US who are essentially too depressed and face too many obstacles to search for work. Instead, they're spending their days staying inside, getting high, and playing video games. They essentially have little to no chance to pursue romantic relationships. Many of them eventually take their own lives. Perhaps some are enjoying their "hedonistic" lifestyles, but likely most have totally given up on life, much like the Japanese hikikomori. It's not healthy mentally or physically. But it seems like as long as people treat these men as "losers" who deserve their fate, the more this problem will grow.

commandlinefan 7y ago
As far as I can tell, men have always been treated this way, in all societies: accomplish or disappear. The difference now is that automation is rendering the hill insurmountable.
- indigochill 7y ago
  >The difference now is that automation is rendering the hill insurmountable. I would say "the difference now is that the failing educational system is rendering the hill insurmountable." Automation is just tools. Reasonably able people can learn to use tools. But they need the means to do so affordably and effectively. Our system of education, however, is largely stuck two generations back and not up to the task of preparing people for the fast-moving world we're now in. And this isn't even the fact that textbooks are out-of-date before they see print, or that greedy publishers keep educational materials locked behind arbitrarily high paywalls. The problem is deeper: people are not taught how to learn, and are in fact taught to fear learning because learning means judgement. They are not taught the joy of self-motivated learning which gives them the drive to keep actively learning on their own, which I believe is becoming an increasingly crucial trait to succeed at work.
  - chongli 7y ago
    the difference now is that the failing educational system is rendering the hill insurmountable. As an aspiring educator, it's becoming increasingly obvious to me that society expects teachers to be miracle-workers, to motivate children so they study really hard and get into a good college. Yet we don't expect the same from parents. Parents are spending less and less time with their kids, while the demands for education are growing more and more intensive. My grandfather got his first job after finishing the eighth grade. He worked for over five decades and raised six kids together with my grandmother, who was a homemaker her entire life. Both he and grandma grew up on farms with two-digit numbers of children in the family. Everyone worked from a young age and learned to provide for the household, boys and girls alike. Nowadays, we expect kids to spend a quarter of their lives or more in school. We expect them to work extremely hard and compete for a spot in a top rated school. We give them no real responsibilities apart from academics. No, cleaning your bedroom or mowing the lawn are not real responsibilities the way milking the cows or making preserves from the garden produce were for my grandparents. If you don't clean your room, nobody will go hungry. Life was much harder, physically speaking, for most people from my grandparents' generation and earlier, stretching back into antiquity. It was not harder to find purpose in life, however. Nature and the struggle to survive together with your family and community was enough for most people to feel fulfilled. Today it's the complete opposite on both accounts. Extremely easy to survive with all of the benefits, cheap food and clean water, electricity and heating available. Finding meaning amid so much plenty, on the other hand, is a monumental task.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

TurkishPoptart 7y ago

>Even after controlling for age, ethnicity, and education, married men are decidedly more likely to be in the workforce than men who have never married. This "marriage effect" is so powerful that married prime-age male high-school dropouts generate labor-force participation rates in the same league as their never-married, college-graduate peers. Analogous but somewhat less powerful effects are seen when we drill deeper into family life: Irrespective of marital status, education, and ethnicity, a prime-age man is more likely to be in the workforce if he lives in the same home as children under the age of 18, regardless of his race or education. This is pretty damn interesting but not all that surprising. For those whom the institution of marriage is still relevant (and those lucky enough to find a partner), getting up and going to work everyday is not a huge problem.

freepor 7y ago
Yeah, most men work because people depend on them. I don't like my job but I show up at work because what the hell else would I do? I have two kids who need food and a roof over their head.
- ntsplnkv2 7y ago
  Isn't this why most people (incl. women) work? We work because we want to pay for food/water/shelter. Then past that we work for things that we want.
  - freepor 7y ago
    I mean clearly some people work for other reasons. Tom Brady still wants to play football at age 43 after achieving enough for two separate Hall of Fame careers. Meg Whitman is CEO of a new company even though her net worth is over $5 billion. They are doing it for other reasons.
    - ntsplnkv2 7y ago
      Yes, that is why I said "past that, we do it for things we want." In those cases, they are doing it for things they want to do. My point is it's not just a male phenomenon.

moretai 7y ago

Perhaps television fucked my head up too much, but shouldn't a society where women have equal pay, get rid of all this animal hierarchy bullshit and find someone they actually connect with? Is the divorce rate still 50%? Is all of this just to spit out a child?

freepor 7y ago

I thought that government benefits in the US were shite? I can understand why European men might opt-out but I thought that you were basically dooming yourself to homelessness without a job in America. How are these men living?

tathougies 7y ago
Government benefits in the US are not shit, at all. They are very generous if you qualify. The issue is qualifying, or lying to do so.
- freepor 7y ago
  Hm, then I suspect that soon enough those benefits will go the way of the LL Bean return policy.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    Historically the benefits are either narrowed in eligibility or more constraints are added. For example, while you can call federal disability benefits "generous" there are lots of nasty constraints that make them awful regardless - while your disability benefit may be "generous" you're forbidden from having much in the way of savings and your "net worth" for that calculation often includes things like a retirement account from work you did while you were still healthy. (Yes, really) Means-testing and carve-outs like that to catch "cheaters" are a common way to eat away at benefits in the US, and politicians are actively adding more stuff like that to food assistance and other programs currently. Means-testing is especially effective here because a "reasonable" limit can be set with the knowledge that the limit will cease to be reasonable after 5-25 years of inflation and expense increases because lawmakers will never, ever raise the limit.
refurb 7y ago
I laugh when people make comments like “except in places like the US that don’t have a social safety net”. A majority of the US federal budget is entitlement spending. And that doesn’t include state spending either.

thrower123 7y ago

This is the reality of what Basic Income will look like for most. It may still be a net positive, for the fraction that has enough internal gumption to self-direct into a fulfilling avenue - but many, many people will drink and drug themselves to death idly.

r0pchainer 7y ago

I am trying to figure out when people will realize that a society without healthy men taking charge and pushing forward is a dying society. It's even more obvious when we see other countries whose feminization of men has actually led to the decline of their population. Reading the sterile, cerebral responses here is a bit disconcerting, but expected given the participating audience, because "smart" people assume that our mind is remotely capable of understanding the balance behind what pushes analog, real life forward. Populations grow and prosper when their men are ALLOWED to be motivated to go out there and kick some ass. Whether it's money, women, etc... our reward centers operate on concrete, tangible stuff. It does NOT feel motivated by the premise of peace and longevity. This is great for low-testosterone men who are more than happy to abide by the rules for a little crumb of bread and some monthly semi-erect action. For fuck's sake, stop being so goddamn cerebral. I am extremely cerebral, I write and sell exploits for popular software and perform red team operations for a living. Yes, I can reason my way through shit, but nobody realizes that the human brain is a naive, finite reasoning machine operating within a narrow framework of a seemingly infinite reality. Anyway, I lift, I eat right, I get laid frequently, I stay away from marriage, I work hard, REALLY hard, and I get the rewards that I expect, I'm happy and I'm fucking killing it. A huge part of my dopamine production is because I make a ton of money, I get laid frequently, and I face physical challenges in the form of lifting/exercise. We've been so cerebral and over-engineering society recently, we are literally killing ourselves as we delude ourselves into thinking we can engineer a 100% peaceful, civilized society of healthy individuals. We exist in an analog world, life is about survival. If for one second you think you can escape nature's law, you are deluded. The law of nature doesn't throw you in a prison cell when you break its rules due to misunderstanding, it throws you in a state of deep depression, disjoint from reality, unmotivated to the point of eventually taking your own life. This is what happens when you over-govern a man. When you tell him "society only needs a small percentage of men." Do you really think we're going to escape the "animalistic" bullshit? Keep dreaming buddy. Our minds live in nature, and nature does not live in our minds. We tried, with different iterations of religions, to find a good compromise by encouraging women to be chaste and men to be respectable, but we've let one side of this equation slip tremendously. But that story is for a different day. We need to realize what's going on and loosen the strap around men's nuts. Most of them aren't capable of flipping everyone off and using your resources to your advantage. In fact, the majority of men probably CAN'T, but we can't kill the dream, we need to encourage this behavior to truly make groundbreaking advancements. You don't innovate and move forward when you over-govern. You don't move forward when you make Gods of weak individuals and protect them at all costs. This is how you serenade a society into a peaceful, purposeless, pillful depression. Wake the fuck up! I 100% expect this to be downvoted, but I hope I've reached at least one other person to wake up and break out of the system.

alexashka 7y ago

It's just corporatocracy [0] and it's inevitable effects. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy

pmarreck 7y ago
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/when-to-use-its-vs-its https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/when-to-use-it...

youdontknowtho 7y ago

I'm going to say something crazy, and it's cool if you disagree if you don't call me names or kick me in the shin. Pay people to go to school. At least for a while. Why not?

majos 7y ago
“Why not” ideas seem hard to sell to governments populated by agents finding hard to allocate resources to their own preferred causes.

rocqua 7y ago

I've only skimmed the article, but nowhere does it seem to compare men to the overall population. As it stands, these distressing trends could hold for everyone, which makes the focus on men needless. Did I miss something here? Does anyone know whether these trends are unique to men? Because if (and that is a big if) this is not unique to men, that would be some horrible cherry picking / manipulative statistics. Regardless though, the data on unmarried non-immigrant men is really disturbing. If it extends to unmarried non-immigrant women, that would harm the narrative of the article, but still present a very big problem. In general I would expect that married people have lower labour participation, because there is a partner to pick up the slack. In general, living with two people should be cheaper per person than living alone.

TristanDaCunha 7y ago
I think the article takes as a given that men's labour participation is tanking, while women's isn't. For most of the audience, this will be common knowledge. Here is a graph about female participation: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.NE.ZS?locations=US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.NE.ZS?lo...
- rocqua 7y ago
  But do we see the same disparity between immigration and marital status for women? The issue raised here isn't (I think) that labour participation is shifting away from men. It's that _men_ have some specific issues. If those same issues are present in women, we need to have a different discussion.
  - TristanDaCunha 7y ago
    Okay, thanks for the clarification. I do understand why the article hasn't touched upon this, since it's just an attempt to diagnose the pattern seen in the overall male subpopulation, which is not seen in the overall female subpopulation. But I agree it could be interesting to look there too.

ahoy 7y ago

National Affairs is a publication of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. It's important to keep in mind their ideology when reading anything they publish.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

TomMckenny 7y ago

Benefits are much more generous and much easier to get in countries with much higher worker participation. And they have the same video games in other countries too. And marriage does not cause entry in the workforce, participation in the workforce is what makes marriage partners more interested. Reduction in benefits has not and is no increasing work participation. There was not spike in worker participation in the 90s when massive "reform" was undertaken. There is no increased work force participation from the cut backs being done now or in recent years. Yet loosening of work safety regulations would certainly be expected to increase disabilities for manual laborers. So the best conclusion is that the supposed cheaters aren't. Also, if those not participating in the work force are merely enjoying life on theses supposed benefits, one would not expect the already high and ever increasing suicide rate in this sector. The author's ideology entails denying calls for higher wages by diverting what is clearly a demand/wage problem[1] into a culture war issue. [1] I'm guessing the author is a fan of Adam Smith where lack of participation is _always_ caused by under pricing. Apparently the author is willing to accept pretty thin evidence to drop Smith when that theory might benefit labor.

Spooky23 7y ago
Welfare reform was always bullshit. It was a compromise where the Democrats got some added benefits and changes, and the Republicans got the ability to cut off traditional welfare and transition people to Social Security Disability This pushed the costs off the states’ books and the federal budget, and made the costs a problem for social security. It backfired as it created a permanent underclass and drove up Medicaid utilization and costs.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > Welfare reform was always bullshit. ... This pushed the costs off the states’ books and the federal budget, and made the costs a problem for social security. It backfired as it created a permanent underclass and drove up Medicaid utilization and costs. I'm not entirely sure this is a bad result. Driving down welfare costs may indeed drive up medicaid costs, but this seems like a decent trade. Rather than giving people a check, give them health insurance and support for them to get their own job. Give people the minimum necessary to keep their dignity (basic housing, public education, foodstamps, basic healthcare), and if they want more give them opportunities to grab it.

okareaman 7y ago

My impression is that young people are just catching up with Bucky: “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ― Buckminster Fuller

belorn 7y ago

There is a large double standard applied here that a man who don't work is checking out of society, but a woman who does the same is a productive citizen since she can produce babies. We wanted and most of us still want equality in the work force with both women and men equality responsible to earn their place in society. The bread winner model is cultural obsolete, even through we still behave, and given many comments here on HN, still think in those terms. A mans role culturally remain to support his children and their mother. If he doesn't do this then we declare them as checking out from society, become hikikomori, an drug addict and hedonistically waster of time. Increased rates of depression and suicides only reinforce our belief that men must fulfill their role or they will only harm themselves and others. So let me make a suggestion. Maybe it is time to change the culture.

elfexec 7y ago

> Unfortunately, the two causes the article cites (dissolution of family structure and rise of single male households) are unaddressed. It's unaddressed because it's the journalist class and their kind that has waged a war against family, gender roles, gender itself and males. At least since the 90s as far as I remember, the predominant message in media is fathers are bad, males are bad and family is bad. Media has discouraged men and women from getting married, having children, encouraged divorce, abortion, etc. When a nation's media pushes nonsense like "toxic masculinity", isn't it about time to declare the media the enemy of the nation? But what's interesting is that the media are just propaganda of the elites. The elites decide the media campaigns and trends which transform and socially engineer society. The question is why? After all most of these elites and many of these journalists are males themselves. One solution is the diversification of the elites, media and society in general. Not in superficial aspects like race, gender, etc, but ideology, thought and values. Seems like there is a lot of incest within the elite/media class. They all seem to think alike and that's not a good thing. Also, these attacks on men are also ultimately attacks on women as well. Ignoring the fact that half of a woman's genetic history comes from a man ( their father ), the attacks on men ultimately harm their future prospects of a husband, family and kids. And their future hopes of happiness. Men's suicide is increasing and women's happiness has been plummeting. https://www.nber.org/papers/w14969 https://www.nber.org/papers/w14969 Add to that the below replacement birth rate of american born women, you'd think there was a crisis in america. But we can't really discuss the real issues here because it's verboten.

notfromhere 7y ago
The inability to understand what toxic masculinity actually is, is so very telling
- tathougies 7y ago
  What a vapid, empty response. I would be ashamed to write something so mindless in response to a well thought out comment. It would make me feel as if I'm resorting to cliche rather than engaging in an intelligent conversation. The commenter is absolutely right that the media is obsessed with articles on toxic masculinity. This is perhaps not a bad thing in and of itself, but media space is limited, and journalists often harp on toxic masculinity to the exclusion of all else. You'd be hard pressed to find a major journalist or sociologist who would be willing to even point out which traditionally male behaviors are not toxic. That and the implicit taboo about criticizing any part of modern womanhood by the media makes it seem as if men (and white people for that matter -- and I am not white so dont play that game with me) are the only class whose toxic traits are written about so openly. The number of articles published praising women for what would previously have been grave vices dwarves the number of articles written that even dare to broach the topic of there being any goodness in traditional masculine roles, which for better or worse, it is clear men are attracted towards.

bostonvaulter2 7y ago

I can't help but think that we need a serious national discussion about this. I feel that this issue is just going to get worse, because there simply aren't enough well paying jobs to go around, especially on the lower end of the skills market (remember that only ~1/3 of the US population graduated from college). In my opinion, this is why we need a president that understands and deeply cares about this problem. This is why I am fully supporting Andrew Yang in his presidential bid. He understands the state we're in and has accepted the reality that all these jobs are not coming back and we need to start working on solutions now. But please don't take my word for it and instead look into him yourself, his Iowa Press interview is a great start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DahyKQccudQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DahyKQccudQ

alex_young 7y ago

This is a wonderful example of how to lie with statistics. Look at the first graph [0]. Super scary up and to the right line that appears to show our labor force being destroyed over time with no link to economic conditions. But wait. Look at the scale. This data represents a 6% change over 50 years. Very weak sauce. Why trust a paper that starts off by deceiving people in such a base way? [0] https://www.nationalaffairs.com/storage/app/media/Winter%202020/Eberstadt%20Charts-Tables/xeberstadtchart1small.jpg.pagespeed.ic.24sadX9bfY.webp https://www.nationalaffairs.com/storage/app/media/Winter%202...

alex_young 7y ago
Why the downvotes? It would be great to hear why my observation is incorrect if you disagree.

raydev 7y ago

> Disability benefits are never lavish, but, together with eligibility for additional benefits unlocked by disability enrollment and with resources from family and friends, they can and clearly do provide the basis for a viable work-free existence for many millions of prime-working-age men today. This really bugs me because I think the author has an opinion that is revealed when they say "viable." The focus is on the bare minimum benefits instead of the awful job prospects for those at the bottom. Unlivable minimum wage paired with jobs that only offer part-time employment, with wild, unpredictable shift schedules. No health benefits or any notable discounts on food or clothing or anything. These people live in areas where it's untenable to live without a car. So they end up paying more in car maintenance to drive to a job that pays them less and less. Gov't benefits that disappear the moment they get a job, which put them in a worse position than if they'd just stayed unemployed. Benefits they might need to pay back to the government. Of course people opt out. Good for them. But don't for a moment think that they're actually happy about this.

danans 7y ago

> Teachers must be not only teachers, but surrogate parents, secular confessors, makeshift therapists, boot-camp drill instructors, financial advisers, de facto cops on the beat, even truant officers or dress-rehearsal probation officers. Little wonder they cannot accomplish all these missions — much less the more modest but hardly trivial duty of inculcating academic excellence. This x 1000. We need to these issues before they get to the classroom.

75dvtwin 7y ago

I will make a guess for the causeses (that I stole from somebody smarter Tucker Carlson [1]), and if they sound plausible, also will offer solutions. a) The reason for "... Instead we have witnessed a mass exodus of men from the workforce altogether. ..." Is that man are looking for work that allows them to earn more than women, that would likely (or like) to date. Women are not likely to marry/create family with man that earns (or has less earning potential) less than them. Just as simple as that -- reasons may be deeply cultural, biological or whatever... but I believe this is to be true. Solution: De-urbanization/ De-metropolization of work opportunities. Basically more gov tech, fin tech, bio tech, and other 'high-margin' business need to spread across a given country (UK, or US or whatever). That spread will create a number of supporting job opportunities as well, that will equalize the earning potential opportunities, lower cost of living averages, create more 'geographically attractive cultural centers' and so on. That (lowering cost of living, lowering barriers of entry into sustainable jobs, with less competition), in turn, will lower the barriers of entry into economic stability -- which is a requirement for a modern family core. It is, actually, desirable, that one-person-income should be enough for a family of 4 (two parents and two children). Whether parents choose that or both work, simulatenously, is up to them. Stable family creates purpose and emotional stability, necessary for healthy work ethics. --- With that said, 3 other important fed gov initiatives that will be needed a) affordable, not necessarily free, but truly affordable health care b) 4-day / 6 hour work week as a 'encouraged' standard. c) equitable divorce model where man are treated using same criteria as woman (including for not just financial separation, but children custody as well). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgvpxE_WKxw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgvpxE_WKxw

Paul-ish 7y ago

Is child rearing and changing gender norms a factor here?