[HN Gopher] The data are clear: The boys are not all right
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The data are clear: The boys are not all right
Author : paulpauper
Score : 226 points
Date : 2022-02-09 17:01 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| thrway99 wrote:
| My observation is that we are going to have a radical rebalancing
| of who reproduces and who doesn't.
|
| Lot of men and women who are generally not too motivated to seek
| out a companion, lose weight, put in the work to make it happen
| just...won't pass on genetics.
|
| Children are a lot of work and energy.
|
| I'm highly introverted and high earning. My wife was the
| aggressor in my case. She pretty much made it all happen.
|
| I think the ball is firmly in the woman's court now. Women have
| most of the advantages (education, societal promotion, fit in
| better with our institutions) yet i see so many women who are
| generally apathetic about getting into a relationship at all.
|
| There is also a massive obesity problem. If people have trouble
| getting attracted to each other versus the alternatives, makes it
| really challenging to find the motivation.
|
| I wonder what all these effects will have over the next 200
| years? If you play out the changing "relationship market
| conditions," it seems like men and women with different
| personalities and dispositions towards seeking out relationships
| in order to reproduce will have a significant effect on the
| species.
|
| Will people who were genetically predisposed towards being thin,
| hard working, open minded to approaching members of opposite sex
| and forming deep attachments resulting in children become more
| frequent?
|
| On a genetic and evolutionary perspective I'm super interested -
| we know that IQ has been rising, but what else will change?
|
| In some societies such as Korea I am told, women are sometimes or
| more frequently the aggressor. I wonder if this becomes more
| common.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > I think the ball is firmly in the woman's court now. Women
| have most of the advantages (education, societal promotion, fit
| in better with our institutions)
|
| I don't think we at all can define what individuals should do
| based on their gender; that is sort of the point. They can be
| who and what they want to be.
|
| Maybe by some theory women have most of the advantages, but the
| outcomes clearly indicate otherwise. Look at the successful and
| elite in almost any field.
| JabavuAdams wrote:
| A note on fitness. Any pressure I've had to lose weight or
| whatnot has come from _me_. All female partners have said that
| they don 't care about my weight, and some actually like some
| belly to rest on. That said, they have commented favourably on
| other physical features, and I'm not particularly overweight.
|
| I say all this just to try and fight the idea that crops up
| that if you're male and don't fit some jacked or "Chad" ideal
| that there's no one out there for you (who you'd have an
| awesome time with). When I look at the incel subculture, it's
| doubly sad because these boys are being fed a model of how
| attraction, sex, and dating works that is just flat out wrong.
| It's like a self-harm club based on false premises.
| Gortal278 wrote:
| I think the op was talking of being obese, which it sounds
| like you are not.
| gryfft wrote:
| >It's like a self-harm club based on false premises.
|
| My only sticking point with your comment is it's not _like_
| that, it _is_ that.
| someguydave wrote:
| Height is way more important than fitness to women.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I don't know. It seems like the middle to upper class is having
| fewer kids, while the lower middle class and poor are having
| more kids. This could be a bunch of different factors like most
| needing dual income to do well but not having time with the
| kids, assistance programs increasing and targeting kids, etc.
| The ability of people to connect via dating services is high,
| including the people you categorized as not passing on genetics
| to be able to meet others in the same category.
| sharikous wrote:
| > while the lower middle class and poor are having more kids
|
| Most statistics show indeed lower middle class and poor are
| having more kids than higher income families, but in time the
| number is decreasing for them too
| wolverine876 wrote:
| People have been finding partners and having children ... for
| the entire history of homo sapiens, and our homo ancestors, and
| their ancestors back to the dawn of sexual reproduction. In
| fact, there is probably nothing we are better evolved to do
| than find a partner, make babies, and raise them.
| throwaway6532 wrote:
| >I wonder what all these effects will have over the next 200
| years?
|
| Well with a birth rate below replacement level there will be
| less and less people with each generation if the birth rate
| stays at that level, so in 200 years there's virtually no one
| left or something like that.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Lot of men and women who are generally not too motivated to
| seek out a companion, lose weight, put in the work to make it
| happen
|
| I don't think you need these things to find a partner and have
| children.
|
| Just go to a maternity ward. It sounds like you think everyone
| there is highly motivated, physically fit, and dedicated to
| working on relationships. They aren't. They're just normal
| people with a range of human flaws and a regular cross-section
| of society. Fat, thin, lazy, hard-working, professional,
| unemployed, etc.
|
| Having kids isn't as hard as you make it sound!
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| IDK starting the baby making process isn't terribly difficult
| once one has a partner. It's the carrying to term and
| everything after that is a lot of time, money, and energy.
|
| Some folks will struggle more with the partnering aspect than
| others. Or mustering the will and resources to begin
| parenting.
| grvdrm wrote:
| Spend some time reading about infertility at the start of
| the baby making process and I think you'll find that it can
| terribly difficult. Especially as you progress into your
| mid/late 30s (women). And it is that starting process that
| can also cost lots of money, time, and energy.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Great call out. I forgot about some struggles in this
| regard myself, though IME dwarfed by the aftermath.
| urthor wrote:
| Throwaway's point about how the system is extremely self-
| selecting is still a very good one though.
| fusionbro wrote:
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| The very rich by ability and the very poor by inability to
| attain family planning, and everyone else in TX.
|
| I maybe in a skewed population (FAANG) but women are much more
| aggressive here in urban areas. While I was walking downtown, a
| woman pulled her Mercedes over in traffic and shouted an offer
| at me. I thought she was hilarious and bold but not attractive
| enough.
|
| In the past, this was sometimes a thing too: in 1943, my
| grandmother (15) decided to have my grandfather (21 - war vet
| at 17 by lying). Their 70-year marriage was technically illegal
| too.
| humanrebar wrote:
| [deleted]
| luckydata wrote:
| This is such a weird take. You really don't need to be all that
| special or beautiful to find a partner, I've always been a
| stocky guy all my life and I never had a real issue finding
| sexual partners and now I'm happily married with kids.
|
| Get yourself a personality, don't be weird, dress decently and
| talk to people. That's really all you need, no matter what you
| look like there's someone out there that's into it.
|
| Don't overcomplicate simple things.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| I think the obesity problem is linked to the fact that many
| people have to work 60 hours a week to survive and don't have
| the time/energy to get in shape.
|
| Capitalism has taken a large swath of people out of the dating
| game just due to working to survive.
| orange_joe wrote:
| People work 10% fewer hours now than in the 1960s, but the
| obesity rate has gone up from 13% in that time period to 36%.
| The obesity crisis is IMO more related to what we eat, and an
| increasingly sedentary lifestyle.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG
| brailsafe wrote:
| This may be true, but people are probably commuting for
| vastly more time per day to their suburban wasteland house
| that can only be driven to, than fewer minutes worked would
| compensate for, and the money doesn't go as far--possibly
| because they felt spending $60k on a dumb car, and 9 hours
| a week in it, was more sensible than spending 2 hours a
| week in a physical hobby.
|
| https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2019001/articl
| e...
| bradlys wrote:
| People worked different jobs back then and did different
| things for recreation. Food was also different and so were
| the wages and cost of living.
|
| Plz don't trivialize it.
| diordiderot wrote:
| Not having a wife at home to make meals, because all
| households _need_ dual incomes
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| Being overweight is overwhelmingly related to eating habits.
| As the sage advice goes: "you can't outrun a bad diet"
|
| You may have an argument with the absolute bullshit that
| people eat in our consumerist society but the fact of the
| matter is, if your calorie needs are 2000/day and you eat
| 14000 calories per week of grains, pulses, veg, fruit, meat,
| etc in the 'right' amounts, you'll stay trim if you're trim,
| you'll stay fat if you're fat, and any changes need you to
| adjust the calorie balance accordingly through eating more,
| eating less or exercising more.
| luckydata wrote:
| Obesity is largely linked to economic incentives and urban
| design. The USA for example is dead set on building car
| dependent cities, which has an knock on effect on both the
| amount of free time available to leisure and the activity.
|
| In some countries people are slimmer without making a real
| effort cause there's a higher percentage of people walking to
| work, and there's less time spent in traffic so that can be
| redirected to leisure and exercise.
| TylerLives wrote:
| IQ has been declining for a while now -
| https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718793115
| ninkendo wrote:
| For males, in Norway, from 1962-1991, and with a range of
| roughly three points. Got anything a little more
| widespread/recent to back up that claim?
|
| Here's what Our World in Data says:
| https://ourworldindata.org/intelligence
| krona wrote:
| This should keep you busy: https://scholar.google.co.uk/sch
| olar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=An...
| wahern wrote:
| > Got anything a little more widespread/recent to back up
| that claim?
|
| The Norwegian study cited to "Dutton E, van der Linden D,
| Lynn R (2016) The negative Flynn effect: A systematic
| literature review. Intelligence 59:163-169". Here's the HN
| thread on that paper specifically:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13723859 (Haven't read
| it myself; was just curious.)
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| Have some respect for yourself.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| What do you mean? This is already happening. And in general
| single mothers are becoming the norm, as the article
| already mentions.
| 202202092037 wrote:
| He meant have some respect for youself and don't get
| involved with such women.
| tmnstr85 wrote:
| White, straight, male, 37 with two kids. One who is severely
| disabled and under the age of 5. In the past couple of years, its
| become clear to me that I will probably become a caretaker to my
| daughter at some point in my life. The prospects of keeping a
| full time job, in my field are quickly changing - I am no longer
| desired. Doing this in a financial services setting is especially
| stark because there's no empathy. Its been really rough the past
| couple of years. I am trying to find my peace with the idea that
| I've done a good job, I did everything I was supposed to do, but
| there were forces outside my control that will dictate the
| future. My wife just made partner at her firm, and I was told by
| a c level executive, of color, that I'm "no longer part of where
| the firm culture is headed". I see this issue every day, it gets
| harder as we get older. As we head towards 2024, that sentiment
| on the other side of the fence gains momentum from this type of
| isolation, regardless of race. It will be interesting to see how
| many men vote in 2024 vs. previous elections.
| emerged wrote:
| White, straight male in my 40s who worked hard to build a
| decent career. The feeling that this culture _hates_ me based
| on each of those categories, completely without knowing me, is
| hard to ignore much longer without a response.
|
| The feeling comes from being on the losing side of _every_
| action the government and popular culture takes. Being told
| that you can't even be involved in a conversation about that
| fact.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Go look at Google's Mother's Day doodles. Go look at Google's
| Father's Day doodles (if you can find them, suspiciously
| absent for a while).
|
| "Men are trash." "Men are awful." Then look up on Wikipedia
| the "Women are wonderful" effect. And of course the ever-
| popular "dick is abundant and low-value."
|
| You get suggestions like white people should be vaccinated
| last. And so on and so on. It just never stops.
|
| It's hard to be left when it feels they hate me.
| bestouff wrote:
| White, straight male (too far) into in my 40s, but in France:
| for now I don't witness that. There is overall concern for
| women and minorities, but no hate towards my "category".
|
| Reading what happens elsewhere, I'm happy to live in a more
| cohesive society.
| mynameishere wrote:
| Just wait then, or pay attention. France is as doomed as
| any other Western country. Zemmour doesn't stand a chance,
| and is probably a fraud anyway.
| rustybelt wrote:
| Would you mind sharing the region of the country you live in?
| This is unlike anything I've ever heard of in my small city in
| the midwest.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ninja3925 wrote:
| What are a terrible thing to say. I am deeply saddened by your
| experience and I hope you will find fulfillment somewhere else.
|
| All the best.
| [deleted]
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > As men's unemployment rises, their romantic prospects decline.
|
| Conversely: as young men's potential future employability rises,
| their romantic prospects also decline. That is - the men who'll
| grow up to be stable and reliable have lonely teenage years.
| bitwize wrote:
| Hey, sports teach valuable life skills -- life skills the
| socially awkward often miss out on. Things like grit, teamwork,
| and not being a sore loser, as well as the importance of
| keeping your body in shape. In fact we are having a crisis of
| not enough boys doing sports, and as a consequence elite
| military units can't find enough recruits who meet the baseline
| physical fitness standards.
|
| A reasonably intelligent person with an athletic background
| probably did well socially in HS, and will probably do well in
| the working world.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Is this actually true? This feels a bit like a post-facto
| generalization from specific situations. "I was a nerd and
| didn't go on dates. Being a nerd got me into software and now I
| make a lot of money. Therefore people who are on the path to
| high earning are not getting dates."
|
| My experience has been that a lot of the stereotypical jocks
| ended up in finance and are doing quite well and that software
| is no longer dominated by social loners.
| babyshake wrote:
| A lot of popular kids and jocks end up in management in tech
| while the loners and kids of immigrants are the ones actually
| creating the software.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Even if this were true (jocks go into management and
| management is useless), it would be the opposite of what
| the parent was saying about the people on the path to high
| pay rarely having romantic relationships since management
| tends to pay well.
| sulam wrote:
| source?
| humanrebar wrote:
| Maybe true but there's a lot of survivorship bias in the
| population. Software shops are often hurting for clear
| communicators. Winsome folks tend to get bumped into
| leadership roles even if they start out slinging curly
| braces and semicolons.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| People who have strong social skills will tend to do well.
| The premise seems very doubtful.
| urthor wrote:
| https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2763720
|
| 36% higher lifetime income for joining a college
| fraternity.
|
| The numbers don't lie.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The meme is not about income or physical fitness, it's about
| psychological aggressiveness. Highly un-aggressive men are
| considered emotionally unattractive and don't get dates
| because, for one thing, they're afraid to ask, but they're
| nice and dependable and will take care of you forever. Highly
| aggressive men come across as dynamic and interesting, and
| turn out to have five mistresses in three states and a
| warrant out for their arrest in two of them.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| As a guy, you can handily subvert this dynamic by learning
| to act _assertive_ in a way that implicitly appeals to
| others ' sensation seeking, without being so _aggressive_
| that you end up being off-putting to others or even scaring
| them away.
| rhino369 wrote:
| A lot of stable and reliable men have really good teenage
| years.
|
| There is definitely an arc-type of socially awkward boys who
| grow up to be engineers, accountants, etc. But within that
| group, romantic prospects are positively correlated with
| employment prospects. An awkward guy w/ a job is better than an
| awkward guy w/o one.
| n4r9 wrote:
| FYI I think "archetype" is the word you intended.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Thank you!
| ketzo wrote:
| Yeah, the idea that employability _necessitates_ a decline in
| romantic prospects is so comically backwards that it 's hard
| to even take seriously.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > That is - the men who'll grow up to be stable and reliable
| have lonely teenage years.
|
| Wouldn't that be nice? That sort of karma is not really
| guaranteed to exist. Chances are the ostracized lonely
| introvert will be worse off due to poor networking and if he
| finds any success at all it will be _despite_ many
| disadvantages. Meanwhile, asshole bullies could very well go on
| to become their bosses because sociopathy is often found in
| powerful people.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I'm one of these men and I hope this actually works out in the
| end. I sense that men also have a biological clock but we can
| reassure ourselves that we can keep putting off settling down
| because of the biological reality of male reproduction. If I
| just get a little more successful, then I will be more
| attractive in courtship. But the thing is, you lose track of
| time really quickly. And, it is quite the bootstrapping problem
| to catch up on romantic social skills that you didn't cultivate
| earlier in life. Being awkward around women in High School is a
| given, but as a thirty-something it can be profoundly
| uncomfortable and off-putting.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Good luck to you. I'm in the same boat and it's comforting to
| not be alone. I've sacrificed a social and romantic life to
| get to this point (20 year old, fairly well paid DevOps guy).
| There are days that I immensely regret leaving school at 16
| and terminating my youth early but financially speaking it
| was the best decision ever. I just push onwards, hope for
| life to become fun, and hope that I won't become a cautionary
| tale.
| recuter wrote:
| Please please please try to find good outgoing non-techy
| roommates that you can tolerate while you are at this age.
| Even better if they are good with girls. Do not live alone
| just because you can afford to do so. Try to spend as
| little as possible of your salary and regardless of the
| market buy a house/apartment as soon as you can. Live in
| the smallest room.
|
| There are plenty of excellent places in the world where you
| can have a reasonable quality of life for about $10k/year,
| your goal is to have that covered from your real estate
| income. Go do that as soon as you can, travel slow.
| Overnight trains, house/pet sitting, couch surfing, 'etc
| are all good things to try.
|
| Try to find a remote job and never touch your salary income
| again, keep investing it. Do not mention your net worth to
| anyone.
|
| You will find in a few years that "DevOps" is a very finite
| skillset so there is no real need to push so hard as you'll
| know most of what you need to know in about 3 more years if
| you do not already.
|
| No reason not to have a social and romantic life and great
| weekends. I'm quite confident your employer and less
| talented peers are exploiting your age and willingness to
| put in long hours.
|
| Don't be available after hours and avoid being on call as
| much as possible.
|
| You only get your 20s once. Make memories.
|
| Money is important but you need less than you think and is
| never a worthy goal in and of itself. You can convince
| yourself of this by reading up on behavioral economics.
| Optimize for quality of life. Have a FU-money number, reach
| it, and bail.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Appreciate the advice. It is a bit harder than it sounds
| though. Building a friend circle from scratch is harder
| than any technical challenge I've faced before. I
| overcame my social anxiousness for the most part but that
| doesn't mean I can cold approach people and build a
| conversation up to a friendship.
|
| Anyway, HN is hardly the place for this kind of topic but
| thanks again. I'm giving it my best but it's not a piece
| of cake.
| recuter wrote:
| Hence the roommates.
|
| HN is certainly the place for this kind of topic, it is
| one of the most important topics discussed here. I've
| been on this site for over a decade and was exactly in
| your shoes when I found it.
|
| Tech crap comes and goes and is repetitive. You'll sponge
| it all up sooner or later anyway.
|
| It is absolutely not a piece of cake, I know buddy. It
| requires a massive investment on your part and I am
| flailing around to really drive home the fact that it is
| worth literally ALL THE EFFORT YOU CAN MUSTER.
| Guaranteed.
|
| I sincerely hope you succeed in making the very necessary
| changes you know deep down you have to make. Best of
| luck!
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Being awkward around women in High School is a given, but
| as a thirty-something it can be profoundly uncomfortable and
| off-putting.
|
| Males should be fixing that by making some female friends.
| Don't go the "creepy incel who hates all women and Chads"
| route.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Try that in a town with double the men that there are
| women. Easier to switch hit.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Where is the ratio that skewed?!
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >" Don't go the "creepy incel who hates all women and
| Chads" route"
|
| Absolutely. I am on the autism spectrum so part of the
| difficulty I have can be attributed to that. However I
| accept that my social shortcomings are my own
| responsibility. I think a big part of the problem is
| finding new friends now that I am in my 30's and life is
| very stagnant.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| The problem is people, including women, get to pick their
| friends. If you're branded as awkward or ugly _all_ women
| will avoid you leading to a self-perpetuating cycle.
|
| Since women can pick their friends and generally pick
| gregarious, outgoing, and socially competent men for their
| friend groups, they ignore and do not understand the type
| of man who is labelled an incel.
| JabavuAdams wrote:
| No, these are false premises. All of my female partners
| have had the feedback from someone that "you're just like
| a guy". The so called "girl next door" wearing sweats,
| and rocking a bad-hair-day ponytail because she's late
| for her lab may be way hotter when she dresses up than
| the median film actress. She may be an awesome friend.
| She may be a frickin' monster in bed, without giving off
| any porn-star vibes.
|
| Incels are fundamentally working off a broken model of
| women, attraction, dating, and sex.
|
| EDUT> Not getting "Stacy" is making them crazy, but they
| don't realize that they don't want Stacy. Stacy's frumpy-
| seeming neighbour will rock their world.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Incels are fundamentally working off a broken model of
| women, attraction, dating, and sex.
|
| That broken model is unfortunately widespread in both
| genders. Some "girls next door" can basically feel like
| failures in the dating/relationships sphere, which ends
| up making them even less appealing to others. It's worth
| trying to fix this of course, but it's not always easy.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Surely one's romantic prospects should not be set in the
| teenage years. Or even be affected all that much by contingent
| employment status, when future potential might be far more
| relevant.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| As another reply touches on, there's a developmental process
| to romance. A guy in his thirties dating for the first time
| will have a seriously hard time because of his inexperience.
| I'm not saying that it's impossible at that point but missing
| the boat in your teenage years can stunt this development. I
| think Jordan Peterson has described this in one of his
| lectures (it's an interesting idea regardless of what you
| think of his character).
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Interesting. I'm just one person, but: I've enjoyed stable
| employment as a programmer since I was 23, and my teenage years
| and early 20s were easily my most socially (and romantically)
| active, and I rarely felt lonely then. I've felt most lonely in
| my late 20s and early 30s.
|
| I sometimes wonder if my career destroyed my ability to make
| and keep friends.
| folkhack wrote:
| Yeah anecdotally same experience.
|
| Social groups just dry up when you get to your late 20's as
| people are marrying off, having kids, and only maintaining
| the utmost of friendships. I know it's brutal but it's a time
| thing... significant others and families take lots of time if
| you're doing it right so socializing time becomes of higher
| value/expense.
|
| It was way easier to meet people when I was younger - not
| just romantic partners. Social groups were much more cohesive
| and much less based around couple activity. People were just
| down for whatever and would jump at something just for the
| experience. I had tons of friends I could just call/SMS like
| "hey I'm bored let's go find a show" whereas I would feel
| inappropriate doing this as an adult.
| brandall10 wrote:
| I think late 20s is when most people lose touch w/ remnants
| of their college social circle if they're not naturally
| outgoing. Usually everyone has moved away or married off at
| this point. It's fairly normal.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| > wonder if my career destroyed my ability to make and keep
| friends
|
| You spend thousands of hours at your job. It is inevitable
| that it will change your personality.
|
| Choose wisely.
| mrtksn wrote:
| > men who'll grow up to be stable and reliable have lonely
| teenage years.
|
| You are describing nerds having high paying tech jobs, right?
|
| I find that little bit short sighted, there are huge
| number(probably the majority) of people with balanced
| lifestyles who are employed in stable jobs, just not really in
| a trendy high paying or high status sectors.
|
| There are also a sizeable number of people who don't posses the
| nerdy characteristics at all and still are good in academics
| and business. Colleges are actually full of that kind of
| people, they all end up in good jobs.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| Probably unpopular opinion: men having it tough is actually a
| good thing for men, if you make the most of it. Yes, in modern
| times as a man, you pretty much don't have any programs
| specifically designed to benefit you. And yes, men get shat on by
| pretty much every corner of society. But it's still possible to
| succeed in these conditions, and some people most definitely do.
| And those who were able to find their way and make it in a very
| unfriendly system tend to be extremely competent, not just
| intellectually but socially and emotionally as well. It's that
| old saying - "hard times make strong men," yada yada. Having just
| gone through the whole school process, I am very confident in my
| ability to solve a problem / achieve a goal on my own, and I
| don't need some special program or exception to the rules in
| order to succeed.
| ketzo wrote:
| Men - and people - should not need to be exceptional just to be
| happy. Hard times make a few strong men and a lot of very, very
| miserable ones.
| jbay808 wrote:
| > I am very confident in my ability to solve a problem /
| achieve a goal on my own, and I don't need some special program
| or exception to the rules in order to succeed.
|
| Picture a distribution, like a bell curve or something.
|
| The programs are meant for the side of that distribution that
| need it. You can talk about how the other side of the
| distribution doesn't need the help, but don't lose sight of the
| fact that many do.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Just as long as you know you have succeeded in spite of it all
| and do not buy into the "almost failed despite being wildly
| privileged" idea that gets pushed.
|
| (To be clear: I am wildly privileged to live in a Western
| country now instead of living almost anywhere else at any other
| time. I'm also generally happy to be a strong and healthy male.
| My thoughts are best best explained by the fact that 1. all
| else being equal I'd prefer to recruit a woman rather than a
| man to the company I work for because that gives me more
| "social credit" at work 2. Boys systematically do better on
| anonymous tests, at least in the western world.)
| amriksohata wrote:
| Everyone is just a commodity in the Kali yuga
| jeffbee wrote:
| This is off-the-shelf "going to hell in a handbasket" fluff that
| could have been written at any time in the last 50 years, and has
| been many times. You could lift half of this article verbatim and
| run in under Dan Qualye's byline and a 1991 dateline and nobody
| would be able to tell the difference.
| caeril wrote:
| Yes.
|
| However, the number of years people complain about societal
| decay is irrelevant to the question about whether it's
| happening or not.
|
| The Roman Empire was "going to hell in a handbasket" for
| _centuries_ prior to 410, according to the social critics of
| the time. It doesn 't make them wrong.
|
| Applying one's personal normalcy bias on timescales of a single
| lifetime to societal evolution that happens on the scales of
| tens of generations is rather short-sighted.
| darkr wrote:
| Whilst there may be a few nuggets of truth buried somewhere in
| this cynical mine for male votes, this is pretty low even for
| Andrew Yang.
| awinter-py wrote:
| great book on this topic is friedan's feminine mystique (1963).
| She wrote about the spiritual crisis affecting a generation of
| young women who were more likely to be 'homemakers' than their
| mothers. worth reading at least the intro IMO for anyone who
| feels dissatisfied with their work / life / contribution
|
| not sure how yang made this his topic. my sense of his random
| walk is 'had a job at yahoo' -> future of work -> UBI -> numbers
| guy -> times square -> ?
|
| really miss the andrew yang policy bot on twitter though
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| Did Andrew Yang work at Yahoo sure your not thinking of Jerry
| Yang?
| awinter-py wrote:
| oops you're right, no idea where I got that factoid
|
| yang had a test prep company that got bought by kaplan,
| apparently, per wikipedia
| klodolph wrote:
| > great book on this topic is friedan's feminine mystique
| (1963)
|
| Another is "The Will To Love: Men, Masculinity, and Change" by
| bell hooks (2004)
|
| There aren't a lot of authors that I feel get it right about
| issues relating to men and masculinity. Bell hooks is one of
| the few.
|
| > not sure how yang made this his topic. my sense of his random
| walk is 'had a job at yahoo' -> future of work -> UBI ->
| numbers guy -> times square -> ?
|
| I live in NYC and spend a lot of time online, so we got kinda
| saturated with Yang during the last year because he was in the
| mayoral race. As far as I can tell, he's a passionate self-
| promoter, and engages on a shallow level with tons of different
| topics as some kind of cynical way to promote his brand. If he
| were at least more skilled at it I would respect him more, but
| he's made so many obvious PR blunders and it's obvious he
| doesn't listen to advisors. He pokes around at sensitive topics
| like race and sexism, but as far as I can tell it's so he can
| stay in the news, because he rarely has anything interesting to
| say on those subjects.
|
| It seems like a random walk because he's doing whatever will
| get him in the news online.
| muh_gradle wrote:
| I also live in NYC, and completely disagree with this take on
| Yang. I can't think of anyone who gets hated more unfairly
| than him. He provides actual substantive policy suggestions
| with evidence to support his claims. He doesn't resort to
| dirty muck-raking the same way that the other mayoral
| candidates and the NY Times did. In fact, NY Times and the NY
| Daily News spent so much time focusing on bashing Yang that
| it's literally the reason why Eric Adams of all people ended
| up being our mayor.
| klodolph wrote:
| I read the policies on Yang's website during the NYC race
| and dug into them.
|
| > He provides actual substantive policy suggestions with
| evidence to support his claims.
|
| This is untrue. The policy suggestions are all poorly
| researched and reminded me of the kind of ideas you'd see
| on a comedy show like Silicon Valley... you know, TV
| depictions of tech bros coming up with "solutions" for
| problems that they don't understand.
|
| I'm not saying that they were all laughable, but it was
| very hit or miss. Yang had some good ideas mixed in with
| bad ideas, and I think a combination of inexperience, lack
| of deeper research, and a refusal to listen to experts is
| what caused all the problems in his policies.
|
| > In fact, NY Times and the NY Daily News spent so much
| time focusing on bashing Yang that it's literally the
| reason why Eric Adams of all people ended up being our
| mayor.
|
| Yang ran a incompetent campaign. He relied far too heavily
| on internet presence--Twitter, Reddit, etc. I don't know
| why he thought that was enough. Say what you will about
| Eric Adams--Adams wasn't in my top 5, and so I didn't vote
| for him--but Eric Adams knew how to work with the press and
| he spent far more time hitting the streets during the
| election than Yang did. Adams was far more in touch with
| the people in NYC who vote, far more knowledgeable about
| how the press works, and had experience with NYC politics.
|
| You can complain about "hit pieces", but Yang was out of
| touch with most voters in NYC, made a series of obvious PR
| blunders, showed no competence at working with the press,
| and had nearly zero experience working with NYC politics...
| Yang didn't even vote in local elections.
| muh_gradle wrote:
| > The policy suggestions are all poorly researched and
| reminded me of the kind of ideas you'd see on a comedy
| show like Silicon Valley... you know, TV depictions of
| tech bros coming up with "solutions" for problems that
| they don't understand.
|
| Spare me the uneducated "tech bro" commentary that I've
| heard throughout. It's unoriginal. I'm eager to hear your
| ranked choices and what policies made so much more sense
| to you though than Yang's and what Yang's good ideas
| were.
|
| Yang made PR plunders sure, but it was completely
| disproportionate. It's odd to me that you can be so
| complimentary towards Eric Adams though, Brooklyn borough
| president, a position that's notorious for doing
| literally nothing. Voting in local elections is
| important, but I consider living in NYC rather than Fort
| Lee, NJ to be mayor to be even more important. NYC
| newspapers certainly didn't care though.
|
| Here's the best example of the muck-raking that I can
| think of, which I've been thinking about since Michelle
| Go's murder. Yang talked about the mentally ill, homeless
| population, the need for enforcement of Kendra's law,
| psych beds, and the concern of ordinary New Yorkers. The
| media and voters ran with the soundbites to mean that
| Yang hates homeless people. Kendra's Law would have saved
| Michelle Go's life by the way.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Perhaps you mean _The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and
| Love_?
|
| Also, it is bizarre to characterize Yang's mayoral campaign
| as listening _too little_ to advisors. He seemed a completely
| different person than in the presidential campaign, and it
| was mostly because of all the expensive new consultants.
| ausbah wrote:
| I know in some areas like declining college enrollment men are
| definitely disproportionately effected, but can you be so sure
| for other areas that the article cites as evidence?
|
| like more men being raised by single mothers, or declining wages
| - I imagine phenomena like this would be effecting both genders
| roughly equally? I do not know - but without knowing for sure, I
| am more skeptical of the article's premise
| trabant00 wrote:
| I pitty todays boys. The entire world from school to internet has
| something against being playfull, hyper active, agressively
| competitive, and all the other things that boys are by nature.
| One fight and here comes therapy and even meds.
|
| I would be crucified for what I did as a youth even though nobody
| got hurt and I turned out to be a top 1% productive member of
| society.
|
| Today being a docile beast of burden is the only acceptable
| option. If not completely in practice at least ideologically.
| Most comply but increasingly more choose to opt out of society or
| worse: become hypocrits and schemers that comply in appearence
| but cross any boundary in secret practice. If most rules are
| stupid they might all be. Rational conclusion for a boy.
| [deleted]
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| absolutely agree I would say that rough sports games and even
| fights were pretty important to my growth as a child. I've
| tried to figure out what exactly I got from that kind of stuff
| as a child but I think its just kinda how males bonded back
| then.
| dang wrote:
| Here's the full Orwell quote.
|
| _People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only
| worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate
| man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than
| he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced
| idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man
| like Paddy, with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out
| of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nonsense to
| pretend that those who have 'come down in the world' are to be
| pitied above all others. The man who really merits pity is the
| man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a
| blank, resourceless mind_
|
| From _Down and Out in Paris and London_.
|
| (Someone should have known better than to try to link to Google
| Books from a mass media piece.)
| gtsop wrote:
| vixen99 wrote:
| How about saying why instead of assuming your 'Wow' point is
| so obvious everyone will agree?
| lph wrote:
| "No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human
| resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our
| greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to
| our social order."
|
| -FDR
| redisman wrote:
| The thing is - we're at 4% unemployment. Which is probably
| about as low as a service based economy can get.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| I don't see how we'll be able to make people care about this
| issue at the current zenith of The Future Is Female zeitgeist in
| the West.
|
| Given the current cultural and moral fashions, I can't think of
| many things that would be harder to empathize with than the
| laments of straight working-age men. There are so many more
| groups that are higher on the oppression totem pole that there's
| no way anybody will ever make it far enough down to care about
| boys.
|
| People have been sounding those alarms for years to perfectly
| deaf ears, and there's nothing in the current culture that would
| indicate that we are ready to start listening anytime soon.
| Nobody cares, and help is not coming.
| azhu wrote:
| I feel you bro. I've felt that same way and I have empathy. You
| have solid points and a valid perspective. You could also
| really use an attitude adjustment.
|
| We're here as a society because of mishandled social
| responsibility. Women have only started to take up their own
| personal care because they can't rely on established
| conventions any more.
|
| We as individuals likely have not done much, if anything, to
| contribute to this social circumstance. Just like women as
| individuals have not done much, if anything, to contribute to
| it. It is none of our faults. Yet they are taking personal
| responsibility for their wellbeing in this situation anyways.
| They are "manning up".
|
| Men on the other hand... are we just sitting around crying with
| our thumbs up our asses? Yes. Yes we are. That shit is weak.
| That perspective on the situation is what's hard to empathize
| with, not the situation itself. Change your attitude, take
| personal responsibility, and bask as love and empathy showers
| onto you.
|
| We can do better than looking to others to solve our problems
| for us. It just takes seeing an example of how. They are in
| short order, but they exist if you dig hard enough. I encourage
| any men who resonate with this to dig deeper. There is sweet
| sweet fruit to be had if you do. And tons of pussy.
| scarmig wrote:
| "Taking personal responsibility" is always an option, and
| it's usually the best option in terms of maximizing personal
| wellbeing.
|
| At the same time, it's important to recognize the social
| forces that constrain different groups and limit the power
| that personal agency can exert over outcomes. The masculine
| gender role is extremely narrow, and if you deviate much from
| it, society will punish you: so-called "personal
| responsibility" plays the role of telling men to shut up and
| fit their role. As a man seeking a female partner, if I want
| to be a homemaker who teaches belly dance part time, I'm
| going to be in for a really hard time, no matter how much
| personal agency I embrace.
|
| That also ignores the shittiness that even people who do
| manage to fit neatly into the masculine gender role still
| have to experience.
|
| It's worth calling out these things in the hopes of driving
| social change, and it's something both men and women must
| participate in if we want to see a change.
| nervlord wrote:
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| This is either pitch perfect parody or a truly wild lack of
| self-awareness. I actually need the /s tag here.
|
| Because replying with the precise tropes of toxic masculinity
| as a solution to... the problems caused by toxic masculinity,
| whew.
| anm89 wrote:
| Things go in cycles. It won't be this way forever. It may not
| change until it doesn't matter for you and I though.
| [deleted]
| ytwombly wrote:
| US-based cis-hetero white man here. The data reinforce the
| impression you get glancing at the headlines or spending a day
| out anywhere in America observing other men. Dare I say it even
| reinforces what I know from painful firsthand experience as a
| man, at the lowest points in my life. I was lucky though, with a
| supportive family who helped me through the confusing years of
| early adulthood.
|
| You can point to the decline of organized religion and with it
| traditional gender roles, but then what explains the relative
| stability in post-Christian Europe? The China Shock combined with
| America's threadbare social safety net starts looking more
| salient. We have inherited a much less trusting, much more
| alienated society than you are likely to find overseas.
|
| Whatever the cause I fully reject the lazy conclusion this is
| somehow women's fault. The "Lump of Labor" fallacy is just that,
| a fallacy. Economic gains are not zero-sum.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > Whatever the cause I fully reject the lazy conclusion this is
| somehow women's fault.
|
| Of course! The problem is not women!
|
| The problem is media, schools, companies, everyone buying into
| this in a collective delusion.
|
| Men also think this, but unlike women we are even encouraged to
| strengthen these insane ideas that we are somehow inferior
| (gets imprisoned more often, less academic success despite
| supposedly being extremely privileged.)
| rayiner wrote:
| > You can point to the decline of organized religion and with
| it traditional gender roles, but then what explains the
| relative stability in post-Christian Europe?
|
| As far as I can tell, Europe isn't all that post-Christian.
| Even countries that have low levels of people actively
| practicing religion still carry a strong cultural legacy from
| Christianity: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/10/02/the-
| catholic-nes...
|
| Counterintuitively, America's lack of a generous welfare system
| tends to destabilize traditional gender roles. Among women with
| children under 18, 56% would prefer a "homemaker" role if they
| were "free" to do either:
| https://news.gallup.com/poll/186050/children-key-factor-
| wome.... Contrast with just 26% of men. 39% of women without
| kids would also prefer to stay home if they had the choice.
| Even out of women who are currently employed, but have children
| under 18, the majority would prefer not to work.
|
| Contrast say the Netherlands. It is an egalitarian, post-
| Christian place, for example, but 60% of working Dutch women
| only work part time, versus 20% of working Dutch men.
| [deleted]
| irrational wrote:
| Who wouldn't prefer to stay home if they had the choice? I
| could spend my days traveling, hiking, going to the beach,
| reading, working on hobbies, learning new skills, cooking,
| etc.
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> Among women with children under 18, 56% would prefer a
| "homemaker" role if they were "free" to do either:
| https://news.gallup.com/poll/186050/children-key-factor-
| wome.... Contrast with just 26% of men. 39% of women
| without kids would also prefer to stay home if they had the
| choice.
|
| > Who wouldn't prefer to stay home if they had the choice?
| I could spend my days traveling, hiking, going to the
| beach, reading, working on hobbies, learning new skills,
| cooking, etc.
|
| "Homemaker" does not mean "staying at home, doing whatever
| you want."
| bluecalm wrote:
| Homemaker role doesn't mean spending your days travelling,
| hiking or going to the beach.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| Metaverse Homemaker Addition allows you to do what every
| you want between wash cycles.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Depends on how many children you have.
| corpMaverick wrote:
| Yes, me too.
|
| But, would you still feel the same if you had to stay home
| to take care of kids and a working spouse ?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| And having very few adults to talk to, no status, no
| career advancement (in fact, the opposite), and little
| recognition.
| [deleted]
| N1H1L wrote:
| The purpose of a man's life is meaning and the search for it.
| For years, centuries even, this meaning in a man's life was
| provided by being a provider. This order was enforced through
| society. And you can use society and religion interchangeably
| here because the distinction between the two is only a century
| or two old. And this order enforced the role of a child-bearer
| and nurturer to women. Obviously, such an order was very
| restrictive (especially to women) and that people would rebel
| against is easy to comprehend.
|
| This state of affairs continued till the 1980s. Since then,
| multiple forces have led to a perfect storm - where men have no
| meaning/purpose in their life, and the desire to have meaning
| often signals that you want to go back to that older society.
|
| But that's wrong. The people who desire to go back are actually
| who are rebelling; the rest of the men are either locked up in
| prison, or overdosing on opioids, or being incels or numbing
| themselves with video games. The failure of modern liberalism
| to acknowledge this is basically being an ostrich while the
| forest is on fire.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Why do you get to say what someone's purpose is? Why is being
| a provider necessarily the purpose in life? People might have
| done it before (I'm dubious of sweeping, golden-age claims
| like that), but for almost all of human history we lived
| short, brutal, illiterate lives as hunter-gatherers. I don't
| feel that is necessarily my purpose in life.
|
| Find a meaning that is important to you; be a provider if you
| like. IMHO, people are spending a lot of time getting wrapped
| up in these questions, debating what is possible,
| participating in trendy despair - it's all a parlor game,
| like worrying about whether your car will start because you
| don't understand the physics and some people online say it
| can't possibly. Just stop talking to them and they will fade
| quickly; get up, turn the ignition, and go.
|
| > The people who desire to go back are actually who are
| rebelling; the rest of the men are either locked up in
| prison, or overdosing on opioids, or being incels or numbing
| themselves with video games.
|
| There are a lot of males - most of them, really - doing other
| things.
| wahern wrote:
| > the relative stability in post-Christian Europe
|
| Relative stability might be too presumptuous. Far right
| politics in Europe is playing better now than it has in
| generations, AFAIU. Largely for the same socio-economic reasons
| it has in the U.S. and elsewhere. The rise of conservative
| populism is a global phenomenon, which is strong evidence for
| it having a shared origin, such as trade-induced labor
| dislocation, the rise of social media, etc.
| hwers wrote:
| I feel like at least being allowed to state that things are as
| bad as they are (outside anonymous forums like this) would be a
| great step towards getting closer to solving things. Right now
| we're still in a state where we have to keep a faked optimism
| everywhere we go which is suffocating.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| What is so bad? IME, you can easily ignore all the fatalism
| (popular to feel on every topic) - pretend it isn't there -
| and do what you want.
| throwaway212135 wrote:
| uoaei wrote:
| > what explains the relative stability in post-Christian
| Europe?
|
| Politics is the new religion insofar as it develops moral
| frameworks and makes people abide by them while convincing them
| they are making the "rational" choice. This is informed
| substantially by Enlightenment-era philosophies and is the
| major component in modern consent manufacturing.
|
| "Rational" in scare quotes because good luck converting
| questions of morality into questions of rationality.
| diordiderot wrote:
| Well there's no such thing as 'morality', there's mostly
| power and sometimes law. The golden rule is a pretty easy
| starting point for determining which rules are fair.
| colechristensen wrote:
| While a lot of the west is "post Christian" in that very little
| actual worship happens, the mythology which is the lens people
| view reality though is very much pervasive.
|
| The biggest examples are Christian sexual morality and the
| separation of things into good vs evil. Look at all of our
| popular culture or politics and find examples of struggles
| which _aren't_ some form of a struggle between good and evil,
| good guys vs bad guys. It might strike people as odd that in
| many other religions and cultures this idea is much much less
| dominant.
| nojs wrote:
| There used to be a "web" link in the header that gave you a
| Google referrer for paywalled articles like this, has it been
| removed?
| Animats wrote:
| _Some people say a man is made outta mud_
|
| _A poor man 's made outta muscle and blood_
|
| _Muscle and blood and skin and bones_
|
| _A mind that 's a-weak and a back that's strong_
|
| "Sixteen Tons", Tennessee Ernie Ford
|
| There are few Real Men jobs like that any more.
| paulpauper wrote:
| The crisis, if there is one, is that society has less use for
| males who have IQs between 90-105 or so, who cannot cut it in
| STEM, and who are finding it hard to cope with increasingly
| competitive economic conditions and higher overall costs like
| rent, and is why many men are delaying family formation or moving
| back with parents (but also due to careerism for women). Men are
| just dropping out rather than doing low-paid work and having to
| deal with political correctness at the office and other
| inconveniences.
| [deleted]
| notacoward wrote:
| This kind of withdrawal seems to be happening in many cultures.
| In Japan it's called _hikikomori_. I forget what it 's called
| in Italy, but I know I've read about it. Here it's the same,
| except ours tend to be more violent.
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| > The crisis, if there is one
|
| I mean it is a crisis (at least potentially), creating a large
| group of disenfranchised men is not going to lead anywhere
| good.
| vmception wrote:
| > having to deal with political correctness at the office and
| other inconveniences.
|
| I think there is room for another look at this (without
| condoning it):
|
| men have careerism out of necessity for stability - or at least
| conveying stability - and made environments that were
| comfortable for them to make it tolerable
|
| women have careerism out of choice for stability and are
| finding pursuing this choice out of pride enters them into an
| environment that was never _really_ about professionalism
|
| so the two audiences are exploiting themselves in office and
| corporate environments for different reasons or pressures
|
| I'm all for making environments comfortable for a greater
| population to be productive and sustain their lifestyle, I
| think acknowledging why an environment is uncomfortable for new
| entrants can help that
| throwaway6532 wrote:
| This is my analysis too. We're hitting a phase-shift where
| behavior of the system becomes non-linear due to these types of
| factors.
| awaythrow483 wrote:
| I'm 33, Ive got a fairly high IQ, make $340k in a STEM field
| and enough to retire tomorrow, I'm not unattractive, and put a
| huge amount of effort over many years into online dating. I've
| pretty much given up on dating. I have a total inability to
| find anyone I'm interested in that is interested in me.
|
| When I was younger and I wanted to go to bars and get drunk and
| be an idiot I had plenty of attractive sexual partners.
|
| So I don't buy this at all. The guys I know who have an easy
| time dating are 1 or 2 points more attractive, make minimum
| wage as yoga teachers or selling crystals or dumb stuff like
| that, and tell Women painfully stupid stuff they want to hear
| about their quantum vibrations matching and other new age
| nonsense.
|
| So I can say this narrative empirically doesn't feel true for
| me.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| Effect of dwindling & non-existent male role models and more
| importantly, fathers.
| paulcole wrote:
| Why is this an issue? Aren't good role models good role models
| regardless of gender/sex?
| jaywalk wrote:
| A woman simply cannot be a role model in all of the same ways
| as a man, and vice-versa. This belief that men and women are
| the same and contribute in exactly the same ways is a big
| part of the problem that this article discusses.
| paulcole wrote:
| The opinion article you mean, right?
|
| I agree that a woman can't be a role model in the same ways
| as a man, but I believe this is not necessarily a bad
| thing.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| It's an assured-sounding statement, but what is it based
| on? I have role models that aren't my gender; it makes no
| difference to me.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| some Depth Psychology (Jungian) suggests that the primal
| biological child is female. Development of a male starts
| similarly to the female, but must take steps over the growth
| phases, to differentiate. Historically males are very, very
| useful for successful survival and reproduction, but times
| have changed for WEIRD and others.. Meanwhile, cultural
| ritual was replaced by commercial "neutral" offerings that
| lessen differences in tribal/cultural groups, and therefore
| also remove or smooth out important development goal posts
| for young men.
|
| source: student of Depth Psychology
| Jtsummers wrote:
| People are emotional creatures, not rational ones. Like it or
| not, there is an outsized influence on (especially) young
| people when they do or do not see people "like them" (gender,
| ethnicity, immigration status, nation of origin, etc.) in
| various roles. And this is also exaggerated by society. If a
| boy is in a community where it's "common knowledge" that men
| are stupid, deadbeat, bums, then no one will be surprised if
| he acts in a way that indicates he's heading in the same
| direction. No one will intervene on his behalf, and he will
| (statistically, not universally) act in a way that conforms
| to those expectations.
| humanrebar wrote:
| Some men are relatively emotionless, and there's nothing
| particularly bad about it, but it can be difficult to find
| healthy role models who are wired the same way.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| The cynical take is that after dry running it in, ahem,
| _certain sub-groups of the population_ the powers that be liked
| the results so much they decided everyone should get it.
| [deleted]
| trentnix wrote:
| Yep. In all the talk of racial or gender privilege, the most
| beneficial privilege a person can enjoy is the benefits of a
| loving, supportive, traditional two-parent household (there is
| insufficient data on non-traditional two-parent households).
|
| You can see a direct correlation in outcomes when comparing
| children that emerged from two-parent households over those
| that emerge from single-parent households. But because that is
| an uncomfortable and pervasive problem to discuss, almost all
| social effort is focused on solving less tangible problems.
| ddoolin wrote:
| I don't have too much to add, but as one of three sons of a
| quasi-single-parent household (multiple father figures, all
| with significant problems) who is now grown up with many
| points of comparison, this is so clearly and immediately
| obvious to me. I also have two kids of my own whom I have
| been on the fringe with and while I'm happy that I'm the only
| (and stable) figure in their lives, I worry what impact my
| long-distance presence will have.
|
| The fathers I did have ranged from absent, to addicts, to
| abusive. I realize nobody is perfect but there has never been
| a positive role model for me and this affected me terribly in
| my relationships for so long (I've been to jail for abuse).
| I'm only lucky in that I got out of that cycle at least
| somewhat, and I can probably only credit the massive
| improvement in my economic condition. My brothers have not
| been so lucky.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| People don't like to talk about it because in public
| discourse it often turns into disparaging single mothers.
|
| My dad worked in public housing and I used to do tutoring
| as a kid in the summer. It was sad as I saw the 10 year
| olds who I really related to grow up in negative paths,
| mostly because nobody cared.
| junga wrote:
| Since you mentioned data: You sure do have data to back your
| claims?
| trentnix wrote:
| A Google search will provide lots more examples, but here's
| an example:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/education-47057787.amp
| junga wrote:
| I tend to agree with that piece. But what made me ask for
| data in the first place was my perception of the opening
| of your post which I read as ,,living in a traditional
| two parent household is more beneficial than being a
| white male" since you mentioned race and gender.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I wonder how much of that comes down to 1.5-2x the income
| compared to a single parent household, versus the beneficial
| effect of two role models.
| aantix wrote:
| I think the money helps.
|
| But what doesn't get talked about with family (especially
| small kids) is that you're with them for 16 hours a day.
|
| Emotions get messy. Someone is always upset about
| something. And the larger the family, the more probable
| that someone is upset at any given moment.
|
| The nice thing about a two parent household is that
| (hopefully) one parent keeps a cool head while the other me
| be annoyed, etc.
|
| It's so much of a help to have a partner that says "why
| don't you take five minutes" or "I think you were too hard
| on ..." And I can reciprocate the same support.
|
| I don't know how single parents do it.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| I have small children I also make a pretty respectable
| Software Engineering salary, my kids have no real
| understanding of that. They just know Daddy works and has a
| job they don't really understand the finances, and seem
| just as content in the home we purchased recently as they
| did when we were living in an apartment, for them the
| realities of finances don't have major impact in their day
| to day lives.
|
| In contrast my mother works in a Title 1 Elementary
| school[2], she spends much of her day dealing with children
| that are in chronically bad situations, it has been her
| observation that the biggest problem is that no one cares
| about the kids, not in a the parents hate them sense, but
| there is no one actively concerned with and thinking about
| and preparing for the child's future, there are all sorts
| of resources the school makes available to try and help
| these kids but it doesn't matter much because no one is
| invested.
|
| When you have only one parent that one parent has is the
| sole person responsible for helping prepare that child,
| investing in that child, and guiding the child, and that
| kind of work is exhausting. It can be done my own mother is
| evidence of that, but when you have two parents now you
| don't have to be the point man on it all day every day you
| can share that burden with someone else, you have someone
| to help bear the burden when it is too much for you, and
| that shares the load.
|
| That I think is an important part of what having a two
| parent household rather than a one parent household brings,
| even if finances aren't great it still means there is
| someone that can invest in the child.
| fusionbro wrote:
| Seems like an easy thing to test, just adjust for income in
| single parents and compare outcomes. Easy enough that it's
| likely been done before and didn't materially change the
| outcomes of this kind of analysis
| ddoolin wrote:
| IMO this is a big factor but it really depends on the
| absolute value. Two low-income earners is not going to make
| a big difference, but two middle- or high-income workers is
| going to be a substantial improvement, although they still
| need to be 1) present and 2) dedicated.
| einpoklum wrote:
| That is either a homunculus argument, or an excuse to blame
| social phenomena on individual moral/ethical failings.
| tasha0663 wrote:
| > an excuse to blame social phenomena on individual
| moral/ethical failings
|
| The aggregate of individual moral/ethical choices manifests
| as social phenomena.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > The aggregate of individual moral/ethical choices
| manifests as social phenomena.
|
| That's not entirely false, but it's misleading. The
| personal choices follow relevant distributions, which are
| themselves not aggregates. Also, such choices are made in
| circumstances and under constraints that are not up to
| individual choice.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| There's little evidence for that kind of causality. Economic
| stability, on the other hand, i.e. the effects of neoliberalism
| over 40 years?
|
| > "Economic transformation has been a big contributor. More
| than two-thirds of manufacturing workers are men; the sector
| has lost more than 5 million jobs since 2000. That's a lot of
| unemployed men. Not just coincidentally, "deaths of despair" --
| those caused by suicide, overdose and alcoholism -- have surged
| to unprecedented levels among middle-aged men over the past 20
| years."
|
| A society divided into wealthy elite homeowners living off
| investment cash flows, and poverty-striken underclass renters
| living off minimum wages, is not a very stable or healthy
| society.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| What you're describing is fundamentally the disappearance of
| the middle class.
|
| Historically, an economic middle class is a relatively recent
| phenomenon. For ages past and across cultures, there were
| "rich" and "poor" and relatively few in between.
|
| What created the middle class in the US was a government
| system that _restricted_ the power of the elites to abuse
| that power. As Thomas Jefferson wrote: "We hold these truths
| to be self-evident, that all men are created _equal_ ". I.e.
| the rich, powerful, government, or otherwise privileged
| people ought not to have rights that the poor do not have.
|
| I think the disappearance of the middle class today is
| largely due to favoritism and miscarriage of justice in
| government -- like failing to prosecute gross economic crimes
| adequately (embezzling, insider trading, monopolism, etc.). I
| don't think rich people are bad by definition, but I do think
| our government tends to show favoritism to them.
|
| EDIT:
|
| Lest I sound like I'm coming down on conservatives only,
| liberals in the US have also been hugely responsible for the
| disappearance of the middle class. The bipartisan post-WWII
| GI bill, signed by FDR, _severely_ disadvantaged African-
| American veterans in how it was carried out - by
| disproportionately denying applications by African-American
| veterans for housing.
|
| In the decades that followed, Democrat welfare programs
| provided significantly _more_ total income to 2 divorced
| adults with kids than a family with 2 married, cohabiting
| parents -- thus encouraging men to move out so their family
| could have more welfare money, and (broadly speaking) causing
| an entire generation of children in poor (and especially
| African-American families) to grow up without a dad in the
| home. This lead to further poverty, crime, drug addiction,
| and ultimately devastation.
|
| Clinton's "war on drugs" and his three-strikes rule only made
| the problem worse by merely prosecuting and imprisoning
| people in poverty instead of working to repair the root
| causes of their behavior. This resulted in many more
| fatherless families.
|
| Upholding the rights of the poor is _everyone 's_
| responsibility, especially those in government, regardless of
| their political affiliation.
| fusionbro wrote:
| diordiderot wrote:
| Oh so you want to live in Venezuela! -Fox News
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Not disagreeing with the main point of this article (boys are
| struggling), but I don't think men's losses have been women's
| gains. (I'm aware this wasn't stated in the article, but this
| type of article invariably brings up "Men vs. Women" debates in a
| way that ignores how intertwined our successes and failures are.)
|
| Rather, the pissing up the wall of men's potential in the name of
| "equality" has made life more arduous, stressful and anxiety-
| inducing for everyone.
| kevinob11 wrote:
| I'm a white straight male, grew up middle class near Seattle. I'm
| now in my mid-30s and have 3 kids. Semi-recently I had an (maybe
| my first?) experience where I wasn't the favored party in a
| situation. My kids have made focus more difficult, and I work in
| an industry (tech consulting) where focus is a big deal, and the
| idea that I'm not the perfect person for the job was a foreign
| feeling. I no longer felt "I was made for this" or "I'm perfect
| for this".
|
| While I hate that things are getting worse for anyone (and want
| to fix it!), these findings are good reminders for me that almost
| everyone else has dealt with similar circumstances much more
| often than I have. Often the cause is out of their control and
| that they are just trying to make the best of it, with varying
| results. It gives me good perspective and reminds me that peoples
| choices / actions include inputs that I'm not exposed to.
|
| That all being said I hope we can find a way to make these
| situations less common for everyone. I'd settle for quick fixes
| (adjust taxes, better welfare, etc.), but I'm excited for the
| societal changes that I hope are the eventual long-term fix.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| > Semi-recently I had an (maybe my first?) experience where I
| wasn't the favored party in a situation
|
| You're mid-30s and you might have just experienced your first
| thing like that? Man or woman, that's hard to believe. And more
| importantly, I'm not sure your experience can be generalized to
| all men.
|
| As someone who has experienced situations like that frequently,
| and knows other men who have, it's a bit frustrating to see the
| implication that we all feel like "we're perfect for this" or
| "we're made for this" all the time.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| uoaei wrote:
| Yours is an argument of kind in reply to an argument of
| degree.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| The degree is irrelevant. I don't doubt that men have
| privilege -- but the "but women have it worse!" comment
| often shows up on articles like these, and since it's just
| whataboutism, it feels like it's suggesting that we
| shouldn't care about these issues.
|
| Shouldn't we care about how society is treating people, no
| matter who they are, instead of getting into a pissing
| contest about who society is _really_ screwing over the
| most?
|
| Not to mention, frankly, it's ridiculous to imply that a
| 35-year old male software engineer's experience is at all
| representative of that of the average male (who is far, far
| worse off).
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| > Shouldn't we care about how society is treating people,
| no matter who they are, instead of getting into a pissing
| contest about who society is _really_ screwing over the
| most?
|
| This is a great point that often gets overlooked in
| discussions around gender, race, sexuality, class, or any
| other issue surrounding equality. I think people often
| hone in on the latter and it becomes counter-productive
| to fixing these issues. Thanks for bringing it up.
| [deleted]
| andrewclunn wrote:
| rayiner wrote:
| Respectfully, this is kind of a privileged take, both economic
| and intellectual. For the majority of men who aren't going to
| college, they've spent a lot longer than a couple of years
| feeling like they're not "the favored party" in a situation.
| nuclearnice3 wrote:
| The poster knows that.
|
| * "Semi-recently I had an (maybe my first?) experience where
| I wasn't the favored party in a situation."
|
| * "almost everyone else has dealt with similar circumstances
| much more often than I have."
| [deleted]
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > On a cultural level, we must stop defining masculinity as
| necessarily toxic and start promoting positive masculinity.
|
| There is no need to tell people how to behave 'on a cultural
| level'. It has nothing to do with anything other than some people
| trying to impose their beliefs on everyeone else.
| throwaway212135 wrote:
| [deleted]
| alphabettsy wrote:
| Purely anecdotal, but it was uncool, dorky, nerdy, etc. where I
| grew up for boys to be interested in math or even English, but
| "more manly stuff" like working with your hands was highly
| encouraged. It seems that kind of culture will result in men
| being less likely to end up in higher paying careers.l than girls
| who are being encouraged to pursue STEM.
| bmj wrote:
| You do realize that a career in the skilled trades can lead to
| very good pay, right? Yes, the work can be hard, and the hours
| sometimes long, but there are very clear paths to working
| independently, or for small shops/contractors that provide a
| nice degree of independence and good pay.
|
| I think high school kids in the U.S. should be exposed to STEM,
| the humanities, _and_ the trades. We have pushed college
| /academic achievement long enough, and I suspect that some of
| the data we are seeing represents a backlash against it,
| particularly when you consider the cost of university and the
| job prospects for new graduates.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > You do realize that a career in the skilled trades can lead
| to very good pay, right?
|
| Only if you can start your independent business, which few
| can do pretty much by definition. That's still a recipe for
| bimodal outcomes. And the U.S. has pushed "college
| achievement" on paper, but their K-12 education still sucks.
| There's no way that this isn't a drag on college outcomes.
| slowhand09 wrote:
| I would say of the significant number of tradesmen I've met
| that owned their own business, practically all worked for
| someone else. Thats how you acquire the skills to start
| your own business. I paid two guys to spackle and paint a
| bathroom, install a vanity and new fixtures. They were the
| "no experience, but lets start a business" guys you don't
| want to meet. 2/3 way thru, I stopped them, paid them, gave
| them one piece of advice - "get a mentor to work FOR". I
| finished the job myself.
| bmj wrote:
| This isn't necessarily true. I know a wide range of folks
| that work in union trade positions, and they make very good
| money. Now, sometimes, those jobs can be unpleasant for
| awhile (building is behind schedule, etc, etc), but they
| also last a finite amount of time.
|
| To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the trades are a gravy
| train for everyone, but the idea that you will barely make
| ends meet is also not the case.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > union trade positions
|
| But union jobs are at an all time low.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I knew people who started oilfield welding businesses at
| the age of 18 right out of high school, bought houses and
| started families. Yeah that is a boom-and-bust business but
| then again so is machine learning.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| Did I say anything to indicate otherwise?
|
| In my area nearly every high school including the one I
| attended offered great programs that for many lead to careers
| in the trades.
|
| I know several people who were in one of the trades programs
| who decided it wasn't for them and seemed to wander aimlessly
| just like many of my friends who went to university.
|
| Maybe the issue isn't opportunity for training or trades vs
| university?
|
| On a side note a skilled trade career can pay very well, but
| is it reasonable to expect everyone will be a union-member or
| own a business? Union support seems to be declining in the US
| and owning and running is business is not for most people.
| erdos4d wrote:
| I used to teach calculus in university and I would always find
| a way to tell my classes how much a plumber makes just to show
| up at your house and their hourly rate. Almost without
| exception they were amazed that they would make less as an
| engineer unless they got lucky and were hired by a top end
| firm. Definitely the local shipyard which hired most of our
| graduates couldn't compete with that rate.
| rajeshp1986 wrote:
| I went to a local college few days back and I noticed that there
| were more girls than boys. I think part of the reason is due to
| high college debt many young men are choosing to take jobs and
| skipping college all together. This will translate to less men in
| the knowledge based/corporate jobs.
| conductr wrote:
| The high paying vocational jobs also tend to be more geared
| towards males. Eg. plumbing, electrician, etc. So I wonder if
| college is the best measure here. I think most people just go
| to college as a means of making money, they aren't actually in
| it for the love of knowledge.
| justinpombrio wrote:
| There have been more women than men in college in the US since
| the 80s. It varies from college to college and from subject to
| subject (e.g. STEM is much more male, MIT more male,
| humanities-focused colleges more female).
|
| A graph from a random internet search result:
| https://educationalpolicy.org/hello-world/
| urthor wrote:
| There's a huge body of education research about this, this
| has been the case for of years.
|
| There's even data from the pre-1900s, _especially_ in the
| primary school years.
|
| Only recently have we stripped away a lot of the sexism
| however, providing a successful transition to higher
| education.
|
| It all boils down to:
|
| Girls are more likely to do their damn homework when the
| teacher tells them.
|
| Therefore they out-perform in formal education.
| scarmig wrote:
| Teachers also give boys lower grades and girls higher
| grades when their gender is evident; anonymous grading
| greatly reduces the gender gap in primary and secondary
| school.
| twofornone wrote:
| >Only recently have we stripped away a lot of the sexism
| however, providing a successful transition to higher
| education.
|
| Is it really so difficult to consider that career
| preferences are gendered? That millions of years of
| sexually dimorphic specialization could lead to
| statistically significant differences in interests,
| abilities, and desired life outcomes?
|
| The recent popularity of blaming any disparity on {$x}ism
| really bothers me. Culture and genes influence outcomes at
| least as much as any external force in the modern world.
| That goes for gendered differences too.
|
| >girls are more likely to do their damn homework
|
| Also ironic that the people who are so eager to fight
| against sexism/racism have no qualms about generalizing
| their scapegoats. But it sort if proves my point: you are
| willing to acknowledge that males may have intrinsic
| negative traits which could cause them to underperform, but
| of course acknowledging the obvious implication that such
| groups may have innate _advantages_ is forbidden; maybe
| because doing so would undermine the very underpinnings of
| the modern progressive push for equality of outcome.
|
| Metrics targeting equal representation among all
| industries/disciplines are fundamentally flawed. There's no
| reason to expect such parity if people are truly free to
| choose their own paths, nordic countries are an example,
| where gender disparity persists despite an egalitarian
| culture.
| scarmig wrote:
| STEM is (barely) more female than male [0]. It only seems
| disproportionately male if you take the idea that 60%+ of
| people in a major should be female as a given, or if you pick
| very particular subfields in STEM and take them to represent
| all of STEM.
|
| [0] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/gender-gap-in-stem-women-
| are-...
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| pc86 wrote:
| Is there a generational thing that causes people to say "data is"
| vs. "data are" in this context? Because to me "data are" sounds
| so egregiously wrong it takes me seconds to focus on anything
| else.
| analog31 wrote:
| I once wrote an article and the editor changed all "data are"
| to "data is." I asked her if I was being old fashioned and she
| said yes.
| wahern wrote:
| > I asked her if I was being old fashioned and she said yes.
|
| Google Ngram seems to agree: https://books.google.com/ngrams/
| graph?content=data+is%2Cdata...
| layoric wrote:
| I get stuck on it as well, I'm probably wrong but to me "data"
| is the collective noun like "team" or "family". This is why I
| think it sounds wrong to use "Data are" when it is being used
| as the singular, eg the "data" being clear. If the data was
| unclear or split you would usually use something else to
| contextualize the difference. Eg, the time-series data
| disagrees with our event data.
| humanrebar wrote:
| The singular is datum, technically. Though real pedants will
| also point out that the plural of octopus is octopodes.
| su6652 wrote:
| The only problem I see if that white, straight men are far more
| likely to be armed and use violence in response to their
| perceived plight. If I had to pick one group to _not_ be subject
| to declining economic and romantic opportunities, it would be
| straight, white men, but only out of fear.
| nervlord wrote:
| lph wrote:
| Andrew Yang makes some good points in this piece, particularly
| about positive masculinity and role models. Whether fair or not,
| the perception that the left is hostile to men has driven
| recruitment for the far right, and that merits some reflection.
|
| But he's also really facile about underlying economic causes.
| It's easy to blame problems on "our culture has been broken by
| the wokes!", but many of the problems of young men are not unique
| to them. Fewer women are entering college, also. Women are
| dropping out of the workforce, also. More young women are living
| with their parents, also. Is that because they lacked strong
| masculine role models?
|
| Or is it because the rising costs of college, housing,
| healthcare, and living have made the traditional path much less
| attainable? Absent fathers didn't do that. These are the same
| patterns you see in any country with a shrinking economy; it's
| just a shock to Americans who feel they were promised better.
|
| (In summary: Maybe Andrew Yang should spend more time talking to
| Bernie Sanders)
| humanrebar wrote:
| > But he's also really facile about underlying economic causes.
| It's easy to blame problems on "our culture has been broken by
| the wokes!", but many of the problems of young men are not
| unique to them. Fewer women are entering college, also. Women
| are dropping out of the workforce, also. More young women are
| living with their parents, also. Is that because they lacked
| strong masculine role models?
|
| You're not _wrong_ , but at the risk of drawing an unhelpful
| analogy, I'll point out that the "all lives matter" response to
| "black lives matter" missed the point in the same way. Of
| course the prospects of _everyone_ is important, but describing
| how young men have distinct and perhaps underappreciated
| experiences should be a viable conversation that doesn 't get
| bogged down before it really gets going.
| lph wrote:
| I disagree, and here's why: Andrew Yang is ignoring the
| elephant in the room. It's not just that the concerns I
| brought up are _another_ factor, it 's that they are by far
| the dominant factor in why young men are dropping out and
| discontent. At least in my opinion.
|
| To use another analogy: it's like going to the ER for a
| sucking chest wound and being told you should reduce your
| cholesterol. They're not _wrong_ , but this is probably not
| the most pressing concern.
| klodolph wrote:
| Yes, exactly. This is a recurring problem with Yang... he
| talks about a lot of subjects, but it's clear that he's
| barely scratching the surface of the problems he's talking
| about. My impression is that his way of engaging with a
| topic evolved on mainstream Twitter, and he's applying
| those same Twitter-oriented techniques in other avenues.
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| I've coached high school sports teams, both boys and girls, for
| the last two decades. I've seen some of these trends unfold
| over the years with my student athletes. My observation is
| girls are just more motivated than boys, even for something fun
| like sports practices and workouts, girls in general will show
| up more consistently than boys. The teachers I've spoken to at
| the school where I coach have confirmed the same thing with
| school work. What I've seen is the boys that are successful at
| school or sports have at least one parent pushing them at home,
| and from my experience it's often the mother. I'm not trying to
| downplay the role of positive male role models and their
| impact, but what it seems like many boys are missing these days
| is motivation and drive, and that can come from anywhere. I
| don't know what it is but it just seems like girls are much
| better at thinking about the future and putting in the work to
| get where they want to be, boys often need the guidance of an
| adult to steer them that way, and fewer of them are getting it
| now.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| High school is a pretty special timeframe where girls on
| average have more conscientious, adult-like mindsets that
| their equally-aged male peers. That's a recipe for
| educational success too. But it doesn't last - males do catch
| up eventually and might even do better.
| dageshi wrote:
| This is speculation on my part, but I've felt that it's
| because women know they may want a child in their lifetime
| and due to their biological clock it gives them a window to
| plan back from.
|
| They know they should do it between certain ages which means
| they need a career which means they need an education e.t.c.
|
| There's nothing equivalent for men, no event they can see
| coming within a decade or two that helps anchor them in their
| lives.
| lph wrote:
| I have two elementary-aged children, a boy and a girl. They
| fit the pattern you describe to a T, and I think most
| teachers' experience would agree.
|
| So anecdotally, the theory that (in general) boys need more
| nudging than girls from _someone_ in their life in order to
| be successful rings true. But what would account for a modern
| change? Are there fewer people pushing, now? Are boys more
| resistant to it now, or maybe more distracted? Are
| expectations of boys different now than they were in the
| past?
| bart_spoon wrote:
| > Are boys more resistant to it now, or maybe more
| distracted?
|
| Or perhaps parents are more distracted. Much has been made
| of how our digital age has made us, as individuals, more
| distracted and less connected to individuals in our life.
| For a parent, it doesn't seem unlikely that that would
| translate to being less invested in their child, or at
| least not as proactive in this kind of nudging.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Because recent technical change heavily favors book
| learning over hands-on skills, which are more compelling to
| males.
| sharikous wrote:
| > My observation is girls are just more motivated than boys,
|
| Do you see that as innate or as a symptom of society's
| biases?
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| I think it's probably some of both. Boys are definitely
| more distracted with stuff like video games than girls, but
| then again many girls are absolutely obsessed with social
| media (TikTok/Snapchat etc) and still manage to succeed in
| school and sports. I do also think it has to do with the
| age of maturation, girls just mature earlier than boys.
| erdos4d wrote:
| Has this ever not been the case? I remember that girls were
| way more mature than boys in HS quite well, it was common
| knowledge and nobody questioned it. They just don't mature as
| fast.
| 0xy wrote:
| Schools are structured to benefit girls, and the deck is
| absolutely stacked against boys. The vast majority of
| teachers are female, and they mark boys worse for equivalent
| work. [1] Boys generally require more physical activity than
| girls, yet the majority of school is "sit down and stare at
| this whiteboard".
|
| Of course they're less motivated, it's quite literally a
| rigged game.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/education-31751672
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I think you're oversimplifying what is a massive systemic
| issue into two points that, while true, might not
| contribute as large of an impact as you're assuming.
|
| Also, just in defence of female teachers, I don't think it
| matters so much that they're women, but that they
| understand that boys will be boys. Anti-male teachers were,
| at least in the experience of myself and a friend who went
| to a different school (we discussed this once), definitely
| present but firmly in the minority.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > and from my experience it's often the mother. I'm not
| trying to downplay the role of positive male role models and
| their impact
|
| No, that is exactly what you are doing.
|
| All the available evidence shows boys, especially, do less
| well across the board when raised without a father in the
| home.
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing with your point, but I don't think this
| entire trend can be blamed on a lack of fathers. I'm
| fortunate now that I coach at a school in a pretty affluent
| community, the vast majority of the kids I coach have
| married parents with active fathers in the house. I still
| see many of these young men fairly checked out by high
| school. I think in many of these cases boys are over
| protected these days, they grow up without the freedom to
| explore and test themselves and their parents create an
| environment where it's OK not to try or put forth an honest
| effort or finish your commitments etc.
|
| Years ago I coached at an inner city school, lots of single
| moms, I've seen the results first hand. I'd like to think
| for many of those kids I was a positive male role model,
| maybe one of the only ones in their life. Unfortunately I
| don't live in that area anymore.
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| I didn't really get the sense that he was placing all the blame
| on "the wokes" as you put it though that is most certainly a
| factor in my opinion. The data he points out is relative to the
| state of things for women in most cases and shows that men are
| falling behind in dramatic ways. I don't think he is
| necessarily trying to say its the only issue of the day.
| Zigurd wrote:
| As with any challenged population, blaming the victim is unfair
| in the majority of cases, is unproductive in finding solutions,
| and it creates division where it is unwarranted. But the phrase
| "positive masculinity" is fraught.
|
| Ease in befriending and reaching real camaraderie with women
| does not depend on masculinity at all. It depends on seeing
| others as equals. I sure don't think about masculinity and
| whether I'm doing it right. What would that do?
|
| I doubt the kind of masculinity advice Jordan Peterson is
| slinging helps any of the men who listen to him. Instead, they
| find comfort and self-justification in that advice. It isn't
| changing their outcomes. It isn't the on-ramp to good
| relationships. It is the on ramp to the "intellectual dark web"
| and that will keep your dick dry more reliably than anything.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Ease in befriending and reaching real camaraderie with
| women does not depend on masculinity at all. It depends on
| seeing others as equals.
|
| ?Por que no los dos? A positive worldview and mindset makes
| it even easier to see others as equal. The negative 'woke'
| mindset is hardly conducive to true equality.
|
| > ... Jordan Peterson ...
|
| Jordan Peterson has never thought very well of seeking
| "comfort and justification". He's the "clean your room and
| get your ducks lined up instead of blaming the world for your
| failure" guy. I'm not sure you're familiar with his thought.
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| I don't understand how the phrase "positive masculinity" is
| fraught, males tend to seek out male role models which is
| only natural and these role models should be positive
| influences, further males should not feel that all male
| traits are "toxic". I don't know that the article called out
| Jordan Peterson and if that is your only example of "positive
| masculinity" than we are probably talking past each other.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > It isn't changing their outcomes.
|
| Peterson's whole schtick is challenging young men to take
| responsibility for their own outcomes.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > I doubt the kind of masculinity advice Jordan Peterson is
| slinging helps any of the men who listen to him.
|
| The only times I recommend someone read/hear Jordan Peterson
| is when they radically misrepresent him.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| urthor wrote:
| The Bay Area is a skewed microcosm of transplanted misfits.
|
| I'm not sure this is a great surprise to anyone. But the Bay
| Area is filled with people who:
|
| 1) Move cross country to live in the most bohemian region in
| the entire United States (San Francisco).
|
| 2) Often pursue a technology profession. An industry which has
| an entire nation of career guidance counselors steering
| introverts to work in.
|
| 3) Sticks with it when remote work lets them move home, at
| little cost.
|
| New York also has major "self-selection" for its inhabitants
| (wannabe high functioning alcoholics).
|
| It's not necessarily a bad place.
|
| But I wouldn't treat is as a fair and balanced cross section of
| humanity.
|
| Yang's article is a far more national/global perspective.
| HPsquared wrote:
| The people drawn to these places tend to be materialistic as
| well. People dump their social connections to move, in
| pursuit of wealth. Not going to be the best people socially,
| on average.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| > wannabe high functioning alcoholics
|
| Heh, now I really want you to characterize LA, Vegas,
| Seattle, and Miami inhabitants in one sentence.
| dang wrote:
| Sorry, but this is such obvious gender war flamebait as to be
| off topic here. Please don't post like this to HN.
|
| Please don't post regional flamebait either, regardless of
| which region you have a problem with.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I wonder if social media technology is as much at fault as the
| neoliberal program of exporting well-paid manufacturing jobs
| overseas and replacing them with low-paid service jobs (with the
| difference going into the pockets of the shareholders) is.
|
| If children are being raised on TikTok, okay, the average video
| length on TikTok is a couple minutes. Advertisements are now 5-15
| seconds. This is not conducive to 'long attention span'. Now,
| imagine popping these kids into a classroom and expecting them to
| pay close attention for, say, 15 minutes, without any breaks.
| What to do... diagnose them with ADHD and dose them with
| amphetamines, what else? Of course this is the same issue for
| girls and boys but is generally going to create more of a dumbed-
| down population. Kids are probably better off playing video games
| instead, those require more attention. Even better, encourage
| them to read actual books.
|
| I wonder if the WaPo would be interested in publishing any
| critiques of social media effects on children, given their ties
| to Big Tech... Let's see... "New report: Most teens say social
| media makes them feel better, not worse, about themselves (2018)"
|
| Corporate media claims... remember this one? "NAFTA and China WTO
| will raise the standard of living for all Americans!"
| gunfighthacksaw wrote:
| Your reminder that having disenfranchised young men with nothing
| to lose in your society is like keeping kindling next to a
| munitions factory and has never ended well.
|
| It's kind of like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs but for a
| society. If your higher needs are only being met at the expense
| of your lower needs it's all going to come crashing down.
|
| The lower needs in this case are channeling the energies of those
| that can commit the most violent atrocities away from committing
| violent atrocities and into something constructive like jobs and
| families.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Of course. We treat females like they are a marginalized
| minority.
|
| My son's school has a "Girls Can Code" program. All collateral
| features women and girls. (Boys are welcome though)
|
| I worked at a place where a C-level executive hosted company
| endorsed dinners at her home for female managers to mentor them
| for executive roles.
|
| If I setup a boys club for computers at school or hosted a men's
| IT society at work, that wouldn't end well.
| idealmedtech wrote:
| I believe it's reactionary attitudes like these (why can't we
| have a special club?) that make tech so hostile to women in the
| first place. If they feel better in a space that specifically
| caters to women, and if by them feeling better, they actually
| learn the skills, why should they not have those spaces?
|
| These are not mutually exclusive things!
| jimbokun wrote:
| Now try proposing a space that caters to men and helps them
| learn and feel better.
| vharuck wrote:
| Not to be flippant, but have you seen somebody try this and
| fail or be stopped? What would be the purpose of the group?
| Why would it need to cater to men?
|
| These aren't rhetorical questions. I'm genuinely asking.
| tsol wrote:
| >If they feel better in a space that specifically caters
| to women, and if by them feeling better, they actually
| learn the skills
|
| This can't apply to men? I believe there were such clubs
| and they were considered sexist in the past. I don't see
| why it's so strange an idea that men might like a club
| where they can be catered to and taught in a way that
| works for them.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > Not to be flippant, but have you seen somebody try this
| and fail or be stopped? What would be the purpose of the
| group?
|
| I've not tried that exact thing but I have tried twice
| carefully to bring attention to mens day at work.
|
| I stopped doing it and I probably won't do it again; it's
| just a simple way to get some mockery thrown at oneself
| even at the generally very civil place where I work.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Making a support club for men probably has the same
| problem as trying to start a UFO or vaccines scepticism
| book club - since it is taboo you will have a hard time
| attracting sane members.
| NylaTheWolf wrote:
| The "Girls Who Code" program was created _because_ of the
| discrimination and bias women face in the tech industry (not to
| mention other workplaces and areas of life). Also, the
| existence of woman managers doesn 't suddenly mean that sexism
| doesn't exist in the industry. I'd imagine that many woman
| managers have faced a lot of prejudice throughout their
| careers. And there's probably a large amount of women who want
| to get into technology, but are intimidated by the space and
| fear potential sexism.
|
| Also, the reason that running a "boys club for computers" or a
| "men's IT society" wouldn't end well is because men already
| make up a large portion of the tech space and, like I said,
| there's a lot of gender bias in the tech world. This comment
| comes off as you using anecdotal evidence to disprove the
| marginalization women face.
| jimbokun wrote:
| What is your evidence for discrimination?
|
| Are they paid less for the same work? Denied promotions? Are
| men being favored for hiring over equally qualified women?
| beiller wrote:
| Your comment does totally make sense. But I also wonder,
| would a "Men's Teachers Club" for example have the same level
| of acceptance?
| anotherman554 wrote:
| I don't know if a men's teaching club would be accepted,
| but I can tell you I've been told by a female school
| teacher looking for work that it's much easier to get hired
| as a male because high school administrators are desperate
| for more male role models to help struggling male students
| given the lack of male staff in high schools.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Special "Help $Gender enter $Field_Where_Gender_Is_Rare" stuff
| makes sense, if (for whatever reason) it seems that having some
| fields highly gender-skewed is undesirable. And whatever the PC
| / ideological reaction, programs aimed the other way sound like
| a waste of resources.
|
| Or maybe there are a bunch of "convince women that nursing is a
| career for them, too", "day care workers shouldn't all be men",
| "ladies can become receptionists", etc. programs that I'm not
| aware of.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > Special "Help $Gender enter $Field_Where_Gender_Is_Rare"
| stuff makes sense
|
| Why? Why not just let people decide for themselves what kind
| of jobs to pursue?
| [deleted]
| lph wrote:
| > hosted a men's IT society at work
|
| Maybe, just maybe, the point of those events for women has
| something to do with the fact that everything else in the tech
| world is a de-facto boys' club.
|
| My current team at work: 6 men. Previous team at a different
| company: 27 men, 3 women. The team before that: 5 men. The team
| before that: 10 men, 2 women.
|
| I guess we can debate "marginalized", but women are
| unquestionably a minority in tech.
|
| (I am also a man, fwiw)
| jimbokun wrote:
| So were those teams trying to exclude women? Or just no (or
| few) women that wanted to be part of those teams?
|
| Right now, tech companies are desperate to hire anyone
| qualified. Are you saying they are deliberately excluding
| women from consideration?
|
| From what I've seen, all the tech employers are desperate to
| hire and promote women, and there are just very few women
| interested.
| lph wrote:
| No, the teams weren't trying to exclude women. Not at all.
| They were representative of the company and the entire
| industry. There are very few women in tech.
|
| So then the question is _why_ are very few women in tech?
| If you really dive into this, it 's a chicken-and-egg
| problem: The fact that so few women are in tech makes the
| whole scene into sort of a frat house, which is often not a
| welcoming or kind environment to women, so women avoid it.
| A feedback loop. And one way you can try to combat that is
| by encouraging entry into the field. Et voila: "Girls who
| code".
| psyc wrote:
| I just realized that so many people always repeat that
| there aren't many women in "tech." But it's really more
| like not many women in programming. In my experience, the
| majority of PMs, designer/artists, and tech writers, and
| about half of QA, have been women. Therefore only the
| programming team felt like a boys club, never the larger
| org or the company. The only place this wasn't true was
| one tiny startup I worked at long ago.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > The fact that so few women are in tech makes the whole
| scene into sort of a frat house, which is often not a
| welcoming or kind environment to women
|
| I have had several jobs in tech. None of those work
| environments resembled a frat house.
|
| Maybe a few startups resemble a frat house, but is it
| really indicative of the industry as a whole?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > If I setup a boys club for computers at school or hosted a
| men's IT society at work, that wouldn't end well.
|
| Maybe not, but nearly every <Subject> Users Group I've attended
| may as well have been a men's IT society for all the women I've
| seen attend, despite specific outreach efforts to get them
| there.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Are you implying that women were banned or explicitly
| discouraged from attending those groups?
|
| EDIT: my bad, think I got you confused with a different
| comment.
| [deleted]
| skinkestek wrote:
| Probably. But why should small boys be punished and denied
| opportunities because of that?
|
| Also, this has been even broader:
|
| Around here, until recently girls got extra points even on
| studies were they were massively over-represented (in
| addition to being generally over-represented in higher
| education.)
|
| Just recently boys started to get extra points when applying
| for Engineering degrees in Chemistry or in Nursing.)
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I don't know where "around here" is or even what "girls got
| extra points even on studies where they were massively
| over-represented" means. Are you talking about grades?
| "points" towards college admissions?
| e4e78a06 wrote:
| At least in the US, most schools practice either
| explicitly or implicitly (through adjusted admissions
| criteria) affirmative action towards women for STEM
| subjects. That's the case even for subjects like Biology
| where the gender ratio is already balanced or tipped
| towards women.
|
| One obvious example of this is the fact that CMU admits
| 50% women into its CS program, even though their
| applicant pool and similar caliber schools have around a
| 20-30% ratio. So if you believe that women and men in the
| applicant pool are equally qualified, women have a 2x
| higher chance of getting in. That's just basic
| statistics.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > One obvious example of this is the fact that CMU admits
| 50% women into its CS program, even though their
| applicant pool and similar caliber schools have around a
| 20-30% ratio. So if you believe that women and men in the
| applicant pool are equally qualified, women have a 2x
| higher chance of getting in. That's just basic
| statistics.
|
| This is a reasonable initial assumption (candidates are
| equally qualified), and so there is evidence that
| _something_ is happening (by examining the initial
| figures). But it may or may not be a bias in favor of
| women (that is, in this case, something like giving
| "points" to female applicants either explicitly or
| implicitly). You'd have to examine the actual applicant
| pool to determine what was happening other than being
| able to conclude that _something_ is happening. It is
| also plausible that the female candidates are, as a
| group, more qualified than their male counterparts.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Around here is Norway were I have spent most of my adult
| life (save a few weeks at work in other countries.)
|
| I'm not a native English speaker and while I get my
| points across I struggle with the school system. Sorry
| for that.
|
| Point is, around here when you apply for higher education
| you get a standardized score based on:
|
| - how good your grades were.
|
| - being over a certain age
|
| - having extra maths/physics/chemistry classes
|
| - being a girl (at least in STEM)
|
| - etc
|
| Recently, but only recently they have finally started to
| add extra points for boys applying for BSc nurse studies.
| mjevans wrote:
| While I share your first hand observations here, I'll note
| that (from my limited perspective) there was nothing
| obviously catering to non-females or any particular gender in
| these groups. Many of the groups I've attended also had
| 'professional standards'.
|
| So what is the discrepancy? What has changed and what is
| being done differently between the groups where 'boys' can
| optionally attend and ones that 'girls' appear to self select
| against attendance? We should reach for a world that doesn't
| require discrimination.
| jms55 wrote:
| 1. Women aren't going to want to join a group where they're
| the minority
|
| 2. Given a brand new group with 0 members yet, it's still
| likely that women will avoid it, because of their past
| experiences with 1. putting them off joining groups in
| general
|
| 3. Women are less common than men in general in CS. Any
| group that accepts the average person will statistically
| end up with more men than women.
|
| The groups that "advertise" to women avoid these problems,
| which is why they tend to work.
|
| I agree that we shouldn't need specialized groups, but I
| haven't seen any other solution, at least in the immediate
| term. Likely society will improve simply due to the passing
| of time, and in 50 years from now and it won't be a problem
| anymore.
| jms55 wrote:
| My CS lectures barely have any women. 1/10 students in a class
| of 200-300 are women. In more difficult/less mainstream classes
| (operating systems, networking, sometimes PL theory), it's
| 1/20. The game development club I'm in has 2 woman in it
| (including me) out of the ~20 people that regularly show up.
| This is in 2019-2022.
|
| My school also hosts a hackathon for women and underrepresented
| gender minorities every year (organized by a student org that
| rents out a building from the school for it). The hackathon is
| also open to high school students. Many people I've talked to
| there talk about how they only went into CS because someone
| they knew invited them to the hackathon, or have made friends
| and feel less alone in CS because of it.
|
| There's a real need for these groups. Whether men needs their
| own groups is a separate discussion that I have no real stance
| on.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| women have been marginalized for most of modern history, so
| it's not like it's a false assumption... I guess maybe you
| could make an argument for over-correction? but a lot of women
| would disagree.
|
| >If I setup a boys club for computers at school or hosted a
| men's IT society at work, that wouldn't end well.
|
| That's because most computer clubs and IT societies are already
| primarily men. It's kind of the default, which is why women-
| only groups are seen as transformative.
|
| If you want to look at it in a different way, you probably
| wouldn't have a problem setting up a group that teaches miners
| IT
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| Girls and women are marginalised in the area of technology.
| This site in particular has hosted terabytes of discussion of
| this problem. If you look back at some of the stories about
| conferences and why codes of conduct have been set up, you will
| see at least part of the publicly visible part of this.
|
| This is why it's perfectly socially acceptable to set up a
| specific group to give women and girls a chance to learn skills
| in an environment where they feel safe from sneering, lewd
| comments, and other such behaviour which is not conducive to
| learning, or simply having a good time.
|
| The article under discussion here is important, because boys
| and men face a great many difficulties in life, but the Venn
| diagram of difficulties faced by men and women has problems
| unique to each and problems shared by both.
|
| Complaining about people getting help in areas where they face
| a disproportionate struggle just seems unkind.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Women marginalized in technology was mostly bullshit abuse of
| statistics. It is just being assumed that fewer women has to
| be the result of discrimination. It is not.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > This is why it's perfectly socially acceptable to set up a
| specific group to give women and girls a chance to learn
| skills in an environment where they feel safe from sneering,
| lewd comments, and other such behaviour which is not
| conducive to learning, or simply having a good time.
|
| No. You just make it clear this is an environment where such
| behaviors are not tolerated.
|
| Also, it's not true that women and girls are incapable of
| sneering and lewd comments.
|
| You come across very much as the kind of person who believes
| boys are inherently deficient and deserve to fail, based on
| your assumptions about how boys will behave, and that they
| are incapable of behaving differently.
| mjevans wrote:
| I believe what's rubbing many the wrong way is the obvious
| bias towards 'girls'. The name of the programs, the focus of
| resources based on being VAR rather than a need someone could
| be (E.G. how I similarly take mild offense at programs that
| happen to target 'RACE' rather than 'the POOR' (anyone
| impoverished, even if that happens to strongly correlate to
| various races in sadly common cases due to past
| discrimination)).
|
| So, hypothetically, what do you and others believe needs to
| change? How would a 'girls can code/tech/etc' look if it
| couldn't //market// towards girls or any other focus of
| discrimination? Other than perhaps types of being in the
| 'have nots' category which any body-type could qualify for?
| tsol wrote:
| What does discussion on HN have to do with programs in
| schools? Really-- the tech industry may have issues but they
| are separate from how we raise and educate children, and the
| messaging we send those kids
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I think the culture that allows for the sexist torment that
| you see in conferences, in games, etc is disgusting and
| cannot be tolerated.
|
| That's a leadership and culture failure. When a female
| employee or student is marginalized or harassed, that's an
| issue that needs to be dealt with unequivocally and swiftly.
|
| In the school scenario I'm familiar with, my son is in 5th
| grade. There isn't a gamergate environment there. We should
| be exposing kids to technology and coding, period. School
| clubs should be building that culture where the idea of
| bullying girls is both unacceptable and repugnant.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Men's comparative advantage, throughout human history, has always
| been their physical strength. It was the one thing a man could
| count on to provide value to society. That is no longer the case
| in our modern economy. You need intelligence, emotional
| intellect, and analytical skills. All of which men and women are
| on an equal footing at. So when you remove the ability to
| generate a viable income through physical labor, it's pretty
| obvious why a good portion of men are now left without anything
| useful to contribute.
| philipkglass wrote:
| I agreed with this until the last sentence. If men and women
| are on an equal footing, why are a good portion of men left
| without anything useful to contribute? I suppose this could
| hinge on the definition of "good portion." I personally don't
| think that a "good portion" of prime working age men _or_ women
| are left without anything economically useful to contribute.
| American unemployment is currently low, hiring is up, wages are
| rising, and the coming AI revolution where robots do every job
| now appears more distant to me than it did 10 years ago.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >If men and women are on an equal footing, why are a good
| portion of men left without anything useful to contribute?
|
| Point being that not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer or
| a physicist. There will always be a good portion of the
| population that really has nothing to contribute economically
| but their labor. For women, these labor positions are the
| ones that have survived our transition to a mostly service
| based economy; healthcare, childcare, cleaning, food service,
| etc. For men, they mostly have not. The days of a man being
| able to use his comparative advantage of physical strength to
| earn above the median wage are long gone.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| This is a spitball take, but I'm trying it out because I'm
| more interested in learning how it plays out than actually
| making a point.
|
| Socialization is moving at a slower pace than the shift in
| economics. The trade deficit starting in the 1970s has
| overwhelmingly affected goods [1], resulting in the exporting
| of goods production overseas and leaving the US with a
| service-based economy[2]. The US at the time had a greater
| proportion of gender-dependent occupations[3]. The export of
| goods-producing jobs tended to disproportionately affect men
| as a result of this gender-occupation dissymmetry[4].
|
| At the same time, people have been socialized with system of
| gender values. In the past these gender values were congruent
| with both gendered occupations[5] and gendered occupational
| values[5]. However, as the proportional of service
| occupations grew, a portion of men found themselves
| socialized with values[4] incongruent with the values
| associated with occupations now available to them. The lag
| between value socialization and economic realities represent
| a point of friction and frustration that is expressed as a
| feeling of being undervalued economically[7].
|
| 1. https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/stlouisf
| ed...
|
| 2. https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/services-investment/services
|
| 3. https://flowingdata.com/2017/09/11/most-female-and-male-
| occu...
|
| 4. https://statusofwomendata.org/gender-differences-in-
| sectors-...
|
| 5. ANN C. MCGINLEY Masculinities at Work (2004)
|
| 6. https://www.annelitwin.com/masculine-and-feminine-
| workplace-... (this isn't the best source, but it is hard to
| find an example of how gender values connect to goods-service
| work and how that has changed over time)
|
| 7. Gould, R. 1974. Measuring masculinity by the size of a
| paycheck. In: J. Pleck & J. Sawyer (Eds.) Men and masculinity
| (pp. 96 - 100). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
| Zigurd wrote:
| I see why you would conclude that "it's pretty obvious why a
| good portion of men are now left without anything useful to
| contribute." It sure looks that way based on the sheer volume
| of male resentment online. Try commenting on any forum with a
| female persona and you will be ready to call for mass
| internment of trolls.
|
| But, the thing is, men are on not just equal footing, but a
| very advantageous footing especially where men dominate
| investment decisions. There is no excuse for men not to step up
| to the challenge of being equals when others carry a heavy
| disadvantage, still.
| RadixDLT wrote:
| I'm sorry but you are grossly mistaken when you say this, maybe
| it's true for the bottom half of men.
|
| "You need intelligence, emotional intellect, and analytical
| skills. All of which men and women are on an equal footing at."
| jimbokun wrote:
| > it's pretty obvious why a good portion of men are now left
| without anything useful to contribute.
|
| Well that went downhill quickly.
|
| You start out with men and women on equal footing. Then the
| next sentence men no longer have anything useful to contribute.
|
| Shouldn't the obvious conclusion be that men and women have
| equally as much to contribute? And therefor you would expect an
| equal number of men and women succeeding academically?
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >Shouldn't the obvious conclusion be that men and women have
| equally as much to contribute?
|
| Not really, because _what_ men traditionally had to
| contribute was their physical strength to perform labor.
| Having that as a requirement for many lucrative positions
| like manufacturing and resource extraction is what allowed
| men to out earn women with their labor in the past. Women
| never filled those jobs with physical requirements en masse,
| and so they now already occupy a far greater portion of the
| other parts of the workforce that men must now compete for.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Males have biological advantages in visual-spatial thinking.
| "Rotators vs. wordcels" is not just a weird meme.
| quesera wrote:
| Yikes. I had to look it up.
|
| So the Internet intelligentsia have: - Re-
| discovered the distinction between the hard and soft sciences
| (or, gasp, the liberal arts) - Declared themselves
| superior - Invented a disparaging name for the inferior
| class
|
| I feel like I've seen this movie before. It does not end
| well.
| bitwize wrote:
| First time I heard of rotators and wordcels, but yeah, when I
| was in high school we were actually given tests to see how
| much of a rotator or wordcel we really were -- the idea being
| to make career suggestions based on the results. I did fairly
| well on the rotator tests, which involved things like telling
| which way a particular gear or pulley in a given mechanism
| will turn. I struggled with the wordcel tests, which involved
| picking out a sequence of letters.
|
| Do you know who ran the board on the wordcel tests? Like, all
| of the girls.
|
| Just another anecdata point, so don't take it seriously.
| hnthrway wrote:
| I have never seen this meme
| acdha wrote:
| There's a lot of speculation but it's not proven. One of the
| big challenges when comparing these kind of claims is that
| the brain is plastic so it requires extra work to figure out
| what percentage of the identified difference is explained by
| differences in what activities people engage in. Since most
| big studies show more variation within a group than between
| groups, there's good reason to question whether this is
| measuring anything other than social effects.
|
| The other challenge is figuring out what activities actually
| have a low-level differences translate into significant
| advantages. There are very few job where a single low-level
| difference is both significant and the only path to success
| -- in most fields, there isn't a single model of top
| performer.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| I think your analyisis is missing something more fundamental -
| men's fundamental biological advantage is higher risk-
| tolerance, physical strength was associated with surviving
| physical risk to a degree that it justified the higher calorie
| expanditure powerful muscles require. Even with a lot of
| mechanisation of heavy lifting, men would still be more willing
| to do anything dangerous because a kin group can afford to lose
| a few men. It seems less that modern society has a reduced need
| for physical strength than that it has a reduced need for
| individuals to take on personal risk - and in fact, the way
| that risk is largely spread out through society in the form of
| the social safety net, one might say it has not just a reduced
| need but a reduced tolerance for risky behaviour. Tough times
| for men indeed. The instinct to take risks for admiration from
| our social sphere runs very deep, and there are only so many
| intellectual or financial risks worth taking.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Nobody has ever wanted to overload a cargo ship until it
| sinks but it seems like in the past ~10-15yr the idea of
| worthwhile risks even existing have become demonized except
| in the most abstract settings (math, finance, etc).
|
| In 1980 the guy that fixed a radio antenna in a blizzard
| because "what good is fall protection if I don't use it" got
| told he did a good job. Today he would be chewed out for
| taking unnecessary risks.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Even in finance, risk has become so socialised (thinking in
| particular of the wall street bailouts) that it's hard for
| an individual to take on a larger share of the risk for a
| larger reward even when he honestly wants to do so.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Gambling on options and crypto currency has only gotten
| easier over the years.
| RadixDLT wrote:
| they also failed to address that most men are bullied and
| discriminated in the workplace by females and feminists coworkers
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| "Most"?
| Beltalowda wrote:
| In what way? I've worked with some people with some fairly,
| ehm, extreme takes on things, and had a fair share of
| disagreements, sometimes with some words that were harsher than
| I thought were professional, but I've never been subjected to
| or observed anything I'd call close to "bullying".
| RadixDLT wrote:
| most jobs with an office environment
| sleepingadmin wrote:
| I like Yang, he's certainly intelligent and his reality/algorithm
| is certainly separate from mine, yet parallel. So I find what he
| talks about is very interesting. The first part of the article
| clearly lays out the reality that men/boys are under attack.
|
| One of the key roles that the political left-wing should
| represent is fixing disenfranchisement. Unfortunately for about
| the last few decades, that not only is untrue, the opposite is
| what is happening. It has been the left-wing who has been
| disenfranchising boys and men.
|
| >Yes, men have long had societal advantages over women and in
| some ways continue to be treated favorably. But male achievement
| -- alongside that of women -- is a condition for a healthy
| society.
|
| Here it is coming from Yang. The right-wing are obviously where
| traditional gender roles are still represented. The equality or
| rather attack on traditional roles started many decades prior but
| for example it's the left-wing who has attacked the boy scouts.
|
| It's the same reason that homelessness is in vast majority men,
| but the vast majority of homeless shelters are women's only.
|
| >Our media, institutions and public leadership have failed to
| address this crisis, framing boys and men as the problem
| themselves rather than as people requiring help.
|
| This is intentionally being done by those groups. Hard to address
| the crisis that they themselves are intentionally creating.
|
| >Resources that keep families together when they want to stay
| together, such as marriage counseling, should be subsidized by
| the government -- a much more cost-efficient approach than
| dealing with the downstream effects.
|
| What's more important. This isn't zero-sum, women benefit from
| men being strong.
|
| >On a cultural level, we must stop defining masculinity as
| necessarily toxic and start promoting positive masculinity.
| Strong, healthy, fulfilled men are more likely to treat women
| well.
|
| This was intentionally done and in fact, it's trending in a worse
| direction. This is about to get worse before it gets better.
|
| >The above is, of course, a prodigious undertaking. But I see the
| need around me all the time.
|
| Toxic masculinity isnt a thing on the right-wing. When the left-
| wing says 'toxic masculinity' the right-wing rolls its eyes. He
| sees this around him all the time because of where he stands
| politically. If you're interested in some right-wing positions on
| this subject.
|
| https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/the_lefts_w...
|
| https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/01/why_leftist...
|
| https://mises.org/library/marxism-and-manipulation-man
|
| Oh and if Yang continues this push. We shall never hear from him
| again.
| e2e4 wrote:
| https://archive.is/zl0O6
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| I think the root cause is that society no longer needs "beta"
| males. Or rather, men in the middle of the distribution. This
| here is a symptom of that broad effect in society. Technical
| leverage, automation, premium on intelligence in the workplace,
| and technology more broadly are pushing out average men.
| zapataband1 wrote:
| Hyper-concentration of wealth means no upward mobility so it's
| no surprise America is having this crisis. Turns out in
| capitalism if the goal is to hoard the most resources, once
| you're winning the game it's no longer profitable to educate
| the masses, better off to leave them poor and dying in wars
| that make even more money. Can you imagine a library or a
| modern public computer lab being built in cities? We make kids
| go into debt for food at school.
| decafninja wrote:
| Possible unpopular opinion, but my wife and I want just one kid,
| and would greatly, greatly, prefer a daughter for reasons that
| include some mentioned in this article.
|
| I feel a son would be so much harder to raise in today's world.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I think individual differences are far more important. I have a
| boy and a girl both, and my son is far, far easier to raise. I
| do not fear for his future, socially or economically. My
| daughter, on the other hand, keeps me awake at night worrying.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| zapataband1 wrote:
| Seems you've put a lot of thought into this, I think whatever
| your kid turns out to be they're already at a huge advantage to
| have someone like you
| epx wrote:
| I have a son, and am moderately optimistic this has peaked
| already.
|
| As the other commenter said, we see different families in very
| different mindsets.
|
| I have been personally affected by sexism type B: was expected
| to work, to be a provider someday, to pay my own way to
| university, if you want a car you buy it, etc. etc. My sister
| had the second family car at disposal and the tuition was paid
| for. There was this undercurrent interpretation of feminism
| that "women will eventually suffer so they should be pampered
| when possible".
|
| There were other factors at play: I have a tendency to self-
| indulgence, my sister does not, so it is prima facie difficult
| to separate what was proper, individualized upbringing and what
| was sexism. But sexism was a part; many male friends of the
| same generation have the same complaint and some could be
| better off today had they have more support at home.
|
| Then there is this relative of mine, that simply threw his
| daughters out at 18, since they are supposed to get a wealthy
| boyfriend and marry rich, so they don't need any further
| support. BTW they are disowned, too.
|
| This is sexism type A, and make it a _big_ A.
|
| Not necessary to say this strategy did not end well: both are
| stuck with less-than-optimal partners and careers. We are in
| 2022 and a nice, wealthy and rational guy won't commit to
| someone without a career and finances in order.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > a son would be so much harder to raise in today's world
|
| Maybe, but today's world is not the world your son would grow
| up in. We're at the end of the cycle from the G. Michael Hopf
| quote below. The beginning of the cycle is once again imminent,
| thankfully.
|
| "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times.
| Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times."
| frankbreetz wrote:
| >>Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms.
| Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the
| workforce.
|
| I wonder how much of this is because more women are joining the
| workforce. If men are leaving the workforce by their own free
| will because their wife is working and they are staying home with
| the kids, both of these facts could be true, but seems like a win
| in both gender equality terms and allowing men to have the life
| they want. This seems better then having two working parents.
|
| I don't really like how "out of the workforce" is coupled with
| unemployed. "out of the workforce" implies they don't have to and
| don't want to work, as opposed to unemployed
| uoaei wrote:
| > I wonder how much of this is because more women are joining
| the workforce. If men are leaving the workforce by their own
| free will because their wife is working and they are staying
| home with the kids, both of these facts could be true, but
| seems like a win in both gender equality terms and allowing men
| to have the life they want. This seems better then having two
| working parents.
|
| You sound like you didn't look at or have any sense of the
| statistics around two- vs one-income, single-family households
| before you posted this comment.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| The effect of womens' labor participation should be easy to
| suss out. Look at professions where womens' share of employment
| is still very low in the US (building trades perhaps), and
| compare it with the rest of the economy.
| tsol wrote:
| Are there a lot of stay at home dads? I personally don't know
| any. I don't believe that's a large societal trend. I agree it
| would be a good thing if it were that way, but I don't see any
| indication to think that
| friedturkey wrote:
| Wild to me that data showing men are facing objective decline
| is called a win, just because the gender gap is smaller (or
| speeding in the opposite direction as before, with regards to
| college entrance rates) due to the situation being worse for
| men.
|
| Society really loves to kick them while they're down these
| days.
| decafninja wrote:
| Do many married men really want that kind of life though?
|
| It's one thing to be single and roaming the world carefree.
|
| But my observation has been that most men who are married,
| especially if with children, have some innate desire to provide
| for the family and not being able to do so (due to
| unemployment, underemployment, etc.) causes them stress even if
| the wife is earning more than enough.
|
| Those that don't seem to be an outlier. Is it biological? Is it
| social pressure? I don't know.
| frenchy wrote:
| I, for one, would like it, and I think I'd like it more than
| my wife. My personality is well suited to being a stay at
| home parent. I like chaos, and I like working with my hands.
| Unfortunately, there's not a lot of reduced-hour programming
| jobs, and our financial situation isn't such that one of us
| can be full-time stay-at-home.
|
| Another thing is that it's awkard for breast-feeding women to
| be away from their babies for long times, and formula comes
| with its own set of problems.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| You can do consulting part time, or go indie, then you can
| work as much or as little as you want. As a programmer you
| really have a lot of options.
|
| Or adjust your lifestyle to not need to earn so much.
|
| If you really want to stay home, there's probably a way to
| make it work.
| worik wrote:
| > Another thing is that it's awkard for breast-feeding
| women to be away from their babies for long times, and
| formula comes with its own set of problems.
|
| True. But it is a short period.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Personally, I would love to quit working and take care of my
| family at home. I find much more joy in that than working a
| programming career. I think a lot of men have been
| conditioned to think we have to be the provider much like
| women have been conditioned to think they have to be a
| homemaker.
| mekal wrote:
| I'm in the same boat as you, but I think it's important to
| remember another factor besides conditioning. It's much
| easier to say "I would love to quit" when you have a job
| than it is to be happy not having a job when you aren't
| sure if you could actually get one to begin with.
|
| Similarly, if you know you could take someone in a fight,
| and they challenge you in public...its easier in that case
| to "take the high road" and walk away than it would be if
| you knew you would lose the fight, or you weren't confident
| you would win. The people in the latter case are much more
| likely to feel shame and/or resentment towards the
| aggressor later on.
|
| I think with "power" like that its easier to make the best
| choice in many cases. It's a shame too...I know a few
| people that are miserable because they don't have a "real
| job", even though they don't really need one financially.
| That lack of power keeps them from being happy and choosing
| the lifestyle that would obviously be best otherwise.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I don't really understand your comment, sorry! However,
| in my case, I think taking care of my family would be my
| "real job" since it actually takes a lot of effort! My
| wife does a lot around here, and I consider her work as
| integral to our family's well-being as my work; maybe
| even moreso.
| worik wrote:
| I did. It was great.
|
| Until my children grew up and I rejoined the workforce.
| That has been a struggle.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I think this is unfortunately a common issue among those
| who leave the workforce to raise children; looking back,
| it certainly seems to match my mother's experience. I'm
| preparing to follow that path as well but hoping to keep
| up by doing small projects or piecework at home when I
| can.
| boringg wrote:
| I figure this is the tough transition once the kids are
| older and try to get back into the career-mode after a
| long hiatus. I hope you are finding your footing.
| danbolt wrote:
| Agreed; I think a lot of the shame deviating from that is
| both internalized and external.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Indeed; how is it fair that men are "forced" to work and
| provide income (with all the stress associated for that,
| especially for low-earners) and are "forced" to miss out on
| their kids? It seems to me that's just as much of an
| injustice as women being "forced" to stay at home.
| ("forced" in quotes as it's not strongly forced, but rather
| "forced" by expectations, prospects, etc.)
|
| I've long considered traditional gender roles of man works
| and provides income and woman raises kids and cooks to be
| unfair to _both_ genders and a general issue that affects
| everyone, and not really a "feminist" issue as such (or
| rather, not exclusively feminist).
|
| In my country there's been a lot of discussion that a lot
| of women are working part-time rather than full-time, with
| many claiming this is horrible and evidence of
| discrimination. Maybe that plays a part, but it seems to me
| the real question is "why aren't more men working part-
| time?" rather than "why aren't more women working full-
| time?"
|
| And more general: up to a few decades ago it was entirely
| normal for a single earner to support an entire family and
| still have money for a yearly holiday. Now that's much
| harder financially, if not outright impossible. Something
| really profound changed in our economy with seemingly few
| people noticing or commenting on it.
| bluGill wrote:
| Until a few generations ago everyone worked from home.
| The kids were with whichever parent or often extended
| family.
|
| You lived on your farm or in your village. Both parents
| did work on the farm as needed. Dad was never far from
| home and did take the older kids to the fields.
| [deleted]
| ok_dad wrote:
| Men are socialized to work by the same society that women
| are socialized to stay home and make babies. Feminism's
| direct goals would be breaking that down so that men
| could stay home (unfortunately we cannot make babies) and
| women could work, or any other combination, without the
| traditional gender role boundaries. Feminism's goals are
| good for everyone.
| skinkestek wrote:
| You are talking about a subset of reasonable feminists.
|
| Feminism also contains the culture that wants six year
| old boys to be held back, feel shame and suffer for the
| sins of their fathers.
|
| Feminism also contains the idea that being a man is some
| kind of disease, something to be ashamed of.
| ok_dad wrote:
| There are examples of men who want women to be chained to
| the kitchen; we should consider the reasonable views
| though, and not throw the baby out with the bath water.
| Ignore the fringe elements, even though that's the thing
| that the media and social algorithms push since they're
| the most "engaging". They are the small minority.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > There are examples of men who want women to be chained
| to the kitchen;
|
| If you ask a representative sample of men most will
| disagree strongly and loudly.
|
| If however you ask feminists to distance themselves from
| the extremists you'll probably find a completely
| different answer.
|
| I have no papers to show but I have been watching the
| debate from the sidelines:
|
| Even something as simple as getting feminists to condemn
| "kill all men" is hard.
| ok_dad wrote:
| > probably
|
| Your whole argument hinges on this word, you are not
| arguing in good faith, but rather, building a strawman.
| I'm not going to engage with this style. Thanks.
|
| > I have no papers to show but I have been watching the
| debate from the sidelines:
| ska wrote:
| That "reasonable subset" is to a first order
| approximation feminism.
|
| All "isms" contain outliers, but it's a mistake to get
| too hung up them in almost all cases. One of the oldest
| tricks in the book for people trying to push back against
| idea is to identify these outliers and generate a
| narrative that this is what the idea is actually about -
| it's bad faith argument and shouldn't be engaged with.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Sibling comment to yours is writing about men who want
| women chained to the kitchen.
|
| Is that too a bad faith argument?
| ok_dad wrote:
| > Sibling comment to yours is writing about men who want
| women chained to the kitchen.
|
| I said:
|
| > There are examples of men who want women to be chained
| to the kitchen; _we should consider the reasonable views
| though_ ,
|
| and
|
| > _Ignore the fringe elements_
|
| Emphasis added on the important parts. I was arguing
| there are always fringe elments, and to ignore those, not
| that the men who are shitheads are important to focus on.
| You're really twisting things around and I won't comment
| further on these bad-faith arguments, have a nice day.
| ska wrote:
| It sure could be if you were trying to represent it as
| most/many men or whatever.
|
| Which is I think what the sibling commentor was trying to
| say, no?
|
| The bad faith argumentation doesn't come from the
| specifics of whatever group you are talking about, it
| comes from trying to represent a fringe view or
| characterization as definitive of the group, then
| attacking them all for it.
|
| Take for example the current news about Canadian trucker
| convoy, there was some coverage of people in the convoy
| being pictured with swastika flags.
|
| It's perfectly reasonable to say: "hey, what's up with
| the neonazi's ? Are you guys really ok with them being
| part of your protest?"
|
| And it's perfectly reasonable to judge them on the
| response to that question. There are even nuanced answers
| that it's hard to judge.
|
| However, it's a bad faith argument to jump from that to:
| "Canadian truckers are nazi's".
| skinkestek wrote:
| Seems we agree.
| 202202092037 wrote:
| _> Feminism 's direct goals would be breaking that down
| so that men could stay home_
|
| Please kindly let me know where such sort of feminism is
| happening - I would like to move there.
| igetspam wrote:
| Earth.
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/feminism
|
| Feminism is the belief that women are deserving of equal
| consideration in all things.
| tsol wrote:
| I'd like to see some stats that feminism has led to women
| marrying men who make less than them. From what I've
| seen, the expectation that a man should provide holds
| true even with egalitarian couples.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Sure, I'm not "against" feminism in general or anything,
| although re-reading my previous comment I can see how it
| gave off that impression. I just think it's a very
| limited view on things, which translates into suboptimal
| solutions. I also think it can feed alienation among men
| at times, rather than involving them in the conversation.
|
| From what I've read and people I've spoken to, quite a
| large number - though far from all - feminists seem to
| agree on that in broad lines, yet somehow the public
| discourse still remains fairly narrow IMHO. Personally, I
| blame the "MRA" people and their nonsense.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| anecdotally I would love to spend all my time taking care of
| my kids, cooking, cleaning, etc... I find it much more
| enjoyable than working for someone else
| giantg2 wrote:
| Regardless of gender, it seems rare that only one partner
| would be making more than enough to support the family. It's
| very difficult to make ends meet with a family on a single
| salary these days (without assistance; and what about saving
| for retirement? ).
| nicoburns wrote:
| Does doing the actual childcare not constitute providing for
| their family? I'd argue that if men see bringing in an income
| as providing and not other things (and I don't think that's
| universal at all) then that's entirely cultural.
| decafninja wrote:
| "Providing for the family" traditionally refers to bringing
| in an income. Of course technically that's not the only
| thing, but for argument's sake.
|
| I'm curious - are there any human cultures where the woman
| was the traditionally (as in, not a recent modern
| phenomenon) the breadwinner and the men stayed at home? I
| know there are cultures that were matriarchal in
| leadership, and that there are animal species (i.e. lions)
| where the female does the hunting. But were there any true
| "Amazon" cultures in the past?
| staticman2 wrote:
| Women needed to stay with the kids to breastfeed. Baby
| formula was only invented around 1865. Any traditional
| culture is going to need women to stay with the babies to
| keep them from starving.
|
| However women would take babies with them while doing
| things like picking nuts and berries.
| [deleted]
| tsol wrote:
| Wetnurses were employed when a mother wasn't in a
| position to breastfeed babies for thousands of years
| dlsa wrote:
| The picture is nowhere near this neat and tidy. Plenty of men
| can't get jobs. They want jobs but can't get them. Life
| circumstances are far more complex. Its not always solved by
| learning to code either. Not everyone can do that. Offshoring
| jobs was not good for societal structures at all. It was all
| about short term profit.
|
| Less men in employment is not a good thing. It isn't some kind
| of passing the torch to women happy event. Its just mass
| unemployment of a significant number of people in their prime
| earning age. Its societal failure.
| johncessna wrote:
| > More U.S. men ages 18 to 34 are now living with their parents
| than with romantic partners.
|
| and
|
| > Research shows that one significant factor women look for in
| a partner is a steady job. As men's unemployment rises, their
| romantic prospects decline. Unsurprisingly, according to a Pew
| Research Center analysis of data from 1960 to 2010, the
| proportion of adults without a college degree who marry
| plummeted from just over 70 percent to roughly 45 percent.
|
| Seem to imply that this isn't a case of men choosing to stay at
| home with the kids. I'm curious what the actual data is though.
| frankbreetz wrote:
| More of all 18-34 year olds are staying with their parents,
| not just men[0], so this may be a problem of unavailable
| housing or some other non-gender specific problem.
|
| [0]https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-
| jeffrey/censu...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Usual suspects. Student loan debt, lower wages, high cost
| of housing, all delaying household formation.
| bmj wrote:
| As the father of 18 year old who is not going to college and
| instead working as a carpenter, I don't think lumping 18 year
| olds with 25+ year olds makes much sense. Perhaps I have an
| antiquated view of family, but I don't feel his
| "independence" has everything to do with where he lives. I'm
| more than happy to have him around the house if it allows him
| to save money and live a better life at, say, 21.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Further, I think it is largely undesirable for people in
| their late teens or early 20s to be living with romantic
| partners. Breakups are way more complicated when you also
| lose your housing.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| People don't get good at stuff unless they practice
|
| At some point you need to just do these adult things in
| order to get good. Delaying doesn't change that much.
| Better to get the practice over with as soon as possible.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| That's true. But moving in with somebody is high risk.
| You often need to practice at just being in a
| relationship and get good at that first.
|
| What is the average number of romantic partners that a
| person lives with in their life? It probably isn't that
| high.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Sure, it can be a great arrangement. It will slow down his
| dating prospects though, who can host if a relationship
| gets serious is a common discussion in dating.
| bmj wrote:
| Dating for the 18-21 cohort, outside of the university
| setting, is already very challenging. Truth be told, some
| of the women my son has dated in this cohort also live at
| home.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Very challenging? Most couples have a car between them
| and a whole lot of appetite for adventure and risque.
| humanrebar wrote:
| Think beyond dating. If they want to get a place
| together, do they have the combined resources to swing
| rent?
|
| It's not like everyone lives on a farm anymore. You
| probably can't just build a starter house on the other
| side of her dad's back 40 acres.
| asdff wrote:
| Rent gets a lot easier when its two earners splitting a
| one bedroom or even a studio
| humanrebar wrote:
| Sure, but that's true with platonic roommates, too,
| right?
| snakeboy wrote:
| Usually platonic roommates are less willing to share a
| one-bedroom, much less a studio.
| decafninja wrote:
| Multigenerational households are the default in many
| countries/cultures with many young adults - even high
| earning ones like doctors, hedge funders, or FAANG SWEs
| -continuing to live with their parents until marriage.
| They manage to get in relationships and date just fine.
| The logistics can be different of course.
| tharne wrote:
| This is spot on. Multigenerational housing used to be the
| norm, not a symbol of failure.
|
| Why we all think it's a great idea to leave our families at
| 18 and pay high rents so that we can live with strangers we
| found on the internet is beyond me.
| openknot wrote:
| There are good reasons in response to: "Why we all think
| it's a great idea to leave our families at 18 and pay
| high rents so that we can live with strangers we found on
| the internet is beyond me," though personally I also
| don't believe that multigenerational housing is a symbol
| of failure, and often lets a person save a lot of money.
|
| It's more difficult to maintain a romantic relationship
| when living with family (especially if both partners live
| with family), and it can also delay life skills (e.g.
| learning how to cook at home, clean, and generally learn
| to live more independently; though it's possible to
| deliberately learn this while living with family, it
| becomes a necessity to learn after moving out).
| tharne wrote:
| There are definitely some benefits to living on one's own
| for a while, but I do not think we should continue to
| view as the only viable option, or even the default for
| that matter.
| decafninja wrote:
| Being pressured to move out of your parents' home ASAP is
| largely an American phenomenon I think. Maybe parts of
| Europe as well?
|
| In many parts of the world, the point where you are
| expected to (and socially pressured to) move out of your
| parents home is marriage. Of course there are exceptions,
| like moving to a faraway city for a job, etc.
|
| Whereas I see many American youths bleeding away their
| income on rent and expenses while living 10 minutes away
| from their parents' home.
| info781 wrote:
| It is the weathly countries where people move out
| younger.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| The thing is, the people that do the systems planning of
| our economy and social structure have an incentive for
| every man to move into a productive lifestyle the minute
| he turns 18. But there's a misalignment of incentives;
| what appears productive for society is not productive for
| the young men in question.
|
| So of course, in print, there's a crisis of young men
| staying at home with their parents til they're 30. But
| for young men, there's a crisis of incentive. Why on
| earth would a young man want to go give half his waking
| life to barely pay his own rent, then run on the
| treadmill that is modern online dating for, at best,
| meaningless hedonistic interactions with maybe, maybe
| not, women he's attracted to?
|
| What it comes down to is that men have no incentive to do
| anything other than low effort, intangible self service,
| because the other alternative is just a more expensive
| version of the exact same thing.
| frankbreetz wrote:
| The statistic uses "now" which implies a change over time,
| so they have been grouped together for while and it may be
| difficult to separate this group from past studies.
|
| This does bring up an important concept of "emerging
| adulthood" [0]. Where in modern day societies there seem to
| be a time period where young adults do what you are
| describing. There seem to be some of this coupled with some
| young men not being able to find purpose in life as
| evidence by the increase in suicide and drug use in the
| that group.
|
| [0]https://www.unh.edu/pacs/emerging-adulthood
| rhino369 wrote:
| It absolutely makes sense. The idea that an 18 year old
| would start their own household is an artifact from a small
| period in our history when 18 year olds could easily get an
| unskilled job that would afford a decent modest lifestyle.
| But that only really started in the late 40's and was over
| by the 70's.
| tharne wrote:
| > The idea that an 18 year old would start their own
| household is an artifact from a small period in our
| history when 18 year olds could easily get an unskilled
| job that would afford a decent modest lifestyle.
|
| I think this is the root of a lot of people's
| frustrations around housing, and adulthood. For most our
| history it was expected that you would have multiple
| generations sharing a household. The idea that you move
| out of your family's house the second you turn 18 or
| finish college is a relatively new idea. As parent
| commenter points out, this was really only the norm for
| two generations, suggesting that that, and not our
| current situation, is the historical outlier.
|
| Living with your family for a while allows you to save
| money and help your parents out after they spent the
| better part of two decades raising you.
| [deleted]
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| You know one thing I find interesting is you specifically
| call out "unskilled job", which I think has a point but
| the OP mentions specifically his son studying to be a
| carpenter that I would consider a "high skilled" job,
| even if it is blue collar, and then you suggest there was
| a small period of time when an 18 yo could provide for a
| family with unskilled labor.
|
| I then realized that for much of history up until
| recently by the time a young man was 18 years old he was
| already a skilled craftsman at his craft to a large
| extant. The young man would've been training with his
| father at his craft from the time he was ten years old
| and so by the time he was 18 would be proficient in what
| he had to do.
|
| I wonder then is part of the issue we face due to the
| fact that we spend so much time trying to instill a
| modern education into youth until they are adults that
| they have to spend an additional 4-8 years acquiring an
| actual skill in order to be able to provide value in the
| workforce?
| rhino369 wrote:
| When I said unskilled, I meant to distinguish the OP's
| carpenter son from unskilled jobs. I don't think there
| has ever been a time before 1945 when the average man was
| a skilled laborer. A liner worker in a factory or farm-
| hand isn't skilled labor. For most of history, those
| people were exploited.
|
| Craftsman usually had a decent living because it took
| training and there was generally demand. But if you train
| twice as many electricians, its not like there will be
| twice as many electrician jobs created. So learning a
| craft or trade is a great personal strategy, but it not a
| solution we can universally apply.
|
| I do think we force way too many people into college-
| track for little benefit and quite a bit of harm.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| > But if you train twice as many electricians, its not
| like there will be twice as many electrician jobs
| created. So learning a craft or trade is a great personal
| strategy, but it not a solution we can universally apply.
|
| I don't know that I agree with that, right now at least
| on the data I have available and the anecdata I have
| observed there is a serious shortage of skilled blue
| color work, plumber, carpenter, electrician, etc. so
| there is definitely a shift that would be beneficial for
| society at large and individuals.
|
| But let's explore this idea a little bit more, right now
| we are used to the idea that there are X jobs for Y
| persons, especially in white color work. This seems to
| derive largely from the fact that white color work is
| focused not on production of goods and services but in
| the production of information (and to some extant
| bullsh*). For example there are only so many marketing
| jobs out there because there are only so much marketing a
| company needs done. Sure adding your first 3 marketers
| may increase your revenue by 50% but adding your 300th
| marketer probably isn't going to increase your income at
| all, in fact it's likely it might actually be a negative
| investment. The problem is the marketer doesn't actually
| add a resources to the world, they aren't producing
| marketing widgets, they merely identify and optimize
| existing distribution channels, and help others become
| aware of your company, and there is only so much you can
| do in that area, there is only so much inefficiency that
| can be optimized away.
|
| Contrast this instead with a plumber. You hire your first
| plumber he can do say 5 jobs a day, if you hire 3 more
| plumbers you can do 20 jobs a day now. Well let's suppose
| later on you hire another plumber he still adds the value
| to do 5 more jobs a day. Now you may say that there are
| only so many plumbing jobs out there, only so many people
| have their 3 year old push a bouncy ball down the toilet,
| but the plumber is also working on new housing and new
| business, the plumber isn't just optimizing the existing
| pie they are causing the overall size of the pie itself
| to increase. Now there does of course exist some sort of
| maximum to this, but after reading World War Z that
| explores this concept in quite a bit of depth (and has no
| similarity to the movie at all) I've realized that if
| society did collapse I as a software engineer have
| absolutely no real or applicable skills, whereas an
| electrician or a carpenter, they will be able to keep on
| doing their job as they were now, because they are
| creating actual wealth, not just optimizing existing
| wealth generation activities.
|
| My point being a society with an overabundance of
| electricians, carpenters and plumbers is probably better
| off than a society with an overabundance of project
| managers, paralegals, and risk analysts.
| klyrs wrote:
| Some form of Green New Deal would create tons of jobs
| like that -- people to upgrade furnaces, install heat
| exchangers, upgrade windows and insulation, and
| manufacture all of the above. Republicans used to be all
| about creating jobs like this... I'm not holding my
| breath, but if a post-trump era is less toxic and the
| parties can sit down together, it could do marvels for
| our economy.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I largely agree. My grandfather grew up on a farm,
| graduated 8th grade, then continued to work the farm
| while mining coal with the other men in his family. That
| wasn't uncommon in his time.
| toyg wrote:
| Yep. And we do it largely because we started from a
| schooling model built to shape factory workers, and then
| tried to develop it by aping what the upper classes did -
| regardless of whether their models could actually scale
| or were at all desirable in large numbers.
|
| Sadly, doing so also stripped dignity from vocational /
| blue-collar work - even when it pays (very) well, kids
| are told that a life in the trades is for the uneducated,
| ignorant swines.
|
| Ironically, part of this development is led by
| emancipation of the lower classes themselves: "I break my
| back every day but my son will study and be a doctor". A
| sentiment we all admire, but ends up reinforcing the idea
| that the father's blue-collar work is crap - and that's
| not how it should be, all workers should have equal
| dignity and value.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Modern factory work is going to need a lot of that
| "upper-level" knowledge too, due to technical change.
| Pure "blue-collar" work where one could neglect education
| altogether is either gone or fast disappearing.
| throwaway6532 wrote:
| That's going to be severely problematic for those in the
| bottom 15% of the intelligence distribution when there
| comes a point that there is nothing in society they could
| do that wouldn't be actively counter productive.
|
| Modern society and its trajectory seems a fundamentally
| unsustainable enterprise.
| Aloha wrote:
| Bottom 30% even - we must have a somewhat equitable
| distribution of opportunity, otherwise you end up with
| unrest.
| throwaway6532 wrote:
| The funny thing is... I would say for about a couple of
| hundred thousands years before the Neolithic Revolution,
| we did.
| tragictrash wrote:
| I'm all for equal dignity and value, but I think you are
| misunderstanding the situation here.
|
| The fact is that money buys better health and familial
| outcomes. The parents want that for their kids. Manual
| labor, regardless of how well it pays takes a toll on
| your body and generally pays less than a lot of the
| highly sought after knowledge worker jobs.
|
| I really think the rising cost of living is whats driving
| these kinds of ideas. The parents want their kids to make
| more money so they can have a better life - a reality in
| america. Others see this and assume that the blue collar
| job is bad or something.
|
| If we had an adequate healthcare system that didn't favor
| the super rich with good outcomes, I would agree. Until
| then, my kids are going to be encouraged to go into a
| career where they can make lots of money sitting in an
| air conditioned office.
|
| I've worked the blue collar tough as fuck jobs, and now I
| work in an air conditioned office making 15x as much.
| Objectively, which one is the better job?
|
| I agree, not how it should be, but you gotta get yours.
|
| Also, if you've ever worked in the trades you would know
| that a large portion of them are ignorant and uneducated.
| That stereotype exists for a reason. Its just a fact, and
| they have a tougher time navigating life because of it.
| I've lived it.
| Aloha wrote:
| The one you enjoy the most that can provide you a decent
| living.
|
| Not everyone can work an information sector job.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| > Also, if you've ever worked in the trades you would
| know that a large portion of them are ignorant and
| uneducated. That stereotype exists for a reason. Its just
| a fact, and they have a tougher time navigating life
| because of it. I've lived it.
|
| I agree with you there, I think there is a tendency to
| romanticize the life of a blue collar worker, and thing
| of them as the noble simple idealized "proletariat", when
| as you point out the stereotypes are stereotypes for a
| reason.
|
| But I have to wonder is part of that because of the brain
| drain in the trades that resulted from everyone going to
| college and feeling they had to do white collar work.
| Before a smart, observant, hardworking young man could
| become an electrician and by virtue of being observant
| and quick witted could succeeded and excel and become an
| outstanding electrician that could bring about innovation
| and elevate his work team. Nowadays though the same
| hardworking intelligent young man is being told that the
| trades are for stupid people, and he is too smart for
| that and wouldn't it be much better to go get a college
| degree so he can get a "real job". Then twenty years and
| $50,000 of student debt later he finds himself as a
| project manager trapped in a standup meeting at 8:00 on a
| Wednesday morning, hating his life, drowning in
| unfulfilled despair and wondering what went wrong with
| his life.
|
| I just think that part of the stereotypes about the
| trades has become a self fulfilling prophecy.
| tragictrash wrote:
| Interesting take.
|
| Two things I would comment on are:
|
| 1) the amount of debt, try 150-200k
|
| 2) in this example, how can you know that he wouldn't
| hate his life if he chose the trades?
| sacred_numbers wrote:
| According to this source[1], the average student loan
| debt for a new 4-year graduate in 2020 is $28,400. Of
| course, this is highly variable depending on the student,
| but $150-200k is not typical for a 4-year degree.
|
| [1]: https://www.credible.com/blog/statistics/average-
| student-loa...
| foobarian wrote:
| I have hopes that the invisible hand will provide some
| corrective feedback. Because at the end of the day,
| _someone_ has to do the electrical work and the
| construction work etc. If it can 't be done without some
| amount of IQ the market will adjust for that.
|
| This is already coming to pass in hot real-estate markets
| where it's almost impossible to get any sort of trade
| help. It feels like most of the skilled tradesmen (and
| women) have a plethora of job choices and they by far
| prefer to build new housing instead of dealing with
| nitpicky rich people for the same money.
| tragictrash wrote:
| I agree we are in an unstable situation and it will equal
| out over time. My main concern is the burden it places on
| us all in the meantime. Those most vulnerable are going
| to be hit the hardest.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > A sentiment we all admire, but ends up reinforcing the
| idea that the father's blue-collar work is crap - and
| that's not how it should be, all workers should have
| equal dignity and value.
|
| Assuming that value equals price, the only way everyone
| would have an equal price is if supply and demand were
| exactly equal across all occupations over a long period
| of time.
|
| That is not a realistic expectation. And the only way for
| people (by and large) to be incentivized to do the things
| where supply is not meeting demand is to have a higher
| price where supply of labor is more needed than
| elsewhere.
| ska wrote:
| > Assuming that value equals price
|
| That's a big assumption. There are lots of careers with
| social and financial values that diverge, ignoring that
| would I think miss the point OP is trying to make.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| My point is everyone can never have equal "value". The
| blue collar father urging their kid to be a doctor is not
| doing it because he thinks he is inherently less
| "valuable" than a doctor. The father is urging their kid
| because the father has experience on the type of quality
| of life a blue collar father can provide versus a doctor
| father can provide, which is a function of the price that
| they can sell their labor at.
| ska wrote:
| You are still being reductive in a way that I think
| misses the point grandparent was trying to make. It may
| be true that not everyone's career can have the same
| value, but it's hopeless to try and define that by
| paychecks alone - that's just not how society values
| things.
|
| In other words your argument could works equally well for
| the father urging their kid to do something that on
| average won't pay better, but will bring them more
| respect and social standing.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I find that it is usually purchasing power which results
| in respect and social standing. What are examples of the
| opposite, that do not involve being related or networked
| to someone who does have purchasing power?
|
| If most plumbers started earning top 10% wages in the US,
| they would have similar social standing to doctors. Even
| doctors have probably moved down in relative status,
| where the new ones are basically W2 employees with
| metrics for a big company.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| I'd really like to see that broken down year by year. 18 is
| rather young to be living with a partner, and not at all out
| of the norm to be living with parents (many 18 year olds are
| still attending high school, others are in junior college,
| others are working and possibly saving up to move out).
| dlsa wrote:
| If most women are optimising unemployed men out of dating /
| marriage then men being unemployed has far more significant
| consequences for men than women. Women are all about equality
| for access to employment but then complain that there aren't
| enough suitable men with jobs. The more a woman earns the
| smaller her dating pool becomes. Perhaps she could be more
| flexible in partner selection? There are outliers but the
| data suggests women are very traditional in very particular
| ways. Whereas the situation for men has been to marry down.
| But no such expectation for women. Its an interesting little
| bit of hypocracy.
|
| There's a heap of complexity around this. Society needs to
| shift and work this out. Its only been around a century. The
| answers are not so simple.
| bradlys wrote:
| > The more a woman earns the smaller her dating pool
| becomes. Perhaps she could be more flexible in partner
| selection?
|
| This will take more than a generation to solve. Culturally
| this is _not_ acceptable for women. Women are looked down
| upon for dating men who make less than them.
|
| For the next 20-30 years, women will continue to shame
| themselves and others for dating men of "lower" or even
| equal value.
| trhway wrote:
| > the proportion of adults without a college degree who marry
| plummeted from just over 70 percent to roughly 45 percent.
|
| seems to be the answer is right here - college. Historically
| the basic level of necessary education has been increasing. 4
| year grammar school couple centuries ago to the K-12 30 years
| ago, and today it is "K-16", i.e. K-12 plus college. Not
| having college today is more and more like not having GRE
| several decades ago.
| rhino369 wrote:
| I think its more that they are dropping out and playing Xbox
| than dropping out and watching the kids.
|
| I'm not sure I blame them. If I had no prospects of a wife or
| kids, I'd quit my job and argue with people on the internet in
| my dad's basement too.
| mandmandam wrote:
| This isn't mysterious. The people sucking money out of the wage
| pool are the 1% class, not women.
|
| 20 trillion in debt for illegal and stupid wars probably didn't
| help either, though it does tie in once again with the 1%
| class.
| api wrote:
| > 20 trillion in debt for illegal and stupid wars
|
| That's really the elephant in the living room. Perhaps as a
| society we are poorer because we set fire to trillions in the
| deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan.
|
| For the HN crowd here's a metric: the average seed round is
| like $2M these days, so Iraq at roughly $3 trillion would be
| enough to fund 1.5 million startup companies.
| ohwellhere wrote:
| It might be both. See charts on the numbered page 4:
| https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45090.pdf
|
| Women at 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles saw real wage
| increases from 1979-2019; men saw a decrease at 10th and
| 50th.
|
| (I'm morally opposed to the top 90th percentile's growth at
| the expense of the bottom. I'm not morally opposed to gender
| pay equality, which I _think_ is zero sum and results in
| lower wages for men as it improves.)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > The people sucking money out of the wage pool are the 1%
| class, not women
|
| What does that mean?
| jessaustin wrote:
| The wealthy determine how the rest of us in USA are
| governed. Inevitably, they decide that they will get more
| and we will get less.
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-
| poli...
| tsol wrote:
| Sounds like they're talking about wealth inequality
| newaccount74 wrote:
| It means that employees are paid less so more profits go to
| the shareholders.
|
| It's not men vs women, but workers vs owners.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I wonder how much of this is because more women are joining
| the workforce. If men are leaving the workforce by their own
| free will because their wife is working and they are staying
| home with the kids, both of these facts could be true_
|
| Not what's happening. For one, marriages are decreasing too and
| marriage age increases.
| salawat wrote:
| Legal marriage is decreasing. You can draw on more benefits
| as single from the System. Legal marriage also leads to
| pathological complications in terms of seperation in some
| states.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| A substantial population of men are also deeply concerned
| that a legal marriage will end in a costly, lopsided, and
| devastating divorce. It is no secret that women have the
| advantage in such proceedings.
| vmception wrote:
| For the _breadwinner_ the outcome isn 't very gendered,
| except for the conditions of custody of any children.
|
| And although not very gendered, it is a shitty contract
| where the worst clauses have extremely high rates of
| occurring. Even when isolating to later aged upper middle
| class economic equals, a 10% rate of triggering the worst
| clauses in a financial contract is extremely bad.
|
| You simply can't decouple the financial aspects of a
| financial contract just because how someone might have
| been conditioned to romanticize an overarching concept.
| caeril wrote:
| > For the breadwinner the outcome isn't very gendered
|
| This is a distinction without a difference. Even today,
| with women's educational attainment and workforce
| compensation skyrocketing, they still strongly marry
| "up". In the aggregate, this leaves the situation
| arguably even _worse_ than before:
|
| 1. More men are pushed out of the marriage market.
|
| 2. Men who _are_ in the marriage market still face
| financial devastation when the wife decides it 's time to
| "find herself" in a no-fault divorce state (e.g. nearly
| all of them).
| csa wrote:
| > Legal marriage also leads to pathological complications
| in terms of seperation in some states.
|
| This cannot be overstated.
|
| True even with a prenup.
| worik wrote:
| In civilised jurisdictions these rules apply to unmarried
| couples too. The amount of economic violence,
| historically, perpetrated by men over women has been
| huge.
|
| The worm has turned
| csa wrote:
| > In civilised jurisdictions these rules apply to
| unmarried couples too. The amount of economic violence,
| historically, perpetrated by men over women has been
| huge.
|
| I'm guessing we are talking about two different things.
|
| I will also add that, in my circle, women are getting
| screwed as much by this as men, so "the worm has turned"
| might better be "be careful what you wish for".
|
| I largely have no issues with approximately equal
| division of assets acquired during a marriage.
|
| The two main issues I have are:
|
| 1. Determining what counts as an asset.
|
| 2. The method of contesting _anything_ in a contested
| divorce.
|
| For 1, appreciation of any asset counts as an asset that
| should be divided.
|
| If you came into a marriage with $1 million in ETFs and a
| $1.5m house free and clear, and those go up to $1.7m etfs
| and $2.5m house, spouse gets half of $1.7m asset
| appreciation for.... I struggle to answer this question
| in a way that us not "being lucky".
|
| Note that they do not owe half of losses if assets lose
| value.
|
| Meanwhile, somehow inheritance is treated as largely
| untouchable money. How does that make sense?
|
| For 2, if a divorce is not amicable, sometimes the party
| that feels scorned takes a scorched earth approach and
| basically is willing to give a ton of money to lawyers
| ("spouse doesn't get it!") while also freezing assets.
|
| I've seen some very asset rich people be cash poor
| because their former spouse just wouldn't let them sell
| _anything_ , even when they split the proceeds. This was
| just nothing other than malice. Sure, you can go to court
| to force them to let you sell for cash, but this is just
| another example of a pathological aspect of our current
| system.
|
| This aspect can also create complications in things like
| limited partnerships and other businesses in which it can
| be really hard to assign values to the asset and even
| harder divide the value of the asset without
| simultaneously destroying that value.
|
| Pre-nups can help, but they largely make the outcome
| slightly more certain while still leaving much to be
| contested via litigation if the party that feels scorned
| chooses to do so.
|
| I know a lot of these rules are in place because of the
| historical economic shenanigans that men have subjected
| women to, but that doesn't mean that the system is
| reasonable, fair, or not pathological for certain
| (perhaps many or even most) cases.
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| What do you mean by "economic violence"? I'm guessing you
| are not referring to men paying for women's costs of
| living?
| ska wrote:
| > This cannot be overstated.
|
| Sure it can. It's not complicated (pathologically or
| otherwise), it's just not what some people want.
|
| I definitely think (particularly young) people should be
| better educated about what a marriage contract is and
| isn't before they get into it.
| csa wrote:
| > I definitely think (particularly young) people should
| be better educated about what a marriage contract is and
| isn't before they get into it.
|
| I agree, but I think the HN crowd might grossly
| underestimate how difficult it is for lay people to get
| accurate, actionable advice that is also fully
| understood.
|
| The default takeaway for a not small number of people is
| "don't get married if you are successful and like
| financial security".
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| The demographic data, which you can pretty easily look up, is
| pretty clear on that. Women started joining the workforce
| dramatically in the '70s. What happened in the '90s was the
| death of manufacturing.
|
| One thing to remember when looking at manufacturing capacity in
| the United States is that it's somewhat skewed. For instance,
| when a CPU doubled its speed, the US government decided that we
| had doubled our manufacturing capacity. I don't know what other
| interesting if you points have skewed the data.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| How "out of the workforce" is defined might be a missing part
| of the big picture. (The term itself is pretty nebulous!)
|
| "Staying home with the kids" might also include learning some
| skills, or trying to start a business, or self-employment. The
| radar will likely miss this. In the US, singles who earn under
| $12,500 don't need to file a federal tax return.
|
| (Note that the radar will always remember that 'missing time'
| ... which you may need to account for later! And that info is
| widely available.)
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20220209170553/https://www.washin...
|
| https://archive.is/47R8y
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