I would say "the difference now is that the failing educational system is rendering the hill insurmountable." Automation is just tools. Reasonably able people can learn to use tools. But they need the means to do so affordably and effectively. Our system of education, however, is largely stuck two generations back and not up to the task of preparing people for the fast-moving world we're now in.
And this isn't even the fact that textbooks are out-of-date before they see print, or that greedy publishers keep educational materials locked behind arbitrarily high paywalls. The problem is deeper: people are not taught how to learn, and are in fact taught to fear learning because learning means judgement. They are not taught the joy of self-motivated learning which gives them the drive to keep actively learning on their own, which I believe is becoming an increasingly crucial trait to succeed at work.
As an aspiring educator, it's becoming increasingly obvious to me that society expects teachers to be miracle-workers, to motivate children so they study really hard and get into a good college. Yet we don't expect the same from parents. Parents are spending less and less time with their kids, while the demands for education are growing more and more intensive.
My grandfather got his first job after finishing the eighth grade. He worked for over five decades and raised six kids together with my grandmother, who was a homemaker her entire life. Both he and grandma grew up on farms with two-digit numbers of children in the family. Everyone worked from a young age and learned to provide for the household, boys and girls alike.
Nowadays, we expect kids to spend a quarter of their lives or more in school. We expect them to work extremely hard and compete for a spot in a top rated school. We give them no real responsibilities apart from academics. No, cleaning your bedroom or mowing the lawn are not real responsibilities the way milking the cows or making preserves from the garden produce were for my grandparents. If you don't clean your room, nobody will go hungry.
Life was much harder, physically speaking, for most people from my grandparents' generation and earlier, stretching back into antiquity. It was not harder to find purpose in life, however. Nature and the struggle to survive together with your family and community was enough for most people to feel fulfilled.
Today it's the complete opposite on both accounts. Extremely easy to survive with all of the benefits, cheap food and clean water, electricity and heating available. Finding meaning amid so much plenty, on the other hand, is a monumental task.
This is not true, in fact, parents are spending 2x more time with their kids.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...
[1] https://www.bls.gov/charts/american-time-use/activity-by-par...
A lot of things were different when your grandfather were in school. Most teachers were male, and boys had better grades than girls. The teaching profession was high status profession, highly respected in communities, and well paid. The post world war 1 and 2 era put a lot of focus on practical skills with practical applications in both home and work. In addition the life path of men had very little free choice, in large part to male only military drafts.
From my own reading of education research and reports, making the teacher profession more gender equal and higher status would likely improve the situation for boys without putting higher expectations on the teachers themselves. Beyond that, the lack of male only military drafts means that both boys and girls have now equal freedom to choose what they want to do, and just as some women do not want to enter the work market so do now some men.
But if parents took responsibility, the first thing that'd go is 80%+ of college enrollments and all one-size-fits-all schooling beyond elementary school.
So how societies sometimes dealt with this excess of men was to send a good number of them off to war. Also occupations used to be much more hazardous so many more die working.
The days of bundling laggers up in a red coat and sending them off with a musket to make the queens empire a bit larger appear to be coming to a close. But in my opinion, we still haven't addressed the underlying problem evolution has left us with. I don't have a good answer either.
no we don't
Relevant: A single male galapagos turtle sired 800 offspring, single-handedly (well, I guess it wasn't his hand) saving his species from extinction.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/12/world/americas/diego-tort...
> Also occupations used to be much more hazardous so many more die working.
Right. Females are precious (in the eyes of genetics) because they are wombs for the next generation. Because maturation takes time, total reproduction throughput is mostly limited by number of females.
This raises the natural question then, why don't most species simply produce way more females than males? Some do, but most don't and the reason is fascinating [0]. There's almost an iterated prisoner's dilemma thing going on where producing fewer of one sex opens up potential genetic exploitation by producing more of the rare sex and over time, that leads to a stable roughly 1:1 equilibrium.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle
So, species tend to produce lots of males but don't really need them. What to do? It seems like the evolutionary answer is to treat them as expendable wildcards. Make them bigger, stronger, more aggressive, and more willing to take risks. Some of them will stumble on to new discoveries that benefit the herd, or die protecting the tribe. Many will simply die from misfortune, but no matter, they weren't needed anyway. There's plenty of sperm to go around.
Through most of human history, this kinda sorta worked out OK because there were enough competing warlike tribes, deadly predators, unexplored territories, and risky occupations to soak up all of these genetically extraneous dudes. But we keep making the world safer and safer and now we are finding out that our culture no longer effectively knows what to do.
It seems like, for many men, the answer is to escape into a simulated world that gives them the challenge, risk, and potential (virtual) reward that they crave. Notice how almost all of the widely played videogames by young men are violent and war-like, or at least sports, itself a ritualized simulation of combat.
And, from that light, the incredible backlash of Gamergate where some men attacked women for daring to criticize or even participate in their videogame world makes a little more sense. They felt they had no place left on Earth where they could be a man and not feel like a failure.
> The days of bundling laggers up in a red coat and sending them off with a musket to make the queens empire a bit larger appear to be coming to a close.
Actually, it was just last year that the US ended the longest continuous war it has been in for its entire history. I've noticed that almost every US President seems to become more hawkish once elected. When I feel like putting on my tin-foil hat, I sometimes imagine the newly elected candidate getting a briefing from security officials. "We've run the simulations over and over, and if we don't have some kind of military conflict to act as a pressure release valve for this surplus of angry, disillusioned men, the end result will be revolution in the US."
I don't really believe that, of course, but sometimes...
I can't say I agree with everything in your post, but this assertion is reasonable. I'd say civilization has already discovered a partial solution to this problem: monogamy where men satisfy their evolutionary urges for usefulness through breadwinning. It isn't perfect for everyone but it's probably the most optimal overall solution, especially when you consider that once basic needs are met, the average person is content to live the life prescribed to them by society. What I'm saying is that maybe we don't need to indoctrinate our youth with the notion that historic gender roles are totally evil and oppressive - we're seeing a lot of the fallout from that practice in contemporary Western society.
No, not every woman wants to be constrained to a life of housework and childrearing, and not every man has the ambition to make a name for himself; but on average humans have innate desires/drives which have specialized, over tens of thousands of generations such that average life satisfaction is strongly predicated upon traditional gender roles.
Yes, I agree. Strangely enough, I think outlawing polygamy is probably one of the most profoundly powerful cultural technologies humans have ever invented.
So putting this back together with the article, the author is showing how unskilled men are dropping out of the social contract. Because, for them, the opportunities for breadwinning are harder to find.
The question isn't how many we need, because need is relative. The question is how many we can employ profitably, and how profitably. (Hedonic adaptation will make us "need" them soon enough).
How many we can use profitably, and how profitably, is not fixed.
Biologically a baby may be male or female at similar probability. I think your argument is flawed, as it implies that the only goal of males is to impregnate as many females as possible and nothing else.
Today I’m married with a child, I support my family as the primary breadwinner, I have a BS and MBA and am pursuing a PhD in computer science. All of that education was paid for by the GI Bill.
Sample size of one, but I can confirm your hypothesis.
With the draft, people from all walks of life were enlisted. (Yes, there were ways to weasel out of it, but beside the point)
Without the draft, the army is largely built from the lower-class, conservative, patriotic populous.
The argument is that the privileged would be less likely to send people off to war if it meant their loved ones lives were on the line.
Who cares if my male peers think I'm a loser? Most of them are incompetent mooching pieces of shit, and I don't have to believe in their crab mentality. They can say "loser" all they like.
Who cares if my female peers think I'm a loser? I've gotten laid enough in life, and it's not like job sites are dating sites. I already dodged the bullet of having to raise somebody else's kid or having to be stuck in a loveless marriage, which makes me not-a-loser in my book.
The article seems predicated on the notion that this number (male participation in the labor force) is the metric that matters, rather than anything about their mental health -- harder to measure, and therefore outside the purview of an economist (especially a right-wing economist). It doesn't even really try to look at what's in their minds, much less how we could go about creating a more healthy world for them to live in -- with everybody else.
I felt as if what the article kept trying hard not to say was, "Well, if only women would return home, there would be more lucrative jobs for men, and more need for the women to be taken care of by a man". That ship has sailed.
Many men have adjusted to a new kind of masculinity for that world. Many haven't, and we'll need to discover some new things. And I don't think that's well-served by the article's tacit notion that what's really needed are more of the old things.
>Well, if only women would return home, there would be more lucrative jobs for men, and more need for the women to be taken care of by a man". That ship has sailed
Worth noting that the current changes are explicitly counter to traditional roles which have existed for thousands of years. Yes, appeal solely to tradition is a fallacy, but it's also unreasonable to conclude that all past civilizations were bumbling barbarians with totally dysfunctional societies.
>Many men have adjusted to a new kind of masculinity for that world. Many haven't, and we'll need to discover some new things
The trouble is that most of these modern changes to the definition and role of masculinity (and femininity) are engineered by a particularly loud subset of the population. They run counter to what could be considered human nature (as evidenced by virtually all past and most contemporary societies) and although the ideals are ostensibly about freedom and equality, they fail to be self critical and account for the potential that gender roles have specialized over millions of years of evolution and there are associated costs to such an apparently egalitarian society.
Consider, first and foremost, that by shaming two or so Western generations into believing that the life of a housewife is menial and subservient, we have virtually doubled the workforce, without necessarily increasing the number of jobs required for a functioning society. Results include the modern necessity for a dual household income and negative wage pressure. And there are studies that life satisfaction of women relative to men has been steadily decreasing for 2-5 decades (can't remember exactly).
Maybe that ship shouldn't have sailed. Maybe it's folly to decide to turn thousands of years of wisdom on its head. Men have intrinsic, biological drives to compete, which are far stronger and more critical for life satisfaction than those of women, and the current Western push for "equality" may be leading to worse outcomes for society, especially for men who feel they've been outcompeted not because of lack of skill but because of forced social norms. The unfortunate truth is that the majority of people live their lives according to the norms of their societies - even when such norms have negative overall outcomes.
How would we be better off with a bunch of men chasing these same still-meaningless jobs but with more dependents tied to them? How should we value the frustrations of the people least suited to compete in this new system against the frustrations of people not even allowed to compete in the old system? The more-options-for-more-people scenario has strong "better off" appeal right there.
You could just as easily conclude that the solution is to push forward and make it acceptable for single-income women-led houses, with "househusbands" who play video games all day while babysitting the appliances and kids. We've automated the shit out of the non-emotional-labor parts of that "housewive" job too, after all!
You preach a return to historical tradition but those traditions were forged in a vastly different technological landscape with far more physical labor required for survival, resulting in some splits generally around physical strength. Today is far different, so it's unreasonable to conclude that those old traditions are the best fit.
>You preach a return to historical tradition but those traditions were forged in a vastly different technological landscape with far more physical labor required for survival, resulting in some splits generally around physical strength. Today is far different, so it's unreasonable to conclude that those old traditions are the best fit.
I don't deny that the landscape has changed. However, human nature largely has not - and tens of thousands of generations of specialization have almost certainly optimized women (in terms of physiology, behavior, and desire) for more social and less competitive tasks. Evidence is all around us - typical male interests and behaviors tend to be far more competitive and aggressive, and we have physiological and genetic mechanisms to explain this difference (testosterone in particular).
>You could just as easily conclude that the solution is to push forward and make it acceptable for single-income women-led houses, with "househusbands"
Well, not exactly. While it could theoretically balance the labor market, what I'm suggesting is that such a campaign would run counter to human nature and lead to worse outcomes in life satisfaction and possibly even economic measures, because of innate differences between male and female psychology and evolutionary suitability (on average) for certain tasks.
I'm not suggesting that we revert to arranged marriages and dowries - and I acknowledge that most of the social progress of the past 100 years or so has been overwhelmingly positive. What I am saying is that perhaps the pendulum with respect to gender roles has swung too far and it's time for it to swing back a little close toward a healthy middle which is more consistent with human nature.
I think you are overgeneralizing about "human nature" and under-valuing people's choices, based on what you're reading/hearing/seeing about one particular group of people.
It seems like you're suggesting "pushing" this group back into the rat race because of genetic disposition to respond to competitive pressure, but I'm highly doubtful that people who are already voluntarily dropping out of the competition/rat race, who aren't chasing the cars/glory/money/women/whatever, are going to be well-served by that.
Or would you rather see an authoritarian solution? I'm sure that will go over well.
Keep in mind regardless of what you want as a woman, there's very real economic risk to being dependent on a man. Wanting to live a happy life as a housewife doesn't put food on the table when he loses his job and doesn't pay rent when he divorces you. It doesn't make life any easier when you find he has a mistress but you don't have the means to leave him.
Meanwhile, for those who are in the money with well-paying careers and considering quitting work to settle down, the opportunity cost of leaving behind your career is enormous: you are leaving tons of cash on the table even if you plan to rejoin the workforce later (as your career is not progressing for N years), you are giving up your dreams of vacationing abroad for maybe 18 years, and so on.
And this is all assuming the man even makes enough on his own to pay for the family. Many households simply require two paychecks in today's economy, and what you want as an individual will be trumped by the cost of rent every time.
I happen to agree that there's nothing wrong and nothing subservient with being a housewife. But to sum up such a complicated and vast socioeconomic development as merely "shaming two or so Western generations into believing that the life of a housewife is menial and subservient" is patently ridiculous.
By and large, these two issues did have solutions.
> Wanting to live a happy life as a housewife doesn't put food on the table when he loses his job and doesn't pay rent when he divorces you
With regard to job loss as well as death and disability, fraternal organizations (such as the Knights of Columbus) were basically founded for this purpose. Still today, they offer a highly rated insurance program and provide scholarships for the children of any members who die before their kids attend college or vocational school.
Divorce was handled by simply not allowing divorce without reason, and requiring the husband to pay upkeep. In more civilized legal systems, wives have automatic access to their husband's finances (community property).
> It doesn't make life any easier when you find he has a mistress but you don't have the means to leave him.
In all 50 states, adultery is still a civil crime. A cheated on wife can sue her husband for adultery if he spends money on his mistress and neglects her and forcefully garnish the wages if she has too.
The merits or lack thereof of these solutions is up for debate, but I don't think we should pretend they didn't exist and stay at home wives were left for dead by society. By and large there were support systems.
Before we automated away most of the jobs for men (leading to the current crisis) we did it first for women, with household appliances like refrigerators, laundry machines, and dishwashers. Go back to the 18th century (or earlier) and you'll find that husband and wife are equally dependent on one another. Families lived on farms where it was "all hands on deck" just to keep everyone fed, clothed, and warm during the winter. This meant even the parents were dependent on their own children to help out, as there was always more work to do.
It really wasn't until the 20th century when men started working away from the home and women found their chores automated, leading to long periods of boredom and loneliness. The genie is out of the bottle on all of this, though, so going back to live on the farm like Agricola [1] is not going to be an option for most people.
There are still some people who live the old way, though. They're called the Amish and they have much tighter family bonds than the rest of us. Even they have a real challenge maintaining their way of life, given that their children are allowed the opportunity of living among "the English" (that's us) for a while before they decide to commit to the community or strike out on their own. It's hard because modern technology is so very addictive.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/amish-shun...
What we consider “completely normal” (cell phones, dating apps, sharing economy conveniences and luxuries) hasn’t done anything to keep us from atomizing to the point where people are killing themselves directly or through alcohol/drugs. The Amish want to keep those things out of their society because they see plainly what the rest of us have become.
It’s extreme and difficult to understand, but I wouldn’t call it ruthless. Those who are shunned have made the informed decision to reject their rules and leave.
Not at all. I would like to see policy makers back away from the nonsensical notion that lack of gender parity across industry is indicative of a broken society, and stop pushing young women aggressively into STEM and leadership roles and encouraging industry to effectively set quotas.
>Keep in mind regardless of what you want as a woman, there's very real economic risk to being dependent on a man. Wanting to live a happy life as a housewife doesn't put food on the table when he loses his job and doesn't pay rent when he divorces you. It doesn't make life any easier when you find he has a mistress but you don't have the means to leave him
Sure, those are legitimate risks, but as other commenters have pointed out there are ways around them. But what people fail to consider is that there is stress associated with the rat race, particularly if someone is pushed into a role unsuited for them, either by cultural or economic pressure.
>And this is all assuming the man even makes enough on his own to pay for the family. Many households simply require two paychecks in today's economy, and what you want as an individual will be trumped by the cost of rent every time.
As I've mentioned, besides globalization, I think the largest contributor to the dual breadwinner requirement is the cultural push by liberal policy makers to get women working. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say.
>Meanwhile, for those who are in the money with well-paying careers and considering quitting work to settle down, the opportunity cost of leaving behind your career is enormous
A problem neatly solved by specialization of home roles, though there's no reason a man can't stay home to take care of the kids. The main issue here is that a vocal minority has taken hold of policy with flawed assumptions which consider neither human nature nor unintended effects, and we're dealing with the fallout.
>I happen to agree that there's nothing wrong and nothing subservient with being a housewife. But to sum up such a complicated and vast socioeconomic development as merely "shaming two or so Western generations into believing that the life of a housewife is menial and subservient" is patently ridiculous.
Do you disagree that two generations of feminist ideology have structured educational and industrial policy such that women are strongly discouraged from child rearing? If not, where do you expect the demand and funds for all of that extra labor to come from when the fundamental needs of society are more or less unchanged? Sure, there are other geopolitical influences on wages and life outcomes, but this is a major and understudied driver.
Yes there is. Babies spend nine months in their mothers. When they are born they prefer their mothers more. Not out of hatred of their fathers but because that is who they are used to, due to simple facts of biology. More importantly, only mothers can breastfeed. While true that fathers can stay home with older children, there is an obvious advantage to mom staying home with babies, both for mom and baby. Keep in mind the WHO still recommends breastfeeding until age 2. Two years out of the workforce is a lot.
My post is just meant in support of GPs "that ship has sailed". STEM and leadership initiatives affect a tiny portion of the workforce by definition of how few women are in these roles, so it's clearly not bringing us back to the 1950s family unit. If you have another policy suggestion that could revert decades of socioeconomic change let me know
Maybe we as men can figure out a different way to interact in society that doesn’t require stripping the other half of their rights.
Maybe the people making this argument just can’t compete in the modern world.
Seriously, what percentage of people in households that are dual-income by necessity are happy with their situation?
- People (men and women) are more stressed than ever
- People are reporting less satisfaction with life than ever
- People are increasingly anxious, isolated and suffering from depression
- What once took one person going to work to provide now takes two, and even then many struggle, and childcare is fobbed off on strangers who charge a fortune in a large part due to the premiums they have to pay for other strangers failing to take adequate care of the children fobbed off on them
- Pessimism for the future of the developed world is the highest it has ever been
- Despite living in the greatest economic times, ever, with less inequality than ever, we have classes of people who swear they're more oppressed than ever and are comparing those who disagree with fascists of the past. What optimism people retain is slowly being diminished watching this charade play out
- Men are dropping out of society, are graduating less, working less, are killing themselves, or trying to kill themselves, or are fracturing mentally, becoming homeless and/or turning to drug addicts at a rate we've never seen before
- More women are also experiencing some of the above, despite graduating more than ever, earning more than ever and being more empowered than ever
- Life expectancy in the developed world is starting to drop as people view society as fractured and without purpose, which is manifesting itself in transient, only briefly gratifying greed-fueled hedonism or self-harm and suicide
- The traditional nuclear family has been denigrated, people are now growing up in broken homes - which has terrible outcomes for children who become adults - and on the sidelines of broken homes acting as a warning sign on marriage, coupling, etc.
- Birth rates are, as a consequence, dropping through the floor
- Governments, hell bent on continuous growth at all costs because a drop in growth will bring the economic pyramid scheme they've concocted crashing down, are replacing their now-demoralized, not-breeding-at-replacement-rate populations with immigrants from completely different cultures who, while economically beneficial, have severe consequences on the idea of identity and sense of community in the areas and countries they (understandably) leave their broken home countries for
- The drop in sense of community, shared identity and sense of security is having severe ramifications on the next generation as they're kept indoors, glued to entertainment, while their parents become increasingly politically polarized against their own people
It feels like we're either in the midst of a grand but badly thought out social experiment, intentionally made, whose consequences our ancestors would mock us for, and our descendants loathe us for, or we've been manipulated into a race-to-the-bottom while being told it's good for us by someone or something to gain from it.
Maybe we're living out the Mouse Utopia Experiment for real, and with these NEETs we're now seeing the emergence of the "beautiful ones" while the rest of us chase one another around biting one another without real reason, straddling what little space is available to us, while the mice we've decided to call leaders fret over making us more productive so yet more food and cheap entertainment can be dropped into our laps.
The above may seem pessimistic but none of it is nonfactual. We techies are pretty out-of-touch with the average joe at this point, and while we enjoy the financial success on two incomes to provide the kind of life available to the average family on one income in our grandparent's generation, most cannot.
But we're told this is working. That it's progress. That we should continue on as we have. I ask is it working? Is this actual progress? Should we actually continue in this vein? Because from where I'm standing we've taken values, lessons, structure and understanding developed and passed down over hundreds of thousands of years as we progressed from animals, through pre-humans and to our modern form and have flipped them on their head, denigrated and discarded them at the behest of entities with loud mouths and personal agendas, backed not by science or nature but simply by assertion, and whose "rules" and "norms" seem to change on a whim as every day, week and month passes by.
I'm not saying I have the answers so I'd appreciate people didn't strawman the above, put words in my mouth and find outrage in them, etc.
The author also notes that this trend is unique to the US, as this trend doesn't exist in other never-communist democracies. These other countries have increased female workplace participation, but don't have the mass male drop-out of the workforce.
Overall, I think it was a good, balanced analysis of the issue and I did not pick up on desire to return to the "good ole days".
He seems to understand that he can't go back, but he continues to wish that there were a solution to "repair the family or the other institutions that formed the foundation". And that's what's holding him back from recognizing new institutions that already work for a lot of men. Formulating a new relationship with women is a big start, rather than wishing that women would still go back to the kitchen so he could have a reason to exist.
Maybe these men should be stay-at-home dads. Or maybe they should start looking into previously female-coded activities, like being a full-time artist or Etsy crafter or volunteer. Not to insist on any of those, but to break out of the mindset that pervades the article that it used to be better and that that's the way it really ought to be but you can't say so because it's not PC. So he doesn't say it -- but it's there between the lines, and I think that that implicit assumption does even more harm than bringing it out in the open. It's the reason that these men keep failing in the same way.
Also, I am fascinated by your mind-reading ability to know what an article writer did not actually say, but was secretly thinking.
Perhaps some are enjoying their "hedonistic" lifestyles, but likely most have totally given up on life, much like the Japanese hikikomori. It's not healthy mentally or physically. But it seems like as long as people treat these men as "losers" who deserve their fate, the more this problem will grow.