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.

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.

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.

Gambling on options and crypto currency has only gotten easier over the years.

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.

>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.

High physical strength is useful for several modern jobs we’re desperately in need of - in particular nurses and home health aides. There’s still construction too, once we defeat the NIMBYs.

Most of this “running out of work” thought is just excuses for the US’s bad economic management in the 90s-2000s; as the GP said, now we’re at 4% unemployment and anyone with skills will be able to find a way to use them. Anything can be a skill if it's unique enough - if AI took all the jobs, "being human" would be a skill. That's comparative advantage.

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/stlouisfed...

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.

> 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?

>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.

Males have biological advantages in visual-spatial thinking. "Rotators vs. wordcels" is not just a weird meme.

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.

Yikes. I had to look it up.

So the Internet intelligentsia have:

  - Re-discovered that hard and soft sciences (or, gasp, the liberal arts) attract different people
  - Declared their preferences (and themselves) superior
  - Invented a disparaging name for the inferior class

I feel like I've seen this movie before. It does not end well.

If by “the Internet intelligentsia” you mean one guy last month, sure. Not his fault a few VCs are promoting it.

His actual point is more like “ML developers are making a lot of money but don’t talk about themselves in the media; journalists don’t earn as much and you have to hear them complain about it all the time”.

It's a nonsensical idea that serves a narrative, so it's promoted by ignoramuses. Check.

Take this "actual point" to its logical ... well, I was going to say "conclusion", but it occurs to me that there's no point here at all. The unemployed are not happy? The ultra-wealthy know better than to incite class wars? No idea.

But anyone who coins the term "wordcel" to label a group they are not a part of, certainly seems to have ill intent.

Well, it is a joke. There's a genre of Twitter jokes based on "men are better at spatial visualization" studies where they imagine men entertaining themselves by rotating objects in their heads as a hobby.

I think the joke inventor made up a philosophy behind it to stop the VC guys from turning it into a culture war thing. He also put crypto guys under "wordcels" not "shape rotators" because they like writing whitepapers.

https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words

I feel that I'm a victim here.

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.

I have never seen this meme

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.

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."