Love seeing this kind of analysis on HN of all places. At least today we can hope that our understanding of history will lead to people being less electorally friendly to the fascist right than they were the first time around.

The trend among men, sadly, is a flight from higher education. It used to be a status symbol, but since more women are entering STEM fields men are increasingly looking for alternative credentials like bootcamps. This is a common phenomenon in many fields across time, where men flee "feminized" work and it becomes less prestigious.

A side effect of higher education becoming "low status" is that men are going to vocational schools that don't teach "useless" topics like philosophy or history. Which makes them more vulnerable to radicalization.

Interesting.

> men are going to vocational schools that don't teach "useless" topics like philosophy or history

And to be clear this includes prestigious nationally-ranked “tech” schools, right? Possibly even those with lip service to a liberal arts education where one can actually be excused from “distribution requirement” courses based on their high school experience. (Oh, you support that? Well… maybe I did too, but I sure didn’t understand the connections. Maybe a class would have helped.)

I'm not sure if I understand your point, but the point is there's a kind of credentialing treadmill where once women get into a particular field or class of institution it loses prestige and men flee to alternatives which become more prestigious. An example is undergrad biology becoming predominantly women and being seem as the "easiest" STEM major.

I think if you see a majority-female CS class graduating from Stanford it is a sign that VCs and other power brokers will begin weighting that credential less.

This is complementary to the anti-intellectualism that's already baked into fascism. Rich people like Peter Thiel have already started paying people to "not go to school" as an anti-intellectual backlash against inclusion and diversity.

Can you get a good job with only a 1st degree in biology? I doubt it.

I may be cynical but I don't think men flee fields were women manage to enter. I do see this trend though. But I rather see it as men moving to the next cool thing, leaving the leftovers of their no longer prestigious / downward trending field for women to finally enter, who may see it as a victory without realizing the goalpost has yet again shifted on them/carpet has been pulled from under their feet already.

Much like women no longer qualified as gamers for playing the same games that men grew up with (point n click, puzzle games...) because men flocked to newer genres since (actions/shooter) Bit of a dated caricature but fitting imho.

If men wanted to keep women out, it is easily managed, case in point programming was seen as secretarial work until men decided it made good money and they should appropriate it.

(Fully expecting to be downvoted for saying this)

My observation is completely the opposite. Higher education is the source of today's youth radicalization. Harvard, Columbia, UPenn are all ground zeros of radicalization that we as society going to suffer from for decades.

What kind of radicalization do you mean? The kind that tries to violently overthrow the government after an election they don't like?

The same leftist university students that brought Islamic revolution to Iran and cultural revolution to China. It all starts with universities. Today's protesting students from Columbia are tomorrow's political elite and mark my words, Germany's 30s will look like a walk in a park comparing to what will be in US.

And regarding your Idaho farmers and other nutters with horns on the head, they are too irrelevant and dumb to cause anything serious even in large numbers.

Yet people with lower education were (again) more likely to vote for the most radical president in the US history.

Social media and its propagandists are the source of modern radicalization, together with failure of neoliberalism to produce growth that benefits the little guy. The university far leftist radical and rural Trump voter have lots in common in hating the status quo. They just blame different things, often the wrong ones like migrants or white privilege.

Everyone not in the billionaire club should hate neoliberalism.

Who is so fragile that they care about the gender of their coworker? This isn’t oil rigs or combat roles, where brute strength has legitimate value.

This is a proven trend that's happened in multiple fields. It's not about the gender of your individual coworkers, it's about the relative prestige of a field. When women become more prevalent the credential or field becomes less valued and men flee.

Either I’m dramatically misunderstanding, or others are. I’m asking, why does women entering a field make it less prestigious? Who are these snowflake men that can’t fathom working alongside women?

Have you been paying attention to the sort of people who have been grabbing all the power in this country of late? Those people.

Discrimination and disparities have self-reinforcing loops. There is a gender pay gap. This is a very complex problem with multiple causes and effects: sexism, maternity leave, married couples making the rational economic decision that the lower earning spouse looks after the kids at home, etc. A person looks at a field, sees that it's lower pay and prestige, and sees that it's filled with women. If they are more sexist than average they draw the conclusion that women's work is worth less and justify discrimination's effects as caused by innate differences. Even if they are less sexist than average they are concerned that other people's sexism has demonetized that line of work. Thus the rational move is often to also perpetuate the disparity by avoiding the "pink collar" job, or not care that a high end job has features unfriendly to women. Advantage begets advantage. The inverse is also true.

Jobs, gender, salary level for a given job, gender roles, and whether child care is considered "work" are all social constructs.

I had some mandatory philosophy at STEM university. It utterly failed to evoke any intellectual curiosity, perhaps even inoculated us against trying to get interested. And don't let me start on history education.

I do agree with you. People need to band up with one another and work this out together. In the mean time though, most people are already in a situation where its far too late unless they can shake their situation and start new somewhere else.

I think anyone who has turned on the news in the last 9 years, what technologies and companies are trending, can predict which way things are going to go. Again though, we all need to come together for that too...

> Individual self-reliance and coping only goes so far. I think OP's thesis is that this is a larger cultural issue of capitalism increasingly squeezing every once of joy out of people's lives, and demanding more labour from fewer people under dehumanizing conditions.

Yes. The US lost the general pattern of an 8 hour day, a 40 hour week, time and a half for overtime, and employment duration measured in decades. Most people can handle that.

Most people cannot handle 996 work, "clopeners"[1], and "side hustles" for long.

That's really it. The US just needs to get back to what were normal labor practices from the 1950s to the 1970s.

The key item here is paid overtime at a higher rate. That makes it uneconomic to have people at work too long. It's cheaper to hire an additional person.

"Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will." - Knights of Labor, 1888.

[1] https://calchamberalert.com/2023/04/14/clopening-schedules-g...

> "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will." - Knights of Labor, 1888.

There's another failure mode of modernity, that makes this quote a sleight of hand: commute. Commute takes another hour or three out of the "rest" and "what you will" sets.

Also, for families, that was eight hours of paid work from one parent, not both...

In 1888, the mothers and any kids old enough to help had essentially full-time jobs with the housework. And mandatory education stopped much younger than today, IIRC from 10 to 14 depending on the country (assuming they had mandatory education at all, which some didn't), so they had more time than you may expect for helping with the household.

There were mechanical washing machines and vaccum cleaners back then, even before electricity, but even that was all harder work than now.

There was a magic period of time after electric-powered washing machines became ubiquitous, but before the market adjusted to women entering the labor force, when you could sustain a home on a single income, and women (and then men, too!) actually had a choice between staying at home to care for house & kids, and having a career. Alas, now the choice is gone, and everyone has to have a job. Sucks for the kids, as now both parents need to go to work, whether they want it or not.

The work was harder but people also didn't wash their shirts after wearing it a single day/time. Machines increased expectations, resulting in workload to remain comparable, since more of it needs doing.

If it wasn’t for wasting an additional 2 hours a day on commute…

It is insane that 8 hours of work per day was considered a reasonable target, back when they didn’t have modern automation. Where did we go wrong? Feels like somewhere we switched from just trying to do the work that needed to be done, to trying figure out a way to generate enough work so that we’ll be needed.

> Feels like somewhere we switched from just trying to do the work that needed to be done, to trying figure out a way to generate enough work so that we’ll be needed.

Modern economy is set on the premise that there's always some way to make money, meaning there's always more work that could be done (regardless of whether that work is actually useful).

I think it's worse than that; people need to be kept busy and on their toes at all times, lest they start thinking.

It's not just thought, but also effort. If you have downtime you have time to organize and advocate for yourself. If you have savings you can withhold labour. The ideal conditions for capitalists are that every worker has the bare minimum to be alive and if they miss work they don't receive that minimum.

"Idle hands are the devil's workshop."

A lot of big cities have youth programs out of fear kids will otherwise join gangs. As an adult if you have a big mortgage payment or rent is high you must hustle. Some of this rat race is optional. Advertisers tell us making yet another purchase will solve your problem(s) or insecurity. Ironically if everyone lived modestly that would trigger a recession.

Teen Vogue had a good article on this back in 2022.[1] Similar to the OP here, but better written.

[1] https://www.teenvogue.com/story/work-culture-america

This is the point of dialectical materialism - before the 8 hour workweek there was an even longer work day with worse conditions. The people born into those circumstances struggled against capitalists (in the sense of people who have capital) to make 8 hour workdays the norm. The next generation was born with 8 hour workdays being standard, and capital pushed back and squeezed in other areas where labour wasn't resisting. Capital has now squeezed so hard that labour is organizing again and realizing they need to fight to retain any of their rights.

Australia just made wage theft a criminal offense.[1] Maximum penalty for employers is 10 years in jail. Became effective January 1, 2025.

This is going to be interesting.

[1] https://www.employmentlawhandbook.com.au/bulletin/new-laws-c...

>> I think OP's thesis is that this is a larger cultural issue of capitalism increasingly squeezing every once of joy out of people's lives, and demanding more labour from fewer people under dehumanizing conditions.

Let's have a look at China, or the former communist countries (soviet union etc). All people in those communist regimes are slaved, being under surveillance and often suppressed (except the regime, of course), with the government being the suppressor (as opposed to greedy companies). History is full of evidence, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R504_Kolyma_Highway

Thinking capitalism is the culprit is naive. Power will find its way. Legal regulations of working hours, holidays, health insurance as well as unions work very well for most modern western countries. In many countries there's a constant fight between unions and companies. That is a good way to balance power. No need to bring back cruel communist regimes.