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Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

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Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#141

Post by J-dawg »

bilbo0s wrote: post #131
Frondo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'd do is this: 1) Vote for politicians who are going to create real structural change in society, e.g. Bernie, not just systems maintainers like Hillary, or rich guys who want to rip us off, like the guy who won. (And really work at a local level to enact structural systems changes!) 2) Work to change the cultural baggage around one's value being tied to one's day job. Make it sexy to be a poet, writer, singer,…

I know this will sound pretty bad... but I actually interact a lot, in a volunteer capacity, with the black community where I live. I'm just realizing that I've never noticed that the whole "men are worth something because of their career" thing there. I'm not passing relative value judgements or anything, but I do wonder if there is something sociologically about black american subculture that makes women look past…

This is going to sound even worse, but..

I think there was some data from okcupid that showed black men are a lot more popular (based on messages sent etc) with women of other races than black women with men of other races (I have no idea why).

The uncomfortable truth could be that high-status black men have their pick of other races, leaving high-status black women to date lower status men.

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#142

Post by lacker »

nodamage wrote: post #120
jack9 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's shocking, just plain shocking, how short people's memories are, in regards to their own governmental details. The manipulations to deflate the unemployment numbers, I was cognizant of in high school, have never stopped. New techniques come up every administration (seemingly every year). It's like how "the tech industry innovation value" is now added to the UDP arbitrarily. Smoke and mirrors. Google "US employed…

59.2% is quite misleading because it includes students and retirees. The next two paragraphs from your own source[1] say: One reason for the difference is that the share of Americans saying they don’t want a job has trended up since the Great Recession: from 31.9% of the working-age population in October 2008 to 34.6% last month (on a non-seasonally adjusted basis). Some of that increase, though, may be due to Baby B…

Why should we exclude students and retirees from our key employment metrics? Society must pay for students and retirees, and the higher the employment-to-population ratio, the easier that is to do.

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#143

Post by soundwave106 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #129
xt00 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true. It's definitely now a situation where we are dealing with the fallout from years of not dealing with the problem. Yea I recently read a story where a factory tried to hire around 50 people and could only hire a small number due to the vast majority failing drug tests. I was actually fairly surprised to hear that. So yea now we are dealing with the problem that has been festering and getting worse for years…

> could only hire a small number due to the vast majority failing drug tests. I'm surprised mandatory drug testing is a thing in the US. In Germany it's actually outright illegal to do drug tests on employees (exceptions are rare, generally employers need reasonable suspicion (!) and the job must be safety critical, per http://www.zeit.de/karriere/beruf/2013-11/arbeitsrecht-droge... ). As long as it does not involve…

Yes, practically speaking, the way its done now, corporate drug tests are indeed of not insignificant cost and of questionable deterrence.

There sometimes is financial incentive for them (insurance discounts), but unfortunately at least some of the reason they show up here more than anywhere else is image. The modern mandatory corporate drug test in America sprung up during the Reagan era, when zero tolerance / "War on Drugs" culture was at its peak. (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/drug-te...).

"Zero tolerance" policies are rightfully being softened in some of the US, but unfortunately in certain quarters, this attitude lives on.

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#144

Post by NumberSix »

extra88 wrote: post #82
NumberSix wrote: post #15

The explanation is that the government massages unemployment figures to make the economy look better than it is. The government has been doing this for decades, under Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. Unemployment is one of the most widely watched and therefor political numbers; anyone who is in power wants it to look as good as possible. One of the tactics to make the official unemployment rates…

"Massages" makes it sound like the change the measures on the fly which is not the case. See my other comment about counting those not working vs. those not looking for work.

I use "massages" to cover two factors. First, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has redefined the way it measures unemployment and employment several times over the decades. In addition, there are a range of seasonal adjustments and other possible variations in the surveys and number crunching that are more difficult to understand and less well documented.

See for example this discussion of discrepancies between the BLS unemployment rate and the Gallup Poll unemployment rate (since 2010):

http://unemploymentdata.com/unemployment/is-the-government-f...

It is difficult to know if in practice the household surveys are done the same way each time and also what seasonal and "one-time" adjustments may be occurring either during the first measurement or subsequent corrections.

As the discrepancies between the BLS and Gallup numbers indicate, there is evidence of shorter term massaging not captured in the major redefinitions, such as excluding "discouraged workers" who want a job but supposedly have not looked for one recently, in the 1994 revisions to the unemployment measures.

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#145

Post by crooked-v »

rrggrr wrote: post #49

"We will have to write off one to two entire generations". This from one industrial client who manages a workforce in the rural and suburban south. Why? The skills gap. Drug abuse, particularly meth. Competition from disability, welfare and black market income sources. I've heard similar from other clients. Their contempt for politicians stems largely from their perceptions that rural/middle America has been left to…

The equivocation between parties is pretty weird, considering that a substantial chunk of the Democratic platform was about things that would offer real help to these suffering areas (for example, subsidized education in new fields), while the Republicans offered pixie dust and the claim that outcompeted mining and manufacturing jobs would magically reappear.

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#146

Post by eropple »

dang wrote: post #123
thrownblown wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm kinda curious what they said.

I've unkilled the comment for you but you can see all the [dead] comments by setting 'showdead' to 'yes' in your profile, if you want to.

Showdead is pretty useful--there are occasional gems worth a vouch.

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#147

Post by confounded »

J-dawg wrote: post #141
bilbo0s wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this will sound pretty bad... but I actually interact a lot, in a volunteer capacity, with the black community where I live. I'm just realizing that I've never noticed that the whole "men are worth something because of their career" thing there. I'm not passing relative value judgements or anything, but I do wonder if there is something sociologically about black american subculture that makes women look past…

This is going to sound even worse, but.. I think there was some data from okcupid that showed black men are a lot more popular (based on messages sent etc) with women of other races than black women with men of other races (I have no idea why). The uncomfortable truth could be that high-status black men have their pick of other races, leaving high-status black women to date lower status men.

> The uncomfortable truth

Which you've just fabricated on the spot based on some racial stereotypes (and your presumably very important feelings).

The data reflect the same basic anti-black racism as the rest of society.

https://theblog.okcupid.com/race-and-attraction-2009-2014-10...

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#148

Post by pharrington »

PKop wrote: post #126
20160226 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't fight biology. Women are hardwired to look for men with resources or the ability to get them. It comes down to whether a man can provide the woman with a safe and clean place to have her babies. In the past, this signal has taken the form of physical strength, number of slaves, land, goats, whatever. Today, it's jobs and/or money. Then add a layer of the instinctive hunger for status within any social speci…

Not sure why getting downvoted. To dismiss out of hand thousands of years of evolution and think the last 50+ years of modern societal change can completely counteract biological forces is.. wishful thinking? I mean, this explanation is at least as good as any other speculation in this thread.

I did not downvote the parent.

My claim: almost every human adult has had at least one sexual partner. I can only find decent studies surveying modernity, but for example: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/19374216/. Assuming most humans having sex is not a recent development, any evolutionary pressures, if they exist at all, on the sexually active population are unclear at best; however, there may be pressures against the tiny few who go through life abstinent.

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#149

Post by Kenji »

jimhefferon wrote: post #38

OK, warning: what's coming is a wild personal opinion based on anecdotal experience with a couple of guys. There are a couple of guys I know who fit into the category in the article. I don't believe that the solution proposed would have any effect. It just is at an impedance mismatch with the mindset, with the culture. I'll mention one guy I know, a neighbor, who fixes cars in his folks's barn, for a living. He has n…

If you stop learning, you stop growing, financially and, much worse, intellectually. People who refuse to learn have to make peace with the fact that they remain in their exact place for the rest of their lives. However, I do ask myself, how can someone who works from 5.30AM to 8PM afford to spend any time to learn?

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#150

Post by pharrington »

77pt77 wrote: post #139
WhitneyLand wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dove anyone have real data on what's nature vs. nurture? So many people make arguments on this important topic that depend on huge assumptions. For example someone below said women won't mind dating men with less status once our culture evolves. Are we so sure of that? This is not a criticism of females. I doubt any gender can be cultured out preference for physical attributes. We can support equal rights and still a…

>I doubt any gender can be cultured out preference for physical attributes. These are evolutionary traits and will most likely not change at least at the time scale of a few generations. >We can support equal rights and still acknowledge innate differences right? That's the idea. Law and human rights are deeply "contra natura" by definition. Ignoring nature to the extent we are doing as a species will not end well as…

I replied to another commenter expressing your same view here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798051. My comment asserts your core view is inconsistent both with apparent human sexual activity and how evolutionary pressures work.
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