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Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

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Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#141

Post by watwut »

tootie wrote: post #64
zitterbewegung wrote: post #19

What is strange is this has been going on since the 1950s and it is even invariant in relation to economic cycles. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 I am also an exception to this rule (I am employed but I live at home). Currently I'm saving for a down payment to a Condo / House.

I'd suspect this has a lot of to with women being in the workforce meaning men are less required to work relentlessly. More recently, it's the aging population. The chart for just prime age males is less dramatic: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25MAUSM156S Also, a topic that has been surprisingly quiet is that employment-population rate absolutely cratered to a near 50-year low during the pandemic. We had a p…

> I'd suspect this has a lot of to with women being in the workforce meaning men are less required to work relentlessly.

Afaik, career men working hours went up after women went to work. The culture of overwork went up.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#142

Post by StandardFuture »

tjs8rj wrote: post #52
beckman466 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect all of this is primarily cultural first, and not related specifically to work, the economy, pricing of good or services like buying a home and starting a family, which would come second. Hmmm I think you're wrong. It sounds like you've got survivorship bias, big time. Most people want to contribute, but the economic system fucks them and makes them dependent. Examples include: the intellectual property re…

Curious: what effect do you think culture has? The economic plays a big role, but there’s a tendency nowadays to call the root problem for everything economic and act like cultural effects are just “holidays and religion” or other marginal effects. The culture has changed dramatically since the 50s when these trends started. For the men, their role has gone from default “protector, provider, head of the home, in char…

> The economic plays a big role, but there’s a tendency nowadays to call the root problem for everything economic

As with everything on the internet (it sadly seems), there is a necessity for nuanced position. Perhaps, economic and cultural factors are playing a self-reinforcing and thus compounding effect on our society?

There are also the non-cultural and non-economic factors such as declining testosterone levels. This could have profound emergent economic and cultural implications that we have not even begun to calculate.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#143

Post by jdhn »

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #34
futureshock wrote: post #22

This seems like a kind rational economic choice. If there are not enough good jobs that can support independent living, providing for a spouse, buying a home or raising a family, then staying home with the easy accomplishment of video games makes sense. Most people never live outside their home states and can't afford to leave the support network of their family and close friends. If you grew up in a medium or high c…

Until this year, I lived in the same place I grew up, one of the highest cost-of-living places on the planet: NYC. Until the pandemic, the goal of owning a home did seem totally out of reach for me, even with my remote SV tech job salary. Then I moved to an unincorporated community in TN, because NYC's lockdowns, mask mandates, and general cultural decay was too much for me to bear - financially, emotionally, and eve…

Has there been any culture shock for you? As someone who grew up in NJ, I'm always interested in hearing how other tri-state area people deal with moving from an urban to a rural environment.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#144

Post by symlinkk »

watwut wrote: post #133
treespace88 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women are paying a high price in the online dating world. It’s preying on their weakness the same way porn does for men. Most women don’t want to sleep around and have a large number of partners. But tinder leads them to believe that they can find an unrealistic partner. And they get hurt by the small percentage of men that play the online dating game well. Women need a lot more data and time to evaluate a potential…

Maybe women are paying the price, bit it is men on HN who complain and bitch constantly. Most women are not on tinder anyway.

That’s incorrect, online dating is the number one way couples meet

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#145

Post by _Microft »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #19

What is strange is this has been going on since the 1950s and it is even invariant in relation to economic cycles. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 I am also an exception to this rule (I am employed but I live at home). Currently I'm saving for a down payment to a Condo / House.

Maybe is has to do with women entering the labor force?

Here I plotted the labor force participation rate of women and men plus the sum of both. While the rate for men declines, the one for women increases.

Update: here is a new graph without the assumption that there are equally many men and women (participation rates for each are now multiplied by the population size of each and normalized to total population). The interesting part is that the total labor participation rate is moving very little, just between ~59-67%.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=EFG8

// OLD: The sum of both moves between 120 and 135% (assumption here is that there are roughly as many men as there are women which should be approximately correct): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=EFEs

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#146

Post by CameronNemo »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #49
kogepathic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> another friend of mine basically refuses to date anymore because he thinks the sort of culture of Tinder dating is a waste of time that favors women disproportionately. My female friends (I'm male) with online dating profiles have shown me their matches and conversations, and it's bleak. They all mostly have an average profile and still receive thousands of likes/hearts/swipes and messages, but the mean amount of e…

I have an idea I've been toying with for a dating tool (I refuse to call it an app) based on the premise that all dating "apps" and "sites" are horrible because their incentives are aligned toward wanting people to actually use them. You pretty much have ad-driven and subscription models and both have perverse incentives. Further, the whole "wink", "like" and "swipe" nonsense increases the "meat market" commoditizati…

I've thought about ways to improve dating networks, and I think the best solution is to throw them out and just get young people to go out in groups and do activities together. Romance would be a secondary output (as would friendships, professional networking, and plain old perspective broadening).

Rationale is that a lot of women, and to a lesser degree men, do not feel comfortable going out 1x1 with a stranger (and potential predator/rapist/catfish). Not to mention the pressure of finding common interests and cultivating a date experience. The group dynamic offers safety, and the hobby-focused nature of the activity offers entertainment without pressure.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#147

Post by mkmk2 »

pm90 wrote: post #127
kypro wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We seem to live in an age of such abundance and freedom that it's now possible to live in all manner of ways which seems to exacerbate these extremes. In the past if you were a man and wanted to eat and have a home you had to work. We also relied far more on children to look after us in our old age than we do today. Today welfare and the affordability of essentials like food make it possible for people not to work an…

> I'm a big believer that people only care to preserve societies they have a stake in and if a large enough percentage of the population own nothing and offer no value it's very easy to see this causing a division Wouldn't someone that is able to spend most of their time playing video games (instead of e.g. farming) want society to continue as it exists today? Without that society, wouldn't they be forced to fight/wo…

I was a whole lot more spiteful when I was playing video games 24/7 and felt like there was nowhere else to go. I would've been far happier seeing an end to everything then, when everything seemed impossible, versus now that I have some experience, some skin in the game.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#148

Post by TuringNYC »

Romulus968 wrote: post #54

I'm in the labor force, but live at home. I can absolutely afford to purchase a home. Why don't I? Because I'm not spending $250,000+ on 1400sq ft. These types of articles make it seem like some huge mystery as to why society is the way it is today. It's no mystery. Houses cost to much and employers don't pay enough.

>> These types of articles make it seem like some huge mystery as to why society is the way it is today. It's no mystery. Houses cost to much and employers don't pay enough.

This is so true. I'd take it further -- for many (not for most of us developers/engineers) but for many others, the choice to move out is a very risky one because you're constantly on a thin line between paying student loans, mortgage/rent, and other costs of employment and wages may not grow while costs continue to grow. I've seen people just give up and enjoy what they have -- a parent's home at the cost of employment. Remember that it costs money to earn money if you need to move to a metro area and that cost can exceed the actual income, especially if it is a job without wage growth.

I think semi-permanent WFH changes the equation quite a bit -- one can now live with parents, earn, and save up money to hopefully cross the chasm into the world of sustainable ownership.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#149

Post by MattGaiser »

vidanay wrote: post #104

I really wish this stigma against living "at home" would go away. Multigenerational homes has been the standard for thousands of years, and still is in large portions of the world.

Indeed.

I have a very multicultural background, but the dominant cultural view, at least when it comes to money, is Chinese.

For us, living at home is not failure. Moving out without planning to start a family if you live in the same city as your parents is considered wasting money.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#150

Post by 1-6 »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #113

I've got two nephews aged 34 and 32 who still live at home and play video games all the time and rarely leave their rooms. Neither has ever had a job that lasted more than a month or so. Neither ever learned to drive even though they live in a town with little or no public transit. They haven't had any education beyond high school. They seem wholly unprepared to navigate life without their parents. It's a slow motion…

Let's not forget that the Social Security is not getting funded so it's probably going to dry out sooner.
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