Men are not doing as well as women in school. If you look in the wrong places on the internet, media, or daily life, all you see is negativity towards masculinity. In addition, there doesn't appear to be any broad social system that is geared towards supporting men. The fact that men don't tend to be a socially adept doesn't help. This all feels like the perfect storm and there are plenty of people who act like "men have had it coming and deserve any ensuing suffering". I don't know how to fix this but I am sure glad I am no longer a young man.
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
#512Part of this problem is our societal failure to build enough housing to keep up with the increasing number of people, with a resulting increase in housing costs that has significantly outpaced the median wage. If you can't afford to live on your own, and can't afford housing where the jobs are located, then you're more likely to live with your parents and be unemployed.
Theres a ton of housing surplus if you dont want to build equity
Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home
#513I'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…
In Tacoma, I lived nextdoor to a guy who "hurt his back" when he was 22. As far as I can tell, he'll sit on his couch collecting disability until 65, at which point he'll switch to retirement.
I find it so odd how society gets obsessed with boogeyman examples of people taking advantage of the system. There will always be some people who take advantage of the system. Accept that, keep it reasonable, but optimize the system for those who will improve it.
The flip side is this person is hurting society significantly less than some committing crimes - even worse crimes that are sentenced to jail time (which is very expensive).
Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adding to this, we've also abandoned the idea of building out in the middle of nowhere and linking it to a city center with a rail line. I'd gladly buy a cheap home in the boonies if I could take a train into work instead of driving.
Its going to be significantly more realistic to retrofit existing roads and highways with machine-readable signage and traffic lights (for example, why do cars have to read traffic lights with cameras, why can't the lights broadcast the status locally?) Then we can run autonomous vehicles (private and corporate) over the same infrastructure.
Oh good proprietary traffic signs
Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home
#515I don't think it's a tragedy. The overly dramatic media and pundits get this all wrong in labeling it such. Young people are simply responding to incentives to live at home longer. Living expenses keep going up relative to inflation and wages, such as home prices, rent, insurance, etc. Living at home is a good way save money, even for the employed. Family formation is expensive and fraught with risks such as divorce…
More succinctly, why work when we have nothing to work for? Anecdotally, I just graduated from university and am gainfully employed. I'm really happy to be employed, yet I quickly realized that I have no idea what I want to do with all this money. I'm never going to be able to buy a house. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about having kids, and don't think I can afford children in the first place. I have no major li…
Go on a nice vacation with friends once the pandemic winds down.
Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home
#516I don't think it's a tragedy. The overly dramatic media and pundits get this all wrong in labeling it such. Young people are simply responding to incentives to live at home longer. Living expenses keep going up relative to inflation and wages, such as home prices, rent, insurance, etc. Living at home is a good way save money, even for the employed. Family formation is expensive and fraught with risks such as divorce…
There is also a question of who exactly is doing this. I am willfully ignorant of conditions in the lowest 20% of society by wealth and status.
It isn't self-evident that life in the real world at the bottom of society is better than a videogame. Imaginary worlds are a lot more fun than reality. Throw in a minimum wage freezing out very low skill jobs, parental willingness to support, no particular prospect of a girlfriend and maybe a bit of access to some welfare programs. Then maybe the real world just doesn't offer very much.
Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's quite an interesting graph. I wonder if it is also influenced by things to do with average age or age of retirement, time spent in school, or something like that. Just looking at it makes me wonder about demographics/education/etc. That's about a 20% drop over the years, I would assume caused by a number of factors.
My speculation is that it’s like the argument that minimum wages increase the skill floor for employment. However, it’s that a combination of automation and cost optimization eliminated all the marginal jobs, rather than the wage floor. Automation allows a salary employee to pick up what previously would have been a full-time minimum wage position under “other duties as assigned” without overworking them. Cost optimi…
Tax the machines
Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home
#518Is this a new phenomenon in any real sense, I wonder. All through history, haven’t there always been many “surplus men” who didn’t find a place in their surrounding society.
Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem comes in when their parents die and they have no path to supporting themselves. Not everyone has an inheritance to look forward to. Living at home and working isn’t really a problem, but entering the labor force at 40+ is not going to go well.
They won't be entering the labor force at 40+. Without some kind of disability benefit that keeps them housed and fed, they'll end up living out of a car or a tent, playing games on a phone they charge by running the engine on the camp Winnebago. Bloomberg will run articles about how cars, tents and gasoline are holding them back from participating in the economy.
Or they'll be fine, marry loving partners, get into doing something lax like flipping cars or real estate, spend more than they probably should on entertainment, have a kid or two, pay off their $100k home by retirement age, and live like most of the bottom 40% of the US.
Not everywhere has money. I'm from a place where mortgages (with PMI) plus property tax are under $600/mo, families mostly own one vehicle (a van or truck), and people outside of regular blue collar either work six months out of the year trucking, at one of two local corporate offices, or hold multiple jobs part time (30-32 hours per so they don't ever get benefits).
That's how a lot of America lives, and that's who Medicare4All, free higher ed, and federal funding for K12 helps the most, which would do a lot to build and reinforce our lower middle class.
Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home
#520What are the things that motivates them, and what do they themselves want to do in life? I ask this because much of the undertone in the article and in this thread is about the failure of meeting the gender role expectations that are put on young men. Do they have a job and a car? Have they studied hard so they can get a good job in order to support a wife and kid? Culture in the last several decades have hammered do…
On a related note, on mainstream TV/articles about declining marriage/birthrates in the West, it's common to see criticisms about modern Western men. How women can't find life partners because men aren't masculine enough anymore, don't want to grow up, don't get educated etc. But very rarely do you see any criticism or even questioning about modern Western women and what men want in a woman. Only what women want. The…
Yeah, TV and related is a pretty big psyop and always has been. I'm going to invoke Godwin's Law but even the Nazis knew how to use movies back then to brainwash people into doing their bidding.
The audience here is (wrongly) responding to you by thinking that you're somehow targeting women in your questioning, but I get what you're trying to say - you see a strange imbalance of personalities being portrayed in popular media and it's setting off alarms in your head, like someone is trying to sell you something or they're trying to push an agenda on you that you don't quite buy into. They are, but you're resisting. Keep doing this. Eventually, find out who the owners are of all these channels and products that are being pushed on you. What do they have in common, and what would they stand to gain from this. Follow the money.