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The data are clear: The boys are not all right

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Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#251

Post by openknot »

tharne wrote: post #246
bmj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the father of 18 year old who is not going to college and instead working as a carpenter, I don't think lumping 18 year olds with 25+ year olds makes much sense. Perhaps I have an antiquated view of family, but I don't feel his "independence" has everything to do with where he lives. I'm more than happy to have him around the house if it allows him to save money and live a better life at, say, 21.

This is spot on. Multigenerational housing used to be the norm, not a symbol of failure. Why we all think it's a great idea to leave our families at 18 and pay high rents so that we can live with strangers we found on the internet is beyond me.

There are good reasons in response to: "Why we all think it's a great idea to leave our families at 18 and pay high rents so that we can live with strangers we found on the internet is beyond me," though personally I also don't believe that multigenerational housing is a symbol of failure, and often lets a person save a lot of money.

It's more difficult to maintain a romantic relationship when living with family (especially if both partners live with family), and it can also delay life skills (e.g. learning how to cook at home, clean, and generally learn to live more independently; though it's possible to deliberately learn this while living with family, it becomes a necessity to learn after moving out).

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#252

Post by fiftyfifty »

jimbokun wrote: post #169
fiftyfifty wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've coached high school sports teams, both boys and girls, for the last two decades. I've seen some of these trends unfold over the years with my student athletes. My observation is girls are just more motivated than boys, even for something fun like sports practices and workouts, girls in general will show up more consistently than boys. The teachers I've spoken to at the school where I coach have confirmed the sam…

> and from my experience it's often the mother. I'm not trying to downplay the role of positive male role models and their impact No, that is exactly what you are doing. All the available evidence shows boys, especially, do less well across the board when raised without a father in the home.

I'm not disagreeing with your point, but I don't think this entire trend can be blamed on a lack of fathers. I'm fortunate now that I coach at a school in a pretty affluent community, the vast majority of the kids I coach have married parents with active fathers in the house. I still see many of these young men fairly checked out by high school. I think in many of these cases boys are over protected these days, they grow up without the freedom to explore and test themselves and their parents create an environment where it's OK not to try or put forth an honest effort or finish your commitments etc.

Years ago I coached at an inner city school, lots of single moms, I've seen the results first hand. I'd like to think for many of those kids I was a positive male role model, maybe one of the only ones in their life. Unfortunately I don't live in that area anymore.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#253

Post by psyc »

lph wrote: post #215
jimbokun wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So were those teams trying to exclude women? Or just no (or few) women that wanted to be part of those teams? Right now, tech companies are desperate to hire anyone qualified. Are you saying they are deliberately excluding women from consideration? From what I've seen, all the tech employers are desperate to hire and promote women, and there are just very few women interested.

No, the teams weren't trying to exclude women. Not at all. They were representative of the company and the entire industry. There are very few women in tech. So then the question is why are very few women in tech? If you really dive into this, it's a chicken-and-egg problem: The fact that so few women are in tech makes the whole scene into sort of a frat house, which is often not a welcoming or kind environment to wo…

I just realized that so many people always repeat that there aren’t many women in “tech.” But it’s really more like not many women in programming. In my experience, the majority of PMs, designer/artists, and tech writers, and about half of QA, have been women. Therefore only the programming team felt like a boys club, never the larger org or the company. The only place this wasn’t true was one tiny startup I worked at long ago.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#254

Post by [deleted] »

paulpauper wrote: post #111

The crisis, if there is one, is that society has less use for males who have IQs between 90-105 or so, who cannot cut it in STEM, and who are finding it hard to cope with increasingly competitive economic conditions and higher overall costs like rent, and is why many men are delaying family formation or moving back with parents (but also due to careerism for women). Men are just dropping out rather than doing low-pai…

[deleted]

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#255

Post by tharne »

openknot wrote: post #251
tharne wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is spot on. Multigenerational housing used to be the norm, not a symbol of failure. Why we all think it's a great idea to leave our families at 18 and pay high rents so that we can live with strangers we found on the internet is beyond me.

There are good reasons in response to: "Why we all think it's a great idea to leave our families at 18 and pay high rents so that we can live with strangers we found on the internet is beyond me," though personally I also don't believe that multigenerational housing is a symbol of failure, and often lets a person save a lot of money. It's more difficult to maintain a romantic relationship when living with family (esp…

There are definitely some benefits to living on one's own for a while, but I do not think we should continue to view as the only viable option, or even the default for that matter.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#256

Post by [deleted] »

trabant00 wrote: post #148

I pitty todays boys. The entire world from school to internet has something against being playfull, hyper active, agressively competitive, and all the other things that boys are by nature. One fight and here comes therapy and even meds. I would be crucified for what I did as a youth even though nobody got hurt and I turned out to be a top 1% productive member of society. Today being a docile beast of burden is the on…

[deleted]

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#257

Post by ohwellhere »

mandmandam wrote: post #91
frankbreetz wrote: post #5

>>Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms. Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. I wonder how much of this is because more women are joining the workforce. If men are leaving the workforce by their own free will because their wife is working and they are staying home with the kids, both of these facts could be true, but seems like a win in both gender equality ter…

This isn't mysterious. The people sucking money out of the wage pool are the 1% class, not women. 20 trillion in debt for illegal and stupid wars probably didn't help either, though it does tie in once again with the 1% class.

It might be both. See charts on the numbered page 4: https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45090.pdf

Women at 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles saw real wage increases from 1979-2019; men saw a decrease at 10th and 50th.

(I'm morally opposed to the top 90th percentile's growth at the expense of the bottom. I'm not morally opposed to gender pay equality, which I _think_ is zero sum and results in lower wages for men as it improves.)

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#258

Post by aantix »

rootusrootus wrote: post #23
trentnix wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. In all the talk of racial or gender privilege, the most beneficial privilege a person can enjoy is the benefits of a loving, supportive, traditional two-parent household (there is insufficient data on non-traditional two-parent households). You can see a direct correlation in outcomes when comparing children that emerged from two-parent households over those that emerge from single-parent households. But because…

I wonder how much of that comes down to 1.5-2x the income compared to a single parent household, versus the beneficial effect of two role models.

I think the money helps.

But what doesn't get talked about with family (especially small kids) is that you're with them for 16 hours a day.

Emotions get messy. Someone is always upset about something. And the larger the family, the more probable that someone is upset at any given moment.

The nice thing about a two parent household is that (hopefully) one parent keeps a cool head while the other me be annoyed, etc.

It's so much of a help to have a partner that says "why don't you take five minutes" or "I think you were too hard on ..." And I can reciprocate the same support.

I don't know how single parents do it.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#259

Post by throwaway6532 »

thrway99 wrote: post #61

My observation is that we are going to have a radical rebalancing of who reproduces and who doesn’t. Lot of men and women who are generally not too motivated to seek out a companion, lose weight, put in the work to make it happen just…won’t pass on genetics. Children are a lot of work and energy. I’m highly introverted and high earning. My wife was the aggressor in my case. She pretty much made it all happen. I think…

>I wonder what all these effects will have over the next 200 years?

Well with a birth rate below replacement level there will be less and less people with each generation if the birth rate stays at that level, so in 200 years there's virtually no one left or something like that.

Re: The data are clear: The boys are not all right

#260

Post by analog31 »

pc86 wrote: post #161

Is there a generational thing that causes people to say "data is" vs. "data are" in this context? Because to me "data are" sounds so egregiously wrong it takes me seconds to focus on anything else.

I once wrote an article and the editor changed all "data are" to "data is." I asked her if I was being old fashioned and she said yes.
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