Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The data are clear: The boys are not all right

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 1001 posts

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

#431

Post by ceasesurthinko »

notacoward wrote: post #313
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…

This kind of withdrawal seems to be happening in many cultures. In Japan it's called hikikomori . I forget what it's called in Italy, but I know I've read about it. Here it's the same, except ours tend to be more violent.

Usually referred to as a NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) in the western world.

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

#432

Post by astrange »

stronglikedan wrote: post #57
decafninja wrote: post #4

Possible unpopular opinion, but my wife and I want just one kid, and would greatly, greatly, prefer a daughter for reasons that include some mentioned in this article. I feel a son would be so much harder to raise in today's world.

> a son would be so much harder to raise in today's world Maybe, but today's world is not the world your son would grow up in. We're at the end of the cycle from the G. Michael Hopf quote below. The beginning of the cycle is once again imminent, thankfully. "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times."

This unproven quote seems like a great justification for what they call “continuing the cycle of abuse”. Or what Calvin’s dad calls “building character”.

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

#433

Post by cperciva »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #419

> we must stop defining masculinity as necessarily toxic I know "toxic masculinity" is a dumb academic term that never should have become a slogan, but Andrew, Mr. Yang, that's not what it means. It's like "async functions". Not all functions are async. It's okay if a function is sync. Adjectives modify nouns to make them refer to a specific subset. It's fine to be masculine. I don't know what it means to be masculin…

There's a difference between "toxic masculinity" and "asynchronous functions". Asynchronous functions are still functions, but there's nothing masculine about "toxic masculinity".

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

#434

Post by mistrial9 »

awaythrow483 wrote: post #359
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…

I'm 33, Ive got a fairly high IQ, make $340k in a STEM field and enough to retire tomorrow, I'm not unattractive, and put a huge amount of effort over many years into online dating. I've pretty much given up on dating. I have a total inability to find anyone I'm interested in that is interested in me. When I was younger and I wanted to go to bars and get drunk and be an idiot I had plenty of attractive sexual partner…

screen time directly subtracts from useful relationship forming, for partners IMHO .. your profile implies massive screen time now

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

#435

Post by scarmig »

dan-robertson wrote: post #397
rayiner wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can point to the decline of organized religion and with it traditional gender roles, but then what explains the relative stability in post-Christian Europe? As far as I can tell, Europe isn’t all that post-Christian. Even countries that have low levels of people actively practicing religion still carry a strong cultural legacy from Christianity: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/10/02/the-catholic-nes... Co…

To what extent is this just people not liking their current job? That is, what percentage of homemakers would rather be employed, and how would the opinions of employed women change if their choices in the poll were current job/appealing alternative job/homemaker?

Women generally report more job satisfaction than men do; you'd expect a higher proportion of men preferring homemaking to their jobs if that was the dominant factor.

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

#436

Post by ceasesurthinko »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #401
photochemsyn wrote: post #53

I wonder if social media technology is as much at fault as the neoliberal program of exporting well-paid manufacturing jobs overseas and replacing them with low-paid service jobs (with the difference going into the pockets of the shareholders) is. If children are being raised on TikTok, okay, the average video length on TikTok is a couple minutes. Advertisements are now 5-15 seconds. This is not conducive to 'long at…

I've heard the causation goes the other way for ADHD. TV and TikTok don't cause ADHD. They're products that arise to exploit people's attention, and they work excellently on people with poor executive function. TV doesn't cause ADHD, ADHD causes TV. You can probably train attention span, and there are ways to cope with ADHD (I cope pretty well, and I have only mild symptoms), but it's measurable and it's genetic. I g…

I don't know, the vast majority of teens are users of TikTok, and attention spans are undoubtedly decreasing across the board. Everyone. Yet I don't think the majority of the population had ADHD previously. If the incidence of ADHD was really like the 4-8% in the medical literature, then we would see 4-8% of teens hooked to TikTok, but no, it's a majority (>50%) of teens that are hooked to Tiktok/youtube/instagram.

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

#437

Post by barry-cotter »

wolverine876 wrote: post #354
corpMaverick wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, me too. But, would you still feel the same if you had to stay home to take care of kids and a working spouse ?

And having very few adults to talk to, no status, no career advancement (in fact, the opposite), and little recognition.

Most people do not care about their jobs. And they have jobs, not careers. They work because they get paid. Occasionally they get a brief flicker of satisfaction. More often they enjoy the company of their co-workers. Occasionally they hate their jobs so much that they engage in unhealthy behaviors s as a coping mechanism, like alcoholism, or they quit.

Basically everyone who doesn’t stay heavily involved in their professional field after retirement was doing it almost solely for money. There are better and worse jobs, more and less enjoyable ones. But a huge majority of people have jobs, not careers.

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

#438

Post by antisthenes »

ytwombly wrote: post #150

US-based cis-hetero white man here. The data reinforce the impression you get glancing at the headlines or spending a day out anywhere in America observing other men. Dare I say it even reinforces what I know from painful firsthand experience as a man, at the lowest points in my life. I was lucky though, with a supportive family who helped me through the confusing years of early adulthood. You can point to the declin…

> The "Lump of Labor" fallacy is just that, a fallacy. Economic gains are not zero-sum.

Frankly, I'm very tired of debunking the zero-sum trope.

Not only are many things in the economy zero-sum, in the case of labor, even if the economy is humming at 150%, it's trivial to imagine a scenario where the man and the woman are both earning 75% of what they would have without the other sex in the labor force. Both are worse off, yet the capital owners are better off and it gives the illusion that everything is going great.

The illusion is so good that we've divorced productivity from wage for 50 years, made tons of women miserable and no one so much as batted an eye.

And in many places, housing has effectively become zero-sum, due to pressure from large capital investors and zoning restrictions on building new housing. In these scenarios, even modest increases in demand can skyrocket the housing/rental prices beyond what is sustainable by the young population.

> Whatever the cause I fully reject the lazy conclusion this is somehow women's fault.

You're right to reject it, but the zero-sum argument is absolutely orthogonal to the issue. It's also completely incorrect and trivially debunked by anyone with a shred of economic common sense.

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

#439

Post by rayiner »

dan-robertson wrote: post #397
rayiner wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can point to the decline of organized religion and with it traditional gender roles, but then what explains the relative stability in post-Christian Europe? As far as I can tell, Europe isn’t all that post-Christian. Even countries that have low levels of people actively practicing religion still carry a strong cultural legacy from Christianity: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2019/10/02/the-catholic-nes... Co…

To what extent is this just people not liking their current job? That is, what percentage of homemakers would rather be employed, and how would the opinions of employed women change if their choices in the poll were current job/appealing alternative job/homemaker?

I suspect it’s a sliding scale—working is probably relatively more compelling if you’re a cancer researcher than if you’re writing up the paperwork for home mortgages. But way more people do the latter than the former, right? And most people doing the latter aren’t qualified to do the former (and that’s okay).

I think that often people with remunerative, intellectually stimulating jobs overlook the perspective of women who have (and are realistically only qualified to have) jobs we would probably regard as more mundane.

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

#440

Post by bradlys »

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…

> My observation is that we are going to have a radical rebalancing of who reproduces and who doesn’t.

I think the idea that everyone has the option to settle down and have kids is a relatively recent phenomenon. It used to be that most men never had kids. Nowadays most men do have kids. That said - 25%+ of men will never have children. Kinda wild when you think about that. 1/4 of all men will never have children. Whether this is a choice or not isn't clear (I'm going to go with - not a choice overwhelmingly). The interesting part though is that the number is less than 15% for women. That means that there are ~70% more men than women who will never have children. These stats are usually taken for men who are age 45+ - where the gender balance is more equal.

Post reply on HN