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No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

robkhenderson.substack.com

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Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#791

Post by Nimitz14 »

igetspam wrote: post #311
dnndev wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is great. I am glad that you were able to make this change! It was not until we had our own children that I truly understood (or maybe appreciated) when my mom would say "After all I have done for you" OR "Thats why we can never have anything nice"... HAHAH. I love it. totally relate now. On a serious side note. I think many (including us) highly underestimate how much time children require.

Having come from a large family, I never realized that people didn't understand just how much work kids are. It's relentless. My wife is regularly astonished. I'm lucky to have been able to stop at one. I would have preferred married but childless but I'll take married to her over any other option, so I compromised. At with just one, we aren't spread so thin.

Older kids can help raising the others, I think having just one is where you do the maximum amount of work, also because with the later ones you are more experienced.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#792

Post by nottorp »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #361
Ensorceled wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "US thinkers" is a ridiculously broad term. It's a pretty good generalization, however. I see it over and over again in US political discussions a total, and possibly (probably?) deliberate, blindness to the idea that health card could be socialized, UI and welfare could be better, access to education could be universal and things like job training or maternity leave could exist, etc.

Then you're not connecting with the US "left" (probably not a coincidence). The Nation is both the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the US (founded in 1865) and consistently represents different parts of the US left. Jacobin is another good example. It is true that if you watch network or cable TV from the US, you will not find the actual left represented, other than perhaps Bernie Sanders. What they…

> Then you're not connecting with the US "left" (probably not a coincidence).

I doubt the US left knows what left is :)

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#793

Post by giantg2 »

rayiner wrote: post #757
giantg2 wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be interesting to see. Maybe you can show us the numbers, adjust for COL, adjust for definition of success, adjust for academic differences, and adjust for cultural biases.

What does adjusting for “cultural biases” mean?

Cultural factors that can influence the measures and outcomes.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#794

Post by imtringued »

dahfizz wrote: post #446
DebtDeflation wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Finally, there was a decent support of policies for the working class. Please provide actual policy examples. I don't mean like when he put on a hard hat and pretended to dig coal with an imaginary shovel while on stage, I mean actual tangible policy proposals that would have improved the lives of working folks. Tariffs were very likely a net negative. Tax giveaways to build domestic factories almost never resulted…

Reducing taxes is a pretty big one. Even the most editorialized and anti-Trump articles[1] admit that "the bill helped average families". These articles usually go on at length complaining that the tax cuts also help the rich. But this is the kind of thing that directly and immediately helps the middle / working class. Reducing their tax burden puts money back in their pocket. [1] https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/ne…

We should follow the singapore/hong kong model of higher property/land taxes and lower income taxes (keep them progressive). The government is supposed to manage the commons and it should be rewarded for doing a good job.

Income taxes are frankly terrible. They increase the risk of corruption because they are "free for all". Increasing land value through public investments is often straight forward. Proper urban planning increases tax revenues, bad urban planning decreases tax revenues. Meanwhile with income taxes, the connection is way more elastic. If you fund a $8 trillion infrastructure bill with income taxes, nobody is going to care if the investment is actually worth it but a lot of politicians will be interested in adding "pork" to benefit from the money.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#795

Post by pnutjam »

jchanimal wrote: post #371
irrational wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, divorce sucks when kids are involved, I don't think anyone on earth, left or right, would dispute that. Tons of people dispute this. The thinking is that people staying married when they don’t want to stay married is worse for kids than people getting divorced and creating two separate households the kids float between. I don’t agree with this thinking, mostly because I’m the product of divorce that saw the a…

Divorced dad, anecdote. My kids, my ex, and I are much better off now. Having the kids around 50% time is a huge sanity boost and allows me to be there for them more than before. I’m lucky to have remarried to a very engaged stepmom, but even without her we’d probably still be better off. I also saw my parents become much happier after they split up (when I was an adult.)

100% of the problems this article is bemoaning are because of lack of financial support. The top needs to stop hoarding all the money.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#796

Post by nradov »

rayiner wrote: post #702
the_solenoid wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree - and will take it one step further: he misses the root causes of "instability", and I bet it tracks directly with the gutting of the middle class starting in the 70's, and/or the same flat-lining of wages (not keeping up with inflation etc) despite huge increases in productivity in about the same time period. Money is a huge stressor in relationships. Misogyny is still a huge thing (to my utter surprise hone…

How does a “flat lining” of wages of cause family stability to go down ? And how do you explain high levels of family stability in countries that are much poorer?

The issue isn't with the absolute level of wages but with increasing income inequality (Gini coefficient) and the resulting loss of social status for young men on the lower end of that scale.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#797

Post by [deleted] »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #682
DeathArrow wrote: post #205

>Norms were loosened around being an absentee father. So more men took the option. I'm afraid that the author got it wrong. All social norms were destroyed between 1950's and now. If society desires hard working, law abiding, family loving young men, it should rebuild what it destroyed. The only interesting point in the story was about that "expert" which publicly behaves how society coerces her now to behave but sec…

Religion destroyed plenty of people and continues to right now. In the 19-20th centuries of the USA it wasn't such a pleasant life for non-WASP or women.

[deleted]

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#798

Post by fzeroracer »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #786
noasaservice wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about "dont give a fuck". This is about intergenerational poverty, and the costs that we all will have to pay because the elites decided to destroy social mobility for the poverty-stricken classes. When you are born and live in poverty, hold jobs that amount to minimum wage or tiny bits above it, have no way to *see* a future of any sort of success; happiness, alcohol, drugs, and sex are the primary forms of…

>It's not about "dont give a fuck". This is about intergenerational poverty, and the costs that we all will have to pay because the elites decided to destroy social mobility for the poverty-stricken classes. I'm sorry but that is just an asinine thing to say and a textbook case of solving "my pet issue will fix the world" thinking. Inter-generational poverty was the norm until the industrial revolution. While it cert…

I don't know if I would call it exactly tangential to societal stability, since we have multiple historical examples of what happens when inter-generational poverty goes too far. And usually the end result is not pretty for those in charge.

It seems easy to say that societal stability isn't dependent on social mobility until the lower class decides that it's time to bring out the guillotines.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#799

Post by pyuser583 »

My parents grew up in white, working class neighborhoods in the 1950s.

The families were extremely unstable. There was stigma to straight up divorce, and lots of “everything is fine” when it wasn’t.

Both parents were raised by grandparents, aunts/uncles, etc.

They turned out very well.

I guess that reinforces the authors point.

When marriage isn’t about individual fulfillment, but supporting the community, you get unhappy marriages but stronger communities.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#800

Post by danaris »

rayiner wrote: post #788
coldtea wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Income after taxes and transfer payments has grown for everyone since 1970 And education, housing, and health costs has sky-rocketed, number of "essential services" to pay for (mobile phone, internet, severan "rentier" subscriptions) has increased, while job stability and availability for working and middle class has plummeted... But yes, the top 10%, the types to usually post at HN, never had it better.

But a lot of those requirements are manufactured. Germany has an advanced industrial economy with half the percentage of college graduates we do (just 1/4). So why do we need to act like “cost of living” for everyone has to include saving hundreds of thousands of dollars for college? I agree the top 10% have poor insight into what life is like for everyone else, but that cuts both ways. I think there’s a real misperc…

Whether it's manufactured or organic, it's still real. That's the economic reality we all have to live with in America, so it doesn't matter whether Germany can operate just fine without the crushing college debt we have: the fact is, middle-class households in America have lost real wealth and purchasing power over the past 50 years because of this and a number of other factors.
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