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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

#921

Post by hhmc »

DeathArrow wrote: post #917
engineeringwoke wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As stated elsewhere in the thread, northern Europe bucks this "trend" that the author sees. The nuclear family is as weak as it has ever been, christianity and its ideals are an afterthought, and people have never been happier.

And yet the suicide rate in Norway is among the highest in the world. Crafted studies proclaim people to be happy but they forgot what happiness is.

> And yet the suicide rate in Norway is among the highest in the world

In relative terms, sure. But in absolute terms it's a tiny fraction of people: 10 per 100k.

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

#922

Post by nottorp »

gumby wrote: post #785
dasudasu wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that the poorest people are covered by medicare or get their fees waved (hospitals won't refuse to treat someone needing critical care). That is not "zero social net". Nobody is in fact jealous of the American healthcare system though. Meanwhile, in most countries in Europe, people live in fear of having to be put on wait lists that extend from months to years, or just plain being unable to access…

Waitlists can be visibly bad in the UK but if you read German or French papers you’ll see complaints about “wait lists” that seem laughable by US standards. I live in SV so can afford a level of health care well above the usual middle class. Yet I have a literal A/B test: my kid broke his arm in Germany and also in the US and the ordinary treatment he got In Germany was significantly superior to that at Stanford Hosp…

You know, there's an interesting point here. Did you get travel health insurance for DE? Did you even think of getting it?

I always get that for holidays, it costs peanuts. Sometimes you don't even have to pay upfront if you use it, sometimes the treatment gets refunded.

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

#923

Post by DeathArrow »

dnndev wrote: post #32
PaulHoule wrote: post #11

A counter is that other countries (Japan, Korea, Italy, ...) that enforce traditional values have had a collapse in the birth rate. Having children out of wedlock is a safety valve for broken institutions that keeps the birth rate higher in the US than comparable countries; that plus relatively open integration helps us maintain our economy, welfare state, pensions, etc. If we turned the screws on women and men to di…

What about married couples that decide not to have children ? The truth is it’s hard, and if the community does not support families then you have less children. Think about both parents working full time + and barely having enough to provide from a material standpoint, let along emotional and education. Point is parenting is hard and life today makes it harder. I don’t believe wedlock is a deciding reason for people…

>Point is parenting is hard and life today makes it harder.

Only if you care about what the influencer of the day is saying. Things are much easier now as we have childcare, kindergartens, disposable diapers, milk formulas, better healthcare.

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

#924

Post by Mvandenbergh »

Aunche wrote: post #199
dijit wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all depends on what you’re aiming for, socio-economically. If you want billionaires then the US model is much more successful. If you want a wide middle class then the Swedish model is more successful. If you want happiness then the Danish model is more successful. If you want to eliminate poverty then the Finnish model is more successful.

It's disingenuous to compare a country with another country with 1/30th the size. Otherwise, you'd come to the conclusion that Sweden would be better off as a tax haven like Luxembourg. Massachusetts matches the Nordic nations by most metrics, and blows them out of the water in terms of median income.

It isn't disingenuous at all if you compare per capita metrics.

Yes, you may have to exclude some very anomalous countries that have models that couldn't scale - Luxembourg for instance - but a country like Sweden is a mix of cities, suburbs, and rural areas with a mix of primary resource production, manufacturing, and services. It's big "enough" that you would expect normal country scaling laws to apply.

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

#925

Post by refurb »

jcstk wrote: post #132

I can appreciate this perspective because I used to have it. I even wrote a similar blog post 10 years ago - it was on the top of HN and the comment section was a beautiful shitshow. For me, this perspective was a good story to tell myself - it justified why I was only investing my time in “work”, and validated me for having “come so far”. Over time, I have reflected and shifted this perspective. That reflection cent…

It's funny you'd say "that’s his perspective of what the world thinks" when he's an academic doing a PhD on the subject chatting with other academics about the same topic.

I mean clearly psychology is a lot of "our area of study observes X and attributes Y as a part of theory Z". It's not a hard science where objective, absolute, undeniable measurements can be made.

But it's not some random dude just pontificating about social structures on the internet.

By your measure we should just throw all the great philosophers works in the toilet because "that's their perspective".

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

#926

Post by jacobolus »

sofixa wrote: post #907
rayiner wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtually everyone in the world aside from a handful of declining European countries believes that “stable home environment” = “married parents.”

Declining how? Besides natural population growth, I can't think of any other relevant decline European countries are experiencing. And even if they were experiencing a general decline, that doesn't mean there's correlation with the percent of married couples vs non-married ones. Marriage or civil union doesn't change the stability of the couple ( besides the fact that the former usually implies a party with a lot of…

It’s especially jarring in contrast to Rayiner’s other comments in this conversation are about how Asian Americans are such economically successful go-getters compared to lazy white people due to their culturally superior family structure or something.

Rayiner: have you looked at the demographic pyramid in South Korea, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, or urban China recently? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/So...

Or if we want to talk about places where “traditional family values” (i.e. opposition to women’s rights) poll very high, how about the demographics of Russia?

The demographic decline in “a handful of European countries” is substantially a matter of time since industrialization, access to birth control, urbanization, female literacy, amount of immigration, housing prices, etc. more than ethnic/cultural/religious origin, and it is going to land on everywhere else in the world (USA, South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, ..) soon enough.

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

#927

Post by DeathArrow »

gumby wrote: post #19

It’s interesting to read these (plausible, far from absurd) analyses from the Anglosphere when we have an alternative to compare, to whit the northern European democracies where marriage is in steep decline across all social classes yet the societies are more successful (at least if your metrics are things like poverty rates, lifetimes, nutrition, stress, etc).

Suicide rate in Norway is 11.8,while in Greece (a more traditional society) is 3.6.

By metric of happiness and self fulfillment, it seems Greece is much better than Norway.

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

#928

Post by raxxorraxor »

21723 wrote: post #605

As a middle-aged man who's been studying this stuff for a while, I'd like to throw in my observations. We are in a Masculine Crisis, and both men and women are suffering, because gender isn't zero-sum, and a society that damages men is just as harmful to heterosexual women, who struggle to find men. Late-stage capitalism's breakdown of the family (which it molded into a bourgeois form, then let rot) happened in black…

I never bought the argument that men are struggling with their masculinity. I was surprised that this even became a topic in tech where programming nerds already have written off being masculine, as classically associated with shooting guns instead of pointers. Basically doing the opposite than pondering in your faculty in your jesus slippers. But I never had the impression anyone took that to heart seriously.

Income is very relevant though and the most honest appreciation of your work and there is a development in a negative direction. This does hit women even worse from my experience though.

But your point still holds truth, instead of lamenting masculinity (very few people care) perhaps "the left" should reorient itself to actually improve working conditions and most importantly wages. I think Jordan Petersen can improve himself even more if he would clean my room too, but I believe many people do like him because it signals rejection of detached gender topics in general and there just so many venues for that. Because people don't care about it just as they don't care about their masculinity. Their pay check however is another matter.

Furthermore the problems in the workplace are not just monetary. Work is more compacted, surveillance is increasing, stress is increasing because of 24/7 connectivity... and now they have to put their pronouns in their signatures? You might get a wave of rejection for that after some point.

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

#929

Post by 3np »

rayiner wrote: post #756
3np wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that really stuck out to me was the implicit assumption that "stable home environment" requires or is equal to "married couple of biological parents living together until child becomes adult". Especially the quote where an agreement that stability is important was interpreted as agreement that marriage is important.

Virtually everyone in the world aside from a handful of declining European countries believes that “stable home environment” = “married parents.”

Argumentum ad populum does not compute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_by_consensus

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

#930

Post by DeathArrow »

layer8 wrote: post #678
DeathArrow wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you have no hope of success, then people just give up. Success doesn't come from hope. It comes from hard work and fighting every day for something better. Luck might help, but is neither required nor enough for success. I was from a poor background and fighting for a better future was the only thing that brought me some kind of success.

I bet you had hope that your fighting would be worth it. What the GP is saying that if you don’t have hope then you have no incentive to work hard, because the lack of hope literally means that you don’t believe there’s a realistic chance it will lead to success. You need that belief to get going and to keep going.

If by hope you mean realizing that chances of success do exist, then you are right.
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