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No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

robkhenderson.com

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Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#171

Post by toomuchtodo »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #157
welshwelsh wrote: post #148

What I took away from this article is that many low-income men have no real interest in being fathers or raising children. Yet, they tend to produce children anyway. We should focus on making birth control more accessible, instead of trying to make people take responsibility for raising children they obviously don't want. That guy who spends all his money on weed and booze while his kids go hungry? He should have got…

Most doctors refuse to perform sterilization procedures on young people, at least until after they have had children. After all, what if they change their minds? My girlfriend couldn’t get hers done until she was over 30.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart, because unwanted children leads to enormous suffering (which I have seen up close as a volunteer Guardian ad Litem, a legal advocate for children in the system). A recent thread on the topic of unwanted children at scale [1].

So I bought and operate a domain which points to the r/childfree subreddit wiki list of doctors [2] who will provide permanent birth control to people who want it without onerous conditions such as partner approval, being over 30, or having at least two or three kids first. I run marketing campaigns on socials with this digital property. Next steps are building a site to act as a "store locator" app for this data. My partner and I also contribute in r/sterilization for those seeking permanent birth control, helping folks navigate insurance (bisalps in the US are free under most insurance situations, and vasectomies are covered at 100% in 10 states) and logistics.

High level, we should collectively be robustly supporting parents who want to be parents, but we must aggressively assist though who would rather not. 40% of US domestic pregnancies every year are unintended [3]. ~600k children are in the foster care system [4], very roughly half of which are adoptable but are never adopted. It costs ~$310k to raise a child from 0-18 in the US [5], and this does not include daycare or college costs.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/childfree/wiki/doctors

[3] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-u...

[4] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-kids-are-in-foster-ca...

[5] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Brookin...

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#173

Post by amanaplanacanal »

lelanthran wrote: post #149
positr0n wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire culture war is between people who resent their dads for being absent or weak, and those who don't. Are you saying that having an absent father or not determines your views on trans people, abortion, saying Merry Christmas vs happy holidays, DEI, etc?

> Are you saying that having an absent father or not determines your views on trans people, abortion, saying Merry Christmas vs happy holidays, DEI, etc? What on earth does any of that have to do with the GP post? I'm also quite curious - you think all of those things listed above are generally seen as positive (or negative) by the same group of people? That's a bundle of different issues that most people either won'…

That’s usually what people mean when they use the term “culture war”. If that’s not what they meant, I wonder what is?

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#174

Post by Pet_Ant »

Dalewyn wrote: post #159
Pet_Ant wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wealth is generally understood to mean how much assets you have accumulated ...by accountants. "Wealth" as used by most people is related to quality of life. It even shows up in the phrase "house poor" where maybe someone has great net assets but cannot live comfortable life due to the drain of the house. Wealth is not money.

Wealth is composed of many factors of which one is money, but you need money to have wealth. Therefore, wealth is money.

Life is composed of many factors of which one is carbon, but you need carbon to have life. There, carbon is life.

---

No, life is the combination of carbon and other things, so wealth is the combination of money and other things. It's the combination and interaction with other things that is important and focussing just on money is missing the forest for the trees.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#175

Post by giraffe_lady »

motohagiography wrote: post #67

simply, when a boy is dependent on his mother's approval for a sense of self it's all the justification he needs, and there is almost no increasingly-terrible situation in which a mother will not love her son. the worse his life, the more he depends on her, the less abandoned she is. it's the definition of a co-dependent cycle. Maybe he replaces her or shares that role with other women, but he ends up in the same cyc…

Is there any problem caused or experienced by men that you don't blame women for?

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#176

Post by not_wyoming »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #42
neilv wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: Nobody in a village should take up 2 houses for themself. But some can, and can even take up 100 houses... so long as the other villagers are fighting amongst themselves, over whether their house should be larger than that of their neighbor. Turns out most of their problems are arguably traceable back to those people with 100+ houses each. Which would be glaringly suspicious to an outside observer. But the vill…

Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation [1]. With that said , we are approaching a housing shortage of +4.5M [2] units, and in concert with YieldStar's Backpage revenue maximization engine [3] (which is laundering landlord price fixing), renters are being squeezed (because where are you going to go if you can't afford to buy? you will pay, or you will be home…

> Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation

This statement and citation fail to account for the impact of AirBnB and other STR market-makers on the housing market.

I strongly suspect a big part of housing price increases is the "small business" equivalent of institutional investors - someone buys 1-2 units that they do not plan to occupy and rent them as STRs. Similarly, vacation homes (aka homes that will go unused for the vast majority of the time) are now much, much more affordable if you can book a couple rentals a month to supplement a mortgage.

I'm *sure* AirBnb has some fascinating data on this, but I don't expect to ever see it in the public eye without government intervention (much as we'll likely never see Meta's studies on teen users' mental health).

tl;dr - but what about her airbnbs

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#177

Post by addicted »

> Those who sit at or near the apex of the social ladder (who decide what behaviors are prestigious) have decided that family stability is unimportant.

The author unironically writes this after pointing out that research shows that affluent families the share of families with biological parents has only dropped to 85% from 95% while the share for poor families has dropped to 30% from 95%.

The idea that the social apex has decided that family instability is unimportant is disproved by the numbers the author themselves shows.

But most such narratives are based on grievances and not facts. So it’s not surprising that the author makes claims that are not only not backed by evidence but are disproved by all the evidence the author themselves includes in their article.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#178

Post by inglor_cz »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #106
Qwertious wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>enact state level YIMBY policies to override local planning (who will always kowtow to local folks who show up to say no, and local folks who say no because it costs them nothing to do so as they already own) It's more than that; it's a standard free-rider problem. If all the other districts in your city support development in their area, then your own property value will go up, but you won't be burdened by any loca…

> The simple solution is to remove the local district's ability to veto local development. At least, as long as city-level/state-level planners don't have an agenda that favors certain districts over others. That is what state level YIMBY policy is intended to do, to override the free rider problem of existing property owners in the local domain. If the human can say no to any new housing, and it costs be nothing to…

NIMBY seems to be one of the intrinsic faults of democracy. Some people really don't like any change happening around them, and, once empowered, will go to great lengths to stop anything from happening.

This is probably something that democratic states need to address by reducing such empowerment. Much like your neighbor cannot tell you what to cook for dinner - even if he is a vegetarian and hates the smell of meat - he shouldn't be able to tell you not to build a house in his proximity.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#179

Post by neilv »

neilv wrote: post #8
lenerdenator wrote: post #2

We didn't want young men to do anything. We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders, and that meant moving factories (where these young men's grandfathers were working 60 years ago) overseas while doing nothing on the whole to retrain the workforce. We got the shareholder returns. Too bad that can't buy a functional society for people born after 1980.

Also: Nobody in a village should take up 2 houses for themself. But some can, and can even take up 100 houses... so long as the other villagers are fighting amongst themselves, over whether their house should be larger than that of their neighbor. Turns out most of their problems are arguably traceable back to those people with 100+ houses each. Which would be glaringly suspicious to an outside observer. But the vill…

Instead of "house", you could also imagine a similar analogy around "amount of apples one person needs to eat to live".

The sociopathic villager who went to the village's communal trees, and took way more apples than they can ever eat, while others don't have enough apples to eat, should be tossed into the lake.

But the sociopathic villager tells stories in the village square, of how those villagers who are starving are lazy, and trying to eat apples without working to gather them.

A village elder starts to say they saw the sociopath going and taking the apples under the cover of darkness, and that's why some people are starving.

But the sociopath quietly welcomes the elder into the fold of those who have cellars full of more apples than they can eat. Then apple hoarding is suddenly the noble way of the ancestors, according to the elder. And, hey, look over there, at those lazy people over there trying to eat apples while working only a half day! Hate those greedy freeloaders, over there!

The housing crisis is one example, but I'm not talking about which parties have literally 100 houses in real society (nor want to get diverted with "just let developers make more money, by building more, and stop looking at any other factors of the problem"). I'm talking about essentials, greed, and corruption more generally.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#180

Post by Gud »

addicted wrote: post #177

> Those who sit at or near the apex of the social ladder (who decide what behaviors are prestigious) have decided that family stability is unimportant. The author unironically writes this after pointing out that research shows that affluent families the share of families with biological parents has only dropped to 85% from 95% while the share for poor families has dropped to 30% from 95%. The idea that the social ape…

It’s still important for the ruling class young adults to prosper, including marrying(from their own class).
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