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Education and Men without Work

nationalaffairs.com

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Re: Education and Men without Work

#211

Post by jimbokun »

jfengel wrote: post #91
tmux314 wrote: post #42

There's a very weird "let them eat cake" attitude in this thread which I find distressing. The study reports on the millions of working age men in the US who are essentially too depressed and face too many obstacles to search for work. Instead, they're spending their days staying inside, getting high, and playing video games. They essentially have little to no chance to pursue romantic relationships. Many of them eve…

The problem, I think, is that the article seems to believe that the solution is "return to the 1950s". The world has changed. The relationships between men and women have changed. The relationship of the economy to individuals has changed. The article seems predicated on the notion that this number (male participation in the labor force) is the metric that matters, rather than anything about their mental health -- ha…

I couldn't help but notice, you contributed no constructive suggestions for how to improve the situation.

Also, I am fascinated by your mind-reading ability to know what an article writer did not actually say, but was secretly thinking.

Re: Education and Men without Work

#212

Post by TomMckenny »

Benefits are much more generous and much easier to get in countries with much higher worker participation. And they have the same video games in other countries too.

And marriage does not cause entry in the workforce, participation in the workforce is what makes marriage partners more interested.

Reduction in benefits has not and is no increasing work participation. There was not spike in worker participation in the 90s when massive "reform" was undertaken. There is no increased work force participation from the cut backs being done now or in recent years. Yet loosening of work safety regulations would certainly be expected to increase disabilities for manual laborers. So the best conclusion is that the supposed cheaters aren't.

Also, if those not participating in the work force are merely enjoying life on theses supposed benefits, one would not expect the already high and ever increasing suicide rate in this sector.

The author's ideology entails denying calls for higher wages by diverting what is clearly a demand/wage problem[1] into a culture war issue.

[1] I'm guessing the author is a fan of Adam Smith where lack of participation is _always_ caused by under pricing. Apparently the author is willing to accept pretty thin evidence to drop Smith when that theory might benefit labor.

Re: Education and Men without Work

#213

Post by smattiso »

r0pchainer wrote: post #116

I am trying to figure out when people will realize that a society without healthy men taking charge and pushing forward is a dying society. It's even more obvious when we see other countries whose feminization of men has actually led to the decline of their population. Reading the sterile, cerebral responses here is a bit disconcerting, but expected given the participating audience, because "smart" people assume that…

So you are moving society forward? Your banal motivations of lifting heavy things and having sex with random women is noble? Says who? You exploit software so that other people can steal, spy, etc. and I would argue that your life is even more purposeless than that of the hedonist. Unless you are building something useful or performing needed services to improve human life who cares? The truth is that everybody is mostly a drag on society.

Previous generations set society up in a way that today it's not really necessary to work super hard. That's what we have been striving for as a civilization since the beginning. Free time to spend with our families and friends.

Without religion, nationalism, war, status"ing", etc, people have woken up and realized that life IS meaningless. If you don't have to struggle to survive, many will lapse into a state of torpor because why not?

Look how many people quit their jobs to travel around in a van and rock climb? That's basically the same as the video game player, but so what?

I believe people should be using their time and abilities to take care of themselves and their families, experience love and joy, and to hopefully leave the world a better place (at least not a worse place). There is still a lot of work to do (cure cancer, explore space, clean up our planet, build homes for people, maintain what we have) and ideally people will be motivated to work on these problems, but to do so just so you can have more sex is ridiculous. In the future people won't be exploring the universe Star Trek style just so they can have a baller pad in Miami and bang "10s".

Re: Education and Men without Work

#214

Post by vasilipupkin »

jfengel wrote: post #160
tmux314 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the "Supply-Side Solutions" section, the author recommends improving k-12 education, more vocational training opportunities, and better counseling. I'm not sure if any of those recommendations entail "returning to the 1950s". The author also notes that this trend is unique to the US, as this trend doesn't exist in other never-communist democracies. These other countries have increased female workplace participatio…

The "return to the 50s" rhetoric is buried in statements like "Unfortunately, American family structure has been transformed over the past generation". Maybe it's unfortunate for exactly the people he's talking about in the article, but it was fortunate for a whole lot of other people. He seems to understand that he can't go back, but he continues to wish that there were a solution to "repair the family or the other…

Yeah, also this seems to contradict author’s own point that other countries don’t have the same declines in male participation rate, even though they have even lower marriage rates.

Re: Education and Men without Work

#215

Post by spaced-out »

bumby wrote: post #106
bazooka_penguin wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did cavemen have a conception of worth? Probably nowhere near what we would think of it. I think if you took these men and tossed them on an island with a forest some would wait to die, many, most would start chopping wood just to have something to do. It's better than being bored. I'm willing to bet very few of these social dropouts just lay in bed like vegetables all day, they're playing games, consuming media, doi…

I think those cavemen would be busy trying to survive and not doing things out of bordem because they have too many real problems to worry about. What your comment reminded me of was Sebastian Junger's book Tribe . One of the central tenets of that book is that people need to feel valued by their tribe/family/society. Lack of this can lead to mental illness. Possibly manifesting as the type of malaise outlined in the…

I don't think plumbers, lineman, etc... are universally looked down on by society. Yes there are some people/communities who do, but there are also people who look down on those who have office jobs, or who do creative work (artists, actors, writers).

Re: Education and Men without Work

#216

Post by okareaman »

My impression is that young people are just catching up with Bucky:

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

― Buckminster Fuller

Re: Education and Men without Work

#217

Post by pmarreck »

tathougies wrote: post #5

The article is long on detail and short on suggestions (which is understandable). However, the suggestions it does make are not obviously going to work. The men illustrated in the article do not seem incapable of work, but rather disinterested. Vocational training isn't going to fix the fact that the government benefits the article cited allows the men to stay at home playing video games all day. Most people (but esp…

> given the propensity of the male psyche to become dependent on dopamine

Do you have evidence for this assertion? Curious

Re: Education and Men without Work

#219

Post by _fq4v »

allovernow wrote: post #198
helen___keller wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... what do you want? A government program to promote the joys of being a housewife? Do you really think that will move the needle on a systemic socioeconomic issue? Or would you rather see an authoritarian solution? I'm sure that will go over well. Keep in mind regardless of what you want as a woman, there's very real economic risk to being dependent on a man. Wanting to live a happy life as a housewife doesn't pu…

>So... what do you want? A government program to promote the joys of being a housewife? Do you really think that will move the needle on a systemic socioeconomic issue? Not at all. I would like to see policy makers back away from the nonsensical notion that lack of gender parity across industry is indicative of a broken society, and stop pushing young women aggressively into STEM and leadership roles and encouraging…

> though there's no reason a man can't stay home to take care of the kids

Yes there is. Babies spend nine months in their mothers. When they are born they prefer their mothers more. Not out of hatred of their fathers but because that is who they are used to, due to simple facts of biology. More importantly, only mothers can breastfeed. While true that fathers can stay home with older children, there is an obvious advantage to mom staying home with babies, both for mom and baby. Keep in mind the WHO still recommends breastfeeding until age 2. Two years out of the workforce is a lot.

Re: Education and Men without Work

#220

Post by xyzzyz »

shard wrote: post #190
xyzzyz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that we could _build housing and give it to homeless people_, or just pay for everyone's basic healthcare needs (even if you could still get better by paying more), raises the ire of a significant portion of the population here. Does that surprise you that people who earned their own houses and their own healthcare through their own work resent the idea of skimming some of the fruits of their labor and giv…

As I understand it, it is a matter of looking at the total picture instead of just the free house. I don't have specific numbers, but I recall an article I read several years ago which was talking about costs that are incurred by a homeless person, covering such services such as police, hospitals, etc, and concluded that the costs were way higher than giving the homeless person a house. Therefore, the reason to give…

> I don't have specific numbers, but I recall an article I read several years ago which was talking about costs that are incurred by a homeless person, covering such services such as police, hospitals, etc, and concluded that the costs were way higher than giving the homeless person a house. Therefore, the reason to give a homeless person a house is not motivated by just altruism, but actually also from saving taxpayer money.

This assumes that the world is steady state, and that government policies don't create any incentives to change behavior. Sure, it might be cheaper, all else being equal, but such program would not make all else equal. You'd get more people who otherwise wouldn't be homeless, but the free house for homeless program made them decide that it's worth it to become one. As a result, you'd have many more homeless people than before, and so your free house for the homeless program quickly becomes very expensive. Indeed, you need to look at the total picture, instead of just the free house.

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