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

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

robkhenderson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 600 posts

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

#241

Post by underlipton »

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…

Your first statement is flat-out wrong. The supporting citation does not actually support it, though it hints at how institutional housing ownership has contributed to housing price inflation. To wit: it explains how innovations during the GFC turned direct investment into an appealing proposition for investors. These investors helped to backstop housing values that would have fallen even further than they already had. In other words, the much-needed correction to the pre-GFC bubble that the GFC represented was disrupted and reversed.

The actual solution to housing price inflation is a full correction that wipes out the inflated value of housing in this country, cutting each property's worth back down to its intrinsic value. Affordability and use would reset to what the real market actually can sustain, as when the income tax forced wealthy property owners to divest of and demolish or convert their grand mansions into apartments for people to actually live in.

There is no housing shortage (Zillow has an obvious conflict-of-interest). There is no need to load even more money into the system by providing cheap money to builders (a naked corporate giveaway that will surely represent yet another wealth transfer from taxpayers to business-owners). Pop the bubble. Planning considerations can follow, once land and property values actually reflect their intrinsic worth. If you do it before that, you throw billions of dollars worth of resources and labor into misbegotten initiatives that do no good for the communities that they're supposed to serve (e.g., highway expansion).

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

#242

Post by m_fayer »

lenerdenator wrote: post #78
taylodl wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Income isn't the only measure of wealth. Also, there are two major expenses affecting Gen Z: 1. Education 2. Housing Both have been increasing at a rate faster than inflation for some time now. While Gen Z may have a greater income, their major expenses are even greater. When all is said and done, they're poorer as a result. Turns out that simply having money is insufficient to solving all financial problems.

Also, healthcare and childcare.

Right now, the ideal political-economic platform will de-emphasize inflation, inequality, etc. all in favor of the five horsemen: housing, education, childcare, eldercare, healthcare.

It doesn't matter how cheap iPads and gasoline are - as long as the five persist, life is an anxiety-inducing gauntlet of financial trials-by-fire for most people.

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

#243

Post by anon84873628 »

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…

The author addresses this with the anecdote about the discussion panelist espousing different views in private vs public. The "social apex" does practice family stability themselves, but de-emphasized it as a cultural norm. Presumably through their power of, say, academic research and media production.

Though the article could have done a better job explaining this. It's like a reverse phenomenon of "do as I say, not as I do".

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

#244

Post by fn-mote »

not_wyoming wrote: post #176
toomuchtodo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> 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.

This does not pass the smell test to me. Small businesses somehow are more inventivized to do this than institutional investors? Because the margins are not sufficient to attract the large businesses?? That needs evidence.

In general, small landlords don't make sense to me as something to ban.

Someone buys a two flat, lives in one and rents the other to help pay for the mortgage. That has classically been ok. You're only objecting to the short term ones?

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

#245

Post by relaxing »

nikanj wrote: post #200
relaxing wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn. This is the first I’m hearing I wasn’t allowed to have a job AND play PS5. I’ll have to rectify this at once. What are the rising standards though? Not beating your wife?

Being emotionally available, participating in chores, providing a comfortable lifestyle while not working all the time, being reasonably well-read and good conversationalist, etc. Have you not noticed how much more we expect from men as partners? NB I’m not saying we shouldn’t expect more from them. I’m saying many are seeing the list of demands, and opting out of even trying

Hm yeah do some chores for sure. Being emotionally available and verbal is an evolution in society, but it doesn’t cost much, assuming you were already willing to spend some time with your partner?

I don’t think being well read is a demand for most of America.

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

#246

Post by codexb »

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…

And yet, there were generations of children who were raised by fathers and had two-parent households.

Access to birth control has increased at the same time that single parent households have increased. It doesn't seem to be having an effect.

I also take issue with your claim that men don't want their own children. Again, we're talking about a change that happened in the 60's and 70's. Is your argument that all men suddenly changed to hate children 50-60 years ago? No. What happened is that divorce laws changed. Social expectations for men and women changed to be more sexually promiscuous. The legal framework that encouraged two-parent households was dismantled.

The author covers the latter topic somewhat, but doesn't delve into the topic of the legal framework that enables one-parent households. There are a multitude of laws surrounding divorce and child support, which originated in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, that encourage single motherhood and make it extremely difficult for working fathers to raise children. For generations, it was possible for men to work and raise children when they were not working. Now, the responsibility of work is often used to deny fathers custody.

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

#247

Post by mecsred »

quacked wrote: post #99

Many have not yet squared up to the fact that society itself is an unprofitable boondoggle that requires massive moral radicalization and willingness to participate in odd, polarizing institutions and practices. We live inside the semi-decayed skeleton of a society built by deeply religious people who believed that society should be built and maintained because that is the moral thing to do . They weren't only motiva…

Not sure why the negative votes on this one, one of the only takes that doesn't make me feel insane so far. I'll reword my understanding of it.

Society requires effort and investment that doesn't produce immediate material benefits. Rationalizing everything down to profit and loss encourages people to see the collected effort as a tragedy of the commons. You need to actually want to be part of a society to start, then if enough people join you, you can actually build one!

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

#248

Post by anonfornoreason »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #173
lelanthran wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I personally prefer another definition of culture war that rises above the ever-changing ground-level arguments. This would be the belief that a person is ultimately responsible for themselves, and any policy or belief that removes that internal locus of control is antithetical to a healthy life and society. I think from here, much of the individual arguments can be classified.

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

#249

Post by bloak »

Tade0 wrote: post #14
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Population explosion = growth of consumption and we have not yet hit the finite limit but we eventually will, perhaps soon

Globally the number of children born peaked in 2013-2017. We'll start seeing it once these people come of age.

That's interesting, and good, I suppose. I knew that the birth rate had peaked but I didn't know that the absolute number of births had peaked.

According to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-births-per-year the highest number of births was 146.05 million in 2012.

(But the total number of births per year fell throughout the 1990s ... mainly because of the birth rate falling in China? ... before rising to that global maximum in 2012.)

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

#250

Post by SoftTalker »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #175
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?

Who is blaming women?
Post reply on HN