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

Education and Men without Work

nationalaffairs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 342 posts

Re: Education and Men without Work

#51

Post by tathougies »

rpiguy wrote: post #32
duxup wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fact that the government benefits the article cited allows the men to stay at home playing video games all day Is that actually the case? The article takes issue with the narrative that supply and demand are involved ... but I don't think this article proves this idea that folks are enjoying government benefits and that results in them not working. The article certainly mentions it, but is pretty short on evide…

Disability is a federal benefit (not state) and according to the article a whopping 2/3 of these men are on at least 1 federal disability benefit. Furthermore, 1/2 of the men take prescription pain medication daily. The government benefits certainly make it easier to not work, but the article does pain to say that correlation is not causation - it is a multi-factor phenomenon. Government benefits may enable the behav…

> What really had my brain going is why is this not the case in the Western Europe?

Can you explain? Western Europe by and large suffers from the same problem. According to Brookings (https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/ccf_201...), while the US has a faster rate of male labor de-participation, the UK, Canada, and France are experiencing similar issues (Figure 2). No idea about the cause though.

Re: Education and Men without Work

#52

Post by downerending »

andonisus wrote: post #19
Merrill wrote: post #14

This story really needs another graph showing "NOT-IN-LABOR FORCE RATES FOR WOMEN AGES 25-54; 1965 TO 2019". See https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/images/hipple-fig6.png It appears that the non-participation rate for women is about twice as high as for men.

What does this have to do with men?

One should always ask "compared to what?". Is this a male-specific phenomenon, or is it actually happening to all? (perhaps with females lagging by a few years)

The answer matters if you're trying to solve the problem.

Re: Education and Men without Work

#53

Post by tathougies »

rpiguy wrote: post #43
Miner49er wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be the difference in pay for low wage jobs. It seems that this is what it comes down to. Many male, high-school dropouts have decided it's a better deal to just coast by on disability and money from friends/family then to work for $10/hour at McDonald's or similar. The way to bring them back into the workforce, IMO, is to offer them a better deal. If low-wage jobs in the U.S. were as good as they are in Eastern…

Another person commented below what I think is brilliant insight. "In America (USA) you ARE your job; it defines you. The American Way is to be hard working and self sufficient. If you can't do that, there are tremendous psychological effects. You can't blame these men for giving up." It is absolutely true that worth and career are highly correlated here in the US. Most of us talk about work even when we aren't at wo…

Meh. The idea that Americans talk only about their job is mainly only true in the upper classes of professionals. Most Americans, the poor and lower middle class, do not talk about their jobs, because talking about being a taxi driver or walmart greeter is not as engaging as talking about being an investment banker, lawyer, or software engineer.

FWIW, the same is true in Europe. Rich people define themselves by the method in which they get rich.

> Most of us talk about work even when we aren't at work

People on hacker news are mostly upper middle class.

Re: Education and Men without Work

#54

Post by wwweston »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #26
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…

I'd rather the losers of society stay in their house, high and playing video games, rather than trying to impress women and provide a family legacy by engaging in gangster behavior to get money. Also, if society is so plentiful that it can handle a certain percentage of people doing nothing but living for pleasure, why not let them? Work is not valuable except for its product, and if its product is not needed, the wo…

I agree with your comment up to a point. At several points in my life I've dedicated it to recreation and felt great about it. :)

I'm not sure that work is only valuable for its product, though, unless you expand the definition of "product" to include changes in the worker. There are certain forms of work we realize this about: we call them exercises or practice. But it applies to a lot of work whose point might be primarily understood as production.

That isn't the only issue at hand, though. The number of unsolved problems or things that could just use dutiful attention in the world isn't so small that we can just write off hundreds of thousands of people from engagement with them.

We seem to have a culture and institutions that increasingly leave a gap between some people and these attentions/duties, though. And that sounds like a problem worth reflecting on.

Re: Education and Men without Work

#55

Post by downerending »

xyzzyz wrote: post #40
CptFribble wrote: post #30

I don't see why this is such a surprise, most people hate working. I thought it was almost a truism that people work for retirement, i.e. the point in their life when they have enough saved to stop working and just relax and travel or fish or whatever. If there's a way to skip 30 years of working at a job you hate and just start now, most people would take that option. This is the basic problem with basic income, alt…

we're going to have to undertake a huge cultural shift and accept a large XX% of the populace just sitting around, vaping and playing video games all day I don't think most people care too much about that. Unlike communist states which forced people to work, even if the job was bullshit, this is a free country, and if someone wants to sit around doing nothing useful all day, they are perfectly welcome to do so. What…

I care a lot more about the social effects than the "taking my money" part. Having lived in areas with very high unemployment rates, there's not much good to say about them.

Re: Education and Men without Work

#56

Post by Supermancho »

Pfhreak wrote: post #24
empath75 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Men generally have the biological need to go do and wander and discover things. I don't know whether it's hormones or what. Debate all you like elsewhere (I'm not trying to debate that point here). What an obnoxious thing to do. You know you're stating a controversial opinion, or you wouldn't have said that. You don't get to set the rules of conversation like that.

Especially without any attempt at citation. "I'm going to say a deliberately inflammatory thing and also it's not up for discussion. But it's also the foundation upon which my argument is built. No critiquing that though, because then my argument might not be sound."

> No critiquing that though, because then my argument might not be sound."

I also make statements and pose arguments about all manner of topics without citation of my foundations. I know and believe what I believe (which are different things), but it is not required that I simultaneously try to educate or argue with base topics that are not relevant to my topic.

I can argue forever with people who dont or cant come to the same place, which is not constructive for me. Apologies, but I have already moved on. You disagree with the precepts and thats fine. Begging for the well tread evidence is noise when it will make no difference to either of us except require you to make up another reason to whine about how wrong the idea is. It is a loss every time I see this same kind of backhanded exchange (ie "You haven't convinced me and I don't agree with the precept") as a form of participation in a discussion.

Re: Education and Men without Work

#57

Post by xyzzyz »

downerending wrote: post #55
xyzzyz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we're going to have to undertake a huge cultural shift and accept a large XX% of the populace just sitting around, vaping and playing video games all day I don't think most people care too much about that. Unlike communist states which forced people to work, even if the job was bullshit, this is a free country, and if someone wants to sit around doing nothing useful all day, they are perfectly welcome to do so. What…

I care a lot more about the social effects than the "taking my money" part. Having lived in areas with very high unemployment rates, there's not much good to say about them.

> Having lived in areas with very high unemployment rates, there's not much good to say about them.

Indeed, and for this precise reason incentivizing unemployment by supporting the vaping and video game habits of the unemployed is exceedingly bad social policy.

Suppose government didn't do redistributive welfare. If you're a typical HN user, you'd probably then end up with tens of thousands of extra dollars a year saved on taxes. Would you then use these tens of thousands of dollars to help your own neighbors enjoy life of vaping and playing video games?

Re: Education and Men without Work

#58

Post by DubiousPusher »

Seenso wrote: post #47
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…

> 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. > Enabled by the preponderance of easily accessible government money, drugs, etc, these men... The benefits we're talking about here are disability benefits, and the intended outcome of those is that some people will be able to stay at home all day. "Fixing" this…

Yeah, what this article fails to address at all is the way people like this got by historically. The truly 100% disabled were put into work houses or left on the street.

Those partly able bodied had a much more diverse array of employment/living arrangements that society accepted. i.e. you could be partly disabled and get yourself a live in job as a domestic or farm hand. This ensured your room and board was covered and that daily you worked with a group of people who understood your needs. But it virtually guaranteed you'd never have a home or family of your own.

The able bodied shirkers who didn't feel like working would do a few siffert thingsb, bum off family, work as cons or professional criminals, or find themselves a sweet job with a group of like minded shirkers or lackies that would cover for them.

This changed a bit with the middle of the 20th centuury needing so many workers but then the U.S. unleashed women into the work force. The vast majority of them were bound to outshine the bottom 11% of men easily.

Re: Education and Men without Work

#59

Post by Pfhreak »

Supermancho wrote: post #56
Pfhreak wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially without any attempt at citation. "I'm going to say a deliberately inflammatory thing and also it's not up for discussion. But it's also the foundation upon which my argument is built. No critiquing that though, because then my argument might not be sound."

> No critiquing that though, because then my argument might not be sound." I also make statements and pose arguments about all manner of topics without citation of my foundations. I know and believe what I believe (which are different things), but it is not required that I simultaneously try to educate or argue with base topics that are not relevant to my topic. I can argue forever with people who dont or cant come t…

Interesting take, I suppose. It's pretty dismissive of people who don't agree with your beliefs as 'whiners' rather than trying to engage in some sort of discussion with you.

I agree that sometimes it's useful to pose arguments and skip the citations, but that usually relies on both parties agreeing that the axioms are at least plausible. I'm willing to entertain discussion on things I don't necessary agree with or don't have data for if I think there's a chance they are true.

I suppose if you are trying to be more evangelical about your ideas rather than inviting discourse on them, then by all means, continue. I just see so many people these days who are closed off to new perspectives who also insist they are having 'rational' discourse about a topic.

Re: Education and Men without Work

#60

Post by Konnstann »

rimliu wrote: post #46
wccrawford wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Men generally have the biological need to go do and wander and discover things." I see no evidence that this is a male thing, versus a female thing, or even that all men feel this. I see plenty of men who just coast through life with no curiosity or drive. They don't explore or discover, they just consume and do what they're told so they can consume some more.

And then there is this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4680619/

Obligatory "IN MICE", but interesting study nonetheless.
Post reply on HN