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Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

brookings.edu

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Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#91

Post by tornadoboy55 »

dang wrote: post #77
tornadoboy55 wrote: post #56

The problem is that when a 45yr old man dates a 25yr old girl all the women rabble and call him a pig, but when a woman will only date a man who 'can provide' its 'only natural'. You see the same issue crop up in tons of things. They tried to ban 'lad mags' in the U.K, but there was no talk of banning so-called kitchen romances (the shitty paperback stuff middle-adged moms love to buy in the supermarket). Iceland tri…

If you want a decent dialog you need to practice decent dialog yourself. That begins with dropping weaponized generalities like "feminist outrage" and "Women of the West have succeeded in perpetually shaming men" (edit: and, of course, the same the other way around). Every side in divisive arguments lobs such weapons at each other. We all know exactly what those leads to on the internet: more of the same, only worse.…

Aren't those generalities true though? Remember when those female talk show hosts laughed on live TV about a dudes' dick getting cut off by his partner?

Or what about the ESA engineer that helped landing on a comet and all the media could talk about is that he wore a shirt with stylized naked ladies on them. Imagine giving a women researching cancer shit because she wore a shirt with 'If a man ain't got muscle I ain't gonna tussle' in a interview. And you give her shit profusely, for a week, until she is depressed and feels the need to apologize on TV, for wearing a shirt.

Bonus points (although not entirely related): women like Anita Sarkeesian that say games (still predominantly a male pasttime if you discount mobile/casual games) like Mortal Kombat promote violence agains women.. no shit, it's a fighting game, where the core gameplay revolves around beating people up. Glad I mentioned casual game since there's plenty of dating games where the goal for the girl is to date the most successful and popular men.

Or what about Disney movies.. The princesses are seen as portraying impossible beauty and standards, whereas you hear nothing about the men in these movies (jaw like an anvil, super muscular, usually smart and rich).

Combine that with the fact that these days there's still campaigns to get more women to university (university is 40/60 men/women these days), there are special women only grants.

Also, Obama touted the 33% wage gap myth and the 1 in 5 rape/sexual assault statistic that are both completely botched.

See what I'm getting at? Society in the West, and especially America, is crazy tilted towards women, and it needs to stop.

Edit: the parent comment went from +7 to -1 in the span of a few minutes. Seems my preemption about downvote brigading by SJWs/white knights wasn't so silly after all, hmm?

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#92

Post by dandersh »

rrggrr wrote: post #49

"We will have to write off one to two entire generations". This from one industrial client who manages a workforce in the rural and suburban south. Why? The skills gap. Drug abuse, particularly meth. Competition from disability, welfare and black market income sources. I've heard similar from other clients. Their contempt for politicians stems largely from their perceptions that rural/middle America has been left to…

The results of the recent election were driven by inefficiencies in the American electoral system, such as the electoral college, gerrymandered districts that result in Republicans holding more seats than their vote totals would suggest, etc.

The "skills gap" is largely a result of the actions of employers. There is disdain for on the job training for easily learnable, high access jobs such as waitstaff, cashiers, etc. Furthermore they aim to pay as little as possible, while being as demanding as possible. They have stopped using defined weekly/biweekly scheduling and switched to unpredictable schedules that rapidly shift total hours worked, days worked, and even reduced hourly shifts. Oftentimes these jobs do not pay markedly more than one would get struggling to get by via social programs, family/friends, etc.

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#93

Post by J-dawg »

Frondo wrote: post #67
bobbytherobot wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One generation behind us, women still sort of relied on men, and now that the tables have turned, women might need to make a compromise. You mean the system was heavily stacked to make women reliant on men. I won't call that a compromise. The tables haven't turned, the game changed. We have drastically removed many of the forces meant to keep women as dependents of men. If the tables had turned, then men would be s…

Yes, this, a thousand times this. People look at stuff like alimony or whatever and think "oh women just get all the breaks". When really, stuff like that exists because women were expected to forego career for marriage, etc., essentially shackled to a man for life. Women being independent, expecting a guy to have his shit together? I think that's great. I say bring it on. Independent women are far more interesting t…

So what do you do when there simply aren't enough jobs for most men to "have their shit together"?

What are all those men going to do when they have both no stake in the economy, and little or no chance of finding a woman to love them? What percentage of men like this can society handle before some sort of tipping point is reached?

I refer you to this comment from "wingless" from another discussion currently on the front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13795855

I'm always aware of this whenever the usual stuff about the "gender pay gap" gets trotted out by the media. Men and men women are playing entirely different games in the employment market. A woman is working for the money and whatever satisfaction she derives from the job itself. A man is working for his ability to attract a girlfriend, his status in society, his entire sense of "value". It's hardly surprising that men are motivated to choose riskier and higher earning careers.

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#94

Post by pharrington »

tornadoboy55 wrote: post #56

The problem is that when a 45yr old man dates a 25yr old girl all the women rabble and call him a pig, but when a woman will only date a man who 'can provide' its 'only natural'. You see the same issue crop up in tons of things. They tried to ban 'lad mags' in the U.K, but there was no talk of banning so-called kitchen romances (the shitty paperback stuff middle-adged moms love to buy in the supermarket). Iceland tri…

You're conflating a ton of different cultural issues (3rd wave feminism, UK's censorship fetish, etc) and removing them from their temporal context. Showgirls only came out 22 years ago; it was regarded as a bad movie, but it didn't generate much outrage.

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#95

Post by dandersh »

randomdata wrote: post #34
csa wrote: post #18

I think that there is more to this story that just "low education low skill men not working". I personally think that this has more to do with the poor state of psychological health at this socio-economic status. Specifically, the people I know who fall into this category have one or more problems: 1. One (big) problem is that they often have an enabler -- that is, someone who is supporting these folks not working in…

Besides, education has never been more accessible. One can sit down at their home computer – or one freely provided by a local library – and gain skills, across a variety of professions, that can make them highly marketable. These people aren't sitting at home watching TV because they lack education. They lack education for the same reason they are sitting at home, which is a much more complex topic, and not solved b…

Education has never been more accessible, but unfortunately, at least here in the US, the education system does not nurture intellectual curiosity and promotes a submissive style of education where "the student" is dependent and subservient to "the teacher".

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#96

Post by awg789 »

bobbytherobot wrote: post #60
jokoon wrote: post #2

I've started some treatment recently, and for some reason I immediately started dating and looking for mates again. I quickly realized how difficult it is. You can't find women unless you have a job, while women have made outstanding progress in education and the workforce, and for some reason they have a hard time dating people who have a less comfortable situation than themselves. I don't want to ride the whole men…

> One generation behind us, women still sort of relied on men, and now that the tables have turned, women might need to make a compromise. You mean the system was heavily stacked to make women reliant on men. I won't call that a compromise. The tables haven't turned, the game changed. We have drastically removed many of the forces meant to keep women as dependents of men. If the tables had turned, then men would be s…

> We have drastically removed many of the forces meant to keep women as dependents of men.

The mysterious forces were not "meant to keep women as dependents of men". They evolved naturally, women took care of the babies while men hunted/gathered stuff. Nowadays, this division is no longer necessary, since you usually don't need muscles and physical prowess to do a job, or at least it doesn't give you a significant advantage.

> If the tables had turned, then men would be systematically be kept out of jobs, particularly high paying careers. They most certainly are not being kept out of those jobs.

You mean as in having scholarships, internships, and work positions exclusively for women? If you don't believe me, take a look at job offers in SF/NYC.

edit: bad grammar...

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#97

Post by ams6110 »

mbarq wrote: post #79
randomdata wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides, education has never been more accessible. One can sit down at their home computer – or one freely provided by a local library – and gain skills, across a variety of professions, that can make them highly marketable. These people aren't sitting at home watching TV because they lack education. They lack education for the same reason they are sitting at home, which is a much more complex topic, and not solved b…

Not like you can sit at a public library's computer all day. You get timed about an hour a session and can only do three sessions a day and of course, if it there's a wait list, you have to wait. Also, many libraries nowadays have been turned into "after school" centers where there's a whole load of talking on the kids section of the library. There is a "quiet" zone, but people still whisper and really just straight…

State university libraries are generally open to any resident of that state, student or not. Private universities might not be.

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#98

Post by rustynails »

I'm not quite sure of what this article is trying to say.

Is this something limited to males only? Has the trend changed over time? How does it compare with the rest of the western world?

As one example, according to CNN, approximately 26% of women in the US choose not to work, which is much higher than the figure for males quoted in this article.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/13/news/economy/women-work-forc...

The article (Brookings) is a fairly poor article in many ways. It really says nothing when you scratch the surface.

I believe it's unhealthy to keep on focusing on gender like this. You get a lot of speculation and false facts. It drives a wedge between the genders and creates victim mentality.

I feel that we've swapped colour segregation from the 60s with gender segregation today. Just look at education (school web sites are particularly sexist as is code.org) and topics like domestic violence couldn't be more segregated and sexist if you tried.

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#99

Post by dang »

tornadoboy55 wrote: post #91
dang wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want a decent dialog you need to practice decent dialog yourself. That begins with dropping weaponized generalities like "feminist outrage" and "Women of the West have succeeded in perpetually shaming men" (edit: and, of course, the same the other way around). Every side in divisive arguments lobs such weapons at each other. We all know exactly what those leads to on the internet: more of the same, only worse.…

Aren't those generalities true though? Remember when those female talk show hosts laughed on live TV about a dudes' dick getting cut off by his partner? Or what about the ESA engineer that helped landing on a comet and all the media could talk about is that he wore a shirt with stylized naked ladies on them. Imagine giving a women researching cancer shit because she wore a shirt with 'If a man ain't got muscle I ain'…

> Aren't those generalities true though?

They're really not. What's true are the experiences that led you to feel the way you do and the fact that you feel that way. But retrofitting that into a social theory with a grab-bag of data points doesn't yield truth. It's just a form of intellectual armor so you can make aggressive claims without being vulnerable where it hurts.

If you gear up with that armor and then charge into HN threads and throw your weight around, that's not dialog, that's battle. It'll get angry disagreement from those who don't align with you and angry agreement from those who do, but what we won't get is thoughtful discussion. That's a problem for two reasons: (1) it's predictable and therefore boring—the true sin on HN; (2) it produces more of itself and destroys everything else. Flames are a good metaphor for this, so the term flame+war is about perfect for it.

Re: Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)

#100

Post by tomjen3 »

jack9 wrote: post #45
NumberSix wrote: post #15

The explanation is that the government massages unemployment figures to make the economy look better than it is. The government has been doing this for decades, under Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. Unemployment is one of the most widely watched and therefor political numbers; anyone who is in power wants it to look as good as possible. One of the tactics to make the official unemployment rates…

It's shocking, just plain shocking, how short people's memories are, in regards to their own governmental details. The manipulations to deflate the unemployment numbers, I was cognizant of in high school, have never stopped. New techniques come up every administration (seemingly every year). It's like how "the tech industry innovation value" is now added to the UDP arbitrarily. Smoke and mirrors. Google "US employed…

That seems like a low number, but babies tend not to be allowed to work in this country, and more people are going to college, retirees are living longer.

A better number might be NEET - self employeed under the retirement age vs entire population. Thats still not entirely fair, since it misses those who have deliberately chosen not to work, but that number is probably pretty small.

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