When Factory Jobs Vanish, Men Become Less Desirable Partners
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
How many in which category? The article treats men who moved away as the same problem as being junkie. Social problems like alcoholism and drugs are talked about as if they would be same as being unemployed. It is odd conflation, it is not the same, not even nearly.
I don't know how all of the 8 billion people on this planet can be expected to meaningfully contribute to something (that can't be done better and more cheaply for everyone by automation) and "earn" their money, without seriously crippling technological advancement (e.g. the advent of self-driving vehicles, or robot lawyers/doctors.)
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/robots_didnt_take_ou...
Also, cook, maid, trainer and paan wale - examples given in my blog post - are not bullshit jobs in any sense. They all directly contribute to the happiness of other human beings with no levels of indirection (unlike "good" jobs such as mine).
Its an old way of thinking, that if anybody else has anything then I don't have it. The new world we're building is called 'post-scarcity' for a reason.
Let's drop it now and take up the issue after we reach post scarcity, when it's so cheap to provide that no one cares about it.
Already clothes and basic food is so cheap as to be almost free here (the store cost is a fad/fashion tax; clothing is made in factories at pennies a garment).
If you take people's wants into account, as opposed to their needs according to abstract principles, we're not yet in a post-scarcity society.
I hope that humans aren't intrinsically consumerist, but I honestly don't know. Does anybody know if research has been don one this topic?
"We even find that relative income is more important than absolute income in explaining individual well-being. More precisely, we find that the income relative to individuals’ own cohort working in the same occupation group and living in the same region matters for happiness" [1]
"To the conspicuous consumer, such a public display of discretionary economic power is a means of either attaining or maintaining a given social status." [2]
1. http://www.uh.edu/~cguven/papers/JonesesCahit_SEP262007.pdf
Yes I've read Veblen so I understand the theory and psychology behind these tactics that advertising exploits (especially luxury advertising), but there are plenty of people, men and women, for whom such shallow status markers have no effect.
"but there are plenty of people, men and women, for whom "
Sorry, I didn't mean to generalize all people. I should have said "a large portion of people".
They are not underemployed, they prefer not to work. Go read the article I linked.
"Prefer not to work" is not a reasonable summary of the article. "Receive no benefit from working" is the real problem.
Not only do low income people in the US lose almost all of their earnings to government benefits phase outs, taking a job incurs expenses. You need transportation to the job, potentially to move to an area with an overall higher cost of living, pay someone to do things you can no longer do yourself because you're busy working, etc.
The result is that for low income people in the US, taking a job can easily cause you to lose money.
Which is the thing a UBI fixes, because there is no phase out other than normal taxes, so you keep >=70% of your earnings and taking a job will actually put more money in your pocket.
A basic job also costs a lot less since it only goes to people who need it.
Meanwhile a basic job has the potential to be very expensive, because unlike a UBI you can't supplement it by working since you're spending your time doing the basic job, so it has to pay a living wage, which is more than the amount you would have to pay as a UBI. And then you will have people who choose the basic job when they would otherwise have chosen an economically productive real job since it's one or the other, which you then have to pay for while at the same time losing the tax revenue you would have had from them doing the real job.
And what happens if too many people choose the basic job so that there are too many unfilled real jobs? With a UBI you can reduce the amount to push more people into the labor force. With a basic job which workers can't supplement with a real job, reducing the amount causes them to starve.
Also, you assume the economic value of a basic job is zero. Is providing child care for working women really worth $0? How about building infrastructure? In fact, this could be a net gain for the treasury if we replace overpaid government union workers with basic jobbers.
If you want to argue that the BJ is somehow more expensive than a BI, could you provide a back of the envelope calculation showing how that would work?
In the US most prisoners are not allowed to work (even for no pay) for this reason.
They will all find work, which they will be able to without a minimum wage.
Suppose it costs $18,000/year to live here and we have a $12,000/year UBI. Finding a job that pays $18,000/year is not possible for everyone but finding a job that pays $6,000/year is, so they don't die.
> Also, you assume the economic value of a basic job is zero. Is providing child care for working women really worth $0? How about building infrastructure?
It isn't that the value is zero, it's that the value is less than what you're paying them. Because otherwise it would just be a regular job.
And it is not likely that the government is going to find highly productive work for everyone rather than ending up with a lot of people digging holes and filling them back in. The whole "central planning doesn't work" thing.
> In fact, this could be a net gain for the treasury if we replace overpaid government union workers with basic jobbers.
If we could actually do that, i.e. find workers to do the same work for less money, then we could/should do it regardless.
> If you want to argue that the BJ is somehow more expensive than a BI, could you provide a back of the envelope calculation showing how that would work?
A UBI is purely redistributive. You aren't actually buying something, you're only moving money around. It only makes sense to talk about "cost" in the sense of net transfers with government for a given person. For the average person it costs nothing -- they pay $X in taxes and receive $X in UBI, net is zero. People at below average income are net receivers, so if you want to talk about what it "costs" it has to be what it costs to people with above average income.
Moreover, a UBI replaces both welfare/basic job and the progressive tax structure, because the effective tax rate as (taxes - UBI)/income is inherently progressive even with a uniform marginal tax rate. With a basic job you still need a progressive tax structure, which from the perspective of our above average income taxpayer means they then have to pay a higher marginal tax rate than lower income people.
And under both the current welfare system and a UBI, the effective rate paid by lower income people is negative. So unless you're willing to put in place a system that is less progressive than the existing one, a basic job would also have to be coupled with transfer payments to lower income working people. To be equally progressive the transfer payments would have to be the same as the UBI net of taxes.
So they end up costing "the same" until you get to the question of what happens to people who can't find a job that pays a living wage.
Then under a UBI, you let people find whatever job they can even if it doesn't pay a living wage, and let the UBI supplement it so they don't starve.
With a basic job, the government invents work for people.
In some kind of hypothetical sense these could cost the same amount as well. You have a job whose actual economic value is $6000, under a UBI you take the job for $6000 and get a $12,000 UBI, under a basic job the government pays you $18,000 to do the job and then has $6000 worth of productive work done which it can sell on the market or whatever.
But the underlying assumption is that the government is as good at finding productive work for you to do as you are. The bureaucracy itself will waste money, it won't optimize for job satisfaction or consider economically productive activity like providing child care for your own children, and it will have the incentive to invent less productive unskilled jobs for everyone rather than matching each person's abilities to the job. Fundamentally it assumes that the government is as efficient at the market at allocating work, which is hopelessly wrong.
On top of that, it makes the relative value of the basic job too high, so that people have no reason to choose a real job that pays $17K/year and produces >=$17K/year in real value over a basic job that pays $18K/year but only produces $4K/year in real value.
So how does a basic job cost more? Because with a UBI there is someone receiving $12K/year from the government while getting paid another $12K/year to do a job that creates $14K/year in economic value, and then pays $4K/year in taxes, so the government is net -$8K/year to this person. Whereas with a basic job the government is paying the same person $18K/year to produce $4K/year in economic value (which they prefer over the $12K/year real job), so the government is net -$14K/year to the same person, the person has $2K/year less in their pocket and there is $10K/year less economic value produced.
It doesn't. There are billions living on $365/year, after adjusting for the cost of living.
It isn't that the value is zero, it's that the value is less than what you're paying them. Because otherwise it would just be a regular job. And it is not likely that the government is going to find highly productive work for everyone rather than ending up with a lot of people digging holes and filling them back in. The whole "central planning doesn't work" thing.
It's good to know that there is no possible use the government can come up with for labor, and that every program that liberals are currently proposing (child care for working women, pre-K, infrastructure spending) is wasteful. I didn't know that.
I'm still waiting for your back of the envelope calculation. Be sure to include the labor disincentive effects of the BI, which was 9% in the Mincome experiment.
https://thecorrespondent.com/541/why-we-should-give-free-mon...
That wouldn't feed an adult for half that long in the US, to say nothing of lawful living quarters or healthcare or transportation.
And even if true, how does it help you? It would allow both the amount of the UBI and the wage of the basic job to be proportionally less, but the necessary amount of the UBI would still be smaller -- at that cost it could be negligible, given that the number of people who can't find a job in the US that would pay $0.18/hour would be nearly if not literally zero.
> It's good to know that there is no possible use the government can come up with for labor, and that every program that liberals are currently proposing (child care for working women, pre-K, infrastructure spending) is wasteful. I didn't know that.
You can't use "building infrastructure" as a basic job because it's already a real job. The benefit of doing the work exceeds the cost of doing the work so it would/should be done regardless of a basic job program and can't be used to create jobs on top of that, unless the additional jobs couldn't otherwise be justified because they provide less public benefit than they cost.
And how is "child care for working women" or "pre-K" better for those people than the equivalent amount of cash which they can use to buy those things or not as they choose? If anything it will make those things worse because a subsidized government option would bankrupt private alternatives that would otherwise provide better service or lower true cost.
> I'm still waiting for your back of the envelope calculation. Be sure to include the labor disincentive effects of the BI, which was 9% in the Mincome experiment.
Was the last paragraph of the previous post not satisfactory?
"Labor disincentive effects" is just a pejorative way of saying that some people may choose to consume their own labor/time rather than selling it to a third party, which is not actually a problem. Your link points out that the "decline" was primarily young mothers and college students. People choosing to spend more time with their children and their studies. How is that bad?
By comparison a basic job directly displaces private labor with less efficient government labor. That's why it costs more -- people will choose a basic job that pays $8 but only produces $2 in value over a private job that pays $6 and produces $7 in value, and now you have higher expenses, less productive value and lower tax revenue.
Choosing to care for your own children over working for someone else doesn't do that because people only make that choice when they get more value from it than the wages they would receive from the other work. They're literally paying themselves (in opportunity cost) to do child care. The ability to do that isn't a cost, it's an efficiency gain.
The only sense in which it's a cost at all is that self-labor is typically untaxed, which is a policy decision that we could make the other way in theory, but we're probably better off not because it implicitly subsidizes self-labor which is generally meritorious (e.g. no transportation costs, no principal-agent problems, no paperwork).
Okay, if you don't take it from the taxes of those who work/invest, where do you take the money to provide for the people who don't?
Not all people who make money work for it. What about those people who earn tons of money collecting economic rents on all the capital and other property they own? By paying economic rents to these people, the rest of us are supporting their lavish lifestyles while many other people struggle to keep a roof over their heads.
I am all in favor of eliminating rents, as distinguished from investment income (which is not a rent).
Eh, tons of the money made on Wall Street is not really investment income but stuff like management fees, so-called 20 and 2 fees, interest on loans, arbitrage from high-frequency trading, etc.
How are you going to eliminate all of that?
As an example of the portion that is a real rent, consider the management fees you pay on 401k investments over and above the management fees paid on equivalent public symbols. (E.g., my last 401k's S&P index fund cost 30 or 40 bps more than SPY.) I favor eliminating this rent by banning 401k's.
Is that what you had in mind?
That ability to mortgage land should be shared among society if anything is to get better. The question is how the 'state' handles any foreclosure in a politically acceptable way when home owners would use their voting power to cajole their way out of giving anything up when they get greedy and over extend. Right now the state offloads this to the banks as the bad guy debt collectors, giving them the benefits of foreclosed assets.
I love how all these revolutionary fantasies always start with the same concept "these greedy capitalist pigs do nothing and get all the money!", as if everything was given to them to just profit from; and even if you want to play the inheritance card, as if their ancestors got the same benefit.
What's with the "bullshit jobs" thesis I see around HN these days? How is working as a cook for a software engineer less bullshit than writing software? At the end of the day the cook can point to something he has done, right?
What exactly qualifies a job as "bullshit?"
A "bullshit" job is one created only for the purpose of creating a job. That is, its unnecessary or redundant and only exists because we've decided that people need jobs and we don't have enough "necessary" or "socially contributing" jobs.
There are also lots of factory, agriculture, logistics, manual labour jobs that I believe will soon (next 10 to 20 years) be replaced by automation, be it robotics, self-driving vehicles or software. It also seems to me that the jobs that are in my opinion most likely to be automated are the ones that currently employ the largest amount of people.
Those aren't necessarily very good goals, but they're more complicated and much harder to do away with than just lust for money.
and "making money" are all pretty much man-made measures of social success and self-worth, which would be meaningless in a post-scarcity society.
I mean, in some cultures, "winning" included having a large number of wives and slaves. In today's world, someone with such achievements would be out of place and seen as archaic.
What does it mean to "get to the front of the pack" when everybody can have [figuratively] everything and nobody needs to work?
Instead, success would (hopefully) be defined by what you can create and discover, or how many people you can entertain.
It's actually at the very end just a proxy for mating value, like this article clearly explores.
That has actually already happened. Current marketing focuses strongly on enjoying non-expensive but creative lifestyle, instead of showing off wealth.
Theres far too many people who will look at someone without a job and say "work harder, you moocher", and then argue using first order logic without any facts or context to say that all safety nets should be taken away to ensure that people dont become sloth like.
Add to that, the manipulation of the media, and manipulation by the media and you have the perfect constraints to ensure that people there will never be a post scarcity society.
The later is in a way already happening just to keep unemployed people occupied:
Have a look at Potemkin economy:
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/frances-potemkin-econo...
> Candelia is one of a number of so-called “Potemkin” companies operating in France.
> Everything about these entities is imaginary from the customers, to the supply chain, to the banks, to the “wages” employees receive and while the idea used to be that the creation of a “parallel economic universe” would help to train the jobless and prepare them for real employment sometime in the future, these “occupations” are now serving simply as way for the out-of-work to suspend reality for eight hours a day
Society fears a large unoccupied class. Whether that fear is warranted or not is a different thing.
The exception might be repetitive tasks that are already being automated, like drug testing.
I have no idea how all these trends are going to play out, at least during the transient regime we are currently experiencing.
It's an interesting story, I had not heard of "practice firms" as a form of training for the unemployed. They don't really say how long people stay in the training program, I think one quoted person had been there for four months, which seems like a long time. "The success rate of the training centers is high. About 60 to 70 percent of those who go through France’s practice firms find jobs, often administrative positions, Mr. Troton said.
But in a reflection of the shifting nature of the European workplace, most are low-paying and last for short stints, sometimes just three to six months."
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/business/international/in...
I read the sidebar and it's a bit too shady but the content in this article is solid.
Thank you for posting the NYT link.
"Idle hands are the Devil's workshop." Human beings do not naturally drift towards societally beneficial behaviour when lacking productive activities to engage in.
I was almost having a mental countdown until this exact expression popped up.
What you wrote is true, but that unemployed population didn't have any money or their needs met.
What would happen if living was really easy and work either unneeded or just downright impossible to get?
This puritanical belief makes the idea of Basic Income politically un-doable through most of the world, along with the belief that a living is something that must be earned through productive work.
That's one way to ignore human nature as a force driving human society.
> Basic Income
That's another.
It's just a framing problem.
For example, the Earned Income Tax Credit in the US is a small de facto UBI. If you eliminated all US welfare programs and used all the money to increase the amount of the EITC you will have effectively solved the problem.
In theory the EITC requires you to earn money, but if you eliminated the loss of welfare benefits that currently occurs if you report earning any amount of money, suddenly you'll discover that everybody everywhere has "income" from doing odd jobs for their friends and so on, most of which they've been doing the whole time in exchange for in-kind services but (illegally!) not reporting it as income because reporting it previously caused a net loss rather than a net gain.
The situation in South Africa is far more nuanced. Due to a sham government and a badly fractured education system, the immigrants to South Africa are generally more skilled and far more employable than many locals. The immigrants also open shops and are more entrepreneurial. There might be some crime from foreigners, but surely we don't need to go making blanket statements like this. This is the kind of thing said by mob leaders during buildup to xenophobic attacks, which surely you know actually take place in South Africa.
Statements by
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
Which, like essentially all Disney works, was based on existing folklore.
At least the American culture is well aware of Fantasia and the brooms with buckets scene. Whatever earlier work? Only someone with specialist knowledge could tell you which work it had been derived from.
Particularly for males.
Single mothers are a different thing altogether and if they can take care of their children without working and alone then they are praised.
When comparing two things, it's useful to understand what is the comparison being made. Of course these things aren't the same in general sense of things - but as far as making a man "unmarriable" (as in statistically desired by either gender for a long-term relationship and partnership), they have a pretty similar effect, don't they?
Domestic violence is something that is even more different - living with such person is spectacularly bad idea and directly dangerous.
He always had a temper - he gave us lots of spankings. By some measures, maybe he was abusive, but he never hit us or left bruises with his belt. He just tending to give out those "whooping" at the drop of a hat if he'd had too much to drink.
Then he lost his job when the major job provider in town closed. He kept trying to find a new one, but it was never a good one. For someone that had spent 15 years making good money at something he was apparently pretty good at, working menial low-paying jobs was devastating to him.
His alcoholism got worse, and pretty soon he wasn't able to hold down even the menial jobs. Needless to say, my parents marriage fell apart.
Not necessarily. A woman might be better off holding out for someone with a job. Especially when she isn't already pregnant.
Anyone who has seen the upper echelons of society knows how many drugs are used up there too - and therefore knows that they are not first tier-causes (of being on the bottom) in every use case.
Drug use is common among wealthy kids because they're so well protected from consequences. All children like to experiment, and have fun. So why not?
I knew a guy who burned through his inheritance, and then became a heroin smuggler. He used his friends as unwitting drug mules, and kept living the high life on the profits. But then one of them got busted, and sold him out. Oops.
Me, I'm amused by the title of George Lakof's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind . But actually, it turns out that "Women are not dangerous things", according to Plaster and Polinsky (2007).[0]
And it was an interesting read (basically about categories/measure words/collective nouns, "families" of meaning or "radial" categories, and rejection of the good old Aristotelian notion of definition as membership in a class together with some more specific boolean predicate, e.g. "a bachelor is a man that is not married").
Anyways, great title, great book. Interesting paper you posted, though I don't recall whether Lakoff actually made the case that Dyirbal speakers saw women as dangerous. The paper suggests that "there is no synchronic conceptual association among all of the items in a given gender class; in particular, the smaller subsets within a class do not need to be radially related to the semantic core. The overall class membership is motivated only diachronically, and even then not necessarily on semantic grounds." - would Lakoff disagree?
For what it's worth, I read it together with Illuminatus! by Shea and Wilson and Lessing's Canopus in Argos series, and found the mix immensely transformational :)
Birds fly and planes fly.
I'd challenge TFA's "men less desirable" summary, however. Some men are less desirable, but that would seem to make others that much more desirable.
I was thinking the same thing. Hooray for being marriage material.
Not familiar with that acronym.
Care to elucidate?
Where were their toxic Islam and toxic homophobia articles following the Orlando shooting? They like to rant about toxic masculinity only after shootings done by white males[2]. Yet not a peep about it when it's Cho Seung Huis or Omar Mateens doing the shootings.
[1] http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/02/salon-shouldnt-have-unp...
[2] http://www.salon.com/2013/11/01/why_is_always_a_white_guy_th...
"Now, as Hoffner and Salon surely know, things live forever on the internet, so you can still read the original Nickerson article here. And doing so makes it clear that Salon took a silly, overly risk-averse approach here, likely caving to a chorus of voices who willfully misunderstood the article. That’s unfortunate, since this was a brave and important article to publish — one the site should be proud of rather than try, futilely, to toss down the memory-hole."
Later:
"No reasonable reader could construe this as pro-pedophilia. Nickerson is explicitly saying his condition has hampered his life immensely and that he is simply hoping to scratch out a decent existence without hurting anybody. That’s the entire point of the article — nowhere does he defend sexual contact between adults and minors. Why, then, was his article deleted? It sounds like Salon won’t ever provide an explanation."
After reading your comment, you're the only one that's coming off like a propagandist.
"Fewer men were working in manufacturing, which tended to mean their wages were lower than they had been when manufacturing had more of a presence in their area. And their wages were not significantly higher than women’s wages, which they had been during the heyday of manufacturing. (Fewer women worked in manufacturing in the first place, so they were less affected by the shocks.)
"This made the men less appealing to the women, the authors suggest—so there were fewer marriages. They find that trade shocks reduced the share of young women who were married, and reduced the number of births per woman."
In terms of marriage candidates, those are the same problem (except those who had moved elsewhere).
In the sci-fi movie Advantageous, a future society with a lot more automation, has high unemployment rates. Recruitment (which in the movie is mostly done by AI) eventually evolves to a consensus whereby most jobs are assigned to men because otherwise society would become a lot more dangerous to everyone.
EDIT: References:
[1] 74% of single mothers voting Democrat
[2] one quarter voting Republican
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/single-mothers-give-... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/opinion/sunday/single-moth...
If you're married to the state, then you vote for more of the state. It's one of the many examples where liberty has been eroded in recent decades, but few talk about it because it's a sensitive topic.
This is the first I'm hearing of this. I know the right is against "leeches," but I've yet to see them single out single mothers.
Unless you're referring to undertones in their (Republicans') way of conduct. If so, then I wouldn't expect single mothers to be able to recognize the subtlety.
That kind of language, in various forms, has been a dogwhistle of the right since Reagan started saying it at campaign rallies.
Though, I am surprised that the term is hovering around 25%.
Also claiming that tax reduction is a form of welfare if very disingenuous since basically that would mean the State would be entitled to take all of your profit by default... meaning any amount of profit allowed would be welfare.
And if you'll remember the 1990s, the entire plan to cut welfare benefits was premised on the Earned Income Tax Credit taking up the slack. Which actually worked in some ways though, if anything, it makes it easier for single mothers to provide for a family by working a low wage job. Which has distorted the "marriage market" though in different ways from the welfare benefit.
It doesn't really matter how much welfare costs (obviously it should kept under control like military, health and education) and that's why I didn't mention that aspect. All I'm concerned about is the state becoming so involved in an individual's life, that it nannies them like a parent.
Huh? Marriage itself is a legal construct by the state, no different than a corporation. Is a corporation a "basic building block for society" too? Should it be? What makes you think marriage is such a great thing that society should be dependent upon it? Statistics show that it's a massive gamble, and you're more likely to lose with it than you are to benefit. On top of that, the risks are enormous: child support, alimony, and in many cases, bankruptcy.
>All I'm concerned about is the state becoming so involved in an individual's life, that it nannies them like a parent.
That's funny, coming from someone who obviously supports marriage, which is absolutely an example of the state nannying people and becoming involved in an individual's life. Try going through a contested divorce and tell me the state wasn't involved.
The simple fact is that your "standard familes" are a complete and utter failure. Society needs an all-new paradigm, because clinging to this archaic institution clearly isn't working.
The only people who actually seem to think that welfare causes these problems, are the ones who don't think we should be paying welfare. People who are on welfare or know those on that kind of assistance know better.
This doesn't mean that women in these situations wouldn't tend to gravitate toward the most power male with the largest resources in the pack but in most case it's the other way around.
I'm not making a value judgment or saying we should want this disparity, just pointing out that throughout our history, it's mostly been this way.
Why won't the men compete for the jobs the women are getting?
Alternatively, the men could stay home and take care of the kids while the women work at the jobs they have, providing the stable two-parent household.
It seems like a large portion of the problem is tied up in men's idea of what constitutes a "manly" role. I don't mean to trivialize the difficulty of changing one's perspective, but changing diapers has to be a better option than dying from an Oxycontin overdose doesn't it?
The reality on the ground is that many women consider extended unemployment a good-enough reason to end a marriage.
A cynical but not unrealistic view is that humans tend to display loyalty to performed roles in relationships, not to individuals.
If one individual stops performing their assigned role, the relationship ends.
I seem to be an appallingly bad feminist. For me, it's about equal social and political rights, but it turns out it's really all about a whole lot of crazy stuff I don't understand. It's odd that the people who most loudly understand what feminism really is seem to be those opposed to it, and people who simply label themselves feminists (such as myself) end up mystified by where all this extra junk comes from. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps people aren't conflating advocation of equal social and political rights with a whole lot of other things, but it's generally not worth the conversation.
(what I see as) the mainstream feminist position is that getting rid of traditional gender roles is essential to achieve equal social rights. It's not really equal if one can legally do a thing but everyone else will think it's innappropriate.
I'm not saying this is because those guys are dumb or lazy or malicious; I have trouble with it and don't consider myself those things. My girlfriend and I try to split stuff up evenly (we both have jobs and neither of us likes housework, so we try to be fair), but I still find it hard to remember to do certain things that she has been doing for years (e.g. remembering to clean the toilet bowl), or I will not prioritize certain other things that she makes sure to do promptly (e.g. I will wait longer to do laundry). I am trying to pull my weight, but I can definitely tell that I am catching up to her in housework productivity. And, from most anecdotes I hear, this is a very common (though obviously not universal) phenomenon.
This is not to say that there are not other things wrapped up in this (people are attracted to roles, and I am sure plenty of women in traditional subcultures find jobless men just plain unattractive regardless of their value in other dimensions). But I can definitely see why someone who is already going to have to raise and provide for a kid would be reluctant to bring another person into a lifelong relationship when that other person (judging from widespread anecdotal evidence) will very likely not be much help at home while also not contributing a paycheck.
Results vary according to your & your partners levels of OCD, however...
How do we know that the solution is "men should do more housework" rather than "women should do less"? Is it really a disaster if the toilet bowl gets cleaned half as often?
That mentality is one of the reasons we need feminism. Women will only become increasingly equal to men as time goes on. If we blindly cling to antiquated, unrealistic notions of what constitutes an acceptable partner, we impede progress.
It's statistics and sociology.
The last time I saw data on this, that was one of the most common causes.
Sort of makes me glad that I met my fiancee while I was very poor, hopefully I set the bar rather low.
I suspect that there are deeper compatibility issues at play and major events like infidelity or job loss just act as catalysts for divorce.
Humans are complicated. They have a lot of different needs that all have complex relationships with one another. Everyone experiences theses needs to varying degrees. If the needs that aren't adequately satisfied aren't outweighed by those that are, then it's reasonable for a person to start looking elsewhere to satisfy those needs.
If my wife became a huge economic burden and wasn't contributing anything else to the relationship, then after a year or two I'd definitely be thinking I could do better.
You could begin to support such an explanation by pointing out that less women work and so less women are able to lose jobs and so less men divorce them because of it. But that only explains half of the divorce inequalities described by GP. Do men really cheat significantly less than women?
So we arrive at a point where either it's more socially acceptable for women to divorce men because of job loss than the reverse (GP correct), or it's more socially acceptable for women to cheat than men (GP incorrect).
Conversely, either it's more socially acceptable for men to divorce women for cheating than the reverse (GP correct), or it's more socially acceptable for women to be unemployed than men (GP incorrect).
Interesting!
Of course, this is all based on anecdote. Also maybe I oopsed and strawmanned inadvertently.
As for how I got out of it. I got someone to give me my first job in IT. I was a cook prior to that. I'm not wealthy but I pretty much have everything I need.
Thank you.
Although, as you say, that's still out of the husband's control.
Very difficult to change in any meaningful way.
You'll have outliers, but statistically it will be insignificant.
+ well hot, smart, and having lived interesting lives by 35. That describes all 3 of them.
When there is no more work, in the house or out, all that is left is room for enlightenment or self-destruction.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
I am a feminist man and I would not be keen to form a lasting relationship with an unemployed woman unless she was already wealthy.
Edit, forgot to include the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13795397
Is Wikipedia good enough?
This "women want a higher earner" picture is a bit crude, and applying it to this situation ignores that men are often ass holes who aren't interested in a genuine partnership, and that category has some overlap with the chronically out of work.
Source?
>If one individual stops performing their assigned role, the relationship ends.
This is a very succinct way to describe reality.
Thank you for stating it so clearly.
It's very much both sex's perspective of role. Clichéd it may be, but there's a truth behind women preferring men with money, power or strength, or a combination of all.
Okay well how exactly "common" is it?
> but there's a truth behind women preferring men with money, power or strength, or a combination of all.
And men prefer attractive women...so what?
The majority of these men are uneducated and unemployed. The article states many are HIGH SCHOOL drop outs.
I'm a male. and I can tell you right now that I probably would not marry a female high school drop out.
The problem to me is not the women. it's that boys are being left behind in school and more work needs to be done to educate and re-purpose males from unskilled drones to skilled or white collar workers.
Frankly, I would not want such father for my children.
While men still puts women's beauty as top (only?) priority.
The article said it is women making the decision.
Today, the burden of household work has been cut to 1/10th of what it used to be, jobs are primarily intellectual, and education is paramount. The model to compare against is not the factory worker who was poor in the 1900s, and somehow due to a quirk of history became middle class in the 1950s.
We ought to compare against the gentleman class---those who in the 1900s had maids, butlers, personal transportation, and intellectual jobs akin to what we do today: management, clerking, accountancy, licensed professions, etc.
In those cases, people married sideways---intellectual women marrying men then helping to run the estate, daughters of merchants marrying other merchants and participating in the businesses, 'professional' socialites giving the entire clan a leg up by creating situations where networking was possible.
This is the position we have inherited, and if we must take lessons from the past--we should take lessons from the right class.
There's a lot more sideways than there is 'down'. Technically its pretty hard to even get to know people of a lower class than you; rarely do you mingle.
A) Be a man, don't compete for women's jobs, drink beer instead of going to work, likely don't have a girlfriend or get laid because you don't have your finances in order...
B) Be less of a man, compete for women's jobs, drink less beer and more wine at dinner parties, bite your tongue about the manliness and receive willing girlfriends and sexual partners...
Anyone with any sense will laugh at this above false choice implicitly being promoted.
For all the attention that is given to the lack of women in CS and Engineering the story in aggregate for all majors is that women outnumber men at colleges. It's been that way since 2000 and the trend has continued in the past 17 years. Its to the point where women outnumber men two to one at some large schools like UNC which are, for example, 60% female. [1]
It's a real mess everywhere.
Anecdotally, I know at least two families in my neighborhood, in which the father stays home with the kids. One of the moms is a physician, and the other is a business executive.
or in women's idea of what constitutes a "manly" role.
Because different people are suited to different jobs. Why didn't (and don't) women generally compete for manufacturing jobs? Because being a creative designer or HR professional or pre-school teacher or dental hygienist is something much preferred for certain types of people. Just look at the numbers [1].
Men not only don't want to do certain types of jobs, but in many cases can't - they're not well-suited for them. So even if/when they compete, they'll lose to less experienced women just entering the workforce. And vise-versa for other types of jobs with flipped genders. There are gender differences, plain and simple. You can argue why they exist, but for this discussion it's not as relevant at this point.
I would like to note that the next "industrial wave" could affect women pretty hard as well: artificial intelligence. Recruiting and HR software, health-care robotics technologies, therapist chatbots, etc, could upend the female-dominated jobs listed in [1].
> Alternatively, the men could stay home and take care of the kids while the women work at the jobs they have, providing the stable two-parent household.
Heh, I guess you haven't read many women's online dating profiles for what is acceptable in a mate and what isn't. You generally have to be higher up on the ladder (education, wealth, status, etc) to attract a woman for mating in the first place. How this manifests in data: 80% of guys are "below average"! [2]
But who needs data, ask your grandfather if he could have "stayed home and taken care of the kids while the woman works" and he'd laugh at you and tell you to stop being a sissy. They may not have been able to explain it, but older generations have typically understood more about human nature than we give them credit for.
[1] https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.ht...
[2] https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0...
> This group includes Olivia Alfano, a 29-year-old single mother living in Evansville, Indiana, where she works as a waitress at Red Lobster. The money is pretty good, she told me: She drives a BMW and was able to buy a house last year.
Am I the only one who is surprised by that? (I don't live in the US)
Edit: incoherence
"The American federal government requires a wage of at least $2.13 per hour be paid to employees that receive at least $30 per month in tips. If wages and tips do not equal the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour during any pay period, the employer is required to increase cash wages to compensate. As of May 2012, the average hourly wage – including tips – for a restaurant employee in the United States that received tip income was $11.82."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage_in_the_United_St...
In other words, the minimum wage does apply, and even with tips the employer must pay at least some money.
Everyone I know who's ever worked for tips has tended to make quite a lot, considering.
I bet she has a gigantic pile of debt and gets a lot of help from state. And alimony.
The problem with a story like the quoted is that it presents the superficial elements of someone's lifestyle without giving any actual insight into the fundamentals (i.e., budget) on which the lifestyle is based.
So, I guess stuff like this might seem surprising to those unfamiliar with US culture. But my point is it may only seem surprising if the assumption is the person actually paid for those things. It's highly unlikely that a house, car, and kids are in the clear on a part-time waitress salary, and more likely that the person is up to her eyeballs in debt and neglected to mention it.
IOW, it matters less if you're living with less than a month's worth of savings, so long as you can afford the payments and have a history of making payments; so here's a BMW.
For the "nothing strange at all" argument: Median home value in Evansville Indiana is $105700 [1] - even with a bog-standard 30 year mortgage at 4% with no down payment that's a monthly payment of only $505. A relatively small down payment ($20K via help from parents), and/or some fancy (unwise) 5/1 ARM financing could probably get you below $400/month mortgage payment. Depending on age and model and condition, a used BMW can be had for under $3K.
If she owns an above-average home and a new/expensive BMW, then I would say there are important details being left out.
I worked at an similar restaurant back in the 2000s and cleared $25k a year working part time, mostly weekends. I'm an unattractive man. The attractive women I worked with would clear double what I made each shift.
Evansville is a cheap place to live, relative to the rest of the US. It's doable to raise a family on that salary with help from family for child care.
> “You don’t want to marry a man who is in all likelihood not economically viable, because it’s not a free lunch,” Autor said.
"Not economically viable" is the exact phrase used in the movie "Falling Down" by the man who was denied a loan by a bank and was arrested while the Michael Douglas character looks on sympathetically. His wife ditched him, too.
Yes, old school partnerships are dying, but that doesn't make males more disposable.
If anything,it gives men and women more options and opens up our society to fine tuning. (effects of large scale single momhood/dadhood, competetive job markets and novel family and supporting social structures) the old was nice, but if a single unit can function and achieve what a complex unit used to, wed all benefit. Supposing the experiment doesn't end in failure and twist society. Though even if it does, we'll self correct. After all, nature still rules us.
It's a culture of work hard, fuck-young and marry-old(er) for partnership for the coming future, we'll see where that takes us.
So what if the coal mines close down?
We dont live in aculture where needs stop evolving. Where there's a need, there's industry of some sort.
Humans brains adapt, especially generationally.
I dont see Germany suffering any detrimental consequences of the modern workplace (where I am right now) and infact it's flourishing.
That Said, the education system and the industrial system works close together here, and it's a better system than most. So countries need to pitch in to the effort if educating it's populace for modern day jobs
Then people need to get a very good education to get one of the new jobs. Because the old jobs are dying out, those you could get into with little education.
The problem for men? That boys fare far worse in school than girls. This gets rarely addressed, e.g. the vast difference in reading comprehension.
Boys then should just adapt? Well, whenever women seem to have a disadvantage (the whole MINT-discussion), society is supposed to fix it. Whenever men have problems, they remain their individual problems, and it's definitely their fault. No systemic forces here to be seen, move along everybody.
A last comment about Germany: The lack of jobs for unskilled workers is definitely a huge problem. It makes it incredibly difficult to integrate everybody with a, shall we say, sub-par education. Almost half of the Turkish hailing migrants in Berlin are unemployed. 75 % of them did not graduate from secondary school.
Wow, this is staggering. Do you remember where you saw those figures? (I don't doubt them, I just want to quote them in other discussions.)
The numbers I used are from this article: https://www.taz.de/!5176721/
> 75 Prozent der Migranten türkischer Herkunft haben keinen Schulabschluss, fast jeder zweite ist arbeitslos.
> 75 % of migrants of Turkish descent do not graduate from school, almost every second is unemployed.
It's from 2008. Upon reflection I would expect that the situation is not as dire anymore, due to Germany's positive economic development.
In any case, the trend in Germany hints towards a dire situation in any case (2009): http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/immigration-surv...
> Some 30 percent of Turkish immigrants and their children don't have a school leaving certificate, and only 14 percent do their Abitur, as the degree from Germany's top-level high schools is called -- that's half the average of the German population.
This article from 2016 references a report from the Federal Statistical Office of Germany. It states that over 40 % of the Turkish immigrants and their children only achieve a very basic school leaving certificate ("Hauptschulabschluss"). With this type of certificate, it is difficult in Germany to even get into a vocational school. Also, over 1/3 of the Turkish immigrants are poor: They earn less that 60 % of the mean income.
https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article155700942/Warum-so-vie...
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Publikationen/Datenreport/Datenre...
Out of the 3 million Turkish migrants in Germany, 275,000 have received unemployment benefits in 2015. Only people actively seeking employment are eligible for those benefits. I could not find the absolute number for Germany for this population. But for the whole of Germany, we have 39 million workers, out of a population of over 80 million. The Turkish migrants tend to be younger, so a larger percentage does not belong to the workforce yet.
I would therefore assume that the unemployment rate is around 20 % for Turkish migrants in Germany, and considerably higher in Berlin, due to the "special" economic status of Berlin as a whole. The article below is from 2001 and has them at 42 %:
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/tuerken-in-berlin-beruf-ar...
Summing up, while the specific numbers should be subject to scrutiny, the trend remains abysmal.
What does MINT refer to?
there's a distinct need to revise all schooling before it's too late, tbfh. the men of old were very well educated, those who could get an education. but it was a harsh education, so the world today isn't willing to deal with it.
if boys sucked so much at reading and writing, we wouldn't have had all those male authors or male scientists. the system's whacked now, and it'll crash and crumble before it's fixed, especially in germany with their switch to MBAs, worsening school systems, and neglect of young boys (have nothing against trying to push women forward, just don't forget the boys)
Have you ever talked to people who live in the projects? They have little hope. There is no "industry of some sort".
I view these two minorities as a result of governmental neglect,corruption or/and policy.
Can you argue about how the topic at hand affects them? Maybe I don't follow your argument well enough.
If we assume that means the next generation adapts, what's the current one to do with its remaining 40-60 years, except for voting for Trump?
You seem to have a lot of faith in education systems in a capitalist environment. My own observations is that universities are just enrolling students in courses regardless of there being jobs available in those fields or not - as long as they are making a profit. I doubt governments can move fast enough to develop proper education systems to educate the population for modern day jobs.
The majority of the population opting out of traditional higher-ed would be a wholesale benefit to the current state of affairs, imo, as it would allow something more suitable to appear.
systems such as the one switzerland has (tight coupling of industry and education) are not bad at all, but it requires an informed public, and more imprtantly, informed lateral-thinking politicians.
the coming crises will test us, and i believe we'll come out stronger, albeit with a few bruises and some lasting scars.
"Generationally" is the key word in your comment.
what do you suggest we do about it? i have a few plans after im done with my studies which include education centers, but ill need to delve deeper into the issue first, something my studies currently don't allow.
And adaptation is a real challenge, because it may mean learning completely new technical skills as well as completely new social and political skills as well as being unusually creative and inventive - and most men have to attempt this after a very poor education and little or no mentoring or modelling of the possibilities.
In the past, men could get by fairly passively because the job-market was full of ready-made slots for them. They could turn up and fill a slot and money would start flowing.
Now the slots have to be invented before they can be filled. That immediately disenfranchises the 90% or so of the population who aren't particularly creative or entrepreneurial.
And even if a slot is invented, the odds of lasting success aren't great. Most projects fail, and failure isn't tolerated well.
So we've gone from an open job market with limited selection pressure and relatively easy rewards to a very closed and challenging job market which only works for maybe 5% of the male population - specifically unusually intelligent, creative/inventive, socially connected and/or wealthy, or just plain sociopathic men.
It's a huge, huge change, and I don't think we've even started to see the effects.
If we eliminate STEM fields from the set of options, the prospects for young men to earn as past generations seems to be drastically reduced.
It's not the absence of a job that'll Choke us, it's the pricing of things with ill adapted wages. I'm in IT, but still,I can see trouble down the road thst I'm trying to tackle now.
We do live in interesting times.
Well that's the problem, isn't it? The self-correction is for nature to destroy us so that something else can take our place.
It's completely possible for births to be below the population replacement rate until the people die out. It already is in first world countries save for immigration, and that can't save you if the third world industrializes and automates to the point they're in the same situation.
If we don't want that to happen we may have to start finding ways to enable people to marry and have more children.
Neither unemployment nor environmental destruction is incompatible with population decline.
The unemployment rate is independent of the population size, because fewer people means less demand which means proportionally fewer jobs.
And unchecked evil corporations can perfectly well automate environmental destruction and carry it out with a minimum number of people.
A culture and society which devalues having children and raising them properly, even as a side effect of a nobler purpose, is one that will die out and be replaced with another.
I guess men who just want to have sex might benefit, because they can just sleep with women and then leave, and society takes care of the single moms. Likewise, women can have more sex with varying partners.
The downside is not having a family or having a stressful family life (as a single mom).
And for the absent dads, the state will try to get the money back from them, so their outlook isn't pretty. They'll bend up being poor and lonely.
[0]: http://www.fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-consequen...
Some statistics:
> Children living in female headed families with no spouse present had a poverty rate of 47.6 percent, over 4 times the rate in married-couple families.
> The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states, “Fatherless children are at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse.”
> Children of single-parent homes are more than twice as likely to commit suicide.
> Children age 10 to 17 living with two biological or adoptive parents were significantly less likely to experience sexual assault, child maltreatment, other types of major violence, and non-victimization type of adversity, and were less likely to witness violence in their families compared to peers living in single-parent families and stepfamilies.
The "gender roles" crowd is deeply dogmatic and misguided, and it's having incredible consequences.
Single-parent families, step-families all require better parenting, management, and communication skills, since they're more complex, and these parents aren't more skilled than the average, with predictable consequences.
Check the statistics on "fatherless" households, children of single mothers perform worse on every single metric. Worse academically, commit more crime (and much more rape), more runaways, more addictions, the list goes on.
> Yes, old school partnerships are dying, but that doesn't make males more disposable.
Implies that "old school partnerships" are dying, but being replaced by something new. That's not the case. It's not a case of old-thing-evolving-into-a-new-thing. It isn't being replaced by anything, just being destroyed. I'll bet you single mothers are much less happy than married women, especially in their 50s and 60s, not to mention the increased likelihood of being abused by dates, strings of failed relationships, increased stress, and loneliness.
that said, ill add that single parents of the past are often a result of a broken house hold. the single parents of the future will do so by choice, this will give rise to interesting dynamics, i think.
it isn;t replaced by anything right now, but crises leads to break through, we might/(most likely will?) deal with is, as nature would have us, by either coming up with a new paradigm, or breaking then reverting to (a better?) version of the old.
maybe im an optimist, but ive seen so much shit, and the world is knee deep in shit these days that i need to believe that we'll make it.
to deal with this issue i personally would suggest community (kibutz style?) child care, which ironically echoes a communist tint, to deal with time-not-spent with children. top that with corporate/workplace restructuring (ala sweden with mandatory father-time as well as mandatory mom-time off for birth) and we'd be on our way.
one issue i do see is old age and loneliness. i see so many lonely old people here in europe. for now, females are growing older and finding it more difficult to find a partner after choosing not to marry. the men are reluctant to take an older woman as a partner, and while i understand hypergamy, im not sure i understand why the older men are not taking mid-30-smth women as partners.
also, i dont understand why can't couples marry and support each other's careers and just have kids later. is it so unnatural? it might boil down to the socioeconomics of hypergamy, which is a thought that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, to think that our females are "programmed" as such is no comforting notion.
EDIT: To clarify, I do NOT condone violence toward non-traditional arrangements. Sorry if I came off that way.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21...
Speculating about a scary future dystopia works less well when we already live in that world and it's not so bad.
There's a whole system of perverse incentives and interacting welfare programs that produce income cliffs where it is suboptimal to work more and have greater income, because that small increase in wages results in a much larger loss of services.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21...
That said, infedility is also a corner stone of our civilisation.
K-selection is civilization. r-selection is feralization. One of the goals of religion was to tame r-selected behaviors and to encourage K-selected behaviors.
Moreover most tribal societies in Western/Central Europe up until the 7th century -- in Scandinavia until the 10th century -- were polygamous. Some of these societies were highly successful. The Vikings for example weren't just barbarous brutes and pirates, but also tradesmen and farmers with highly sophisticated technologies like metallurgy, coinage and shipbuilding.
So no, I don't think that "Civilization is built on monogamy". If anything, monogamy as a family model is built on the roman church, and it's the heritage of the roman church our society is based upon.
Never before has it happened, that those wishing for this to be true, just plugged there ears and eyes, hoping for dreams to become true by wishing and praying, slammed into the ugly reality of old meatware (Weimar).
I agree with the goals in general, but is it really so tough, to accept what is, and work within the limits of the brittle, old mangine you got, instead of dreaming up a "new human" and singing loud enough to not hear the flying gears?
PS: The Vikings are a nice example of non-islamic jihadism, aka dumping of excessive youth in violent campaigns in the neighbours tribe backyard?
That's not a claim, it's a fact. You need to study evolutionary psychology. Women seek a man to provide and protect. Period. Other qualities are in play too, but I'm talking about an evolved need. You take away the ability of a man to provide and protect and he becomes shit to a woman. You take away the womans ability to provide for herself and she becomes more dependent on marriage to get by. Why does this gender difference exist? Because being pregnant and caring for children both make women more vulnerable and detract from their self preservation ability. Hence the evolved family structure that works.
Do you have any idea what the social structures of paleolithic humans were?
Is that a good thing? Is it something we should pursue?
http://www.fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-consequen...
It's much more complex than "we need to accept everybody! Every arrangement is just as good as any other!"
[0]https://psmag.com/8-000-years-ago-17-women-reproduced-for-ev...
I wonder if the universal basic income will be enough to make the societal shift needed in this case.
> The other, minor difference is that men are polygamous, not hypergamous. A man’s imperative is not (necessarily) to get the best woman. It’s to get as many women as possible with as little investment and commitment as possible. If he can do it, he would love to get as many women as possible at and a little below his own SMV, and have sex with as many of them as possible for as long as possible, without committing to or investing in any of them. That’s spinning plates. Most men don’t do this, because they can’t, because they’re not attractive enough, but that’s a different post.
OK, so I'm a guy, and I can say for sure that this is what I always wanted. Most of the time, I wasn't attractive enough, because I was too self-conscious and nerdy. But I did manage it for a few years, until STDs took me down :(
Anyway, there's also this about women:
> A woman’s imperative is to get the best one man she can get for sex and for provisioning. That’s why you don’t see many women “dating” (i.e. having sex with) several different men at the same time. Women don’t spin plates; they pick the best plate they can and take care of it as best they can. Instead of trying to collect plates, they just change out the plates, one for another, when a bigger, better one comes along.
That's consistent with what the parent article concludes, I think. It's just that there aren't many good plates left.
0) https://therationalmale.com/category/hypergamy-2/
Edit: Responding to therpe1, I'm no evolutionary biologist, and I get that I've quoted a guy with quite an agenda. Still, the distinction that he draws fits will with the biology that I learned, and my personal experience. But please, do cite evidence.
First, most everybody has a natural urge to have sex with a lot of hot people. It's just that some people (women, for instance) will face greater opprobrium from their families and communities for doing so. That doesn't stop all women though. Many do in fact have sex with multiple men at a time. I am open to talking about the statistics of how many men vs. how many women do this, but I would not make conclusions involving stupid plate-spinning metaphors as that article does. And actually, the only stats I can find indicate that women tend to engage in polyamory more so than men [1].
And whether or not you're personal preferred lifestyle is to settle down, it's pretty much irrelevant when you're speaking about men generally. I have had a very high number of sexual partners, but I chose to then get married and have a single sexual partner. It's not because I would have been unable to keep sleeping around. I get approached by women more now than ever before and I'm not lying to say that I could find a new attractive sexual partner every day. I don't want to though. So, my experience and attitude directly contradict that passage you quoted.
[1] http://www.advocate.com/current-issue/2016/1/08/polyamory-nu...
It's a recipe for disaster. Civilization is built on monogamous relationships: children being raised by a couple (statistically a far better environment than single parenthood), young men and women focusing their energy for the betterment of society.
I always thought their divorce and breakup rate was a lot lower than in the US?
But I was mostly dismissing it, considering that rational thought would in the end triumph. Considering that, in the least, each repetition should bring extra information for the effect to manifest.
That thread prompted me to give some though to the subject and the answer I arrived at so far does not make me happy at all. Realizing that repetition by itself is enough, clarifies some things I did not understand and simply classified as reality not making sense.
I feel ever more justified in my energy consuming efforts to fact-check information I receive and in my strides to present information as opinion/personal thought/conclusion based on sources/mere reproduction of sources instead of truth. I am more aware of this than before but at the same time it causes a lot more stress to me now than it did before.
I am less willing than I was to engage in live discussions where I receive information, because that places a burden of fact checking on me and I can not always do that at the speed of real life. And depending on the interlocutor I can not rephrase the discussion in terms of hypothetical statements.
The problem is, people would tend to not read this Wiki:Discussion page, as its "external" to the community, so in addition a system for metering trustworthiness (trusted by users i trust) would be needed.
Here's the thing though - not having a script is a good thing. It allows people to discover what matters to them and what humanity and society is to them. If it's something other than the current state of things - then it should've been changed a long time ago, rather than putting pressure on people to conform to an ideal that nobody wants when they're allowed to think for themselves. It's also what LGBT people have been dealing with for a long time, so you might want to ask how they deal with it, rather than asserting it's the end of society.
Single parenthood isn't the only alternative to being raised by a couple. In fact, those being the only two options is a fairly recent thing. It used to be that children were broadly brought up by communities - to the point that food would be served by whoever happened to have the kids nearby when it was served. Still happens in some places, even in the middle of huge cities - I was brought up like that. Now, for some reason (fear?), parents attempt to keep a tight leash at all times, and the only interaction with one's community a kid might get is through approved and strictly regulated extracurricular activities.
Additionally, there's quite a variety of different cultures around the world that all do different things. India had quite a number of polygamous marriages until relatively recently, for example - all of its major religions, and the culture surrounding them, are relatively neutral on the subject. Third genders were a relatively common and accepted thing across the world until British Colonialism introduced Christian morals to a lot of places, often reducing them to prostitutes and symbols of evil/bad luck. And so on and so forth.
Honestly - existential worry about one's place in a changing world isn't a new thing. You can find stories on the subject going back centuries. People will figure it out.
brave new world. maybe it will take the shape of "Universal Basic Soma".
orgy porgy!
"She may not leave you the day you lose it, but the countdown has begun."
I mean, I get the basic facts, but I find it oddly jumping around between the men's situation, interjecting manual labor in fields that are dominated by women and then going off in the direction of single parents. Not that I would expect any kind of mentioning possible solutions, but this piece left me scratching my head a little .
If a woman prefers a man with wealth or status, she's a gold-digger, and feminism is wrong about women -- they want traditional gender roles. Women are just naturally drawn to wealth and status despite what feminism says they should want.
If a woman has sex with a man regardless of his wealth or status, she's a slut. Feminism is wrong about women -- they are naturally attracted to "bad boys", not "Good guys" who are responsible and work hard. "Good guys" are being cheated out of sex by women. If they support feminism despite the fact that women no longer value social/economic status, which reduces their chances to have sex, they are "white knights".
If a woman won't have sex with a man, it's because she's a frigid bitch -- feminism has made men irrelevant. Feminism is responsible for suicide bombers and spree killers because they couldn't get sex from women.
It's amazing to me how much pseudoscience and entrail-reading comes into discussions of gender. It's so tightly linked to our experience of the world that it's almost impossible not to spin one's own experiences into quasi-rational explanations.
For example, this quote from the article: "A substantial number go on to have children with a second partner, or even a third, creating complex and unstable family lives that are not good for children."
Says who? Human beings have pretty much always lived in extended clans with "complex family lives". The nuclear family is a pretty recent invention in the history of homo sapiens. The whole article seems to be trying to paint a picture that humans lived in nuclear families from the dawn of time to just a few years ago -- that it is taking children away from the way they are meant to be raised. In fact, this is bringing humans closer to the way they've pretty much always lived, in extended clans with complex family trees, with incredibly complex language for describing those relations.
"This creates challenges for the people (usually women) who have to raise a child without the economic or social support of a partner. Their struggles are why the authors see such an uptick in children living in poverty in the aftermath of a decline in manufacturing employment."
This is just terrible writing. Women raising children without support of a partner would, by definition, not be affected by the decline in jobs for men. The whole article (and many of the comments here about it) are filled with these kinds of self-refutations and self-fulfilling prophecies. People just start with a conclusion when it comes to gender and work backwards.
I'm wary to offer my own opinions on these issues, because they might be just as full of confirmation bias, question begging, and social proof-seeking. Maybe human beings are just really bad at discussing this topic.
> Says who? Human beings have pretty much always lived in extended clans with "complex family lives". The nuclear family is a pretty recent invention in the history of homo sapiens.
I think the article is saying complex AND unstable, not complex THEREFORE unstable. The assumption being instability is bad, complexity alone isn't bad, but both together can be worse than instability alone.
> "This creates challenges for the people (usually women) who have to raise a child without the economic or social support of a partner. Their struggles are why the authors see such an uptick in children living in poverty in the aftermath of a decline in manufacturing employment."
> This is just terrible writing. Women raising children without support of a partner would, by definition, not be affected by the decline in jobs for men.
I think the assumption there is that before these women would have a partner with a full time job, but instead they have no partner and have to work + raise a child. This isn't saying that women who didn't have a partner before are worse of now, it is talking about a demographic shift from having a partner to not.
I not only find this with lower middle class men but men I work with as well. They are getting sick and tired of being manipulated by women and trapped into families they never planned to or agreed to and being expected to do all the work financially for the rest of their lives...
I find in male dominated environments with men of higher socioeconomic status, that they end up dating financially needy women who are incentivized to lock them into a long term financial relationship because theres not enough economically independent women to date.
Additionally, I find women like me tend to be much more attractive to them for the reason that working women doing well and climbing the socioeconomic ladder by ourselves are attractive because we have ambition, which in their socioeconomic stratus is not something they are conditioned to, so not only is it attractive because you have more in common to talk to someone about, but its also from their point of view rather exotic and rare, and thus instantly more desireable. While a comment below stating chinese stats is generally worriesome, in America, the issue is not that lower income men can't get women, its that they cant get the women that they want. While most of the comments talk about how these women need to be more openminded, I find myself as a socioeconomic 26yr old woman progressing in my technical career in engineering and software development, I find that there is not nearly enough women, and that we need many more.
IF this happens (and that happening whether its happening and causes behind it happening or not is a WHOLE different discussion) over time then the standards men have for women will raise. While these men are pining after women who in reality don't exist in great numbers, just highly highlighted, the other 95% of women are incentivized to compete on a personal and economic level if they find men on their level and above their socioeconomic level are choosing women who make their own money, and they will begin to understand they are the only ones providing for themselves and over time women will seep into previously considered male dominated environments and take on more management and leadership roles.
Over the long run, this will hopefully allow men and women to engage in short or long term relationships or whatever they choose as we all become more accepting and openminded based on the person and less on the economic benefits they can provide. Progress is painful, and as one of the few women pioneering in it, I get pressure form men i work with to date and marry, men who serve me drinks to date and marry, and I get hate and drama from all the girls who are mad at me for making more money than them (who have no problem dating men with money but lots of problems with women making money, and can't seem to solve that issue in their head)
In general, its not as glamorous as it seems if you are actually a full time, preference for low drama female with your career as your first priority. Women like us are highlighted as the pain point of the issue, but we are not the cause of it, and over time hopefully the solution.
The other complaint I have about this whole argument is if women are getting a higher socioeconomic status while men complain they don't have jobs, then there are clearly jobs, they are just stereotypically female jobs, so instead of men complaining that the universe isnt entitling and providing them to the (in the grand scheme of things incredibly fleeting and nonpermanent manufactoring jobs) they should be more open to becoming nurses, teachers, government jobs and other jobs that are clearly in a great shortage for that women are not only working full time side jobs while taking night classes to become nurses and etc but raising kids while doing it often times as a single parent.
If they can do it men can do it, they just don't want to because its an uncomfortable stereotype to break, but in WWII many women stepped into manufactoring jobs to fill the void in America, so men need to do the same thing.
For now its a bit of an awkward phase for men because they are used to being the ones that get to choose and women have always been very willing to compete in looks and otherwise to get access to that financial stability as it was the only socially acceptable way to do so for so long without permanently striating yourself into a considered deplorable condition.
Men need to realize over time women becoming more independent is a good thing for everyone. Gorwing pains will always exist in society, its how we adapt to them that makes both men and women successful and competitive candidates in the working field and in the personal relationship realm.
This ongoing complaint I keep hearing about men wanting to fall back into manufactoring jobs and women getting jobs is a more a complaint about how they wish things would never change and how they want people to accomodate them instead of steering the dicsussion to how to adapt to reality.
Men seem to have been replaced by a master-slave relationship with masses of people working for a small group of large companies that provide for both men and women. It is like large businesses are the new man. I feel like they are a middle-man that simply should be replaced. I tend to agree with the unabomber in that modern life simply isn't compatible with humans.
We should do well to recognize criminals as fellow human beings, instead of mindlessly reject everything about them, just so that we can follow the predictable and tiresome ritual of shunning the deviant so we ourselves can be perceived as good.
The industrial revolution and global colonization changed that, injecting opportunities for an ever-growing section of men; and genocidal mass-war eventually did the same for women. This land of mirth and honey where every man has an opportunity to bootstrap himself is a somewhat fantastical invention. Social mobility might have been higher than average in the US between 1850 and 1950, but anywhere else "where you come from" was always the most important factor in anyone's fortunes.
The point however still stand - both wars and political parties who brought them in had a lot of support. Not just from women. Those revolutions and wars did not just randomly happened out of nothing. People, not just women, wanted them.
Also, many German veterans from wwi wanted the war, wanted to reverse humiliation they felt after loosing. Some were opposed, but opposition was not universal among them.
It wasn't just escape from powerty, it was something meant to give their lives meaning, building imperium and all that crap.
[1] http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/151/the-white-feath...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/the-wee...
Life used to be rough and unfair for most us men. Maybe the oldest son had a chance to inherit the farm or shop of his father so he could provide for a wife and family. Many men, however, had no such luck and went through life without marrying, many without ever dating or being with a woman.
Western women don't need men to provide an income to the same extent as before, and that opens up a lot of other possibilities for us men.
Guys can actually get married although they only earn enough to support half a family or 40% of a family. I even know several guys that makes less than 10% of the family income (and that's through welfare). What chance would a stay home dad have had in 1920? What chance would an unemployed guy have had?
And equally important, we can date women without providing them anything else than a bit of romance. It has still only been a couple of generations in which a majority of us dated for years without having to marry.
Some women still look at earning ability but many women also look at other traits nowadays. Looks, intellect, humour, family skills, interests etc. Work on that and be grateful you weren't born at any point in human history before the 1950s.
Why is post-1950 men better off in this regard than pre-1950?
Through after some searching, I did find today what I looked at several years ago and they seems very similar to what I recalled. "The survey shows that about 80% of the single women interviewed think that it's reasonable for men to only consider a relationship if they receive a monthly income of above 4,000 yuan (US$635)", which was above the average income in 2011 when the study was done. - (http://www.womenofchina.cn/html/womenofchina/report/136873-1...)
For the even more depressing parts, okcupid blog from 2009 shared some data. For how men view of women: (https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0...). To quote: "This graph also dramatically illustrates just how much more important a woman’s looks are than a guy’s."
For how women view of men: (https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...). To quote: "if you’re a young guy and don’t make much money, cool. If you’re 23 or older and don’t make much money, go die in a fire."
That said, in real life, there's not necessarily a lot of social mixity so people will tend to meet people who earn about the same as they do.
Slightly out of topic, funnily enough when I used such a website, I lowballed my earnings because I didn't want to meet women for whom that was an important factor.
Anecdotally, I've heard quite a few Chinese woman tell me that they wanted to marry someone who was rich only to end up marrying a few years later someone who earned about as much as they did.
I don't have statistics for countries that have been developed for some time like US and Europe but, in my experience, flexie is absolutely correct. It's not that difficult to find women who don't really care about the earning ability of their mate.
Post-1950 man has so many more freedoms and opportunities and ways to live life, sure it is probably harder if you want to live your imagined 1950s lifestyle but now you don't have to live that 1950s lifestyle.
I am sure a huge number of men were chain ganged into living that way during the 1950s which made life a lot worse than now.
But I guess with choice and freedom brings anxiety and fear of choosing incorrectly.
In fairness, she also imposed these rules on herself, so that she could take care of herself and any children in the event something happened to me. (She works part-time in a highly paid field. Partly because it interests her to work, and partly as an economic hedge -- we don't really need her income now, but if something happened to me, she could switch to full time and support the family.)
It's economically rational to want a spouse who can earn money. It's not necessarily gold digging.
Citation needed. This has absolutely not been the case in most of recorded history and in most of the known world.
Not for men without college degrees.
I wouldn't even want to change for a successful young, white American male in the 1960s or whenever America was at its industrial peak.
Look, we are so lucky at this point in time in the Western world. Far from everything is great, but we live long lives in comfort, mostly painless, mostly without death or disease or hunger, mostly without war, we date around for fun during a decade or two, travel as we like, wherever we like, get entertainment on demand, chose our own profession, before we marry out of love when we are in our 30s or even 40s. Kings would envy our comfortable lives and I bet even Cary Grant would envy the dating life of a regular young man armed with Tinder.
As far as comfort, I'd don't accept the premise our lives are more comfortable now than in 1955. My guess is most young men would gladly trade the latest dating app and the interwebs for the conditions of the typical 1955 US male.
Does that include being drafted into the Korean War? The Vietnam War? The Suez Canal Crisis?
I wouldn't have thought gay men were under consideration here, since we're talking about marriage to women.
I feel that you rely more on interpretations of personal experience instead of objective look at the world.
That book has a lot of his opinions on the disappearance of the men's virility, but the parts in which he explains the causes and consequences of that are fascinating.
Civilization was built on all sorts of identity-based subjugation relationships and as we chip away at them, in the long run, it gets better.
If your implicit assumption is true (women only stay in relationships because they require a partner's income to survive) then we have a moral imperative to provide escape hatches from those toxic relationships as quickly as possible.
Evolution works on the level of genes. It literally cannot prescribe complex social roles. "In the old days", both men and women worked full-time at various tasks: hunting, gathering, mending, caring, building, planting, harvesting, etc.
It absolutely can. Evolutionary psychology is science, and it's based on the scientific method (ironically, unlike the sociology that's obsessed with "gender roles", which isn't based on science at all). Check out Gad Saad's podcast on Joe Rogan.
From the article it seems the problem is that women continue to seek providers, despite what decades of feminism have tried to tell them they should want.
Are you implying that we should be closed and/or ashamed of beliefs we might hold in this category of discourse?
As someone who's hung around this place along time, I'd love to see a link of a discussion with "unchecked" claims that women should stay home.
And then look how many people have ideas about what's "natural" that come straight out of Victorian etiquette books.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13795530 and marked it off-topic.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13795608 and marked it off-topic.
But I accept your disapproval of my jibe towards HN.
Poor men cannot afford weddings and children. Shocking.