Education and Men without Work

The article is long on detail and short on suggestions (which is understandable). However, the suggestions it does make are not obviously going to work. The men illustrated in the article do not seem incapable of work, but rather disinterested. Vocational training isn&#x27;t going to fix the fact that the government benefits the article cited allows the men to stay at home playing video games all day. Most people (but especially men, given the propensity of the male psyche to become dependent on dopamine) would rather take the short term thrill of continuous dopamine hits provided by video games than working to make a living.<p>Who can really blame them? For the vast majority of history, the main impetus for men to seek status of any kind is to impress women and provide a legacy for families. As the article mentions, men who are cut off from each of these simply stop participating in the kinds of behavior that make modern society possible. Enabled by the preponderance of easily accessible government money, drugs, etc, these men, lacking any legacy or dependents to speak of, would rather bide their time hedonistically. Some, realizing their situation, choose not to bide their time at all (look at the rise of middle aged male suicides).<p>Unfortunately, the two causes the article cites (dissolution of family structure and rise of single male households) are unaddressed. This is understandable as even mentioning these problems in high society today would be frowned upon. The article admits this, but, the writer, being part of the same society he&#x27;s criticizing, falls into the same trap.

There&#x27;s a very weird &quot;let them eat cake&quot; attitude in this thread which I find distressing. The study reports on the millions of working age men in the US who are essentially too depressed and face too many obstacles to search for work. Instead, they&#x27;re spending their days staying inside, getting high, and playing video games. They essentially have little to no chance to pursue romantic relationships. Many of them eventually take their own lives.<p>Perhaps some are enjoying their &quot;hedonistic&quot; lifestyles, but likely most have totally given up on life, much like the Japanese hikikomori. It&#x27;s not healthy mentally or physically. But it seems like as long as people treat these men as &quot;losers&quot; who deserve their fate, the more this problem will grow.

Benefits are much more generous and much easier to get in countries with much higher worker participation. And they have the same video games in other countries too.<p>And marriage does not cause entry in the workforce, participation in the workforce is what makes marriage partners more interested.<p>Reduction in benefits has not and is no increasing work participation. There was not spike in worker participation in the 90s when massive &quot;reform&quot; was undertaken. There is no increased work force participation from the cut backs being done now or in recent years. Yet loosening of work safety regulations would certainly be expected to increase disabilities for manual laborers. So the best conclusion is that the supposed cheaters aren&#x27;t.<p>Also, if those not participating in the work force are merely enjoying life on theses supposed benefits, one would not expect the already high and ever increasing suicide rate in this sector.<p>The author&#x27;s ideology entails denying calls for higher wages by diverting what is clearly a demand&#x2F;wage problem[1] into a culture war issue.<p>[1] I&#x27;m guessing the author is a fan of Adam Smith where lack of participation is _always_ caused by under pricing. Apparently the author is willing to accept pretty thin evidence to drop Smith when that theory might benefit labor.

I don&#x27;t see why this is such a surprise, most people hate working.<p>I thought it was almost a truism that people work for retirement, i.e. the point in their life when they have enough saved to stop working and just relax and travel or fish or whatever.<p>If there&#x27;s a way to skip 30 years of working at a job you hate and just start now, most people would take that option.<p>This is the basic problem with basic income, although I still think it&#x27;s important and necessary, we&#x27;re going to have to undertake a huge cultural shift and accept a large XX% of the populace just sitting around, vaping and playing video games all day. Not everyone is built to seek out the constant struggle of self-improvement.

This story really needs another graph showing &quot;NOT-IN-LABOR FORCE RATES FOR WOMEN AGES 25-54; 1965 TO 2019&quot;.<p>See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;opub&#x2F;mlr&#x2F;2016&#x2F;images&#x2F;hipple-fig6.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;opub&#x2F;mlr&#x2F;2016&#x2F;images&#x2F;hipple-fig6.png</a><p>It appears that the non-participation rate for women is about twice as high as for men.

&gt;Even after controlling for age, ethnicity, and education, married men are decidedly more likely to be in the workforce than men who have never married. This &quot;marriage effect&quot; is so powerful that married prime-age male high-school dropouts generate labor-force participation rates in the same league as their never-married, college-graduate peers. Analogous but somewhat less powerful effects are seen when we drill deeper into family life: Irrespective of marital status, education, and ethnicity, a prime-age man is more likely to be in the workforce if he lives in the same home as children under the age of 18, regardless of his race or education.<p>This is pretty damn interesting but not all that surprising. For those whom the institution of marriage is still relevant (and those lucky enough to find a partner), getting up and going to work everyday is not a huge problem.

&gt; but they nevertheless suggest that changes in family structure had a powerful and adverse impact on male work rates and labor-force participation rates...<p>This article seems to assume that changes in family structures are a <i>cause</i> of men not working. I see no mention that it could actually be an <i>effect</i> of that. Who&#x27;s gonna want to marry (let alone have kids with) a man who is unemployed and isn&#x27;t even looking for work?

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

Something to highlight in this article is the prevalence of pain medication use among the out-of-work population:<p>&quot;Apart from the small fraction (around 13% in 2015) of prime-age male non-workers who are adult students, the remainder report spending many of their waking hours watching and playing on screens — over 2,000 hours per year on average. Almost half of these non-working men report taking pain medication on any given day (which should raise a red flag for those worried about the opioid crisis)&quot;<p>The watching and playing on screens isn&#x27;t ideal (2000h&#x2F;y == 40h&#x2F;wk <i>on average</i> -- which doesn&#x27;t seem to leave a ton of room for a base level of healthy exercise and socialization) - but at least it is relatively harmless.<p>But that <i>half</i> of these folks would take pain medication on a daily basis seems staggering.<p>The author seems to correlate this abuse with the availability of opioids via Medical and Medicare. That does seem like a problem. However, reading further into the blog of the quoted author[0], that writer (who visited many affected areas during their research) attributes it to the private sector pushing opioids heavily.<p>Personally it seems fairer to attribute most of the cause to the private industry which made the painkillers popular and mainstream, as opposed to Medicare and Medicaid, which functioning as desired should be making all healthcare more accessible (with the unfortunate inclusion of opioids as a dangerous subset of that).<p>[0] - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;samquinones.com&#x2F;reporters-blog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;21&#x2F;donald-trump-opiates-america&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;samquinones.com&#x2F;reporters-blog&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;21&#x2F;donald-trum...</a>

&gt; According to the latest monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, &quot;work rates&quot; for American men in October 2019 stood very close to their 1939 levels, as reported in the 1940 U.S. Census. Despite some improvement since the end of the Great Recession, Great Depression-style work rates are still characteristic today for the American male, both for those of &quot;prime working age&quot; (defined as ages 25 to 54) and for the broader 20 to 64 group.<p>The premise of this article is based on this statistic. Oddly enough, no definition of &quot;work rate&quot; is given. After some quick searching, I didn&#x27;t find anything accessible, either.<p>This may be significant. Is a full-time &quot;investor&quot; included in the count? What about a programmer working on a startup? What about some other kind of self-employed contractor?<p>There are many ways a person might not show up in a tally called &quot;work rate.&quot; Many (all?) of them have become a lot easier to pull off over the last 20 years.

I think male socialization has left many men poorly-equipped to deal with the modern workplace. Prior to the information age, the primary challenges in the workplace were physical or motivational. So an attitude of &quot;be tough and work through the hard times&quot; was effective and allowed you to earn a living. Boorish behavior was tolerated or even celebrated as &quot;male bonding&quot;. But as women entered more professions, that behavior became divisive.<p>In the modern workplace, the primary challenges are emotional, and I don&#x27;t think a lot of men have the tools to deal with them. Many men never had to learn how to deal with anxiety, fear, uncertainty or anger. Bad behavior from men was tolerated or even celebrated until recently. What worked to get them where they are is no longer appropriate going forward. So it&#x27;s no wonder more men are opting out of work altogether because they feel they are in a no-win situation. You see a lot of this in &quot;incel&quot; communities where many self-deprecatingly refer to themselves as &quot;neets&quot; (no employment, education or training).<p>To be clear here, I&#x27;m not blaming men as this is a societal problem. It does not affect all or even most men. This is part of the &quot;toxic&quot; aspect of &quot;toxic masculinity&quot; -- it harms men just as much as it harms women, only in different ways. It is possible to undo, but it takes years of therapy and a commitment to &quot;be better&quot; in the face of misleading signals that say you don&#x27;t have to change &#x2F; compromise.

There is a large double standard applied here that a man who don&#x27;t work is checking out of society, but a woman who does the same is a productive citizen since she can produce babies.<p>We wanted and most of us still want equality in the work force with both women and men equality responsible to earn their place in society. The bread winner model is cultural obsolete, even through we still behave, and given many comments here on HN, still think in those terms. A mans role culturally remain to support his children and their mother. If he doesn&#x27;t do this then we declare them as checking out from society, become hikikomori, an drug addict and hedonistically waster of time. Increased rates of depression and suicides only reinforce our belief that men must fulfill their role or they will only harm themselves and others.<p>So let me make a suggestion. Maybe it is time to change the culture.

It&#x27;s interesting to see the contrast in discussion with other posts that talk about how we need to get rid of useless jobs. Those posts normally talk about how we need to make it so it&#x27;s possible to just live off government benefits instead of spending our lives working, meanwhile this submission calls it a national crisis when men are leaving the workforce and choosing to live off of government benefits. I don&#x27;t think people choosing to leave the workforce is necessarily a bad thing, but there should be a way for them to find a sense of purpose or community, if that&#x27;s what they desire.

Talking from the perspective of an EU country, the salary deductions on employment contract for a single person are brutal and exceeding 40% of the gross salary, while public institutions treat young single native male as their worst enemy. Enormous successes simply don&#x27;t happen over here, no point engaging in a startup and risking the mental health. The dating market is... well enough was said already by now. Once achieving housing and certain financial comfort, why should one bother with employment?

As unpopular it may be to say such a politically incorrect thing (admitting this is a generalization, and all the caveats that come with it) --<p>Men generally have the biological need to go <i>do</i> and <i>wander</i> and <i>discover</i> things. I don&#x27;t know whether it&#x27;s hormones or what. Debate all you like elsewhere (I&#x27;m not trying to debate that point here).<p>My point is that when they don&#x27;t get an outlet to do this, they cause trouble. Idle hands are the tools of the devil. They get in trouble, they cause trouble. They create things, but also get into trouble.<p>And a society that doesn&#x27;t provide outlets for working-aged males to go out and do things is inviting trouble.<p>What I observe about the US is that we are making the cost of employing people so high that we have no incremental way to put people at the low end of the skills ladder (or at the high end of aging out) to even minimal use -- and the only way to get even a low level purpose in life is to be employed by a company that goes through very constrained legal and regulatory calculus to employ someone.<p>In other countries, people who are unemployed can:<p>-- Be community volunteers next to government workers to augment local capabilities<p>-- Be ticket takers on buses, trains<p>-- Be part time informal labor &#x2F; delivery people<p>-- Be &quot;shop minders&quot; who aren&#x27;t fully employees but help when needed<p>All these things for even a paltry wage, but purpose in life. In other countries, you notice immediately the presence of such people.<p>But we in the US have foreclosed the ability for people to fill these roles. I guess the last time we did this was with the WPA. The very rules we have in place to protect people (and claimed benefit of workplace standards, etc) prevent many at the bottom from being useful.<p>It&#x27;s to our societal peril, as we can see lately.

National Affairs is a publication of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. It&#x27;s important to keep in mind their ideology when reading anything they publish.

I thought that government benefits in the US were shite? I can understand why European men might opt-out but I thought that you were basically dooming yourself to homelessness without a job in America. How are these men living?

I can&#x27;t help but think that we need a serious national discussion about this. I feel that this issue is just going to get worse, because there simply aren&#x27;t enough well paying jobs to go around, especially on the lower end of the skills market (remember that only ~1&#x2F;3 of the US population graduated from college).<p>In my opinion, this is why we need a president that understands and deeply cares about this problem. This is why I am fully supporting Andrew Yang in his presidential bid. He understands the state we&#x27;re in and has accepted the reality that all these jobs are not coming back and we need to start working on solutions now. But please don&#x27;t take my word for it and instead look into him yourself, his Iowa Press interview is a great start: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DahyKQccudQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=DahyKQccudQ</a>

I&#x27;ve only skimmed the article, but nowhere does it seem to compare men to the overall population. As it stands, these distressing trends could hold for everyone, which makes the focus on men needless.<p>Did I miss something here? Does anyone know whether these trends are unique to men? Because if (and that is a big if) this is not unique to men, that would be some horrible cherry picking &#x2F; manipulative statistics.<p>Regardless though, the data on unmarried non-immigrant men is really disturbing. If it extends to unmarried non-immigrant women, that would harm the narrative of the article, but still present a very big problem. In general I would expect that married people have lower labour participation, because there is a partner to pick up the slack. In general, living with two people should be cheaper per person than living alone.

This is the reality of what Basic Income will look like for most. It may still be a net positive, for the fraction that has enough internal gumption to self-direct into a fulfilling avenue - but many, many people will drink and drug themselves to death idly.

&gt; Among economists and policy analysts who have examined these unsettling trends, the general consensus is that declining male workforce participation in modern America is mainly a structural, demand-driven problem — a matter of evaporating local jobs, and especially jobs requiring limited skills, in an increasingly dynamic and globalized marketplace.<p>Basically these are the men would have traditionally &quot;built stuff&quot;; factory workers, etc.<p>We don&#x27;t have any factories anymore.<p>&gt;If this assessment is more or less correct, it would be hard to overstate the importance of education and training as instruments for addressing our &quot;men without work&quot; crisis.<p>How would that help? We don&#x27;t have jobs for them. And the few that maybe could find work, well, those jobs will soon enough be automated away.<p>&gt; Third, there is America&#x27;s curiously poor prime-age male labor-force participation-rate performance in comparison with other affluent never-communist democracies. Between 1965 and 2015, U.S. levels fell faster and sank lower than in any comparable country, with the exception of Italy (where official employment figures notoriously neglect &quot;unofficial&quot; work income). Yet America&#x27;s race to the bottom in prime-age male labor-force participation is not readily explained by lackluster economic growth (which could also be called sluggish demand).<p>In America (USA) you ARE your job; it defines you. The American Way is to be hard working and self sufficient. If you can&#x27;t do that, there are tremendous psychological effects. You can&#x27;t blame these men for giving up.<p>We need to accept that this is the way forward and stop treating people who don&#x27;t work like leaches. We need to retrain society that there will be plenty of able bodied people without work and society will need to take care of them.

&gt; Disability benefits are never lavish, but, together with eligibility for additional benefits unlocked by disability enrollment and with resources from family and friends, they can and clearly do provide the basis for a viable work-free existence for many millions of prime-working-age men today.<p>This really bugs me because I think the author has an opinion that is revealed when they say &quot;viable.&quot;<p>The focus is on the bare minimum benefits instead of the awful job prospects for those at the bottom. Unlivable minimum wage paired with jobs that only offer part-time employment, with wild, unpredictable shift schedules. No health benefits or any notable discounts on food or clothing or anything.<p>These people live in areas where it&#x27;s untenable to live without a car. So they end up paying more in car maintenance to drive to a job that pays them less and less.<p>Gov&#x27;t benefits that disappear the moment they get a job, which put them in a worse position than if they&#x27;d just stayed unemployed. Benefits they might need to <i>pay</i> back to the government.<p>Of course people opt out. Good for them. But don&#x27;t for a moment think that they&#x27;re actually happy about this.

This is a wonderful example of how to lie with statistics. Look at the first graph [0].<p>Super scary up and to the right line that appears to show our labor force being destroyed over time with no link to economic conditions.<p>But wait. Look at the scale. This data represents a 6% change over 50 years.<p>Very weak sauce. Why trust a paper that starts off by deceiving people in such a base way?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalaffairs.com&#x2F;storage&#x2F;app&#x2F;media&#x2F;Winter%202020&#x2F;Eberstadt%20Charts-Tables&#x2F;xeberstadtchart1small.jpg.pagespeed.ic.24sadX9bfY.webp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationalaffairs.com&#x2F;storage&#x2F;app&#x2F;media&#x2F;Winter%202...</a>

&gt;”The fall in participation for prime-age men has largely been concentrated among those with a high school degree or less... …”<p>What would a high school diploma or 2 year college give them that would enable them to get higher skilled jobs?<p>I’d be inclined to think that rather than needing “GE” (general Ed) they need vocational type trading that focuses on making them skilled in a particular area (no, not coding). That might have to be complemented with a few other skills that allow them to integrate into the workforce (what it means to be dependable, how to add value, etc., rather than “show up” which is half of it, but not all of it).

It&#x27;s just corporatocracy [0] and it&#x27;s inevitable effects.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Corporatocracy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Corporatocracy</a>

I will make a guess for the causeses (that I stole from somebody smarter Tucker Carlson [1]), and if they sound plausible, also will offer solutions.<p>a) The reason for &quot;... Instead we have witnessed a mass exodus of men from the workforce altogether. ...&quot;<p>Is that man are looking for work that allows them to earn more than women, that would likely (or like) to date.<p>Women are not likely to marry&#x2F;create family with man that earns (or has less earning potential) less than them.<p>Just as simple as that -- reasons may be deeply cultural, biological or whatever... but I believe this is to be true.<p>Solution:<p>De-urbanization&#x2F; De-metropolization of work opportunities.<p>Basically more gov tech, fin tech, bio tech, and other &#x27;high-margin&#x27; business need to spread across a given country (UK, or US or whatever).<p>That spread will create a number of supporting job opportunities as well, that will equalize the earning potential opportunities, lower cost of living averages, create more &#x27;geographically attractive cultural centers&#x27; and so on.<p>That (lowering cost of living, lowering barriers of entry into sustainable jobs, with less competition), in turn, will lower the barriers of entry into economic stability -- which is a requirement for a modern family core.<p>It is, actually, desirable, that one-person-income should be enough for a family of 4 (two parents and two children). Whether parents choose that or both work, simulatenously, is up to them.<p>Stable family creates purpose and emotional stability, necessary for healthy work ethics.<p>---<p>With that said, 3 other important fed gov initiatives that will be needed<p>a) affordable, not necessarily free, but truly affordable health care<p>b) 4-day &#x2F; 6 hour work week as a &#x27;encouraged&#x27; standard.<p>c) equitable divorce model where man are treated using same criteria as woman (including for not just financial separation, but children custody as well).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=mgvpxE_WKxw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=mgvpxE_WKxw</a>

I&#x27;m going to say something crazy, and it&#x27;s cool if you disagree if you don&#x27;t call me names or kick me in the shin.<p>Pay people to go to school. At least for a while. Why not?

&gt; Teachers must be not only teachers, but surrogate parents, secular confessors, makeshift therapists, boot-camp drill instructors, financial advisers, de facto cops on the beat, even truant officers or dress-rehearsal probation officers. Little wonder they cannot accomplish all these missions — much less the more modest but hardly trivial duty of inculcating academic excellence.<p>This x 1000. We need to these issues before they get to the classroom.

Self-checkout cash registers. Amazon. AI. When public assistance is more profitable than entry level jobs (and the maintenance of those jobs, gas, etc).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5dZ_lvDgevk&amp;t=11s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=5dZ_lvDgevk&amp;t=11s</a>

Is child rearing and changing gender norms a factor here?

Perhaps television fucked my head up too much, but shouldn&#x27;t a society where women have equal pay, get rid of all this animal hierarchy bullshit and find someone they actually connect with? Is the divorce rate still 50%? Is all of this just to spit out a child?

&gt; Unfortunately, the two causes the article cites (dissolution of family structure and rise of single male households) are unaddressed.<p>It&#x27;s unaddressed because it&#x27;s the journalist class and their kind that has waged a war against family, gender roles, gender itself and males. At least since the 90s as far as I remember, the predominant message in media is fathers are bad, males are bad and family is bad. Media has discouraged men and women from getting married, having children, encouraged divorce, abortion, etc. When a nation&#x27;s media pushes nonsense like &quot;toxic masculinity&quot;, isn&#x27;t it about time to declare the media the enemy of the nation? But what&#x27;s interesting is that the media are just propaganda of the elites. The elites decide the media campaigns and trends which transform and socially engineer society. The question is why? After all most of these elites and many of these journalists are males themselves.<p>One solution is the diversification of the elites, media and society in general. Not in superficial aspects like race, gender, etc, but ideology, thought and values. Seems like there is a lot of incest within the elite&#x2F;media class. They all seem to think alike and that&#x27;s not a good thing.<p>Also, these attacks on men are also ultimately attacks on women as well. Ignoring the fact that half of a woman&#x27;s genetic history comes from a man ( their father ), the attacks on men ultimately harm their future prospects of a husband, family and kids. And their future hopes of happiness.<p>Men&#x27;s suicide is increasing and women&#x27;s happiness has been plummeting.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nber.org&#x2F;papers&#x2F;w14969" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nber.org&#x2F;papers&#x2F;w14969</a><p>Add to that the below replacement birth rate of american born women, you&#x27;d think there was a crisis in america. But we can&#x27;t really discuss the real issues here because it&#x27;s verboten.