The Idle Army: America’s Unworking Men
wsj.com
wsj.com
Edit: there's a reason economists usually use "looking for work" for unemployment numbers: it's really hard to gauge why people don't look for work.
http://www.npr.org/2014/06/05/319214546/stay-at-home-dads-on...
The first few years of work young people are usually a complete mixed bag, even if gifted. They need quite a lot of baby-sitting, tolerance and guidance from co-workers and bosses and make silly mistakes and usually are quite poor at communicating.
It's all part of growing up. I can look back and realise that in myself back then.
And then it changes and you start getting promotions and then it's all different.
So don't judge anything by where you all are now, give it another 2 or 3 years. I know it sounds trite and patronizing, but it's true.
It's one of the reasons I'm always surprised pg, Thiel, etc. pushed for people to start companies straight out of college or even while in college. Young people are often so utterly clueless that I think a lot of the mistakes they make could just be fixed by them working for someone else for a little bit, even 6 months. As well solving the tendency for hip young entrepreneurs to make incredibly basic HR mistakes.
Unless they luck out and find themselves amidst a housing bubble circa 2006 where everyone and their brother is employed in constructing real estate, investing in real estateo, transacting in real estate on commission basis, underwriting mortgages for real estate or pitching dubious mortgages for others to buy real estate, there's not a lot of opportunities for under-educated males nowadays.
The article is typical WSJ garbage, gets cause and effect confused, makes comical, out-of-touch assumptions and, as usual, places the burden and fault on NEETs.
Discussing the unemployment levels of men in America without taking into account the vast sociological changes involving the genders in the last 20-30 years e.g. a lot more women in the workforce, societal expectations of more parenting involvement from men, etc.) is not much use unless you are trying on some sort of strange shaming tactic on men. FWIW I don't think the author is doing this intentionally.
I don't see it as a good or a bad thing - society has reorganized itself and there is no place for these people anymore. With greater and greater levels of automation the problem is only going to get worse. 30% of people find it hard to do math beyond 8th grade, where would they fit in the modern economy? Furthermore if you start from the very bottom, some people will struggle and succeed, but most will give up - whats the point anyway? Living a minimalist lifestyle supporting your own limited needs beats working for Amazon and keeling over at 35 with a heart attack.
Seems as if success and fulfillment in modern society is on the edges of the distribution - either you're a minimalistic bum or balls to the wall businessman.
How many are stay-at-home dads? How many are living with wealthy parents vs. how many are on welfare? How many of them were looking for work but eventually gave up after their efforts proved fruitless? How many of them have actual, legitimate disabilities?
These are all interesting questions. And for actual disabilities, I don't think living with cystic fibrosis and being unable to work is the life of pleasure the author thinks it is.
It states for example on one paragraph, that the men not working, exacerbate family breakdown.
As someone in my 28s having lots of problems like in the article, I can personally claim, that for me, and all my friends, it is the other way around:
Creating a family in the current society, is almost impossible, two incomes is necessary, thus reducing time available to take care of kids, divorce is too easy, making it too risky for men (in my country, 72% of "no-fault" divorces were initiated by women for example), young women are not interested in serious relationships (instead they are interested in having fun, one-night stands, drinking, sex, etc...) because it gets in the way of having a career.
So, because of all this, starting a family, even if you really, really want it, is excessively hard.
So... why bother? Why put a massive effort to work your ass off, if you won't have anything to do with the money?
Alright, you go and work 60 hours/week, save money... and now what? Buy a house, to live in it alone? Buy a car, that doesn't fit your parents garage that has their car already? Or buy videogames that you can't play because you work 60 hours/week?
It is logical, that the thing to be done, is do the mininum necessary to support a loner lifestyle, this is not my case (far from it), but I've met people where their current simple non-creative jobs can pay for international trips, restaurants and prostitutes, but are still too far from supporting a family, so... why not just stay where they are, and enjoy international trips, restaurants and prostitutes? Why work so hard to not have any leisure time, if the result would be reach old age alone, rich, and with nothing to spend that money with and no friends?
EDIT: people are making some assumptions about me and understanding this wrong. So to clear things up:
1. I am more of a exception guy, I don't like one night stands and whatnot, and don't go to bars or clubs, I look for women in my social circle, that is academia, workplaces (related to tech, always), and church. The women I described is what I saw there, maybe women elsewhere are different.
2. I am from Brazil, sometimes I forget how confortable life in US is in general, many people replied that you don't need two-person income if you have a non-luxurious life, here in Brazil, the US "middle-class" life, of having two cars for example, is only for rich people, most of the population can't afford even a single car (I for example don't own a car, even if I summed all my income of the last 5 years, I would still not have enough for a car), here two-person income is necessary even if you are going to live in a favela shack with walls made of discarded wood and roof tiles, I just assumed this was the case for most of US too. I would love some detailed information if that is true, or not.
3. From what I've heard, housing, healthcare, and some other basic necessities are very expensive in US in general, housing is very expensive in Brazil too, even if bad quality "supermarket" food is cheap, you can't start a family with a single income if you can't afford housing and healthcare, for example if your kids get sick, how you will pay for it? Even here in Brazil where the state gives completely free healthcare, people still consider it too risky to not have healthcare money, sometimes your kid need something now and you don't have time to wait the state.
4. Some people reading the text are assuming I am a NEET myself... that is not the case, I just find myself seriously tempted to do so though (because I am trying, very hard, to get money to start a family, yet I never got a legal job, and so far my total net worth is negative, some months I paid more in interest than the monthly mininum wage)
im guessing you dont know any young women cause this is absurd
We moved from the coasts to Iowa. I got a 14% salary bump. My wife got a 41% salary bump.
We have been socking away savings non-stop, just bought a house, and all of a sudden can afford vacations, furniture... Everything.
Life is better here, all around. Our commute dropped from a 1.5 hr drive to a 20m walk (5m if we drive). We went from shelling out $3,000 a month for a crappy one bedroom with no space to paying $1500 for a giant house.
We can walk to a swanky wine bar, and afford drinks rather than drive 45m to one where we just split a glass and grimace at the bill.
We can eat out, we can travel, the schools are good, the crime is non-existent, and our backyard has a trailhead in it!
For example: http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/8622-S-Waba...
recently renovated, a block to the L, ~30 minute train ride into the Loop.
I didn't even know the regional differences in drink prices were so pronounced until I was talking on the phone with my cousin a few months ago. I live in Dallas, and she lives in NYC. I was talking about how I was about to go out for drinks with friends, and I ended up mentioning that how most of the bars here have one night a week where wells (and, at some places, U-call-its) are under $3. Her mind was blown. She didn't even know drinks that cheap were a thing anywhere.
That was one more entry in the "why I'll never live in a place like NYC" list.
To be fair -- if you live in Iowa, it is much more likely to be the other way round. People drive everywhere in the US countryside and there are no sidewalks or even unpaved foot-paths.
This is not even taking into account the weather.
I'm getting the feeling that the city snob cargo cult is playing our.
I grew up in an upper middle class D.C. suburb. My parents and my brother and I lived in an 1,100 square foot house and had one car. This was typical 25 years ago. My peer group these days makes substantially more money than my dad did back then, and might live in a 1,000 square foot apartment for just two people, and still talk about how expensive it is to start a family. It seems like the minimum standard now is being able to afford a 2,000 square foot house and private school for the kids.
it's also possible to go out to clubs, have one night stands, and want a stable relationship and family too!! imagine that.
If you get labelled as "PUA" or "MRA" or "MTGOW" or "KIA" or "GG" or some other labels I see thrown around, people seemly are more quick to dismiss whatever you wrote for any reason.
I wanted to be clear, I am not one of those.
Where did you get those weird stereotypes from?
Purely anecdotal, but as a guy 28 years old without a girlfriend, I would love to be proven wrong.
So, he should be figuring out how to keep these girls in his social circle, rather than considering it a rejection. Guys have time on their side, and maintaining contact with people has a way of moving them closer. Sadly, like anything else "playing the game" is how you win. Getting to know people has a way of overriding the initial physical attraction. Of course, it can go the other way too, physically attractive women can frequently be socially disgusting princesses.
Maybe you should stop looking for confirmation that women are the problem
https://www.google.com/search?q=average+marrage+age
For women its gone up nearly 5 years in the last 25. A 28 Y/O guy is probably dating women younger than the average marriage age at this point. Especially true, if those women happen to be college educated.
Of course, the "I'm not looking for a serious relationship" line is being used like "lets be friends". AKA "Your nice, but I'm looking for someone higher up the mating hierarchy."
Frankly, if I were in my 20's, single, and got a line like this from a women, unless it came with some form of explicit rejection, I would consider it a bonus. A single guy in his 20s should be enjoying his freedom, and having an bunch of casual date/etc partners shouldn't be viewed as a problem. Guys have time on their side, and that starts to become really apparent in the 30's.
No, it's really not. If one wants to live a 1950s-style life (e.g. a single car, no cable, no Internet, entertainment mostly playing outdoor sports, squeezing an entire family into under 800 square feet, eating mostly canned foods, children going to public school, each member of the family only owning a few changes of clothes) then one can manage to support a family on a single income.
But if one wants to have a modern lifestyle, with a big house, a bathroom for each member of the family, eating out, electronic entertainments, big closets &c. — then yeah, it'll cost a lot.
For example: the average rent for a tiny apartment in são Paulo (city that has 200.000 homeless households) is about the same as the minimum wage. thus you need someone to pay only the rent, and someone else to buy food, clothes, and so on.
If there are no incentives (or in reality - negative incentives) for men to fulfill their traditional roles in society then why should men do that?
Financially - you're absolutely right, you're not getting anywhere in life on one income. To make any real money you have to really bust your ass as an entrepreneur but lets get real - vast majority of people don't have the motivation, discipline and desperation to do that.
Marriage is a pretty much a scam for men - a voluntary agreement to be a beast of burden. 80% of men shouldn't be married (at least not to people they are).
Same with most young men. Your statement is unnecessarily gendered.
But now, they have no incentive to change that behaviour, in fact, the whole point of the article is talking about such behaviour, thus why I don't mention it explicitly on my comment, my whole comment is about why they keep that behaviour, thus mentioning it again would be redundant.
This one is nearly as whiny as your strange stereotype of woman.
divorce is "too easy". The only thing this sentence says is that divorce happens frequently and that's an inherent bad thing. The only implied solution to this problem of divorce being "too easy" to initiate would be to somehow make it more difficult for women to divorce their husbands... an incredibly disturbing sentiment.
> young women are not interested in serious relationships (instead they are interested in having fun, one-night stands, drinking, sex, etc...)
bog-standard misogyny that reads like a post off of /r9k/, totally anecdotal and paints all young women as stupid and sexually promiscuous.
As for "not interested in serious relationships" I think the posters anecdotes are valid and there is no misogyny on his part. If anything - I'd recommend the OP to embrace the new normal and not stress about it.
You're talking about common-law marriage, which is actually a very old institution. The Supreme Court approved its validity in 1877. It also still, in most states that still have it, requires that both members of the couple involved declare themselves to be married and/or present themselves to the community as a married couple.
It's actually starting to go away, even: Pennsylvania banned it taking effect in 2005, and Alabama will abolish it effective with the beginning of next year.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage_in_the_Uni...
Saying that women are not interested in serious dating isn't sexist, although it is an oversimplification of a real issue.
In 2012, 34 percent more women than men graduated from U.S. colleges. Today, the odds of a college graduate marrying a non-graduate are lower than at any point since the 1950s. Hence, there are probably more women not engaging in serious relationships.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/07/06/has-being-si...
This single fact explains lots of things in the present. It appears we're trapped in a local maximum while journalists and politicians blithely ignore the plateauing of growth, wages and technology outside of computation.
If you think everything is getting better and better, you've taken your eyes off the road for a while now.
I would say that housing should be less expensive. These prices are impossible even with a good salary. You need two good salaries to buy one house and still have money for your other expenses.
It's a mess.
Alternatively, selling to cash out and move to some spot favored by American retirees, such as Costa Rica or Palma de Mallorca, where the dollar (as well as Social Security check) goes much further.
How much of that city owned land is zoned residential, has no building restrictions and is set up for electricity, gas, water and roads? Most developers also present a choice of finishings, if you're committing to a brand-new construction, where one can go from custom Italian marble to basically nothing. KB Homes and Lennar are particularly known for no-frills simpler-designs cheaper units, check out South or East San Jose and anywhere in Morgan Hill / Gilroy vicinity.
Much rather live in Seattle, NYC, Boston, etc. Much better living, profoundly more jobs (both in number and variety), far better culture, better politics, much more environmentally friendly.
It's debatable over whether or not North Texas counts as "the midwest" (really, Texas can be divided into five sections, which go into separate regions), but I like to think of it as such. We're in Tornado Alley, and most of Dallas feels like a typical middle-American suburb.
TBH I've heard Texas has a pleasingly libertarian vibe about many personal choices, but you are required to love HS football.
Edit: for the downvotes lets remember that Puerto Rico is part of the U.S. and that Puerto Ricans are American (i.e. estadounidense).
How the hell do you pay so little? I pay $25/month just to have a gas connection.
Judging by the downvotes, many people are totally in denial about this. It is pathetic.
I'm a red blood tooth and nail capitalist. If I say wage stagnation is real you had better believe it.
Compensation has risen consistently, it's just been mostly (untaxed) non-wage compensation.
It is not that I don't believe non-wage compensation exists, it is that the same pattern exists in most other Western countries, not just America. It tends to begin a decade or so later in my own country and others (explained by us playing economic catch-up), but it is the same pattern. You can't explain this with a little redistribution here or there. Remember we're talking about (in this article's context) mostly younger people bearing the brunt of this, so it is not as if they are incurring major medical bills on average, thereby not requiring that health subsidy, so that is a hypothetical rather than a fact.
I suspect this is all better explained by lack of technological change (ex-computation) with logical follow through in the growth statistics and wages.
Let me give you an anecdote. Most graduated students from universities make less income per year than I did from my summer job. Read that twice. And I wasn't making much more than min wage at the time.
That can partly be explained by oversupply, but fundamentally this is such a contradiction to the education/wealth meme (go to Yale or go to Jail, you don't want to get a job at Mikky-Ds) that it has slipped under most older people's radar altogether.
The fact is actually that most college students would have been better off working minimum wage, living with their parents. They would be in a considerably better position today if that had taken that advice.
This is changing rapidly, more people are waking up to the realities of the job markets.
There is no longer any point in going to college. The jobs just don't pay enough for it to make any sense. I went to an elite university and I'm saying it. People who have the good fortune to have rich parents should not be counted as part of the statistics because there is a limit to the number of people who can work internships from Dad's townhouse in the most expensive cities in the world.
You adjust ROI for cost of living and you quickly discover any students in 'good jobs' have wealthy parents capable of covering their living expenses in places like London, New York.
This was not always the case, but it is now.
Today's intelligent student is better off starting their own company. Not because it is easy or likely to succeed, but because they are all out of options.
I suspect this is all better explained by lack of technological change (ex-computation) with logical follow through in the growth statistics and wages.
In that case, why has the US experienced significant compensation growth? Does the US have technology that they don't share with Europe?
Remember we're talking about (in this article's context) mostly younger people bearing the brunt of this, so it is not as if they are incurring major medical bills on average, thereby not requiring that health subsidy, so that is a hypothetical rather than a fact.
A lot of non-wage compensation is structured as wealth redistribution towards politically favored classes (e.g. old people) - that's the whole point. So what?
It sounds like your real complaint that older voters have hijacked the mechanism of government to steal from the young. (See also cost of living in NIMBY-filled places like NYC and London.)
> It sounds like your real complaint that older voters have hijacked the mechanism of government to steal from the young. (See also cost of living in NIMBY-filled places like NYC and London.)
That sure is a major part of my complaint yeah.
You probably already know this but that is something Niall Ferguson in his Reith lectures several years ago referred to as the breakdown of Burke's Social Contract, that inter-generational warfare will ultimately turn young people to the right wing whether they like it or not (four years after that claim, we witness the surge of alt-right, chan culture going from random to the right, the ever broader resonance of neoreactionary thinking). At some point I think these social critiques of their parent's religion (constantly reliving the 60s rebellion against their parents) convert to something about political economy and this all goes supernova. I don't think Trump is that point, this is a trend that is just beginning. I think the implosion of social democracy is on the way. Briefly, it is an end to migrants, healthcare and pensions (and military subsidies for us Euros). Instead resurgent tribalism, provoked and maintained by the Net and a total pull down of all those leftist memes about equality, oh the humanity, colonialism and so on. Basically from the perspective of the NYT it is the End Times. Hello and welcome back to the Victorian Era (2.0)!
All this is a symptom rather than a cause. Generational rebellion is quite normal after all. A total reinterpretation of history requires more of an explanation. That is what happens when the foundations come into question. Egalitarianism and universal thinking (as personified by Thomas Friedman) tends to flourish in times of peace and wealth, aristocracy when peace and wealth are in question. This is good news for Silicon Valley actually. And DARPA.
That means the cause is a lack of true economic growth. All economic growth must ultimately source from technological progress. The relationship between the technological world -> economic world -> social world -> political world is complicated but it exists, it is the bedrock of all.
Notice how money is free at 0% interest. Notice serious drops in oil price. Notice hordes of well educated students with no money. Notice lack of inflation. Notice the pervasive underemployment. The economy has lost its mojo. All those signs should traditionally have led to explosive economic growth, startup formation but they ain't. The economy has lost its mojo in some structural way and the levers at the Fed and ECB aren't responding except with the sound of grinding gears.
I think your graph from the Fed tells us more about the Fed than real incomes. Compensation! Total fudge factor when they are getting ridden for not producing results I'm sure.
>> I suspect this is all better explained by lack of technological change (ex-computation) with logical follow through in the growth statistics and wages.
> In that case, why has the US experienced significant compensation growth? Does the US have technology that they don't share with Europe?
First, I cannot prove this without expertise in forensic accounting but I'll tell you what I suspect to be true. I realize that isn't great but I don't know there's something better when talking at this kind of scale.
It is mostly demotic accounting fraud. Europe has already been there and done that with social democratic policy. There are some outliers but it is mostly fraud - by which I mean magick money from nowhere. Your compensation is coming from redistributive policies that fuck the future for short term political gains. As is tradition. A voucher for marked up dental work and broken roads.
The thing with those compensations is that you can make them seem infinite in scope, but tweak the parameters such that people don't actually receive a genuine benefit.
In my country we have free healthcare. You will also die on the waiting list before it materializes so people pay twice (taxed + also get private insurance). In the UK across the water pensioners appear to have a good deal but everybody suspects the entitlements aren't going to exist when they are called upon. I hear something similar is going on with SS in the USA. Entitlements are part real initially (borrowed perhaps from infrastructure funds or Fort Knox, somewhere where the loss isn't obvious for a long time) but it is ultimately a hypothetical.
Similar thing goes for corporate compensation. You surely know most of that is pure fraud. Dental work valued at 250 bucks when it is really worth 50 on the market, that kind of thing, only on an industrial scales across all the institutions.
We ought to thinking of this like a value investor. They like to see hard cold cash dividends. That guarantees something is working, right? And the absence of that... traditionally is either serious growth or serious bullshit.
> Do you have data on total compensation per hour in other countries, or are you just relaying anecdotes?
Total comp per hour I couldn't find anywhere (probably difficult as hell to calculate, esp. historically) but these graphs sum up the picture I'm trying to relay.
You'll rightfully complain compensation is missing from the graphs. Then again I would argue compensation was missing from the data for most of historical time. What was the value of a working housewife who converted staples into nutritious meals? That is a kind of compensation just as healthcare from a government is. Maybe if people had the time to prepare decent meals and relax for a bit instead of being harried by bills and rent they would be less unfit and thereby...
The man said that he'd tried driving for the taxi company, but it didn't work for him. I had various other passengers who'd also tried their hand at taxi driving, and couldn't make money. The traditional model for running a taxi service involves leasing cabs out for 12 hour shifts. Drivers have to work as much of those 12 hours to maximize their income. The first couple hours pay for the lease. An hour or two pays for gas. The last few hours are when you pay yourself.
This passenger had started driving for the Venture Capitalists' "not-a-taxi" business, and he thought it was great. The venture capitalists' business taps into the vast hoards of people who aren't good employee material, and those who want to supplement their income. But the money wasn't really enough for this passenger - he was working on a way to increase his income. After expenses, driving for the venture capitalists is the same as driving for the taxi company: they're both low-skill minimum-wage jobs.
It was a very nice neighborhood... I imagined that this family had support from their parents to be able to live there.
When I was talking to my ex-wife yesterday, she pointed out that I value freedom more than anything else. This is why I was drawn to taxi driving, and why I stuck with it for so long. The taxi company had their dress code, and standards. They didn't care what I did with their taxi, as long as I paid them at the end of the shift. I could have found a regular JOB, but I enjoyed the adventure of going new places every day, and meeting new people every day, and occasionally being sent to help someone who needed more than just a ride.
JOB is a backronym that stands for "Just Over Broke". My income from taxi driving was enough to finance my entrepreneurial ambitions.
The only "real job" I've had was working for Amazon [1]. I worked at a summer camp when I was 12 or 13. After I graduated from teh college with a "B.S." Computer Science degree (it is an expensive piece of paper that hangs on my father's wall), I worked at various family-owned businesses, and helped take care of my grandparents...
I am not well-suited to being an employee. Now that I don't drive around in the taxi anymore, I'm thinking about applying for the IT department at the local hospital... Recently I went to visit a friend in the ER, and this fellow was swapping out a scanner, so I struck up a conversation... It'd be a temporary gig.
"Millions of young males have left the workforce and civic life. Full employment? The U.S. isn’t even close."
If the USA is not close to full employment, then the USA does not have to work about inflation. And yet, in other commentary, the Wall Street Journal has been obsessed with the risk of inflation, for many years now. They have urged the Fed to raise rates to head off a surge in inflation. But if there is hidden unemployment, then rates can remain low longer, with little risk of inflation.
The thing with inflation, is that its not broad-based, 1930s-fill-a-wheelbarrow-with-Deutschmarks-for-a-loaf-of-bread inflation, it's inflation in some sectors and deflation in others. Housing, education and health care are going through the roof, but groceries and consumer goods are staying about the same or getting cheaper, and gasoline and heating costs are the lowest they've been in a decade or more.