Young White Dudes Are Decidedly Opting Out of the Whole ‘Job’ Thing
melmagazine.com
melmagazine.com
> In 2018, Bloomberg reported something similar. “Though employment rates have been climbing back from the abyss, young men never caught up again,” writes Jeanna Smialek. “Millennial males remain less likely to hold down a job than the generation before them, even as women their age work at higher rates.”
> Admittedly, the focus of Smialek’s article and the data she cites is mainly around men without a college degree. But the explanation that Nathan Butcher, then a 25-year-old high school graduate, gave her — “I’m very quick to get frustrated when people refuse to pay me what I’m worth” — is strikingly similar to the one Carlin gives me.
Am I wrong in reading this as "An article on Bloomberg talked about young men mostly without college degrees, and I found a college graduate who sounds like someone from that article, so I can extrapolate this for all young men"? It's not even a handful of anecdotes; it's just the one, and is presented without additional content to help describe why this one case is representative, which is fairly disappointing.
And while the beginning is at least pretty fair in how it represents its hyperlinks, which do lead to real data that is definitely useful and interesting, I started to notice that they got less frequent towards the end. There were things said by a Michael Madowitz but:
The Michael Madowitz cited throughout the article is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_American_Progress, which Wikipedia describes as a "public policy research and advocacy organization which presents a liberal viewpoint on economic and social issues". Not that there's anything explicitly and directly wrong with that, but I'm certain the author could've found a source without an explicit political lean, or have compensated for it somehow by bringing in other viewpoints.
On the whole, I would say that while some of the content this article is made of/links to is useful, the composition itself is not.
[Investing in] crypto played a big part in having any actual money to surviveIt's 1996 and I'm attending an information session for University of Pennsylvania in my hometown.
The presented asks at the start of the session: "Do we have any UPenn alums in the room?" Several folks get up and say "I was class of '67", "I was class of '68" etc.
My first reaction was: "Wow, admissions rates at UPenn are something like 5%. These must have been some smart parents to get in back then."
Little did I know (and which I found out later), admissions rates at UPenn in the 60's was around 50%. Why? Because Johnson cut all of the Eisenhower funding from the 50's so universities had to admit a ton more students to help cover the drop in funding.
I bring up this story because it makes me stop and think about how young people today may be going through a totally different experience than I went through based on some factors totally outside of their control.
How can the author accept the premise that young white dudes are opting out of the whole "job" thing and not at least entertain the possibility that they'll be opting out of the whole "family" thing too?
I read this in the article, and I made a link to the recently-HN-front-paged article from NPR about suburban moms entering the gig economy.
That, and these kids (regardless of race or gender) are getting f-ed in general. I see so many places paying them less than what I was making in their position 20 years ago, and life didn't get any less expensive since then.
I, for one, am glad this isn't the 50s anymore. I have a feeling I wouldn't very much enjoy working with "young white dudes" who have contempt for diversity in the workplace.
When I see a company that makes a point of flaunting how diverse they are, I assume that place is full of the social justice crowd and is probably being run on emotion instead of sound business practice. In my experience, those people and places suck to work with. At best I'm going to end up hearing a bunch of ideological bullshit on a day-to-day, which I don't at all care for at work, and now I have to worry that I'm going to experience discrimination because folks have come up with some weird notion that my pale skin and scrotum means my life is just all kinds of easy and that other folks should have access to programs or a "leg up" that I am not eligible for.
There is nothing noble in pushing for equality of outcome.
No problem of lack of diversity will be solved without dragging down or discriminating against some demographic of society without a full commitment to equality of opportunity.
The myopia involved with being suckered into accepting discrimination against one group to the benefit of another being an acceptable approach demonstrates a lack of commitment to understanding the forces actually at work in the world.
Diversity or lack thereof isn't the problem. Equivalent access to the foundational necessities that facilitate successful integration into, and the ability to further develop and meaningfully contribute to the ends of, society's perpetuation and advancement with minimal accidental systemic compulsion is the problem.
Diversity is just the "bread and circuses" perversion that slows down any meaningful attempt at the former due to some mistaken impression that undoing an injustice must involve a new injustice being committed.
Two wrongs a right does not make.