No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

Over time, I have reflected and shifted this perspective. That reflection centered around the question the author hasn’t asked himself yet: who creates these expectations? It’s always some loose definition like “society” or “elite”, or some other handy wavy grouping of people.

But, to be clear, those expectations are coming from the author. That’s his perspective of what the world thinks, based on his interactions, based on what he chooses to read, listen to, etc. He's not describing anyone but himself.

I found that if I find myself projecting onto social norms, society, or some other loose definition of “they”, what I’m really doing is projecting a part of myself that I haven’t been honest about yet.

I’d find this statement equally compelling (which is to say, not at all):

> Since we stopped using horses as a primary means of transportation, men’s sense of self worth has diminished. Riding a horse carried a lot of high status connotations: drive, masculinity, towering above the land, and man’s domination over nature. Now, we drive metal cars, low to the ground, and driving one is seen as commonplace. All of men’s low sense of self worth stems from this.

> "Today, one in six American men between the ages of 25 and 54 are unemployed or out of the workforce altogether: about 10 million men. This number has more than doubled since the 1970s."

We have this place in the USA called "The Rust Belt" which was once a dynamic and active manufacturing center providing millions of well-paid jobs for these now unemployed American men. California once had a world-class electronics manufacturing industry (and a garment manufacturing industry) that provided hundreds of thousands of such jobs. Under the rubric of neoliberal globalization, those jobs were shipped out to Mexico, China, Indonesia, India and other low-wage centers, and the huge cut in labor costs went right into the pockets of a small fraction of now-extremely wealthy Americans. Why neglect that phenomenon?

> "Over the past half-century, the number of men per capita behind bars has more than quadrupled."

Again, we have a robust alternative explanation: the explosion in incarceration under the War on Drugs program launched by Nixon in the early 1970s and continued and amplified by successive Democratic and Republican administrations. This resulted in the explosive growth of the quite profitable private prison complex (which did not exist before the 1970s), and of course enforcement was highly skewed towards poor and minority groups. These groups were far more likely to smoke crack on the street corner than to snort cocaine in private clubs, and a 100-wt of cocaine powder was considered equivalent to a 1-wt of crack crystal in sentencing.

So if the author wants solutions to these problems, why not promote rewriting domestic and international law to exert significant penalties on corporations who outsource manufacturing overseas, and also end the War on Drugs by eliminating incarceration for possession of drugs, and instead focus on a public education approach emphasizing the benefits of getting off drugs and alcohol?

"You put a guy in chaotic and impoverished circumstances. And then you decide not to expect anything out of him. How can anyone possibly believe this will lead to anything other than disaster?"

I think the author has neglected a hugely important factor in this. Sure, what others expect of you can influence you greatly. But what one expects for themselves is a huge factor too. This self expectation can be largely driven by what opportunities one perceives to be available to them. Some of those perceptions are influenced by others, like teachers or parents exposing the child to a possible career path. Others are what the see their peers and slightly older group doing. Among this vein...

How hard is it to get a decent job today if you have a criminal record, even a minor one, vs in the 1970s?

How have real wages trended since the 70s?

Where have the high paying (relative to working fast food, etc) manufacturing jobs gone? How many jobs require expensive college degrees now?

Enlisting used to be a widely available option. How about now? I believe it's much more selective about who they take.

It might not be that young men are expected to do nothing. It might be that society has created a system in which it is hard for young men to do anything. If you have a lack of hope because the deck is stacked against you and none of your peers are making anything of themselves, then why wouldn't most people give up? Lack of hope and reduction in meaningful opportunity is a huge problem. There are many factors behind these. But the author doesn't seem to touch on any of them.

Having children out of wedlock is a safety valve for broken institutions that keeps the birth rate higher in the US than comparable countries; that plus relatively open integration helps us maintain our economy, welfare state, pensions, etc.

If we turned the screws on women and men to discourage out-of-wedlock births we might find that people decide not to have children at all.

Henderson suffers from the same research bias as Charles Murray, the author of the cited study. I don't disagree with Henderson's conclusion in general, but the journey from A to B is inconsistent as Fishtown and Philadelphia (the poorest city in America) as a whole are substantial case studies on deindustrialization and the impact those lost jobs have on a once thriving community.

This deindustrialization is also partially responsible for the increase in drug use and drug activity in Fishtown during this time of unprecedented job loss. Fishtown used to be the opioid capital of the country in the 1970s. This activity has since been pushed into the adjacent neighborhood of Kensington [1].

The impact of deindustrialization and the loss of good paying factory/union jobs has more to do with the breakdown of the family unit in the last 70 years than any of the other idea Henderson cites.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/magazine/kensington-heroi...

It’s really no surprise that if your only options for work don’t pay much and demand a ton, you’re not gonna be too invested in that work. If you don’t see how you can build a stable life for yourself through work…why work?

Expectations go both ways. We used to expect people to work hard at one job that a household could survive on. Such jobs basically no longer exist outside of tech or law, so it’s natural that other behaviors change too.

And to the author’s fevered insistence that nobody can talk about this…I suggest talking to people. This is a very common discussion on the left, outside of his weird caricatures.

> But broken homes are a fairly recent phenomenon.

I don't get why the author dismisses income, and especially income inequality, so quickly. Since the 1960s the income gap between the affluent and the working class has grown a lot. The quality of "working class" jobs has also declined. Where in 1960, "working class" meant you could afford a house, a car, healthcare, and often had a pension provided by your employer. A 2022 working class job looks more like Amazon warehouse work where you can be fired at any time for failing to meet some algorithmic quota.

It's no wonder then that respect plays a role:

> Money usually becomes an issue because he seems unwilling to keep at a job for any length of time, usually because of issues related to respect. Some of the jobs he can get don’t pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss.

Perhaps the real failing of the upper class is creating jobs that treat the working class like disposable cogs, liable to be discarded at will. And yet the author subtly shifts the blame for onto the working class for not putting up with it.

"Norms were loosened around being an absentee father. So more men took the option."

No source is provided. Just an opinion. It's pretty clear that anyone with this kind of opinion about "societal norms" and pressures has a pretty myopic view of history that doesn't go back before the 1950s, or an extremely sanitized view of history. It couldn't possibly be because of increasingly bleak outlook for the children of the working-class or a failed war on drugs or any number of actual tangible things other than "people are being degenerates"

The 1960s version of this story instead ends with the husband beating his wife behind closed doors without repercussions.

Which is preferable?

As I see it, what's happened in the middle class is that relationships don't reach the stage of full commitment until much later (walking away is considered to be normal and healthy prior to marriage, people expect to have several relationships before "settling down", etc), but having children before you've reached a committed relationship is still very much thought of as reckless and bad.

So overall I just don't really buy this part; it does not seem well supported by the rest of the piece.

Quoting the paras just as a reference for which part I'm referring to: "The educated class decides cohabiting partnerships are just as valid and important as marriage. And they also believe it’s okay to walk away at a moment’s notice from a cohabiting relationship.

"Poor and working-class people follow suit. To the detriment of themselves and their children."

Amy, a white thirty-year-old mother of three, ages six, five, and three, had a boyfriend who worked steadily but insisted on spending on selfish pursuits. This is what eventually broke the young couple up. ‘He wouldn’t spend money for the kids’ food. I had to send my kids across the street to my mom’s to feed them and stuff. That’s what I got fed up with. I shouldn’t have to live like that…I said it’s time for him to support these kids instead of [me] being on [assistance], and he didn’t like it.’”

To put it another way: He didn't want to support another man's children (or various men's children). I think that's entirely reasonable but a better approach would have been to not get involved with Amy at all.

This makes it sound like it is just men who need sex and have to do things to get it. One would think that everybody needs sex and thus women need it too. And it would stand to reason that the less fortunate women would need sex and be not able to get it easily and thus have to resort to sleeping with jerks and raising kids as a single mother.

So just saying women should stop sleeping with jerks is not really a practical thing. If anything good men should be expected to sleep with not so fortunate women to cut the jerks out of the equation ;)

Kidding aside this is a very complex problem and the article trivializes it - education, assistance to kids in need(mental/physical health, financial, foster care), providing compatible opportunities and then setting expectations will make a dent in this problem. And then there are just incompatible people doing stupid things that should be left to their devices and outcomes - there is no fixing willful idiocy. But what social policies need to do is provide a way out for anyone who wants it.

> Those who sit at or near the apex of the social ladder (who decide what behaviors are prestigious) have decided that family stability is unimportant.

Up to this point, the problem statement has all been about choices made by those lacking wealth, but now we seem to have suddenly veered into that being the fault of those "at or near the apex of the social ladder" and in a way I can't relate to. On the contrary, hard work and "hustle" seems more high status than ever!

Maybe this is a minor point, but I have been finding this two-step of 1. Identify a problem among the low status / poor / blue collar, 2. Blame it on the elite, disorienting. I first came across it in JD Vance's book where I thought he did a really good job of identifying problems with the culture he was raised in but then ended the book with (in my view) misplaced blame and no real ideas for how to fix any of the problems. And it just seems like I've seen people (JD Vance quintessentially) doubling and tripling down on that pattern ever since.

Edit to add (now that I've finished reading the article): I think there is an entire premise here that I really don't buy, that this culture is driven by the affluent and "middle class meaning college degree holders". In my experience this isn't right at all; nobody in the working class cares in the slightest what academics at Harvard or wherever think about family formation and stability. They aren't aware of what academics think, and wouldn't care what they think if they were to become aware of it. It is very roundabout to identify a cultural problem and then blame that problem on the milieu within a different culture that does not exhibit the same problem...

Note that I'm not criticizing or looking down on people for giving up. It's a rational response when you believe that the standards are being set unrealistically high or you're going to be blamed/condemned no matter what you do. Why expend your energy on a lost cause? Save it for something you can win. I've done it myself, and called it strategic thinking. Everyone who has quit a job or broken off a relationship has given up. What I'm saying is only that it seems more common than it used to be. People turn to it more quickly. So called "deaths of despair" have been trending upward for quite some time. "Lottery or nothing" thinking (ahem crypto) is everywhere. For people at the margins, teetering on the very edge between giving up vs. hoping against hope and soldiering on even though they expect to fail, the balance seems to have shifted more toward giving up.

What I'd like to understand is why. Have circumstances really changed in a way that generates more despair than before? Are there messages we as a society are sending that encourage giving up instead of persevering? I don't have the answer, but it seems like a far more general phenomenon than just absent fathers and it's not limited to one political or economic group.

There are so many factors here the article doesn't touch on. Such as men's biological desire to maximize sexual partners, women's biological desire to maximize quality of and support for offspring, and cultural variation of expectations among all classes.

In my circle most of us were raised by parents in unhappy marriages. (Often for religious reasons.) The few happy marriages appeared surreal like some fake Hollywood production. So the same norms that keep families 'intact' can have a lot of unhealthily effects.

There's also less of a ramp or ladder for men who do want to support the family to commit to such an obligation confidently.

> This highly educated and affluent person prioritized stability for her own children. But refused to publicly endorse this value so that less fortunate children could also benefit from family stability.

I’m from a rigidly socially conservative immigrant family that professes fashionably liberal values in public—imposing a double standard between “us” and “Americans.” Meanwhile my wife’s family is from a working class part of the Oregon coast. Watching and hearing about the family instability in these communities is heartbreaking. Half or more of everyone’s parents are divorced. The kids float around seeking stability and the adults can’t provide it.

The article is right on the mark talking about the importance of social expectations for men. My family’s rigid expectations have been such a blessing. It made a difference that the way to earn their respect was to get an education and a good job and support my family, and knowing that I would lose that respect if I did anything selfish to destabilize my kids’ lives. The contrast made me realize that professing liberal social values that one doesn’t live by harms society. It matters what we say about what’s good and what’s bad, what works and what doesn’t. Creating a culture where men can attain dignity and social respect by providing for their family and staying with the mother of their kids matters. And creating a culture where men are told it’s okay not to do those things creates harm.

This isn’t really a political point though it sounds like one. Social change has swept through America so thoroughly that the head of the “conservative” party is a three-times-divorced man of little character. The social and cultural guard rails have been removed from the whole country. But the impact is obviously felt most damagingly in parts of the country where men need to find dignity in working at the animal feed plant are harder hit by that cultural change than parts of the country where men can find dignity earning half a million dollars a year doing interesting knowledge work.

> The people with the most money and education—the class most responsible for shaping culture and customs—ensure that their children are raised in stable homes. But actively undermine the norm for everyone else.

I am not from the USA but I don't believe this is true in e.g. Europe. At least in my country (Spain) and where I live now (Japan), it is understood even by the upper class that it's better to live in an educated society than in a criminal one. Sure there's some within that upper class that might want it, but I'd say it's a tiny minority of classists and not the upper class overall. But I also believe that in these countries the upper class is closer to the middle/lower classes, while in the USA I can see how the huge gap might make more people in the upper class think that it's an impossible goal and just give up and try to isolate the classes.

I hate to be the person to point this out, but this ideal has all of the same problems as the incel plan. Women are going to find whoever they think is attractive attractive and there's nothing you can do about it no matter how high or low your social aims.

Yes, a lot of people would love to rewrite human nature to make pudgy men with stable jobs the peak of male form but that is as ridiculous as it sounds. :-)

If you want to do anything about this it's going to have to involve changing men.

I'm afraid that the author got it wrong. All social norms were destroyed between 1950's and now. If society desires hard working, law abiding, family loving young men, it should rebuild what it destroyed.

The only interesting point in the story was about that "expert" which publicly behaves how society coerces her now to behave but secretly raises her own children in a way that she deems better for their well-being but comes into contradiction with the norms of the day.

So yes, trying to destroy family, religion, men self esteem and purpose in life, by creating a hedonistic society with no morals will prove a disaster for Western society. A disaster which if extended for long will equate to suicide.

I wouldn't blame young men but those evil people who continuously waged war on Western civilization and tried to demolish everything good while promising freedom, justice, equality. Freedom, justice and equality nobody got.

This is very dependent on whether there are children or not. I don't think the educated class believes that it's ok for a father to just walk away from their children and refuse to be a major part of their lives.

Does it seem that a lot of this is "we hollowed out these areas for economic efficiency and then all the dudes (regardless of race...) became layabouts and drug addicts". I grew up in Kenya after the SAPs were imposed by the IMF and I vaguely remember complaints of alcoholism just spiking. I guess my dumb thought is maybe dudes just need to build, farm, or produce something tangible otherwise they become heroin addicts.

Im curious what rich will have to say to few billion ppl on Earth then.

“Dude just get a better job”

“Just try harder” “Some generic slogan that doesnt work in reality.

The whole modern world is a ponzi scheme. There have to be ppl starving so that I can write that post on my iphone while sitting on the toilet in 4 bedroom appartment..

For that to change we need a system change. And we all know it will never happen, because humans have greed and inequality encoded in DNA. (Its actually true if you search for right papers).

Which is extremely sad, because our human nature is probably what will destroy us in the long run.

I’m not disagreeing with the notion that people want to appear progressive and thus don’t want to discourage “new family models”, of course they do, but that’s a symptom of identity politics, which are a direct result of the absence of culture, which, imo, is a direct consequence of Maslow pyramid.

Fix social stability, then we can afford to talk about fixing culture.

Women are massively encouraged in society today, by a barrage of persistent and positive messaging across all mediums. Young men are not. The results were highly predictable and it has been warned about for multiple decades at this point.

Women are subsidized and favored in their pursuit of education. Men are not.

Today from a young age girls are told they can do anything, they can be anything. Today they're openly told they're better than boys and that's not considered sexist. Women walk around with shirts or other propaganda formats that say: The Future is Female. That's hyper sexist, hyper bigoted against men, and yet in society it's tolerated. This cultural behavior is regressive and intentionally promoting of inequality.

The pendulum is increasingly swinging hard against men. If you want a collapsed society, allow it to continue. The deficit is already so bad it'll take decades to repair, in society broadly, from the damage that has occurred amongst younger males.

I just watched "Dancing with the Birds", a documentary on Netflix with great footage of male birds of paradise and bower birds seducing their mates. It strongly underlines the above proposition. These birds perform absurd, bizzare, wildly expensive behaviors for no other purpose but that the chicks dig it. After that the male gets under the female tail feathers, and that's his last contribution to fatherhood.

I think we typically underestimate how much this applies to humans, and how much female political power is also sexual power, and visa versa, for good and ill.

Yep. If you were raised in poverty, the WORST thing you can do is listen to "approved" mainstream advice. That culture / media isn't there to help you, but to sell you things or make money on telling you what you want to hear.

I'll go one step further and say that if you are a man born into poverty, check out Aaron Clarey's asshole consulting. Don't agree with everything he says, but as a starting point, that's 10 times better than what your guidance counselor will tell you.

> At the event, Parkinson stressed the importance of stability and two-parent families for children.

As oppose to a single parent that needs to work all the time, sure. But just read a few anthropology books, every possible combination of family and child raising method has worked in the past. Children raised in a small village, or extended family seems like it would be even better than a some modern concept of a traditional family where one member works and other cares for the house and children. In the UK the popular opinion in Victorian times was that children should not be shown affection because it would make them weak. Or even continuing to this day that the upper class don't really involve themselves with the child rearing too much - nannies and boarding schools. Probably that's another rearing method that's quite poor https://bylinetimes.com/2021/04/28/boris-johnson-is-a-boardi...

All the institutions that promoted marriage are ignored, so people are testing the shark-filled waters and going it alone.

Society-wide, this is self correcting over a couple centuries though, as the families which prioritize values are out-breeding those that do not (e.g. birth control is quickly segregating population growth by culture).

Government programs (as presently conceived) will never catch up in terms of effectiveness because they don't have this self-replicating behavior. They can provide relief but not much in the way of lasting improvement.

We should focus a lot more efforts socially and politically to create self-sustaining families and avoid culture and policies that disrupt them.

This is just not true. It's almost constantly talked about, it's even a trope in movies, jokes, singers saying about it.

What is really not discussed is the other side of the equation. Who chooses those men?

Are women equally capable to make moral choices (I believe they are). Or are they just kind-of-sentient robots that are programmed to have kids, will grab any man that will make them pregnant and deserve only compassion when that "random choice" does not turn out to be a good dad?

I think (in terms of culture) this is closer (than what the author claims) to the truth: Complain about men not pulling their weight. Never mention women responsibility. It's taboo to discuss it openly in a good faith. So now we have a fringe claiming men are only victims of women evil, which is another side of this stupid-coin. We can't meet in the middle anymore.

The article makes some fantastic and insightful points but one thing it ignores that I think is important is the fact we started paying people not to get married in the form of increased public benefits for single parents.

>For example, there are many studies on identical twins separated at birth who are adopted by different families.

How the hell are there 'many' studies on this? I'd think this Prince and the Pauper scenario would be so fantastic, that there'd be no more than a dozen cases, owing to the extreme rarity of circumstances which all need to happen for this sensational scenario to come about.

Or do psychiatrists make sure somehow that identical twins in orphanages are adopted with people from different socioeconomic strata?

Many people here are outright slaves. They are trapped in a predatory system that prevents them from gaining any dignity. It should be no surprise that some people say "fuck this," and drop out of the system or refuse to climb the corrupt social hierarchy. The millions of young men missing from the workforce are all speaking with their actions, "I don't approve of this system. I'd rather die than comply with it."

Without an effective system of representation, this is how people express their discontent: drop out or commit crime. No one that believes in their country becomes a criminal. A precondition for criminality is always a loss of morale. That's why the system comes down on these "criminals" so hard, not because their crimes are so bad, but because they are dissidents.

Some of you drive to work along streets full of homeless people. You are told that these are just drug addicts or problem makers. In truth, they are obsolete or noncompliant slaves.

This can't last forever. One day we'll all be asking how we could let it get so bad, but it will be too late--I fear.

It seems to be claiming that differing social norms leads to unstable lower class families.

But a) im pretty sure being a deadbeat dad is still considred bad among all social classes

b) if that was the case, why is this disporpotionately affecting lower class. Do middle class have different norms?

C) the article talks about a woman who broke up with her partner because he was a shit partner. Isn't that the opposite of the thesis of the article? Man did not meet expectations so was kicked to the curve?

Now, I will get onto my down voting. I have watched generations of men devote himself to video games. They develop amazing skills in these artificial worlds. At the same time, I was reading tons of books, writing a few of my own and generally avoiding TV and video game. Of course, I was the freak. But I cannot wonder if that life in the fantasy land a video game has not left its traces in these men.

I am supposed to believe that a "sociology professor at Princeton, and Kefalas, a sociology professor at St. Joseph’s University" can somehow convince me that he knows what a "low-income woman" thinks or does in her life. I've lived around "low-income women" my whole life and I haven't figured it out.

"The conventional view is that a lack of money leads to out-of-wedlock births."

Whose conventional view? This is not the view of poor people.

"Today, one in six American men between the ages of 25 and 54 are unemployed or out of the workforce altogether: about 10 million men.", the book this came from was written by a conservative scientist from Iowa. I tried to check some of the stats and every one of them seem to be wrong.

This link outright proves there are not 10 million men unemployed in America. https://www.statista.com/statistics/193244/unemployment-leve... So who's statistics are right?

This is a horrible article that seems to do nothing by try and place blame rather than provide a solution to a problem that does not exist. I will go as far as to say this article is quite racist. The article says "American" men but then only targets white American men in their statistics. Which is it, American men or white American men?

This is a poorly written article based on personal views and statistics that don't even target the proper demographics of the content of the article. Unbelievable.

The families were extremely unstable. There was stigma to straight up divorce, and lots of “everything is fine” when it wasn’t.

Both parents were raised by grandparents, aunts/uncles, etc.

They turned out very well.

I guess that reinforces the authors point.

When marriage isn’t about individual fulfillment, but supporting the community, you get unhappy marriages but stronger communities.

> But nobody wants to admit it because it upsets people.

This is the main thesis of the post sandwiched by loads of data and charts yet completely unsourced and devoid of evidence. Maybe true, maybe not. This is basically a well-reasoned hypothesis but there's no reason to believe it's true.

How about not put them in chaotic and impoverished circumstances? Sweden does not have these problems at the scale the US has.

Also after World War II, a working class guy could get a job at a factory in Detroit, and be able to afford his wife staying home to raise kids in a house he owned, commuting in a car he owned. Maybe going to school on the GI Bill at some point. All of this is gone. People like Charles Murray spent decades attacking the US working class, and now he bemoans that wage slaves are not interested in pursuing the Sisyphean tasks he has laid out.

All of this is concurrent with the material destruction of working class life in the US, which is why the first thing Henderson has to try to knock out is it has anything to do with material conditions.

It was a hell of a lot better to be a working class man in 1960 then 2005. Two thirds of union jobs are now nonunionized etc.

Well, like most forms of discrimination, THAT'S THE POINT. These people aren't blindly going through life, discriminating without a cause. They know damned good and well what they're actually doing and will use the current state of things as justification for why they should continue the trend. In other words, conservatism. And no, it doesn't really matter what they call themselves or who they vote for, because money speaks louder than ballots.

Most parents are well aware that their kids aren't inherently special past their genetic connection. But if you can automatically cut 30-70% of the population out of the competition for the opportunities you crave for your own kid, then that works to your benefit.

As someone who grew up in a poor Eastern European country, I felt both envy and admiration for the US. I thought the Americans had best of everything. US seemed like an ideal in many senses.

20 or 30 years later, I feel grateful we still have families, traditions, respect for ourselves and a way of life which can lead to moments of happiness. All of these are under pressure from self appointed far left elites trying to "civilize" and "westernized" us. I hope they won't succeed and that the West is starting to come back to it's lost senses. A civilization built in thousands of years shouldn't be destroyed in few tens of years by madmen and lunatics.

I will happily accept all downvotes, but I rather get downvotes then not say what I feel.

> Affluent families in 1960: 95% > Working class families in 1960: 95%

> Affluent families in 2005: 85% > Working class families in 2005: 30%

Ok. Maybe that has something to do with this:

More than six out of every ten American households (64.7%) in the bottom fifth of households by income had no earners in 2020. In contrast, only 4.5% of the households in the top fifth of households had no earners last year, providing more evidence of the strong relationship between average household income and income earners per household.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/explaining-us-income-inequali...

This then talks about poor people dating too much/families being unstable… as if the instability isn’t put on the poor by overpolicing. Is this more blaming poor people for their poverty?

People in the second group have to work much harder than those in the first group to achieve well-being, even if they are professionally successful. People in the first group can afford to underachieve, since they will progressively become richer than those in the second group anyway.

The way I see it there is not simply a low and middle class, there is a multitude of subclasses among them that are mostly defined by inheritance. Partly as a result of it, we now live in awkward economic bubbles that don't mate with each other.

Uh. I know the author grew up rough, but yeah, I'm going to need a citation on this one.

This entire article is based on one huge assumption - everything was better when people felt compelled by society to get married. Was it? Was it really?

Is that why there was an entire genre of boomer humour that can be condensed down to "hahaha, I hate my husband/wife?" Were there no social problems attributable to dysfunctional families in the 1960s and 1970s?

Also this...

> And a lot did use to be expected [of men]. There were social norms to work hard, provide, take care of loved ones, and so on. Today, these norms have largely dissolved.

They really have not. Try going on on Tinder as man without a job, see how far that gets you. Now try it as a woman, you'll be shocked and stunned, I'm sure, to see that it's still considered far more socially acceptable to be a woman out of work than a man out of work.

Gender roles are still very much baked into our society. I am the primary caregiver for my children, thanks to being a dev, I work from home full time, so I can do all the things that need doing, yet my wife, their step-Mum, has missed out on several jobs because people assume that she'll need to take too much time off if they get sick - right after she's told them that I'm the primary caregiver who works remotely so is at home for looking after sick kids, and during school holidays etc.

People flat out don't believe her, because they're still stuck in the mindset that men provide, and women care.

On the other hand, my younger sister received less pressure from my parents to success academically. In fact they never expected anything from her, and I feel that's unfair for her, because as a result, she's achieved less than me at her age. I know for a fact that this is a documented phenomena (first borns are more successful).

Could it simply be because in the 60s women were more dependent on men and their income than nowadays?

For example:

> Those who sit at or near the apex of the social ladder (who decide what behaviors are prestigious) have decided that family stability is unimportant.

The author proceeds to quote an anecdote from a UN conference to supposedly back up this point.

In reality, what is actually going on here has nothing to do with "elites" at all. There is a political ideology (to which I suspect the author at least somewhat subscribes) that puts a high priority on self-reliance, "pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps" and an avoidance of state intervention in the lives of individuals. There is another political ideology which acknowledges that we all benefit when society offers support and assistance to people in need of help, in part because none of us really know when or if we may find ourselves experiencing bad luck or bad judgement or both.

The latter political ideology wants to try to help and nurture everyone to whatever extent possible, to avoid judgement on the decisions/mistakes that people make and focus on how to get them back on their feet and how to minimize the social cost of those mistakes.

The former ideology opposes these efforts, and uses the tools of both the law and of funding choices to try to limit the extent and availability of a social safety net, in the belief it is an overall negative influence on society and the individuals that comprise it.

So when people who believe in the social safety net try to avoid condemning single parent families, what they are actually saying is not "family stability is unimportant". They are saying "we know that relationships sometimes, even often, do not work out, and we think that as a society we should provide as much support as we can so that the children and parents in such situations suffer the least harm possible."

They are met with responses like Rob Henderson's, that mischaracterize their concern and empathy, and with responses from legislatures that essentially say "We're not spending our money to support poor people who make bad choices, they should get their act together and hold themselves to higher behavioral standards."

I'm not taking a position here on whether either of these views is the correct one. But I do get tied of people like Henderson trying to fold fundamentally different conceptions about the role of government into some snide dig at "elites". There plenty of wealthy highly educated people in positions of economic, political and cultural power who both insist on the value of family stability AND refuse to provide meaningful support in cases where it isn't happening. Those people are "elites" too, just as much as people who suggest we should be more understanding and forgiving of these failures. Instead of taking cheap, meaningless shots in a useless culture war, it would be better to cogently lay out a rational basis for why your preferred political ideology is better for society overall, given the criticisms that already exist of its real world effects.

I wish there was some kind of pill without much side effects, that made you asexual. Then men could focus on science and other interests.

For Example Sir Isaac Newton's self proclaimed greatest achievement was his lifelong celibacy.

I wonder how sexual selection affects humans overall intelligence... Have human intelligence gone up in the last 200-20000 years or is it the amount of free time that is responsible for the technological boom the last 200 years ? Or does technology advance exponentially ?

These are requirements of high paying jobs, too.

His very weak evidence for this was one affluent person who didn’t want to admit publicly that she prioritizes stability for her children over self gratification - a value which goes against the grain of her inner circle.

He spins that as a class war conspiracy.

Why would such a person ever do something like this? This is basically living a lie? Has society gone so low that it’s considered admirable to take such a position?

In my city, the local government stopped arrests for crimes like theft, property damage, and open drug use. For crimes involving assault, they would maybe do an arrest, keep the person locked up overnight, and then let them go.

The local politicians argued this was right and moral, because these people only commit crime because they come from poverty or generally don’t have “privilege”.

Well… it’s no longer a desirable place to live. The streets are littered with trash, there’s a problem of used drug syringes in public parks and other public spaces, and there are homicides just about every day in the news, or stories of some homeless person assaulting some pedestrian. Just the other week, some old Asian woman got sucker punched. I think a few weeks before that, some drug addict beat a woman with a bat at a public transit stop.

I’m a fairly progressive person, overall. But I look around, and I’m not sure what country I’m in at times.

And I’m writing this on HN because I think the tech industry is part of the problem. When I was at Amazon, we had essentially stopped hiring any demographic in engineering roles except for Indian nationals. We’d bring them in at slightly below market pay (still respectable salaries), but these folks often had 30 days to leave the country if they quit Amazon’s grueling corporate environment. Meanwhile, we didn’t give them the right to vote, effectively shutting down out from the political process. And, for the most part, these folks were willing to work with a toxic work culture, since the alternative meant having to uproot their families and leave the country, perhaps hoping for permanent residency in Canada.

In retrospect, we decided to not hire people born in this country. But we also didn’t want to give the full rights to the people we brought in to substitute them. We knew full and well that if it becomes easy for them to switch jobs, we wont be able to extract the same work hours from them.

Meanwhile, America’s poor are completely forgotten and lost.

Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in the book Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play

Seriously?

This whole article has a pretty offensive view of people. It reads like "nobody dares to say these things because they are unpleasant, but I'm brave enough to say them and therefore they must be true".

For a more meaty examination, I’d recommend Robert Putnam’s “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.”

In my view, doing so is necessary for an author to be intellectually honest and open.

Generally speaking, I'm not looking for an author to 'sneak in' a belief by way of a good narrative.

I've read similar commentary by a socially conservative author writing under a pen name (Theodore Dalyrimple) [1]. He wrote a highly selective account that matched his beliefs. It is one thing to so this -- it is another thing to try to hide the underlying belief system which preceded the commentary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Dalrymple

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKeKuaJ4nlw)

On the whole, if you mothered children in the pre-feminist era, and you didn't have a spouse... you and your children could starve. Because there was very little space carved out in our society for women to work. And under the cover of that asymmetry of power men got away with all sorts of abuses.

Yes, the family may have stuck together. And there was a defined and potentially socially responsible role for men in this context: provider and economic glue and source of authority for the family. But at what cost? Spousal and child abuse rates were sky high, though they may not have even been perceived as such at the time. They were just part of the normal authoritarian structure of the family.

Have young men suffered from the changes that have come along with women obtaining additional powers and the bonds of the nuclear family becoming less strong? Quite possibly. But we also have to accept that what was holding that together was also potentially toxic.

Put another way: In general -- over the last 200 years -- capitalist market relations have severed many traditional bonds and obligations. The primary obligation of an adult individual, in our liberal capitalist society, is as a wage labourer, an economic contributor. On the whole people "are" what they "do" (for $$).

The family structure has always been a mix of authoritarian bonds and genuine warmth, material obligations, etc. I think we're still figuring out what its new form will be. It may be that in our neo-liberal hyper-capitalist present society that there are contradictions here we cannot resolve.

Marx/Engels thought so, anyways, check out this paragraph from the Communist Manifesto:

"On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. "

Now it’s the reverse.

> 3. The upper class, who wants to keep you mired in it

I cannot stress enough how much division and polarization is driven by the wealthy who have a vested interest in sowing discord among the lower classes.

The truth of the matter is that you, as a lower-income white person, have way more in common with a lower-income black person than a wealthy white person. Yet the amount of people who will vehemently oppose the very idea that the likes of Jezz Bezos and 8 other people pay slightly more taxes is mind-boggling.

Republican-controlled state legislatures are busy passing laws to create wedge issues against trans people, gay people, womens' reproductive rights and so on. And it's nothing more than a method of control, of whipping up the base with issues most of the country actually doesn't care about.

I really wish people were better at recognizing this manipulation as we've now progressed to the point where the #1 "news" show in the US is spreading straight up Nazi propaganda [1]. I don't mean that as a perjorative. It is quite literally Nazi propaganda.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGb748VOcYU

I wish social programs could help address these.

> In 1960, across social classes, the vast majority of children were raised by both of their birth parents. By 2005, there was a massive divergence. What happened?

The 60's happened.

Social norms broke down all over the world.

- - - -

Yes, the rich by and large want the poor to be tractable docile workers. Look at history, the relatively recent mass colonization of half the world by a tiny island nation. Slavery. The wealthy and powerful always try to subjugate whoever they can. It's their golf.

- - - -

Yes, society keeps young men in line with the "carrot" of (culturally sanctioned) sex and the stick of ostracism/shunning/shame. This is one of the fundamental pillars of what we call culture.

(The other being death, but that's less popular than sex. With the recent and relative rarity of hairy jerks with swords showing up out of the blue one day to burn down the village and kill, maim, or kidnap everybody in the place, we now use hallucinatory bogeymen for the most part.)

- - - -

Technology has obsolesced a great deal of the work these young folk used to do. (Mostly farming and war.) They are "surplus to requirement" from the POV of the system. All that oxycontin abuse? The rash of suicides? Symptoms of the malaise.

- - - -

So yeah, it sucks to be a drone.

(Heck, if I wasn't good with computers I'd probably be homeless right now. And even that is getting squiffy these days.)

- - - -

On the flip side, there has never been a better time to do things. We have radio-networked pocket supercomputers that can access pretty much the entirety of human knowledge from all of history and all of the world, there are robots, and it's never been easier to get laid.

I threw that last one in as a joke, but it cuts back to the core of the article: once we relax that social control of access to sex, does society fall apart?

(And also the loss of the "common enemy". It's a truism in political science that a common enemy is very very helpful for establishing and maintaining social cohesion. But again we talking mostly about sex here.)

I think the answer to that is, "It depends."

It seems to me that with easy access to birth control we should be seeing the responsible parents having more kids and the promiscuous folks having fewer, eh? So over time society would get stronger, no?

Maybe most people fall into non-reproductive hedonism and the Amish inherit the Earth?

- - - -

I think the bottom line is that if you find yourself a poor male with few prospects you have to figure out a lifestyle that you can live with and get on with it. Society mostly doesn't give a shit about you and is unlikely to start. You can blame the elites, but I've met some and they are just as clueless as everybody else, they just have more money, so it's pretty pointless to blame them. And anyway if you try to do anything to them they can and will shoot you. The entire US Army is essentially there to protect the elites, so good luck with that, if you want to be a rebel.

So where does that leave you?

Make some money. Find some good, solid folks and family up with them. Start a commune in the woods. Live happily ever after. I'm not joking: I've met people that have done this. They are very happy. And there is no (NO!) information about their "thing" on the Internet whatsoever. Think about that: these smurfy people totally exist but you cannot learn of them via the Internet. Most of the really happy settled folks out there DO NOT advertise. They keep quiet. They do not do SEO. You won't see them on television or youtube.

No one is making money from telling you about them so you won't hear about them unless you go looking.

There's a whole world of happy "alternate" lifestyles but "the system" won't tell you about them because it's against the system's interests! That's why hippies are always portrayed as dipshits on TV: if you saw for yourselves the lives of the non-dipshit hippies you would "quit your job, repent, and slack off."

Really it goes back to European vs. Native lifestyles and colonization. The Europeans were psychotic bastards who murdered and tortured and enslaved people, and who had absolute masters and abject servants, and all kinds of psychotic baggage. The native cultures were (and still are in many many places) not quite so messed up.

People who could get away from the towns and join Native American societies didn't want to go back. Whereas Natives had to be forced (typically with savage brutality) to adopt European culture.

"Going native" was perceived as a serious problem, because it was: if you didn't like society, or your actual literal "master" (a person under the psychotic delusion that he or she actually literally owned you) you could try to escape to, say, the Sioux nation.

We mostly exterminated or marginalized these societies, and filled and/or enclosed most of the open land, so it seems like options are fewer.

And today we have "the homeless" to act as a goad: if you don't work you will starve in the street. There's not supposed to be a way out.

This in a land (I'm continuing being provincial here and talking about North America) where the herds of buffalo were so large they could take more than a day to pass by, where the rivers were so thick with salmon during spawning season that it's said you could walk across them, where flocks of passenger pigeons were so thick and numerous that they could eclipse the sun and turn day into night.

We destroyed it, farmed ourselves into the "Dust Bowl", etc...

It doesn't have to be this way, there's a better life out there, but the system won't help you reach it.

So fuck the system. Go make your won system.

He actually writes about the culture and habits of rich kids. They're not elites in any practical sense. That word does not mean "inheritor." The sycophancy of the rich, the presumption that they should be expected to be somehow better than the hoi polloi, is really getting tedious.

Someone is elite because they've accomplished something, not because they've been handed something. Attempting to apply that word to the wallet is common, and remains incorrect and gross. Yes, I know the reader can very easily Google up examples. The reader should also be able to name cases where Googling up examples gives hilariously wrong information.

Rich kids have always been slackers, in every society in human history. The real change here is that we've stopped taxing them, so "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in two generations" doesn't apply anymore.

Ayn Rand was wrong. Stop expecting wealth from parents to create high quality people.

Every study ever done on the matter has shown what common sense and literature have said all along: rich people are just lazy. It is almost certainly the clearer version "everyone who can be lazy is, but many cannot afford to be."

Hell, I would be.

We've forgotten that because we now believe that they're earning their mega-wealth by giving it to bankers to be grown for them. We pretend to ourselves that because they can pay people to produce profits from money they weren't involved in earning, they're somehow doing something. Then, we point out extremely rare individual counterexamples and say "see? See? Elon exists."

The idea that their "doing nothing" is a result of lack of social pressure is disastrously undermined by that they've also done nothing when there was social pressure, throughout all of history; even to the point that several royalties fell because nobody in the royalty could be bothered to stop looking at art and having sex long enough to keep the lights on.

We should want evidence of claims like this.

Even despite the education and resource gap, even scaled to the popular bin sizes, in all of history, the vast majority of invention and business success has come from the unwashed masses.

The null hypothesis supports this as entirely expected, unrelated to what society requests. No society in history has achieved otherwise.

This.

Middle class is deeply demolished, pushed to far lower level of wealth, high, but not so high class start seeing a possible escape toward a new neofeudal class but present situation is too liquid to been able to spot a right place and development plan, the only reasonable target is being flexible and diverse as much as possible, and that for young of the first cohort means the certainty of a future worse than that of their parents, witch fuel unrest and abandonment not taking careers since so far no one taught as you want seems to appear. For the second cohort that means try avoiding a career at all to avoid being trapped preferring gambling on family money waiting for the appearance of a more defined future. Both those cohort are acculturated enough to know that in anything the first pioneers who arrive, the frontier/first line will suffer and die quickly, the seconds, thanks to the knowledge of the pioneers prosper and the third will arrive late to prosper.

Poor know that they will be poorer but that is sold as not a such bad thing, they say society keep going in the end, humans are there for millennia and while there was good and bad moments for the real poor situations have mostly improved a bit, having seen a potential "in 2030 you'll own nothing and be happy" many of that cohort trust or at least desperately hope that that's will be the case.

So IMO essentially all "social classes" except for a very thin and more and more thinner élite see a bad future and no interest to do anything positive, some because there is no logic possible plan to go through the storm some because they think the storm is already around them and they can just hope not knowing because of lack of culture the classic una salus victis nullam sperare salutem.

Honestly, myself, coming from a wealthy family who can afford essentially anything we might reasonably want having a good personal social position, I have many ideas but still deeply hesitate because so far I can't see anything defined enough in the medium-long term. Schools was a deep delusion, at first I study at home with family selected teachers and with wonderful results confronted with my friends. At high school I decide to go to a school and the result was shockingly bad, I literally lived on income for almost all the time, having already more knowledge than the demand. At uni another delusion, programs seems to be designed to form Ford-model stereotypical workers just at an a bit formally higher level. That's was extremely demotivating and I do not know how can be for those who haven't even see something else.

Long story short it's more than mere no expectation: the modern society being way too elitist have deprived of any expectation anyone, promoting and rewarding mediocrity, crushing those who have personal expectations and desire with the clear aim of creating a society of useful idiots in the classic Greek sense, human-robots to be bolted is a pre-defined system. In that environment young can choose between:

- being criminals;

- being terrorists, as a sub-type of criminals whose target is more political and long term than for short-term profit;

- being nihilists abandoned on the screen to just see the world run as a spectacle.

I fear that there is no non-destructive ways out of such impasse. We are so folded in such a crappy social model that a war, a full-scale tragedy seems to be the least devastating option to change. History however tell that such movements never goes as planned, so plans are deeply needed and incredibly hard, while we all know that nothing will go according to the plan anyway, the needed plan is just a pre-digested guide to hope being successfully counter possible development in shorter times... That's stressful enough to made most just hopeless and a few minority neurotic and angry enough to being unable to do much more than quick shots guided by anger and emotions in general.

We are in a Masculine Crisis, and both men and women are suffering, because gender isn't zero-sum, and a society that damages men is just as harmful to heterosexual women, who struggle to find men. Late-stage capitalism's breakdown of the family (which it molded into a bourgeois form, then let rot) happened in black communities about 40 years before it started to hit rural whites. This makes it hard to sympathize with the so-called "white working class", who clutched their pearls and moralized and showed no sympathy at all when this dysfunction was hitting blacks in Detroit, half a century ago.

What is a Masculine Crisis? Well, I think this sentence hits it straight on:

Some of the jobs he can get don’t pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss.

When you tell men that the only way to be masculine is to "provide", and then deprive them of all means to provide except to subject oneself to the whims of a high-status person--a person given that status not on merit but simple random accidents of heredity--you leave them without a decent choice at all. Not playing is no option (a man must "provide") but every play is a losing one (the requisite self-emasculation of subordination). Whether this is a condition of low expectations (society has given up on men) or high ones (as workplace pressures mount, due to the erosion of worker's rights and dignity) is irrelevant; either way, it shuts people down.

Of course, the experience is pretty awful for women, too. Work, for 95% of people in this society, is just horrid. No one should have to do stupid shit to survive--I hope we can agree on that. I just don't think this particular social ill is as gutting for women as it is for men.

When it comes to the Masculine Crisis, we on the left are really missing the opportunity. Ex falso quodlibet; principle of (possibly literal) explosion. When no options exist for someone, he tends to make one. I'm not an accelerationist of any kind (leftist or rightist) but acceleration is happening. Alas, the left is so deep in the cul-de-sac of gender being entirely socially constructed (which is not true) and therefore meaningless (which it's not) that they can't figure out how to operate in this environment. So, instead, the Masculine Crisis is left to be exploited by the center-right (Jordan Peterson) or worse, the actual fascists.

Conditions like this produce war. Why? Because five thousand years of human history have produced exactly one situation in which a man can be subordinate and still accept himself as a man--to pick up a weapon and join an army of some kind. Mind you, I don't want war; I'm staunchly against it except as a last resort. However, conditions like those in the modern workplace (except for those born into hereditary wealth) are at such a level as to throw young men into hopelessness... and they will often do anything for those who promise any kind of hope, no matter false.