No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022) | Hacker News Reader

No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

robkhenderson.com

234 pointsmooreds578 comments

This whole article is talking about absentee fathers, but every example is listing why the mother left or kicked out the father.

Nowhere in the article is mentioned the obvious common denominator - women are no longer utterly dependent on their husbands. People didn't stay together more often in the 50s because the couples were better, or because people were held to higher standards, it was because getting out of a terrible marriage was incredibly difficult if not impossible, and even if successful would cause immense hardship.

The article also simply takes for granted that it's a bad thing that these nuclear families do not stay together. While it's true that just directly comparing the children of single mothers to those raised by two parents the former tend to be worse off by a number of metrics, this disadvantage disappears once you normalize for the socioeconomic conditions of the mother, and indeed they are actually slightly better off.

People aren't irrationally making their lives harder, they take actions they feel will be beneficial, and it's unsurprising that they have a good idea of what would be personally beneficial. While the exact mechanism is up for debate, the leading theory is that in underprivileged communities where people tend to have children at a young age a heavy reliance on multi-generation family is more beneficial than the nuclear structure (or in other words, when you have a kid at 18, your 40 year old mother can probably provide a lot more resources and experience than a 19 year old guy).

You can't simply say that men aren't stepping up; the world has changed, mostly for the better, and as a consequence family structures are going to look different now from what they once did.

> This whole article is talking about absentee fathers, but every example is listing why the mother left or kicked out the father.

Because the article takes the very rational and supported by the article side that these mothers were actually founded in kicking them out.

> The article also simply takes for granted that it's a bad thing that these nuclear families do not stay together.

No, the article goes much further that that. It points out that upper-class and middle-class people like to pretend and promote that the nuclear family doesn't matter while themselves acting like it does.

The main thesis of the article is that modern culture is actually undermining the poor while being mostly posturing.

> You can't simply say that men aren't stepping up

It's a good thing that it's not what the article is saying then.

> It points out that upper-class and middle-class people like to pretend and promote that the nuclear family doesn't matter while themselves acting like it does.

Rich people say you don't need a yacht. Yet, rich people buy yachts. Clearly yachts are very important for becoming and staying rich, and the wealthy are undermining the poor with their "yachts are a luxury" posturing.

It is to be expected that people encountering different circumstances would adopt different behaviors. That well-off people are more likely to live in a nuclear family does not mean living in a nuclear family is the reason they are well-off, nor does it mean that people in worse circumstances would be better off if they made the same choices.

This is not what the parent wrote.

Not having a yacht is not like “having a worse yacht by xyz criteria”, hence that comparison just does not work. There is always a family.

I personally agree with the parent here, it might be helpful to read the article again.

Okay fine.

Rich people say your car doesn't need to be a Lamborghini, a Toyota Corolla is fine. Yet, rich people buy Lamborghinis. A Toyota Corolla is a worse car by xyz criteria. Clearly having a better car is very important for becoming and staying rich, and the wealthy are undermining the poor with their "you don't need a sports car" posturing.

I think it would be helpful for you to reread the article, specifically:

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

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

> Instead, we retreat to discussions of poverty and economics because talking about family and parenting makes people feel weird and judgmental.

> But young men will only do what’s expected of them.

> And a lot did use to be expected. There were social norms to work hard, provide, take care of loved ones, and so on.

> Today, these norms have largely dissolved.

> Young men have responded accordingly.

> Yet, rich people buy Lamborghinis.

Do they really? Seems more like a case for wannabe rich people.

I think you misunderstood, or I’m a little male lost in what your point is: there is no causality between owning an expensive car and being rich. There is evidence pointing to otherwise for (whole) nuclear families and being rich(er).

Secondly, doing as is expected of them and “not stepping up” is not really the same thing, is it? Almost the opposite, actually, stepping up is doing what is expected of you, with some emphasis on this being hard.

> this disadvantage disappears once you normalize for the socioeconomic conditions of the mother

Link?

https://theconversation.com/having-a-single-parent-doesnt-de...

I'm slightly cautious about that contribution. The author describes the focus of her work as being that of 'changing society', albeit largely on encouraging breastfeeding. If someone is a campaigner rather than a disinterested researcher then their words should be treated as such, especially outside of formal research pieces.

You don't need to take the author's word for it. The blue text are links to the formal research pieces being cited.

Men are discriminated against in the form of affirmative action and other programs now that explicitly take resources from them and give them to others. Many men now expect the government to take care of women in the form of food stamps, Medicare, social security, welfare type programs and thus do not contribute or participate. This leads to more children being raised without fathers, which has been proven time and again in studies to harm them greatly.

It's time for us to trust the science again and do what we can to keep families together so that children gain all the advantages of having an involved father.

Im guessing you're one of these people described in the article that had a stable, family upbringing?

I would assume that to be true as well. As someone who had only one parent available, this is an annoyingly trite opinion. Of course socioeconomic effects contribute as well, this is again trivial.

You've misunderstood the claim, which is not that socioeconomic effects contribute, but that they dominate.

I understand the claim but I don't agree with it. I specifically don't believe the differences disappear if you correct for socioeconomic factors, however you would seriously accomplish that.

Money isn't the only stress factor, it is that a child suddenly can become the primary relation to their parent and they might even be alone with that in case of only child. Of course additional family and siblings and a bunch of other environmental factors would have an effect too.

I do think it has an influence, but it cannot be reduced to that. To state the opposite is probably just bad science like in so many cases. It is the hypothyroidism explanation of social sciences.

But that was your claim:

> this disadvantage disappears once you normalize for the socioeconomic conditions

And the tirade about families changing hints as the usual ideological slant. But for nobody under 50 divorces are anything new.

Your guess is incorrect, though I could be Mr. Roger's kid and that wouldn't change the data.

> the world has changed, mostly for the better

This remains to be seen, honestly

There are an awful lot of unhappy men out there and they are going to boil over eventually

It may be less boiling over, and more exiting. A major increase in suicides, increasingly fewer people willing to do jobs, and a ever aging demographic with increased pressure on social support and health care. Everyone looses with no clear path forward.

Well, mass shootings are increasing as well

That would seem to qualify as "boiling over" to a certain extent to me

That is a US centric issue. There are a lot of "unhappy men" in the rest of the western societies as well, and no atrocities like that. Thankfully.

That sounds more covering the issue rather than addressing the root cause.

Mass stabbings then

Let's hope they learn to grow up before that.

> the mother left or kicked out the father

> the world has changed, mostly for the better

Yeah, maybe. There have been a few analyses on this topic, and depending on the source, the live-in boyfriend or stepdad is somewhere between 2 and 8 times more likely than the biodad to physically or sexually abuse the kids.

If you're going to divorce the father in order to "find yourself" or whatever contrived excuse you need, you should at least take a vow of celibacy or something.

Well the first part about who is likely to be an abuser I can see how one would argue that. But why focus on the mother about what she should be doing in a divorce? Responsibility for the children rests with both parents! Even if in the end it's often the mother actually stepping up.

I find that's a central part of the article, that societal pressire for men to look after their children is lacking. And they don't on their own measure up. There's no easy answer, and telling the mothers they are responsible for absentee fathers is too easy a take.

> often the mother actually stepping up

I don't think the evidence bears this out. It's often the mother's lawyer optimizing her post-divorce income (via child support) by agitating for as much of the custody split as possible, in a family court system that is systemically biased against fathers being awarded custody. I will edit this with citations if I find time later.

Plenty of men get joint custody, and in many jurisdictions, this is the default.

The law cannot help it that there are so many bum men. This article is about that. Whether or not low expectations are the reason remains to be seen, but there is an epidemic of worthless bum men.

Of course the courts are biased against males! Males are much less eager to take on custody. And I claim that without even checking, because it's in plain sight and also a main thread of the article we comment under. I'd be very surprised if you would show otherwise. That to me explains but of course does not excuse the bias in courts.

Something that intend to write on someday that I'll excerpt here: the phenomenon of "young men with nothing to do" is driven by a society-wide misallocation of capital that is itself driven by wealth inequality - specifically, old people and elites who command too large a proportion of wealth. This concentration of wealth in the hands of a cohort that is less diverse, and has less diverse interests, than the general public concentrates investment and bids up the prices of common necessities while leaving nascent demand for other goods and services to languish, often unborn. This diverse set of would-be goods and services are the ones that would have employed many of the "shiftless" young men described (myself included). Instead, there are no ventures available with which to employ our skills, or the things we could have become skillful in; we're forced to compete with elite practitioners in the fields rich old people care to invest in or purchase from.

As TFA details, this is actually to the advantage of the aforementioned cohort - whatever particular shape a family takes (and it can be successful with queer parents, or one parent, or grandparents), its instability is useful when fighting advocacy for labor, community investment, and such. The energy expended in keeping things together at home can't be redirected against elite interests. That's why they take exception, not because one-dad-one-mom-one-boy-one-girl is the only way to successfully do-the-family.

I'm curious if you could expand—what exactly are these fields that rich old people only care about?

Looking at a broad picture of the economy, I'm really not sure this tracks. Lots of capital is being invested into software and AI, for example, which doesn't seem like something "old people" necessarily care about or even understand. In addition, the marijuana industry is now larger than the airline industry.

It's not what they "only" care about, when it comes to investment; it's what they can make money on. Or, rather, what their investment advisers or fund managers think money can be made on, and all the more so if younger investors are shut out.

In software, anyone younger than their mid-30s is late (too young to invest in Apple when it was at lows, Facebook IPO, etc.). AI is just the latest rolling of the software hype trade, with cloud and mobile and crypto and SaaS and more before it. And investors don't have to understand marijuana to know that being at the ground floor of an industry that's high-demand, low-supply-by-regulatory-capture would be incresibly lucrative; they piled into ownership (not stock, which was a pump-and-dump for suckers) while indie growers were shut out.

But the crux of the issue isn't simply that they like these investments. It's that they'll cannibalize everything else to prop up their chosen champions. Ironically, the mass tech layoffs of the past couple years are an example, with hundreds of thousands of workers sacrificed to keep companies not just solvent, but "growing" on paper. The post-COVID "boom" that funded their positions was misallocated capital that could have gone towards jobs that were actually sustainable; those people would still be gainfully employed, rather than unemployed or underemployed as they are now.

This isn't much of a new phenomenon. There are many examples in European history at least where a monarch puts all of his time and energy into patronizing the arts, causing his kingdom to fall into ruin. Charles V's reign of Spain was plagued with uprisings of disgruntled peasants. Certainly worth looking into for your full write-up. "There is nothing new under the sun" is a great idiom to call upon to back up an argument.

In the olden days people died much younger. If you were middle/upper class you could expect your inheritance right as you were raising your kids.

Also a lot more was expected of grandparents. They did a lot more childcare.

Finally, some material analysis.

Man I hate when people use the phrase “broken home” unironically. My parents divorced when I was young and I can assure the writer that both of my homes were always whole. Do you know what breaks a home? Two people who no longer want to live together being forced to cohabitate because of regressive notions of the what makes an effective family. Definitely preferred swapping weekends with each parent to having to listen to them fight while they thought I was asleep. Overall this article felt quite broad, moralizing, and assertive with very little actually substantive evidence.

same here. although my parents lived so far apart that regular visits with the other parent were not possible, i actually felt that them being separated so far was a good thing considering how the two of them just could not get along. the distance did not hurt my own relationship with my absent parent, nor have i ever felt guilty for their separation. neither parent felt the need to talk bad about the other.

that said, living with a single parent did plenty of damage to us children, so in that sense we most certainly had a broken home. but the cure for that would probably have been for our parent to find a new partner (which they tried but didn't succeed in because any potential candidates were not interested in children), but most certainly not for my parents to get back together (and i know they tried. from first separation to final divorce it took more than half a decade, and that's probably the time where we kids suffered the most).

Fellow kiddo of divorce here. One of my homes was whole. The other was an absolute shit-show from age 5 to 19, when I stopped talking to them. Bio-dad was useless. In fact, I felt quite represented overall by the article, what with it discussing how poor women will choose no man over a shit man. My mom definitely chose that, and I'm immensely better for it. I'm just disappointed I had to do mandatory visitations.

Luckily I got a step dad later on who stepped right up. I wouldn't be who I am today without him, he's awesome.

every experience is unique. It's simply that, as a statistic, a non-nuclear home setup is one disproportionately rife with instability, chaos, and sometimes abuse. My single parent did the best for me, but it'd be hard to convince there's a "whole" home, when there were some days where I had to fend for myself with rice and beans a 12 years old, or when rent gets too high and we ended up rooming together with a 2nd single parent family just to stay afloat.

> 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.’”

Translation: “I was impregnated by 3 other guys, and they all left me, and now I finally found a boyfriend but it turns out he doesn’t want to spend his money to feed my kids.”

Sweetie, we’re not married, so there’s no reason for you to expect I feed your children. My earnings are my earnings just like your earnings are your earnings in this feminist culture of independence.

When dating someone with children, but you don’t want to go all-in with that person, please just leave: you’re not only making the life of your partner miserable, but also destroy their child’s or children’s. You will invariably end up walking away at some point, and the children will witness all of the ensuing mess.

If, however, you have an intention to stay, there is no reason to make a distinction between their money and yours, and you will come off bigoted and thrifty.

And of course you can also choose to be a sexist like the parent commenter, but that only makes you look like a fool.

He's made his expectations in the relationship clear. It's entirely up to her whether she accepts that or leaves.

There's nothing "sexist" about that. The only sexism here is expecting a man to pay for dating by supporting her kids.

> He's made his expectations in the relationship clear. It's entirely up to her whether she accepts that or leaves.

Pretty sure she did that.

First, let's make a distinction between TFA and the comment I was replying to, which implied that dating a woman with children did not imply any responsibility towards her children.

And this is what I'm objecting: Dating someone with children does, in fact, imply that responsibility, because the children aren't involved in the decision of you dating their parent, yet are immediately affected by it. The children evidently have previously experienced a separation of their biological parents, and I have yet to meet someone that wasn't traumatised in one way or another by this. So if you enter a relationship with their parent without the honest intention to stay, you wilfully cause pain to children for your personal pleasure. Think about this for a moment, it isn't hyperbole.

On the other hand, if you actually mean it, love your partner, and want to build a shared future, there's no reason to draw this weird line between their money and yours; you're a family now after all. Obviously that doesn't mean you need to let someone take advantage of you! But that isn't what I'd call family either.

As I said: Dating someone with children has far more implications than sleeping around in your twenties. It requires commitment and readiness to build a stable, lasting relationship. It's absolutely okay to not be at this point (or never getting there), but please: Keep away from single parents, then. The consequences of your actions have long-lasting effects on their children.

Edit: Oh, and this:

> There's nothing "sexist" about that. The only sexism here is expecting a man to pay for dating by supporting her kids.

Nah, sorry. A comment that starts off by calling a grown up woman "Sweetie" and then proceeds to assume she must have been "impregnated" by three different men without any reason to think so, is just some misogynistic bullshit.

>Dating someone with children does, in fact, imply that responsibility, because they children aren't involved in the decision of you dating their parent, yet are immediately affected by it.

really depends on too many factors to make a judgement call. Are they living together? Are the kids still in contact with their previous father? Have they discussed the kids to begin with and established barriers? is the relationship purely physical or are there emotional stakes?

It's a complex topic, and I wouldn't distill it down to "you inherit all the duties of your date".

>Think about this for a moment, it isn't hyperbole.

Situations in which this is justified:

- the mother hides the kids from you

- you establish barriers from the beginning and agree... until you don't

- You think you can handle the kids and it turns out you can't. Be it financially, emotionally, or otherwise. People can change their minds

- No matter your attempts, the kids simply never warm up to you. As you said, they are involved and a kids' opinion on a potential father will impact what may otherwise be a compatible couple.

The mother isn't necessarily a perfect actor. The kids certainly aren't. And you probably don't know your limits until you get some field training. I think a lot of your arguments hinge on this assumption that the default these days is a deep connection instead of casual dating with messy communication, and that the kids will fall in love with the potential father 100% of the time if the mother does.

> Dating someone with children has far more implications than sleeping around in your twenties

Ehh. There have been broken up relationships that were non-eventual for a child, and messy 20's relationships that haunt you and your partner for decades to come. Again, the situation is too complex to distill into "one is better/worse than the other".

Whether the boyfriend in question was the father was not explicitly stated. Further, I'd argue that if you want to date a lady, her kids come with that as a complete package. My two cents.

No, dating a lady does not obligate you to support her children from other men. What a ridiculous take. Accepting their presence and being good to them, sure, but those aren't the same as being made to support them. If I started dating a woman and quickly asked her to fork over money to support my aging parents or my own family responsibilities, it would be rightly viewed as an unfair and manipulative emotional/financial hijack of responsibility. The opposite doesn't hold true?

that's the kind of attitude that forces women to reject her own children just so that she can find a new partner. sure, as long as dating only involves paying for the shared dinner whenever you spend time together, that doesn't create an obligation to do more, but as soon as you start supporting your partner beyond that, you have to accept that some of that support goes to the children.

What you're saying is absurd. Millions of women manage to take on an active dating and relationship life, without rejecting their children or piling unreasonable obligations onto their partner. Yet somehow you seem to imply that men are at fault if they don't rapidly open their arms to responsibilities that they never created.

It's called being and adult and regardless of sex/gender it means taking ownership of what's your responsibility. Yes, there is a point at which, in this case, a man will take on certain financial and care responsibilities over children that aren't his if he's with a woman who has them but the "when" of that is a subjective line that comes from mutual agreement, not some automatic social debt.

ok, i was exaggerating, but this has happened, maybe less in western cultures but in places where women are more dependent on having a husband that supports them.

when someone with children tries to find a new partner, that partner needs to be clear from the first day that if this relationship is going to go forward, the children are part of the deal. if the potential partner is not willing to accept that, then that is a non-starter for any long term relationship.

a single parent should not have to spend a year dating someone before it is clear whether their partner is willing to contribute to parenting the children if that is what they are looking for.

if a person is misleading their partner about their intentions then yes, they are absolutely at fault. do not date someone with children if that is not the route you want to go.

in any relationship it is the responsibility of each person to support their partner with all their personal issues. that is the purpose of a relationship. unless we are talking about a casual relationship, like being friends.

>that's the kind of attitude that forces women to reject her own children just so that she can find a new partner.

It's a harsh reality, but reality nonetheless. kids are already on the decline. Many men may literally be unable to help support a family of 5, especially with all 3 kids being so young. You gotta swing for the fences with someone who can do that support, or otherwise try to align with someone ready to bear that responsibility of a family they did not help birth.

Men are already absolutely worthless per unit on dating sites, so there won't be much sympathy on a male-oriented forum about dating troubles.

>as you start supporting your partner beyond that, you have to accept that some of that support goes to the children.

I suppose that's why many partners pass on a potential partner with children. May as well not pretend it's not a roadblock.

> Sweetie, we’re not married, so there’s no reason for you to expect I feed your children.

Dating a single parent isn't a strictly transactional affair. And it may be financially beneficial (for everyone) to not marry yet still cohabitate and pick up the slack in childrearing. YMMV.

It may indeed be financially beneficial, but that is an arrangement they must both agree to.

Agreed. Afraid a lot of threads here are talking about different things. Casually dating for a while shouldn't carry a lot of responsibilities from either party. Yet as things deepen or carry on for extended periods, it's reasonable to expect a more equal division of labor.

these he-said she-said problems are hard to resolve with one party (and that is part of why those relationship forums have the worst advice ever). The issue here can lie anywhere from "they weren't aligned on how far they are in the relationship" to "she did not take into account the expenses he did pay but only remembered the refusals". The tone of the article makes the reader want to think the boyfriend was a selfish step parent who can't budget, but who knows the real truth?

> Translation: “I was impregnated by 3 other guys, and they all left me, and now I finally found a boyfriend but it turns out he doesn’t want to spend his money to feed my kids.”

This just in, when you date a single mother, you will probably end up being involved in her children's lives and supporting them. Didn't think we needed to spell that out but here we are.

You simply dating her and naturally being involved in her childrens' lives doesn't make you responsible for financially supporting and raising them. This is a ridiculous viewpoint and one that implicitly places men who date a woman with children as automatic cash cows out of some grossly twisted notion of patriarchy.

I wouldn't think something so bloody obvious would need to be spelled out but here we are.

nor does dating make you responsible for financially supporting your partner. but if you do financially support her, then you have to consider that her financial needs include supporting her children. if your goal is to meet her needs then you must cover that, or change the goal and agree to only cover part of her needs.

You're essentially stating the obvious of informal adult relationships: Communicate what each is offering or can offer and see if it works for both for the sake of an agreement. The previous comment I replied to bothered me specifically because it seemed to take the position that by dating a woman, a man is automatically obligated into supporting her children and childcare needs, which is... plainly ridiculous.

how is that ridiculous? if you intend to enter into a long term stable relationship, then that is effectively starting a new family. and if one partner in that new family already has children, then they are part of it and you are on the way to becoming a step parent. do not date someone with children if that is not what you want.

this is different if it is a casual relationship, then whatever. but then at least be clear from the start that this relationship will not be more than that.

there seems to be a disconnect of expectations here.

how is a relationship supposed to work if the parent has to take care of the children all the time? you'll be lucky if you get to see each other even once a week. and what are the children going to feel if they see their parent with someone who does not care about them at all? they are going to think that this person is just as bad as the other one that left them, or worse they are going to steal the other parent away from them too.

it's not rational, but children who lost one of their parents are not rational. they have experienced trauma and have anxieties. you are going to have to work with that. children need all the love they can get.

it is asking a lot. i grant you that. and it is certainly not for everyone. but it is what the children and that parent need. so it's not ridiculous at all.

I don't know why you assumed they weren't his kids. The article implied they were. It is unclear, but there is no evidence that they aren't his and certainly no evidence that her kids all have different fathers. This is incel talk.

Your comment would have been so much more effective without the last sentence.

Your translation is dishonest and dumb. Having three kids doesn't mean they were from three different guys.

It was uncharitable to illustrate each child being from a different guy but the way the article worded it, it definitely seems like they are not the boyfriend's kids, so it isn't necessarily dumb to assert that the article has an uncharitable take on the boyfriend

We expect young men to grow up and become "husband material". Due to various changes (standards for husbands rising, economic opportunity diminishing), this goal has become clearly unreachable for many.

I would opt out if I was a poor young man today, and focus on enjoying the small pleasures (drinking with my buddies, playing PS5). The hill they are expected to climb is ludicrous, and I am not surprised they respond by walking away.

Damn. This is the first I’m hearing I wasn’t allowed to have a job AND play PS5. I’ll have to rectify this at once.

What are the rising standards though? Not beating your wife?

>What are the rising standards though?

If you're on a dating app, that's one impression of the dating pool, so it's no wonder some dudes take the 6'0"+, $100k+, abs or gtfo lists seriously

And if you are wondering why they are being heavily influenced by that, gestures to article

Its not wrong the 80/20 rule applies to the dating apps in a real way, a small minority of males on them sweep the majority of matches and anyone not it the upper quartile may as well not even apply. When your part of the 80% of males in compilation against eachother for the lower 20% of matches it can be daunting. You can choose free porn, play games, drink, and hang with friends or fight the constant rejection, and pay for dating app middlemen to show you to more women and if you finally score date you still have to pay for both of you and have no guarantee that it will go any where. (Its not unheard of for women to use dating apps as a source of free meals.) So why not opt out.

To what you said, I will add this is not only about guys. I've female friends who are in the same situation (bottom 80%) and who have opted out. And if you are gay...

I think we should subsidize weight-loss medications.

Oh gtfo. No woman is desperate enough for food to put up with shitty dates. They have shelters for those cases.

That’s pretty naive. My mother and her friends love recounting stories about doing exactly that in the 1980s while travelling. Probably just a date at a restaurant but certainly it’s not unheard of. A glamorous date at a nice restaurant vs a soup kitchen? Come on.

Yikes, you're pretty sheltered.

> What are the rising standards though? Not beating your wife?

Unironically yes. It is much easier for women to leave their marriage than it has historically been. This has lead to rising standards for how husbands need to behave.

Being emotionally available, participating in chores, providing a comfortable lifestyle while not working all the time, being reasonably well-read and good conversationalist, etc.

Have you not noticed how much more we expect from men as partners?

NB I’m not saying we shouldn’t expect more from them. I’m saying many are seeing the list of demands, and opting out of even trying

> Being emotionally available, participating in chores, providing a comfortable lifestyle while not working all the time, being reasonably well-read and good conversationalist, etc.

I...honestly cannot tell if this is meant ironically. Those things seem like table stakes for being an adult. It's not "expecting more of them" to simply expect people to...grow up, and help care for the other people in their lives. You write "participating in chores" as if that's one of a list of demands!

That's not a demand; that's just...life.

Pretending there is no difference between men and women is a total dead end.

Emotions and social games are a lot trickier to navigate for men, who didn't have umpteen years of evolution to practice.

In a lot of ways, we're expecting men to be more like women, and women more like men, while hating each other for it. Divide and conquer, the oldest game in the book.

> In a lot of ways, we're expecting men to be more like women, and women more like men, while hating each other for it.

Can you provide some specifics?

Being the perfect adult is table stakes? This description is the ideal middle class man. If that's table stakes to you, either you've got one hell of a catch or you've got a few more years left before you settle. Most adults, full grown adults, men and women, don't meet all those requirements. I do, most don't.

There's actually plenty of people like that out there, but probably not where you live.

My dude, if you think that's the 'perfect adult', whew... That is, absolutely, the bare minimum for an adult friend, let alone a romantic partner.

Let's just break this down to be clear as to what you think the 'perfect adult' is:

- Being emotionally available

- participating in chores

- providing a comfortable lifestyle while not working all the time

- being reasonably well-read

- good conversationalist

But there is a difference between seeing a highly publicized and pervasive media push that there is a huge list of things you must already be good at... vs casually starting a relationship and learning along the way you must do all these things for long term success.

Not to mention there is no indication from women that they will tolerate the few things you need to learn about and improve.

This is why more just give up prematurely.

Are you saying we used to always expect men to do all of the above, or do you agree with me that we ask more from men than we used to?

> Being emotionally available

My dad taught me boys do the opposite. My schoolmates told me that emotions were not for boys. I'm pretty sure I'm not a unique snowflake.

> participating in chores

Dad said that boys don't do domestic chores. If a couple lives inside an apartment, all chores are domestic.

> providing a comfortable lifestyle while not working all the time

Jesus, this is not exactly trivial for most of us.

> being reasonably well-read

Very few of my friends, family and acquaintances are well-read. I'm pretty sure they don't even know what table stakes are. But it's not a hard requirement, they have kids anyway.

> good conversationalist

Not a trivial thing either. Incidentally, being well-read doesn't help if your partner is not, or if your partner is onto serious books and you like to read horny gay romps.

Well, I guess don’t move to the big city and try to settle down with an IG baddie?

I appreciate the fact that people like this exist, everywhere, in large quantities. But that means that the dating market, in some places, have decided there is no product market fit. Very HN statement.

Now, the options are - rebrand, or move to new market, or government regulation to provide ‘protectionist’ tariffs and trade barriers to promote ‘homegrown industries’.

I prefer the free market, but I can understand why the West Virginia coal miners want the government to bail them out. I’m not sure what to do about this state of events at all.

Welllll, women are saying a lot of men don't do this. They are basically bums.

Our great crisis is the growing number of bum men. And rather than work on being not bums, they sit around and complain online and stew.

Hm yeah do some chores for sure. Being emotionally available and verbal is an evolution in society, but it doesn’t cost much, assuming you were already willing to spend some time with your partner?

I don’t think being well read is a demand for most of America.

> Have you not noticed how much more we expect from men as partners?

What, basically what we've expected of women for many years?

The problem is two wrongs is worse than one; you're never going to solve discrimination against one group by discriminating against another, for example.

What discrimination of which groups are we talking about?

Yeah wow that seems tough /eyeroll

I'm gay and probably slightly autustic so for me the very natural goal of having a partner is indeed unreachable. The society doesn't give me any other goal to pursue, so I'm stuck just smoking weed and watching YouTube, which is depressing.

> the very natural goal of having a partner is indeed unreachable

It is not. Plenty of gay men in the world. About one in ten, last time I checked the statistics. But I'll admit it's real tough for most of us out there, not because we are few, but due to all the other reasons. You don't need no goals given by society; make some of your own.

Society gives you plenty of goals to achieve. Do you really believe pursuing a relationship is the only real goal you can work toward?

> Do you really believe pursuing a relationship is the only real goal you can work toward?

Yes, and I'm tired of pretending it isn't. I'm sorry I'm a human, not some higher being that exists above natural constraints of biological brain that spent millions of years evolving around the concepts of "be a member of a tribe" and "have a family".

My tribe will fire me the second I stop being useful to them by the way, so yeah.

Hmm. Well, this might be the first time I've been described as "some higher being", so... thanks for that.

You're welcome

It's a horrible goal, too. Programming is way better than (and mututally exclusive with) being in a relationship!

You can do both!

I know plenty of gay people and autistic people in relationships. Get off the internet and touch grass.

Ah yes. Whenever someone asks me what can we do about poverty I'll just reply "I know plenty of people with lucrative jobs, get off the internet and touch grass".

We've been telling people for years already that them being lonely is their personal failure, not some systematic problem, yet people, on average, keep getting even more lonely. What makes you think that continuing to present loneliness as a personal failure will eventually solve the problem?

Hahaha IKR I keep hearing that advice and like has it EVER worked for ANYONE? If someone doesn't believe things can get better, then you can't make a depressed horse drink or however it goes. The thing that needs to be learned CANNOT be communicated.

I discovered it for myself after like 6 months of therapy. Give it a shot if you can. Trust me, being smug about it to people online is so worth it.

And on a societal level it's an interesting philosophical question, but waiting around and hoping that something external comes along to magically fix the problem that you're experiencing personally isn't a plan for success. That feeling of loneliness isn't going to go away sitting at home, playing another single player video game by yourself, it's going to go away by socializing with people, in some sort of fashion.

It's gonna be cringe. it's gonna be awkward. it'll be fine, you'll survive.

Poverty is a wholly different problem, with different solutions, and comparing poverty to loneliness isn't doing you any favors. If we're gonna play that game, how about comparing it to obesity? society bears some responsibility for McDonald's, and for not giving good education on nutrition, but the reality there is that there are some wonderful new drugs to help with that problem. even with the new drugs and before them, at the end of the day, it still is a personal decision on whether or not to do something about the problem.

so the government isn't going to come in and start forcing people to attend friendship-making ceremonies. the solution to your loneliness is pushing yourself to go out and find people. don't go off trying to fix the systemic societal level problem for everybody, just solve for one. fortunately you don't have to wait around for a magic anti-lonliness drug to be research and formulated and then undergo trials before approval by the FDA. the drug for loneliness is alcohol. go do a lubricating amount of it around other people.

> We've been telling people for years already that them being lonely is their personal failure, not some systematic problem, yet people, on average, keep getting even more lonely. What makes you think that continuing to present loneliness as a personal failure will eventually solve the problem?

Your logic here seems to be that, over time, telling people it's a personal failure (which I don't agree has been the rhetoric, but for the sake of conversation...) will lead them to fix that failure - which isn't at all my experience. There's plenty of issues one can point to that, just because we've been informing people of for many years, doesn't mean any progress has been made.

> Ah yes. Whenever someone asks me what can we do about poverty I'll just reply "I know plenty of people with lucrative jobs, get off the internet and touch grass".

If someone said, "I'm in a wheelchair, so having a job is unreachable" then I might respond in a similar way as GP (though perhaps a bit nicer)... because you can have a job while in a wheelchair, and have a relationship while gay and autistic.

Boys today are being left behind because they're not given attention by the school system. That's what I take away from not having any expectations of them.

This article spells out the incentive structure that leads to low-status men underperforming.

> 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.

> 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.

Tightening constraints from the employer class around employment, and loosening constraints from middle class individuals on cultural expectations leads to low status men abandoning their partners.

Same as it always was.

Or perhaps moving a factory workforce into the service industry has been degrading? (Since of course we shipped the factories overseas.)

I would correct the quote as such:

>Don't pay enough to live in a way that his family and community respects his contributions and sacrifices, if such pay even gives him room to contribute at all.

>Require him to get along with customers and coworkers that may be abusive and prejudiced, for no other reason than that the position is "supposed" to be servile and manned by a lesser person.

>[Require him] to maintain a complete physical and psychological affect of arbitrary "professionalism", servility, and agreeability, even while dealing with higher-status individuals who are not only allowed to be emotional, aggressive, and competitive, but who actually benefit from it in their career.

TFA spends a moment on what I think might be the crux: that the elite set rules they don't have to abide by. This is unfair, and poor young men recognize that it's unfair, and they're punished when they point out that things are unfair, because breaking the masquerade makes people uncomfortable, and nothing is more important than the comfort of high-status individuals.

As much stability in the family structure of poor folk may be breathing its last breath, noblesse oblige is long dead.

Having done both I vastly preferred the service industry. Factory job had more unpleasant coworkers and boss (thanks to grueling physical labor) plus a submissive attitude towards unpleasant machinery.

The factory money was better though.

> a submissive attitude towards unpleasant machinery.

Are you referring to litteral or methaphorical machinery here? Actual machinery can be a pain.

Your 'a submissive' attidude is a good wording for the 'are you a fag or what' mindset many seem to have to work conditions that suck.

I worked a summer mounting rear axis on trucks, so my experience is kinda limited. But it was really bad and the clock was ticking for each axis in a way that made you hate your job in a week. The first day was fun...

you mean rear axles, no? Not rear axis, which isn't a named thing.

Oh ye 'axle' I thought is was the same word as axis.

>> 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. Same as it always was.

> Or perhaps moving a factory workforce into the service industry has been degrading? (Since of course we shipped the factories overseas.)

The sentences literally following this quote have an idea on the question:

"It used to be high-status to hold a job and take care of your family. Not so much anymore.

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."

As a meta aside, not specifically reacting to you, the amount of people commenting on article they haven't read at all is bothering me more and more.

Yes, some people have to be hands-on building the physical world or they will not be happy. And by unhappy, I mean constant nagging doubts of inferiority and uselessness. Eventually you are going to check out under those circumstances.

I have felt guilty my whole life working white collar, but I'm useful and people need and want me, so I get by.

Well fortunately for those people it's easy to find construction jobs now, as long as they're willing to relocate.

> Same as it always was.

I feel like it's an industrialization thing. Before industrialization people would farm their own land, set up their own shops etc. Sure there would be people above you, but they wouldn't and couldn't micromanage you.

The peasant surely didn't have morning standups with their lord.

> farm their own land

Peasants didn't have "their own land". All land belonged to the aristocracy, and you would farm the their land.

Even the official end of feudalism, at least in the UK, was at least a century before the Industrial Revolution.

But the aristocracy didn't micromanage that, is my point. Unless you were a slave I guess?

Look no further than the native land of JD Vance and you can find sharecroppers. However, these days no self-respecting man would sharecrop. "I'll just sit at the house."

but this is the nature of all employed work: "submissive attitude toward the boss." Even if you're the CEO of a major corporation, you still have a submissive attitude towards shareholders.

It's rare but some people work in co-ops. Though I guess you could say they are not doing "employed work"?

In any case, there's forms of labour out there that can be more empowering to the worker.

>It's rare but some people work in co-ops. Though I guess you could say they are not doing "employed work"?

Aren't you still beholden to the board (which theoretically is elected by you, but still)?

Subordination does not equate to submission, it's not really the same thing

Fine nuance of exactly the type that's hard for folks to get behind today. If we could get people to consider nuanced positions, many of our problems would already be solved. Even in engineering orgs I've been a part of, navigating the challenges of seniority, hierarchy, and status has been really challenging.

I think I see where he's coming from, and it makes sense to me. But where is the evidence that expectations have changed for young men? A paragraph or two with examples would be useful. It is of course a bit nebulous to try to define "expectations on young men" so I'm willing to go with some sort of essay that presents the evidence.

The author talks a ton about expectations and “expected from” but is very careful to never phrase it all together in active voice because the central claim “harvard elites in conference rooms expect young poor men to abandon their partners and children, therefore harvard elites cause young poor men to abandon their partners and children” is on the face of it absurd.

You can poll young women for what they require of young men to date them. Plenty of content of that on YouTube.

It's not nebulous.

Maybe YT compilations of what "young women want" is not a good source of cultural information.

https://www.tiktok.com/@girl_on_couch/video/7363742421588512...

a grain of truth in every joke

A lot of this is only applicable to Western Societies. IMO this is entirely due to the breakdown of Family and Social structures in the name of so-called Freedom/Progress. When you have no Structure/Discipline imposed on you by Society/Culture your Freedom of Choices become too much to handle and you simply give up and choose nothing.

I see more single mothers here in Africa than i have ever come across in western countries. Lack of work leaves men unable to care for their family causing them to simply give up and walk away, leaving the mothers to fend for themselves. I see no supportive structures, discipline or culture to counteract that.

I haven't been here long, so my impressions are not founded on a lot of experience, but it looks like what is happening is that the villages are unable to sustain themselves forcing people to leave the village and seek their fortune elsewhere, which causes just as much of a breakdown of family and social structures as it does in the west.

I would wager that in terms of percentage of population the situation in Africa is not that bad as in Western countries. Some very poor countries may suffer to a larger degree but not Africa as a whole.

To give a counter example, take a look at India and China, the two most populous nations. In both cases there is a huge migration from rural to urban centers but Social expectations, Cultural norms, Family structure and Economic necessities give youngsters something to strive for. In China in particular; you have entire villages populated only by Grand parents and Grand children because the Parents are away working in the City. And yet the situation is not dire like what is being painted in the article in spite of many problems. In India the rural to urban migration is not that vast compared to China so the effects of Family/Social/Cultural structures are even more stronger.

Freedom/Progress needs to be balanced against Structure/Discipline for any Society to thrive. This is the reason all societies from ancient times always put Family/Clans at the center and enforced Discipline via Religious diktats/Cultural norms/Social mores etc. While many of these should be revised in the modern context their complete dismantling has left many adrift and in a existential crisis.

> In China in particular; you have entire villages populated only by Grand parents and Grand children because the Parents are away working in the City. And yet the situation is not dire like what is being painted in the article in spite of many problems.

This sounds like its own kind of dire.

Absolutely. But what is interesting is that the family structure doesn't breakdown. The Parents work themselves to the bone and send money back to help their Parents and Children in the village. The Grand Parents take care of the Grand Children. When the children grow up, depending upon the Parent's situation in the City, they move to the city to live with their parents and study/grow up there or if they are already at the employable age join the workforce in the city. And through it all they hang together.

But that's just an Industrial-stage family structure. Loosely speaking. It's not that interesting and not fair to compare that with post-industrial neoliberal societies in the West.

(I'm East Asian American.)

Mate, China's demographic situation is extremely worse than any western country.

If anything, cultural shift has been way more extreme and fast in China than in the west.

> you have entire villages populated only by Grand parents and Grand children because the Parents are away working in the City

Sounds lovely!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042330

These are some of the opening remarks of this article:

> It is usually the young father’s criminal behavior, the spells of incarceration that so often follow, a pattern of intimate violence, his chronic infidelity, and an inability to leave drugs and alcohol alone that cause relationships to falter and die.”

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

and this is the conclusion:

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

Is it just me, or is there a massive disconnect here? The rising prison population was not caused by a loosening of the norm that one should not go to prison; that's absurd on the face of it. Intimate violence and alcohol abuse have not somehow become de rigueur over the last few decades because of the luxury beliefs of the middle class.

There is a massive disconnect there. I've met plenty of divorced people and lone-parents which are neither of those. And of course, my own experience is no data of any sort, but I've felt that having an unlimited amount of patience for any partner, or they having it for me, it's not assured on either part. In fact, I've the deepest admiration and respect for people who do manage to live with the same partner for more than a few years. How do you do it, guys?

> ...people who do manage to live with the same partner for more than a few years. How do you do it, guys?

There are probably as many answers as there are couples. One idea is just don't have (or look for) any better options. If the only realistic alternative seems to be solitude then the threshold to leave is higher.

This discusses what "elites" think a lot, but does not discuss why that matters

From 1950 to 1979, times we think of more stable families, the Gini index in the US never went above 39. From 1993 to 2019 it never went below 40. There has been a shift where working class men were more on par with the heirs of the USA, but things have shifted so this is less so. The shift in power to what elites think is more important coincides with a shift of income and wealth to these heirs.

Another problem cited is a lack of "a submissive attitude toward the boss". From the 1930s to the 1970s, US workers had larger union representation, and engaged in sit-down strikes and wildcat strikes. This does not sound like a submissive attitude toward the boss. As the heirs have successfully cracked down on worker organization, this becomes individualized, with submissive workers getting low pay (according to this) getting work, and those not "submissive" as this says, who seek higher pay not being connected to production, leading to instability outside of the workplace.

There has been a conscious shift by the mentioned elite to remove workers representation, power, organization, pay and stability. These are seen as less of a problem than some supposed lack of a paternal attitude from the elite to lecture the working class about their lack of a "submissive" attitude as this says.

It's the same nonsense we've heard since 1980, from funded think tanks and various establishment institutions, it goes hand in hand with the policies and shift in income and wealth disparity which led to this.

I see this as the victory sign of feminism. Women doesn't need men anymore so men are left on their own. Nothing wrong with that.

But the article talks about how the men are basically doing whatever they want and women are left as single mothers with multiple kids...

Independence achieved at last, for men and women.

What kind of bum doesn't take care of your kids? That's no independence. That's a dereliction of duty.

Pure incel talk. Pure loser talk.

Who wants to go through life being a loser?

Incels with kids? Get your narrative straight before you blow a gasket.

That implies equal choice / responsibility for the kids. If men aren't required to contribute half the work -- or at least some financial equivalent -- then it's not really independence for women at all.

And if the man discourages the woman from developing her own career, then leaves, she's been denied twice.

And so atomized and isolated, we become easier pickings for big capital

There's a biological reality. Which btw, has been greatly tamed with contraceptives and what not, so the only thing left is individual failure.

Financial independence for the feminist movement was always about divesting from a husband, not relying on a husband.

This is the kind of article you get when you abandon materialism or, worse, never heard of it. It's an attempt to locate all cause of social form in the ideological superstructure. Deeply incoherent and irrelevant.

The article seems to contain a lot of hand-wringing about upper class' beliefs allegedly harming lower class families, but I don't see any mention about the main change in the labor force since 1960 - namely the participation rate of women. Men probably work less nowadays simply because it's easier to do in a two-income household vs a one-income household.

The article also said "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."

Who is at the apex of the social ladder? Am I?

I wish the author had expanded on this a little more because that feels like a high leverage point.

So your hypothesis is that factory jobs have not indeed dried up, and it's just all the women taking up those factory jobs instead?

> So your hypothesis is that factory jobs have not indeed dried up, and it's just all the women taking up those factory jobs instead?

No, the hypothesis is that men don't have as much responsibility. If they fail to provide women cover it.

The destruction of the traditional structures has its effects, good and bad. I dont' believe that women participating is a bad thing, on the contrary but new challenges come and taking an absolutist freedom stance without fixing the bugs that arise is a bad outcome.

It seems to me that nowadays social structure and norms are all in the ideal or virtual world, but the world is still physical and does not really care for ideals. As it never did.

We didn't want young men to do anything.

We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders, and that meant moving factories (where these young men's grandfathers were working 60 years ago) overseas while doing nothing on the whole to retrain the workforce.

We got the shareholder returns. Too bad that can't buy a functional society for people born after 1980.

Also: Nobody in a village should take up 2 houses for themself.

But some can, and can even take up 100 houses... so long as the other villagers are fighting amongst themselves, over whether their house should be larger than that of their neighbor.

Turns out most of their problems are arguably traceable back to those people with 100+ houses each.

Which would be glaringly suspicious to an outside observer. But the villagers are too busy being enraged by the idea that some lazy person might not have to live in a tent.

Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation [1]. With that said, we are approaching a housing shortage of +4.5M [2] units, and in concert with YieldStar's Backpage revenue maximization engine [3] (which is laundering landlord price fixing), renters are being squeezed (because where are you going to go if you can't afford to buy? you will pay, or you will be homeless, which certain jurisdictions are attempting to or have outlawed).

To solve housing for those who need housing, enact state level YIMBY policies to override local planning (who will always kowtow to local folks who show up to say no, and local folks who say no because it costs them nothing to do so as they already own), provide cheap money to builders [4], and build as fast as you can.

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

[2] https://zillow.mediaroom.com/2024-06-18-The-U-S-is-now-short...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[4] https://www.startribune.com/janet-yellen-minneapolis-treasur...

(Edit: I would still support restriction of investment ownership of housing, depending on implementation details; you have to defend the young from the old and Capital, as they are treating the young as cattle to be squeezed for all they've got simply by virtue of their existence timeline [5] [6], and it's causing folks to simply give up)

[5] https://www.ted.com/talks/scott_galloway_how_the_us_is_destr...

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K64GTDwWJo4

(as always, think in systems)

Institutional ownership is immaterial? Erm, from the same source, 10% of some metros is a lot, and that’s just moving the meter to 100+ homes. If you did 10+ or 3+ it would be even more.

“This share rises to 3.8 percent of single-family homes for institutional investors owning over 100 homes, and up to 10 percent in certain metro areas such as Atlanta.”

Then if you also consider foreign ownership of home, it would rise even more. Lots of wealthy folks have dollars due to it being primary international currency and they buy up our assets

Unfortunately this is a big side effect of internet we haven’t solved yet. It’s made buying a home anywhere easier, which inflates prices (demand is much higher now for same number of houses), squeezing out middle class locals

>enact state level YIMBY policies to override local planning (who will always kowtow to local folks who show up to say no, and local folks who say no because it costs them nothing to do so as they already own)

It's more than that; it's a standard free-rider problem.

If all the other districts in your city support development in their area, then your own property value will go up, but you won't be burdened by any local development costs. And if you develop in your district but nobody else develops in their district, then your property value won't go up (or will go up only slightly) but you're burdened by the local development costs.

It's classic prisoner's dilemma stuff.

The simple solution is to remove the local district's ability to veto local development. At least, as long as city-level/state-level planners don't have an agenda that favors certain districts over others.

> Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation

I believe this nationally, but when you see things investors buying 1/3 of Atlanta homes in a given quarter [1] or investors buying 26% of the affordable homes, it becomes hard to believe there is not some level of effect occurring in target population centers. Most of the arguments I see about the small effect of investor purchases seems to focus on national averages (happy to be pointed elsewhere), but I think focusing on national trends will dilute the observed effect where it is occurring.

[1] https://atlantaagentmagazine.com/2022/03/24/investors-purcha...

[2] https://www.redfin.com/news/investor-home-purchases-q4-2023/

Canadian leaders have finally admitted that high levels of immigration combined with no changes to housing policy has destroyed their affordability.

This means immigration policies must be explicitly tied to housing policy if you don’t want to screw over your poor.

Your first statement is flat-out wrong. The supporting citation does not actually support it, though it hints at how institutional housing ownership has contributed to housing price inflation. To wit: it explains how innovations during the GFC turned direct investment into an appealing proposition for investors. These investors helped to backstop housing values that would have fallen even further than they already had. In other words, the much-needed correction to the pre-GFC bubble that the GFC represented was disrupted and reversed.

The actual solution to housing price inflation is a full correction that wipes out the inflated value of housing in this country, cutting each property's worth back down to its intrinsic value. Affordability and use would reset to what the real market actually can sustain, as when the income tax forced wealthy property owners to divest of and demolish or convert their grand mansions into apartments for people to actually live in.

There is no housing shortage (Zillow has an obvious conflict-of-interest). There is no need to load even more money into the system by providing cheap money to builders (a naked corporate giveaway that will surely represent yet another wealth transfer from taxpayers to business-owners). Pop the bubble. Planning considerations can follow, once land and property values actually reflect their intrinsic worth. If you do it before that, you throw billions of dollars worth of resources and labor into misbegotten initiatives that do no good for the communities that they're supposed to serve (e.g., highway expansion).

A 4.5M unit shortage wouldn't be present if the past several administrations hadn't allowed huge amounts of immigration in the past decade. Reality isn't constrained to "you have to build as fast as possible since your population is going to increase very quickly and there's nothing you can do about that".

If every person who came to the US in the past ten years went home, there would be a colossal increase in housing availability and rent prices would crater.

> Institutional housing ownership in the US is not a material contributor to housing price inflation

This statement and citation fail to account for the impact of AirBnB and other STR market-makers on the housing market.

I strongly suspect a big part of housing price increases is the "small business" equivalent of institutional investors - someone buys 1-2 units that they do not plan to occupy and rent them as STRs. Similarly, vacation homes (aka homes that will go unused for the vast majority of the time) are now much, much more affordable if you can book a couple rentals a month to supplement a mortgage.

I'm *sure* AirBnb has some fascinating data on this, but I don't expect to ever see it in the public eye without government intervention (much as we'll likely never see Meta's studies on teen users' mental health).

tl;dr - but what about her airbnbs

YIMBY policies just end up with a small number of luxury condos being built.

You need SHIMBY policies, social housing in my back yard.

>Also: Nobody in a village should take up 2 houses for themself.

>But some can, and can even take up 100 houses...

How much % of the housing supply is actually taken up by people with 100 houses?

Ever wonder about who can afford to make all-cash, above ask offers on houses?

Or you can rent that house after the PE firm buys it and rents it out...

https://www.propublica.org/article/when-private-equity-becom...

https://www.thesling.org/are-hedge-funds-and-private-equity-...

How much of zoning laws are lobbied by peopke with 100 houses? People owning the houses is not the problem, as other people still live in those houses. The incentives to keep it a good investment is still a problem.

What’s ironic[1] about these comments is they set up these ignorant-sheep narrative about how the villagers are bickering among themselves. Which begets more finger-pointing among the villagers instead of looking at the real source of their problems.

[1] Not ironic if you don’t think you’re one of the villagers.

Excellent point. You could look at it as very resilient diversion -- even calling out the diversion becomes a diversion.

I'm wondering how often it happens organically, and how often it has some conscious help.

It is a narrative, yes, but are you asserting that the narrative is not substantially true? I struggle to think of anyone I know of, let alone know personally, that is mostly on the systems analysis side of the spectrum vs the story telling and bickering side.

Culture is constantly running in the background, teaching us not only what to think, but also how to think. And changing culture is hard.

And what in your opinion is the real source?

How do you imagine villages actually worked? An extremely common way was that the entire village would be owned by one man who would collect rent from all of the villagers.

Instead of "house", you could also imagine a similar analogy around "amount of apples one person needs to eat to live".

The sociopathic villager who went to the village's communal trees, and took way more apples than they can ever eat, while others don't have enough apples to eat, should be tossed into the lake.

But the sociopathic villager tells stories in the village square, of how those villagers who are starving are lazy, and trying to eat apples without working to gather them.

A village elder starts to say they saw the sociopath going and taking the apples under the cover of darkness, and that's why some people are starving.

But the sociopath quietly welcomes the elder into the fold of those who have cellars full of more apples than they can eat. Then apple hoarding is suddenly the noble way of the ancestors, according to the elder. And, hey, look over there, at those lazy people over there trying to eat apples while working only a half day! Hate those greedy freeloaders, over there!

The housing crisis is one example, but I'm not talking about which parties have literally 100 houses in real society (nor want to get diverted with "just let developers make more money, by building more, and stop looking at any other factors of the problem"). I'm talking about essentials, greed, and corruption more generally.

I have a better analogy. It’s the analogy of a guy who got up every morning to plant apple trees in his orchard. When the time came for harvest, he picked all of the apples and sold them to market. With his proceeds, he bought some more land from his neighbor and planted even more apple trees. The next year there were too many apples for him to pick by himself so he hired a few people to help out, and used the proceeds to expand his orchard.

There was another man in the village who never planted a tree or picked an apple. Instead he sat in his house filled with envy and resentment at the apple farmer, and made up a bunch of ridiculous stories about how the apple farmer was stealing from everyone else. And so he found all of the other villagers he could sway, and inspired envy in their hearts. And the envy and resentment and hatred grew and grew until one night, they went to the orchard and burned down all the apple trees and the man’s house while he and his family slept inside. And then they all celebrated their crime.

Of course, when no one else in the village ever planted an apple orchard ever again, there were murmurs of complaint. The town baker couldn’t bake his famous apple pies the next fall, but he knew better to complain because he didn’t want the envious mob showing up at his bakery in the middle of the night. So he kept quiet.

The housing crisis is one example, but I’m not talking about which parties have obstructed the creation of wealth in real society. I’m talking about essentials, envy and corruption more generally.

My extreme political opinion is that no one should be allowed to own more than one property in which they do not reside.

Gen Z are the richest generation in all of American history on a median per-capita real income basis, compared to older generations when they were the same age. And it's not even close. Millenials are the second richest in American history.

The only problem is housing. Any discussion not focused 100% on housing is not grounded in reality.

Income isn't the only measure of wealth. Also, there are two major expenses affecting Gen Z:

1. Education

2. Housing

Both have been increasing at a rate faster than inflation for some time now. While Gen Z may have a greater income, their major expenses are even greater. When all is said and done, they're poorer as a result. Turns out that simply having money is insufficient to solving all financial problems.

> Gen Z are the richest generation in all of American history on a median per-capita real income basis, compared to older generations when they were the same age.

Per capita? Not at all. What source says that?

More of Generation Z lives with their parents than previous generations, often because they can't afford housing, or even rent, high college debt etc. They live with their parents, and thus in households with higher income, so only in that sense are they "rich" - the household income is higher than if they could afford their own house.

Per capita real income higher? No. What source claims that?

Every time someone says this, if there is a source, this always come back to them living with parents and household income being higher. Not per capita.

Your numbers are by definition wrong, since young people would not have a problem to afford housing if they were "the richest generation".

I guess this is the progress of new-speak? We've had a decade of people saying "oh, people are so rich today that they don't want to have children". Now it's "oh, people are so rich today that they don't want to have homes". In a few years it will be "oh, people are so rich today that they don't want to eat food or have medical care".

>Gen Z are the richest generation in all of American history on a per-capita real income basis, compared to older generations when they were the same age.

source: https://www.economist.com/img/b/608/739/90/media-assets/imag...

Richest? How? Maybe by total wealth.

I think wealth should be measured by how many hours at the median wage do you need to achieve a socially acceptable standard of living. Unfortunately, our standards have gone up and there are things that are now necessities that weren't before.

> Too bad that can't buy a functional society for people born after 1980.

They don’t care about a functional society or other people. Their kids are off in Bali this week, Nice the next.

Yea, the world of the actual-rich is like Elysium, but (for now) without outer space as the physical separation. They live in an entirely different world, fully detached from our reality. They don't need to care about "a functional society" because they make their own society and very rarely have to land on planet Earth and interact with our dysfunctional one.

I want a financial person to explain to me why we continue to expect exponential growth of companies’ revenue year after year, and why that makes any logical sense in a world with finite resources.

Assuming you’re asking in good faith:

1) Ephemeralization [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization] is when we arrange a given set of atoms in increasingly useful ways, letting us get the same thing done with less.

A trivial example is information distribution. Another one is how we turned sand into thinking machines. Myriad more examples exist.

2) We have vastly more resources than people think. Our deepest mines are ~5km. There’s a hell of a lot of planet below that, with increasing % valuable metals. There’s enough room on the planet - you can give everyone on earth a big house with a yard and we’ll all fit into a single Canadian province, or into Texas. We can generate 100% of our power needs with solar, nuclear, and batteries. And as we get richer, there are more and more people with the time and ability to make greener choices.

Our systems are proving to be flexible - look at the price of solar + battery over time; look at the deluge of funding for nuclear research. People are working on bio jet fuel. Other people are working on carbon capture tech and geo-engineering ideas for the worst case scenario.

3). We’re not stuck down here. There’s a whole universe out there. A tiny but growing % of our economy happens off-planet. A private company recently landed on the moon. SpaceX is dramatically lowering launch costs. In a few decades, we’ll be mining materials up there and manufacturing goods in space.

Exponential revenue is easy - you just need exponential inflation and it comes for free.

Increased productivity is maybe the goal - but how it's measured is up for discussion. If you do it in dollars, then do you adjust for inflation? If you do, what inflation? (inflation on the price of bread or super-yachts etc).

Or do you do it in value? What can you get for your work? In the 1990s a "machine in your pocket that can play any music ever recorded" would have been near-impossible/priceless. 25 years later it costs maybe a dollar a day and we can all have it. If we can always get the same stuff for an ever-decreasing amount of effort, then that could be seen as exponential growth. You could argue that you could measure growth by technological advancement.

Conversely if your rent is going up 10% a year, then who cares that you're 5% more productive and making 5% more money every year. That doesn't feel like growth.

Unless you're not renting and you're the landlord and then you're experiencing sweet sweet growth.

There is no rationality. It is a justification for “I’ll get the most I can now and push the externalities on some future fool”.

It is no different from traders hunting buffalo to extinction. They got their money, consequences be damned.

They'll rationalize the irrational.

The thing is, if more of the value produced by labor was directed back towards labor instead of equities, you're going to see far fewer people asking "how is this sustainable?", because they're on the gravy train too, but the equities holders have now gotten so used to being the special kid in the class that they can't fathom not trying to keep labor costs as low as possible.

Value growth isn't tied to physical resources anymore, it's increasingly ascribed to intangible things, such as intellectual property. I'm not saying that growth is guaranteed to continue, just that economies have already been growing based on more abstract values; it's not all about food and fuel anymore.

Obviously physical limits will bind at some point; indefinite exponential growth implies at some point that each electron in the observable universe is outputting the entire current world GDP every year, which is pretty unlikely under our current understanding of physics. But it's for you to explain why the physical limits bind at the point we happen to be at right now. Why does the observed historical trend break now, rather than (say) in fifty years' time?

That's close but not quite. In older times, this economic profit is an accumulation of wealth, instead of having the apples just pay for the daily laborer's calories, it means, maybe they can take a few apples home to make apple sauce and that the farm owner can sell the extras in a market. You paid for the maintenance (ie. workers not starving, replacing machinery, ) and you had some left. Land is a whole other problem. The Wealth of Nations has a pretty good description of the interactions between labor, landowners, capital.

The recent problems is the disconnect between money and actual food/materials/energy production.

If your grandfather lived in a 100kw village with a 100 dollars circulating, and made 1 dollar, it is reasonable to think he could buy 1kW for his family.

If we live in a 100kw village (because no, we should reduce energy production) with 100,000 dollars circulating and you make 500, you can buy 500w.

Now do it for turkeys, or steel, or etc... Degrowth is impoverishment in most cases. Things haven't gotten much more productive, and we are more people

Population explosion = growth of consumption and we have not yet hit the finite limit but we eventually will, perhaps soon

A hundred years ago, the average person had little free time, little spending money, and little to actually spend that money on, if they had any.

Human attention is absolutely not a finite resource. Or at least companies haven’t come close to monetizing all of it.

Inflation (so numbers grow), different companies at different stages, etc? Also not exponential growth, but just significant growth and crashes every X years

It's a perfectly sustainable model (assuming you're fine with an economic crash every dozen years or so)

If you're willing to drop the "logical" constraint, I think this explains most of humanity due to us being fundamentally a story-based species:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect

In our culture, someone bringing logic to the table is likely to get crushed by someone bringing a good story.

And to make the situation even funnier: most anyone could tell you story after story about this phenomenon! It reminds me of:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...

(Ironically, this too is a story, lol...perhaps no other way existing is part of the problem?)

It's all just one big ponzi scheme. Albeit a legal one.

>I want a financial person to explain to me why we continue to expect exponential growth of companies’ revenue year after year, and why that makes any logical sense in a world with finite resources.

Because entropy. When a living organism stops its exponential cell division, we call that death. In an economy, when things cease to grow, we call it recession. When that growth is in balance with the decay, we call it a healthy economy. When it outstrips it, we call that inflation, which the monetary system is designed to fight against.

Capital wanted to break labor. And they did.

> We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders

And ever-decreasing prices for consumers. Don’t forget that!

Free trade results in more goods for everyone, by enabling different places to focus on what they do best.

> while doing nothing on the whole to retrain the workforce.

I completely agree that some more attention needs to be paid to retraining. The answer to disappearing jobs is to prepare folks for new ones, not to artificially preserve the old ones. One has to be careful, though, not to distort the market for retraining itself.

> And ever-decreasing prices for consumers. Don’t forget that!

Except that's not happening for major purchases. Housing is more expensive than ever. Education is more expensive than ever. Healthcare is more expensive than ever. Cars and Trucks are more expensive than ever.

Besides taxes, the above are the biggest slice of the consumer's wallet, and those prices have almost never decreased. Shareholder returns keep going up, up, and up though.

free trade sounds great in theory. unfortunately what we see are imbalances for a myriad of reasons for example one of the largest economies government owns or heavily subsidizes companies or entire industries in order to maintain control.

> And ever-decreasing prices for consumers

This is more of a hope than a reality. The trickle down economics logic. “We promise it’ll be good.”

workforce in usa seems pretty good. Have you seen the homeprices they are able to afford ?

But that's the thing. Most people can't afford a home here; we're renters. The exception is upper class people riding stock market hype bubbles.

I don’t think you have grasped the catastrophic damage the housing crisis has done to trust in the western economic system. At this point younger generation would put the CCP in charge in they knew they’d fix housing. And they would.

Have you seen the sacrifices made to afford those homes? Just because someone owns a home doesn't show the whole picture.

There are plenty of Americans that own homes and are struggling to make ends meet elsewhere.

Home ownership is set up to consume a person. Miss a payment and there are serious repercussions to one's financial well being, so it becomes a priority.

Up to a point, miss a credit card payment and it's extra fees. Miss a utility bill a month, and it's the same. Buy less food and you'll survive, albeit less comfortably.

Nobody can afford it, to the point where we’ve done dark bloodpacks with banks and financial institutions to try and get the average family into what used to be an average priced home.

*the credit they are able to afford

or, rather, the risk financial institutions are willing to take in order to, again, transfer value to shareholders in an ever-increasing manner.

A mortgage is 30 years. Who thinks most people will have well-paying jobs in 20 years? In 10? In 5? What's the current percentage of American workers who can afford a house, a car, and a single child responsibly? What's the average income-to-mortgage ratio in America, is it sustainable?

What rationalization are we supposed to have for self-worth when robots and AGI do all of "our" labor?

This entire society is melting down so that a handful of billionaires can have and do whatever they dream of, the rest of us are supposed to do what exactly?

We're supposed to find meaning and worth in the scraps that are left?

edit downvotes without rebuttals are equal to "shut up and keep working"

There's an elephant in the Argument: Why don't women adopt these elite ideals and leave their kids? We should at least have an explanation why either nothing significant changed in the last 100+ years (a stretch), or something else that is counteracting said elite ideals. To put another way, why did the elite woman act against her own publicly professed Expectation? [0]

Another hint there's something amiss is the flawed premise. Men are not doing nothing! I see a whole bunch of consumption. Here is one of the author's citations:

> Edin and Kefalas describe the behavior of young males in low-income neighborhoods:

>> [...] Young mothers regularly rail against young fathers who squander too much of their earnings on alcohol, marijuana, new stereo components, computer accessories, expensive footwear, or new clothing, while the needs of the family are, in their view, not adequately met. [... Amy] had a boyfriend who worked steadily but insisted on spending on selfish pursuits. This is what eventually broke the young couple up.

All those are true, but try to tell that to every one of those Industries. If you were the CEO of a shoe company men spending on food is money not spent on your shoes. Why have your primary consumer spend less with at your company, even if that benefits the broader social fabric? It is in your material interests (one could argue your "Fiduciary Responsibility") to drive spending towards your company, which is why you pay the Marketing Department the big bucks.

If I were to throw out a guess, I suspect the difference is between Expectation and Ideal, or the difference between external and internal motivation, respectively. You can't form a cohesive self-identity from constantly shifting external expectations (ask your therapist), it must be stitched together from already free-floating desires/values/signifiers of society. Where I think the author gets close is how society influences how and what to Desire [1].

[0]: For those who read Cialdini's Influence this is an apparently powerful violation of the Commitment to Consistency, which hints something deeper is going on. Her deliberately going out of her way to correct the interviewer's view of her perhaps speaks to a greater commitment to another consistency?

[1]: https://iep.utm.edu/lacweb/#SH2b

This article is riddles with biased language and seems generally unscientific. This undermines the premise being highly specific.

The author of TFA read Charles Murray's Coming Apart and has inexpertly regurgitated (to the extent of just copy-pasting the figures) that book's central thesis while failing to understand its nuance and context. If you're interested in this idea -- and you should be, because it's important! -- then you should just skip the article and read the (vastly superior) book.

Born too late to enjoy exponential asset growth. Born too soon to see the true environmental impact of the asset growth.

Lost generation, can I just get some drugs to cope please, my computer job is making me lose my humanity ;(

Just kidding it’s all good :)

It would make an interesting film(book/documentary/comic?) where the protagonist is laid off because the factory in Anytown, Georgia closes down and by some magical plot contrivance he is able to move to Shenzhen and get his job back.

You could go a lot of different ways, or several at once, with this set up.

This is the excuse-plot around Shenzhen IO; you then spend the rest of the game making awful novelty tchotchkes

Given the experiences of my white friends in China, a laid off factory worker moving to Shenzhen would have done extremely well for himself, especially back then.

You know what you kind of hit the nail on the head there -- that narrative has really been pushed by a lot of sources and that kills internal drive if you think all your efforts are for naught.

I don't believe that narrative though.

Also your comment too late for exponential asset growth -- that never stops (see crypto, AI Stocks, tooling stocks, etc). The cycle always continues.

"Born too late to enjoy exponential asset growth."

Unless you bought Bitcoin...

Just wait til you lose your computer job.

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

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

Author can explain "everyone".

> Instead, we retreat to discussions of poverty and economics because talking about family and parenting makes people feel weird and judgmental.

And again.

I suppose the jury is still technically out on whether the Western strategy of leaving mostly everything up to mostly chance is a good idea, but I am not liking the preliminary results. I imagine the experts are on it somewhere though (because science and democracy essentially guarantee optimality), so I won't bother worrying about it.

We're encouraged to pick a destiny but hardly anyone reaches theirs and then the fault is put on them so they don't speak up.

> > we have found no evidence to contradict the basic general principle that men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex, and perhaps not a great deal more.

Yes, because evolution, no?

Any other situation is really weird (contra-entropic) which is why things that channel sex/violence (testosterone) into constructive ends are so important. We call them "civilization" (verb and noun.)

- - - -

Anyway, the article seems to overlook the Sixties:

> The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon and political movement that developed in the Western world during the mid-20th century. It began in the early 1960s, and continued through the early 1970s. It is often synonymous with cultural liberalism and with the various social changes of the decade. The effects of the movement have been ongoing to the present day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture_of_the_1960s

It's hard to describe how crazy things got and how we live in a different world now, even the people who were there can barely articulate what happened.

What I took away from this article is that many low-income men have no real interest in being fathers or raising children. Yet, they tend to produce children anyway.

We should focus on making birth control more accessible, instead of trying to make people take responsibility for raising children they obviously don't want.

That guy who spends all his money on weed and booze while his kids go hungry? He should have gotten a vasectomy. We need to be asking why he didn't- was it a lack of education, or was the procedure too expensive?

Most doctors refuse to perform sterilization procedures on young people, at least until after they have had children. After all, what if they change their minds?

My girlfriend couldn’t get hers done until she was over 30.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart, because unwanted children leads to enormous suffering (which I have seen up close as a volunteer Guardian ad Litem, a legal advocate for children in the system). A recent thread on the topic of unwanted children at scale [1].

So I bought and operate a domain which points to the r/childfree subreddit wiki list of doctors [2] who will provide permanent birth control to people who want it without onerous conditions such as partner approval, being over 30, or having at least two or three kids first. I run marketing campaigns on socials with this digital property. Next steps are building a site to act as a "store locator" app for this data. My partner and I also contribute in r/sterilization for those seeking permanent birth control, helping folks navigate insurance (bisalps in the US are free under most insurance situations, and vasectomies are covered at 100% in 10 states) and logistics.

High level, we should collectively be robustly supporting parents who want to be parents, but we must aggressively assist though who would rather not. 40% of US domestic pregnancies every year are unintended [3]. ~600k children are in the foster care system [4], very roughly half of which are adoptable but are never adopted. It costs ~$310k to raise a child from 0-18 in the US [5], and this does not include daycare or college costs.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/childfree/wiki/doctors

[3] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-u...

[4] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-kids-are-in-foster-ca...

[5] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Brookin...

I got mine done at 37, after having two kids, and they still asked me if I was sure.

I can see why you'd be hesitant to do it on a 22-year-old. If you asked me at 22, I'd probably say I don't want kids. But I completely changed my mind as I approached 30.'

Also, vasectomies are less reversible than people think.

This decision really needs to be removed from the hands of doctors, as long as there is no physical risk to the patient.

Or we still have physicians with the mindset of "What does your husband say?"

And then more and more schools, not less and less, are teaching abstinence-only sex ed.

And politicians pushing it. Including Lauren Boebert, 4th generation teen mom, who has a son who got his girlfriend pregnant at a ... questionable ... age. And Sarah Palin, who works with her daughter while her daughter has had two kids out of marriage.

(To be clear, my perspective on sex ed and morality is not saying there's issue with sex and children out of marriage, quite the opposite. But you have people who are being held up as rolemodels doing ... not what they preach.)

Curious if the doctors are actually just proxies for insurance providers in this case?

A lot of men, particularly less educated men, have bizarre beliefs that vasectomies harm sexual performance or make them less of men. I saw the other day a person asking on the biohacking Reddit if a vasectomy would harm testosterone levels. Asking poorly educated, poorly read, and low-skilled men to make highly informed decisions is going to be a losing battle.

I'm willing to bet the rates of vasectomy are highly correlated with education levels.

There are chances for chronic pain though. A few people on HN said they wouldn't have done that if they knew what would happen

It's a costly inconvenience. Women are responsible for their bodies. Then you have to sell the prospect of someone cutting at their manhood. It just ain't happening.

It's called eugenics and was widely practiced in the 20th century against the exact people you propose.

Edit: Down vote as much as you want. Eugenics is the above. Doesn't mean I'm for or against it. It was promoted at the time as a way of protecting children from growing up with "unfit" parents.

The difference is eugenics involved forced sterilization against your will, where what people here seem to be calling for is a free voluntary sterilization option.

perhaps some guys have kids because their wives/girlfriends required them to do so.

No woman can "require" a man to have a child.

Mine cost me $1k up front, health insurance didn’t cover a penny. It’s really silly.

When you think about it, it is kind of crazy. If a person can't afford that, then they definitely can't afford kids.

You have no right to judge like that, other peoples choices in general are none of your business because it's not your life; and come one, you obviously don't know the whole story.

How about buying a bag of food for the guy instead? Get to know him and try to understand the path that led him there. Like, actually solve a problem, make something better instead of hating more.

And yet, there were generations of children who were raised by fathers and had two-parent households.

Access to birth control has increased at the same time that single parent households have increased. It doesn't seem to be having an effect.

I also take issue with your claim that men don't want their own children. Again, we're talking about a change that happened in the 60's and 70's. Is your argument that all men suddenly changed to hate children 50-60 years ago? No. What happened is that divorce laws changed. Social expectations for men and women changed to be more sexually promiscuous. The legal framework that encouraged two-parent households was dismantled.

The author covers the latter topic somewhat, but doesn't delve into the topic of the legal framework that enables one-parent households. There are a multitude of laws surrounding divorce and child support, which originated in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, that encourage single motherhood and make it extremely difficult for working fathers to raise children. For generations, it was possible for men to work and raise children when they were not working. Now, the responsibility of work is often used to deny fathers custody.

simply, when a boy is dependent on his mother's approval for a sense of self it's all the justification he needs, and there is almost no increasingly-terrible situation in which a mother will not love her son. the worse his life, the more he depends on her, the less abandoned she is. it's the definition of a co-dependent cycle. Maybe he replaces her or shares that role with other women, but he ends up in the same cycle of dependency and collapse. Fathers teach boys to set boundaries for themselves, which has the effect of weaning them off psychological dependency on their mothers approval and innoculates them to some of her edges and those of other women. This is why only can men make other men, as without masculine boundaries, their emotional locus of control is external.

We blame the absent fathers, and that's at least half the problem, but only half. The other half is that mothers don't raise men alone, and so you get punks and criminals, boys with "nice guy" predatory survival strategies, neurotics, and other maladapted and unserious men. It's arguably why "bastard," is such a longlived epithet. The only reliable escape is to master something and find mentoring in pursuit of the competence that develops the necessary self-confidence and esteem for setting personal boundaries.

> He should be held to high standards. Otherwise, he will sink to the level of his environment.

A male peer group can raise these standards, but it's mean reversion, and if you're in a neighbourhood of boys raised alone by their mothers, that's going to be a low bar. The entire culture war is between people who resent their dads for being absent or weak, and those who don't. There are paths out, but as a wise woman once said, "no one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them."

> The entire culture war is between people who resent their dads for being absent or weak, and those who don't.

Are you saying that having an absent father or not determines your views on trans people, abortion, saying Merry Christmas vs happy holidays, DEI, etc?

I've never read about this topic but the comment above interested me in trying to find any references related to the claim it's making. So far, [1] is the most interesting one. While it doesn't precisely line up with what is claimed above, it does say that a more "paternalistic" parenting style is causal for the child's later political beliefs.

[1] https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2022/june/when-par...

> Are you saying that having an absent father or not determines your views on trans people, abortion, saying Merry Christmas vs happy holidays, DEI, etc?

What on earth does any of that have to do with the GP post?

I'm also quite curious - you think all of those things listed above are generally seen as positive (or negative) by the same group of people?

That's a bundle of different issues that most people either won't support all of, or won't oppose all of.

Yeah there are some interesting ideas in there and I respect the ideals of open debate and exploration of these topics, but this is by far the weakest part of the comment. I'm also finding it difficult to infer which tribe that is supposed to apply to - similar accusations are often lobbed at the blue tribe for supposedly wanting the state to act like a father, but I think performative masculinity in general speaks much more to a lack of strong male role models. So maybe it's better to assume the problem across the board, and perhaps only modulated by political tribe - the first comment on the original blog post speaks to the phenomenon even extending to other cultures.

It very well could

> and there is almost no increasingly-terrible situation in which a mother will not love her son.

Could someone please rephrase this? I'm having trouble understanding it.

This comes off as incredibly preachy about gender roles.

Is there any problem caused or experienced by men that you don't blame women for?

Men* have to have a purpose for being. They will either find a constructive one or a destructive one. If they fail at either, they'll find a way to self-destruct. It's really that simple.

* Can't speak for women.

Scott Galloway has been saying something similar.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/19/opinions/masculinity-toxic-me...

We may agree or disagree with Galloway, but we need to pay attention to this issue.

Why would you be able to speak for all men?

Because I'm right.

The author makes good points, but there is no mention of the demise of religion or the social factors leading to the dismantling of the nuclear family as causes.

I was telling my wife about the loss of religion and how that leaves many people without without purpose. Religion is often a precursor to the cultural norms we live, without even being aware of. Sunday is for resting in the west for example.

To find a reason to keep living is very hard and may entail an acceptance that all is for nothing and being content with that. Many people cannot walk that path or have deep anxiety before even being able to confront those questions on a personal way. Religion fills that gap, until the person wants to move forth.

It is easier to look into the void with a guide.

Personally I am not religious and I don't get along much with my immediate family

Any solution that involves a prescribed push towards religion and family would be antithetical to my freedoms of religion and association

Me and the vast majority of my friends haven't experienced religion, and yet we're all in stable nuclear families. I didn't know we were anomalies.

"Hoisted on the petard of the our own decadence" seems to be a valid interpretation only if you think that the last 200 or so years of family structures in capitalist, Western nations is the only valid way of raising children and maintaining family bonds. This sort of thing reeks of the kind of chauvinism you only get from the echo chambers reverberating within the hallowed halls of places like the author's alma maters.

A big subtext of this article is that individuals with low socioeconomic status are incapable of making good decisions and must be strictly governed, and that the upper middle class is just as guilty as the absent fathers for the erosion the nuclear family structure.

I find the argument that folks with disposable income set a poor example for those of lesser means to be specious, pernicious, and divisive. It's the kind of argumentation that sets lower middle class conservatives up against upper middle class liberals so that they're too busy fighting a culture war to consider what new atrocity billionaires are getting away with behind their backs.

I've read TFA and another one linked by TFA. I did enjoy the reads and the links but... In both articles the author seems to contradict himself, more than once.

For example:

> The affluent have decoupled social status from goods, and re-attached it to beliefs.

> it is those who have more to start with (i.e., upper-class individuals) who also strive to acquire more wealth and status.” Plainly, high-status people desire status more than anyone else.

So which one is it to achieve status: goods/wealth or beliefs?

Or this:

> It used to be high-status to hold a job and take care of your family. Not so much anymore. 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 people with the most money and education—the class most responsible for shaping politics and culture and customs—ensure that their children are raised in stable homes.

Once again: which one is it?

Then in both articles there's the same mechanism of saying basically "it's not visibly the fault of X, but under the hood it's actually the fault of X".

I mean: how can you argue with people who consider that everything that is wrong on earth is the fault of the "rich" and that even if the rich have good values, it's their fault that the poor have bad values?

"They do A, they say A. But they think B. Hence the poor are suffering".

Another take is that intellectuals, including in universities, have been very hard at work in the west (both in the EU and the US), since decades, to push the religion of the state. And what stands between the state and the individual? Religion and family, for a start.

And in a deliciously ironic turn of events, it's the one class leftist intellectual from universities (there are no right-wing intellectuals in universities anymore) hate the most, the "rich", that managed to push back against that narrative and raise their kids perpetrating the notion that being a united family is a good thing.

I really don't buy it that the rich are oppressing the poor by showing united families. And no amount of quoting french intellectuals is going to change my mind.

This really is not the greatest article in my opinion.

Much of the rhetoric follows circular reasoning without solid evidence and is mostly biased opinion.

What is promoted as forgone conclusions, is harmful, and follows along similar lines to Critical Theory seen in Marxism and its more modern derivatives.

Ultimately the issues come down to the social norms which have been degraded, while also not going into why or how those social norms were actually degraded (in any real fashion).

Critical Theory is caustic, and promotes nihilism and the absence of a cohesive cultural/social norms or mores. We have seen this more definitively recently with the Woke, but its been ongoing since the 70s.

If the author was at all genuine in their coverage, they would at least have covered this in some reduced fashion, it seems telling that no mention is made about the actual causes.

Instead, the overarching structure and themes are blame unemployment, then blame the men for being selfish (needing respect), then blame the rich who lie, but its not the mothers fault (so you can't blame them). In essence, its blame everyone but the group who is contributing most to the problem (those with the snake tongues pushing critical theory to distort reflected appraisal).

All said, its very childlike, and on its face the article checks almost all of the boxes to be considered soft-socialist/communist propaganda.

The article fails to follow rational principles (utilizing multiple fallacies with little to no direct support), it hits common socialist talking points. These include aspects where foregone conclusions are drawn towards destructive interference of gender relations, employer relations, government/societal relations, and western identity/concepts [indirectly].

The article presents much opinion as fact, and while some of the numbers referenced are correct in isolated cases the conclusions drawn are not.

In my opinion, the author lost all credibility by the end of the article, and it is clear they are promoting harmful narratives that don't address the underlying issue.

TL;DR don't bother reading the article; it has no real insight into the problem.

> 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 unironically writes this after pointing out that research shows that affluent families the share of families with biological parents has only dropped to 85% from 95% while the share for poor families has dropped to 30% from 95%.

The idea that the social apex has decided that family instability is unimportant is disproved by the numbers the author themselves shows.

But most such narratives are based on grievances and not facts. So it’s not surprising that the author makes claims that are not only not backed by evidence but are disproved by all the evidence the author themselves includes in their article.

I’m in a thriving affluent family community, and I haven’t seen anything like what my lived experience is portrayed in media after the 1980s.

I think this is a case of the unwashed masses having no idea how good it can get, and the government failing to counteract cultural messages that being a single mom is empowering.

I think they're making the argument that the upper classes make the argument that family stability is unimportant and should be de-prioritized in favor of "doing what makes you happy", but they don't actually believe that when it comes to their own families. The effect (according to OP) is that the upper classes are destabilizing the lower classes by advertising norms they don't actually believe in.

> The people with the most money and education—the class most responsible for shaping politics and culture and customs—ensure that their children are raised in stable homes.

> But actively undermine the norm for everyone else.

> ... is disproved by the numbers the author themselves shows.

Yup I just made a similar comment (but using other examples). TFA is contradicting itself and another linked article (from the same author) is also contradicting itself.

I don't think that disproves it at all? Affluent families have decided that family stability isn't too important, but their affluence makes it easy to obtain, in the same way they obtain other unimportant things like fancy dinners or overseas vacations. If Amy's boyfriend from the article were rich enough that he could satisfy all his selfish pursuits while still spending on the family, it sounds like they'd still be together.

The author addresses this with the anecdote about the discussion panelist espousing different views in private vs public. The "social apex" does practice family stability themselves, but de-emphasized it as a cultural norm. Presumably through their power of, say, academic research and media production.

Though the article could have done a better job explaining this. It's like a reverse phenomenon of "do as I say, not as I do".

Not only is it a completely conspiratorial claim, the much stronger argument against it is simply looking at a region of the world where elites still heavily advocate family centered norms, i.e East Asia.

In those countries the other social strata don't happily follow suit, young women do something else, they opt out of family formation altogether. If you go to South Korea and ask pretty much any young educated woman why she doesn't want kids or even a relationship, the answer is that she'd risk being trapped in it and disadvantaged at work. The same is true in Iran or Turkey which now have lower birth rates than France.

This stuff has nothing to do with "elite values" or "luxury beliefs", I'd say it barely has a cultural component. As education levels and absolute incomes rise virtually everywhere people change their values.

Several of the graphics in the article are from the book Coming Apart [1] which actually makes a more complex argument.

Specifically, it says the ruling class no longer publicly supports traditional family structures, despite continuing to follow them for themselves.

Nobody these days would have anything bad to say about single mothers, or unmarried couples. But when you look at the behaviour of the top 20 percent in socioeconomic status? They're all forming married two-parent households.

(The book covers a load of other topics and supports its observations a lot more than my short HN post, naturally)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)

> The idea that the social apex has decided that family instability is unimportant is disproved by the numbers the author themselves shows.

Henderson acknowledges this explicitly. He spends a great deal of time pointing out the hypocrisy of wealthy Americans proclaiming that marriage is outmoded and unnecessary for raising children, yet mostly wait to get married before having children themselves.

It’s still important for the ruling class young adults to prosper, including marrying(from their own class).

Many have not yet squared up to the fact that society itself is an unprofitable boondoggle that requires massive moral radicalization and willingness to participate in odd, polarizing institutions and practices.

We live inside the semi-decayed skeleton of a society built by deeply religious people who believed that society should be built and maintained because that is the moral thing to do. They weren't only motivated by per-capita GDP or the promise of weekends off or the pursuit of variety in breakfast cereals, as neoliberal economists seem to claim. They had deep underlying motivations to create a civilization in which they and their families could flourish and engage in the twin pursuits of culture and commerce.

We are now seeing the third-or-fourth generation that is growing up in an era where economic metrics are cited as the "core fundamentals" of a society; unfortunately, comfort and consumption are not motivating enough factors to drive people to feel loyal and energized to contribute to their civilization. Take away the glory and meaning from the basic acts of living among your peers and you will end up with large swaths of people who do enough to get by, and not much more.

Not sure why the negative votes on this one, one of the only takes that doesn't make me feel insane so far. I'll reword my understanding of it.

Society requires effort and investment that doesn't produce immediate material benefits. Rationalizing everything down to profit and loss encourages people to see the collected effort as a tragedy of the commons. You need to actually want to be part of a society to start, then if enough people join you, you can actually build one!

> Take away the glory and meaning from the basic acts of living among your peers and you will end up with large swaths of people who do enough to get by, and not much more.

This is exactly how I feel. Sure, my life is comfortable, but at the same time it's so small and pointless, which leaves me completely unmotivated. Why do anything if nothing matters.

You also have to look at much of the impetus behind how long held religious morals were devised.

Millenia of human suffering. Wars. Oppression. Exploitation.

In other words, everyone became a Marxist, at least when it comes to the materialism.

> “Chanel, a white thirty-three-year-old with three children, ages fifteen, nine, and three, broke up with her youngest child’s father just after we met her for the first time. When we ask about him later, she says dismissively, ‘He’s not around no more. I got rid of him…He was only here to sleep—didn’t want to pay no bills, didn’t want to do nothing. When he was here all he did was fight and argue and drink. I had to get rid of [him].’ She purses her lips in disgust as she tells us such men are unworthy of the children they father.”

She had 3 children with that guy. Instead of picking a nice dorky Christian boy, she went after the tingles. I hear so many stories from young mothers about how they had the opportunity to settle down with a wholesome boy who was willing to care for them, but she preferred the bad boy without a job because the sex was just so fucking awesome. And then she gets pregnant and start tricking on the streets. I have no sympathy for such women because they can’t help their monkey branching tendencies. The social media has convinced these girls that it’s ok to play fast and loose with sex, which results in fast and loose choices and long-term devastating social consequences. As much as men need to be taught, women need to be taught to lower their physical standards. Because the hot gangster guy who gets “play” is hardly going to settle. Sure the acne-ridden nerd is ugly, but he’ll be there for you through thick and thin.

Sounds like she had at least two different fathers to her children, maybe 3.

This is poverty creating behavior. She made an enormous mistake bearing a child to not one, but two deadbeats, but she doesn’t frame it as her error.

This is an insane level of projection

The reason women don't pick the "nice dorky Christian boy", is because of comments like this. Nice Guys turn everybody off.

Visit r/exchristian to find out why the "nice Christian" guys aren't always a great catch. I say this as someone who was a "nice Christian" guy.

And when men sleep around they are just sowing their wild oats. Yet when women do it, it's some kind of unnatural moral failure.

Everyone should be free to explore their own sexuality, without judgement, and with robust education and tools to control their own reproduction.

Absolutely nothing you said about her is based on any facts or analysis in that article. Don't fall into incel behavior here with projections and unfounded assumptions spouting them off as fact. Do better.

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