The Rise of Men Who Don’t Work, and What They Do Instead
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Plenty of the "men who don't work" are simply unemployed but are not counted on the unemployment numbers because they've been unemployed for a long time. This population isn't depicted in the article, which looks like a major oversight.
The only reason that there was a "rise of men who don't work" is that there was an economic collapse which we haven't recovered from, and possibly won't ever recover from by the pre-crash definitions of recovery.
The article already hints at this: Apart from the young cohort (until mid-20s), the rise in men going to school is probably less about an increased desire for education and more about an inability to find work. More men caring for their families may be a good thing (increasing equality between men and women in practice), but it may also be a symptom of high unemployment. And is it really plausible that more men are disabled today compared to 15 years ago? It seems more plausible that there is a grey area of disability, and a bad economy drives more men in this grey area to apply for disability benefits.
Yes, that seems plausible to me. For example, there have been a number of combat operations the intervening 15 years; if someone left the military due to injury, they would be counted in the disability figures, but not in the employment ones. NPR did a big story on the factors behind this a while ago:
http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
Another big factor is that states are incentivized to move people off of welfare (which the individual states pay for) onto disability (which the nation pays for through Social Security). So a rise in disabled workers has also coincided with a decline of people on welfare -- it's just private companies shuffling people around without improving their condition.
To be fair, the NPR article was not without controversy. A number of groups objected to the way it was presented, including former Social Security commissioners.
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/04/18/177745599/forme...
You're right on the point about disability, though.
Sure. The population is much older than it was 15 years ago.
I wouldn't care to speculate whether that makes up all the difference, but having a disability and trying to overcome ageism at the same time sounds pretty brutal.
Something hinky is going on here - we live in a bubble-wrapped safety-first society, yet disabilities jump 50% in 15 years?
Further reading: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Autismbux http://4chandata.org/adv/Has-anyone-here-followed-Remus039s-...
Developers can pull this off without much effort. 2-20X the pay for our work, little expectation of company loyalty nor stigma for resume gaps or job hopping, crazy skewed market to ensure that a new contract is only a Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter update away. Why would anybody spend their 30s not taking several months a year off in that situation?
Naturally, I'm biased a bit, since that was me for a dozen years or so. But there aught to be a skinny little blue line on that chart for us. And I bet it's a lot less skinny today than it was back when I started doing it.
http://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence
Basically the only reason most people struggle financially in the US is due to their own financial illiteracy and living above their means. If you manage not to fall victim to either of those then you can save a substantial portion of your income towards a very early retirement should you choose to do so.
Kids are pricey though, so this approach is most viable for those who've eschewed the traditional family.
That is really only true for households above the median income.
So "most" is not a factual statement. About half of the country can save [at most] a few thousand dollars a year unless they want to ruin their health and take other risks that are essentially gambling.
That is part of what pisses me off about /r/financialindependence. Alot of the "suggestions" those people make are essentially gambling. [e.g. going without proper insurance coverage, high risk investments if you cannot save much due to income, eat unhealthy to save money which will cost you later] Or they assume you are making $60k a year so you can save $20k/year. You can't save $20k/year if you are making $30k.
My anecdotal experience working alongside lower class workers is that most of them run into trouble through trying to live a middle class lifestyle without the income to support it. They buy new cars, they eat out often, they refuse to work more than 40 hrs/wk, and they live in pricier apartments without roommates. All of these mistakes tie into the financial illiteracy that plagues people who were never exposed to those with good money habits.
Of course the alternative view is to blame these folks and tacitly assume that the right to a comfortable lifestyle with a couple kids is a luxury only for the rich.
We can also work to change those circumstances for future generations.
Poor people will never stop having sex, or wanting kids, or desiring a drink at the end of the day, because it just so happens that you don't lose basic human desires when you're poor. A lot of talk about financial literacy is really just moralizing about behaviors the lecturer would never dream of giving up himself.
It's a dead-end conversation, because, again, humans are always going to do the stuff that humans do.
But this entire thread is doomed because it stems from a claim that most people who struggle do so because they're living above their means. It seems to me that most people who struggle do so because they don't have as much money as the people who don't struggle.
EDIT: Dear HN, can we make > start a quote, already? Look at how many people in this thread alone have used it in that way! I do it all the time and usually edit it back out.
The living wage project from MIT is designed to be the minimum viable estimate with no savings and living paycheck to paycheck.
http://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/06037
$23,640/year
http://livingwage.mit.edu/places/1308904000
$21,007/year
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032011/perinc/new01...
http://livingwage.mit.edu/places/1324504204
> $17,640
Btw, Augusta, Georgia is literally one of the 10 cheapest cities [and if you read the Household Income as a "well they can do it!", remember the living wage is a single adult, two adults is double and they can't again]:
http://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/real-estate/T006-S001-10-...
~36% of the population is below the living wage number in major metro areas.
52.16% make less than $30,000.00
> My anecdotal experience working alongside lower class workers is that most of them run into trouble through trying to live a middle class lifestyle without the income to support it. They buy new cars, they eat out often, they refuse to work more than 40 hrs/wk, and they live in pricier apartments without roommates. All of these mistakes tie into the financial illiteracy that plagues people who were never exposed to those with good money habits.
> The basic framework of early retirement is pretty simple: cut way down on your spending, then invest your savings. High savings rates can lead to surprisingly fast retirements. For example, if you save half your income, you'll be ready to retire in around 17 years.
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/1/8518455/extreme-early-retirement
The majority of the population can't save half of their income like Mr Money Mustache and other FI people suggest.
It isn't even mathematically possible for most of the country.
Your moralizing is proof you are ignorant and don't have a real argument.
The figures given by the living wage calculator are assuming a middle class lifestyle which is obviously ignorant when discussing lower class economics. Plugging in my own city of Ann Arbor, Michigan gives wildly inflated figures that fall in line exactly with my claims up above. The rent figure given is for having your own one bedroom apartment with no roommates, the food figure is hilariously overstated ($242/month), transportation assumes a pretty new car or very long commutes ($306/month). These figures simply are not realistic for a lower class individual.
I am living a lower class lifestyle right now as I type this. I live in a shared home with 2 other people. I drive an older but reliable car I purchased for $2.2k cash (a luxury expense, I could have kept taking the bus/biking to work). I rarely eat out, and I avoid expensive items at the grocery store barring a few healthy choices like nuts. I split a $45/month 50 mbit internet connection with both my roommates. No cable. $30/month cell phone bill (another luxury). I have health and auto insurance.
Overall, I have a pretty comfortable life for less than <$10k/yr. Nothing is stopping genuinely poor people from doing the same except extraordinary misfortunes (birth defects, severe disabilities). There is no moralizing here, just the cold hard numbers and experience from someone actually living this life and interacting daily with others at the bottom of the workforce.
EDIT:
After seeing your comment above I want to point out that at no point did I assert you could retire by 30 years old on this kind of income. If you're trying to argue that point then it's a strawman. I will also add that if you're still making ~20k/yr all of your life then you've made some financial mistakes in regards to your actual career choices, even janitorial staff end up around 35k/yr after a while.
K.
You may want to consider:
1) If I had to rely on a bus/bike for work, I would not have a job.
2) If I did have a reliable cell phone with data capable of providing a wifi hotspot in an emergency, I would not have a job.
3) If I did not have a solid internet connection, I would not have a job.
A number of things you claim are luxuries, really are not luxuries if you want to be employed in a number of fields. Even the guy that does the basic helpdesk stuff needs that and he only is paid $30k a year.
You also are ignoring one-off costs like repairs and medical costs when you quote these numbers and thump your chest. I have annual medical costs [beyond insurance] of 10% of your claimed spending. For fuck's sake.
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/mcdonalds-sample-budget-sheet-...
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/07/mcdonald...
> McDonald's Can't Figure Out How Its Workers Survive on Minimum Wage
Hell, even the McDonald's Sample Budget everyone calls a joke has over $12,000 in annual expenses.
http://livingwage.mit.edu/places/2616103000
> The rent figure given is for having your own one bedroom apartment with no roommates
> I am living a lower class lifestyle right now as I type this. I live in a shared home with 2 other people.
$649 is the housing budget including utilities, cleaning supplies, and all other related expenses not just rent.
https://annarbor.craigslist.org/sha/5024320646.html - $500 https://annarbor.craigslist.org/hou/5025045124.html - $400 https://annarbor.craigslist.org/sha/5024006969.html - $400
Yeah, these people are renting one bedrooms. Sure buddy. $400+money for utilities,etc. puts them safely within the $649 budget and they aren't renting one bedroom apartments now are they?
I honestly don't even believe you at this point because you are clearly oblivious to the going rental rate in your own f'n city.
> EDIT: After seeing your comment above I want to point out that at no point did I assert you could retire by 30 years old on this kind of income. If you're trying to argue that point then it's a strawman. I will also add that if you're still making ~20k/yr all of your life then you've made some financial mistakes in regards to your actual career choices, even janitorial staff end up around 35k/yr after a while.
You support the prevailing view of /r/FinancialIndependence and their idols who make claims about retiring in their 30s like that.
That isn't a strawman and I quoted an article where they did exactly that. How am I supposed to read your mind and realize the very group you chose to use as a benchmark to discuss:
> If you manage not to fall victim to either of those then you can save a substantial portion of your income towards a very early retirement should you choose to do so.
Maybe you should be more specific then rather than cry strawman when those FI folks talking about "very early retirement", its retirement in their 30s.
Cry strawman if you want but by the standards of the community you were talking about, 30s is what that phrase means and I can point to a ton of posts/blogs in relation to that group of people.
Even paying a bit more on rent a roommate scenario with split utilities is never going to add up to $675 a month if you're at all savvy and modest in the residence you choose.
If your job requires a car and phone but doesn't pay an amount that allows you to afford those things then you should get a different job. $40/month will get you unlimited everything phone wise, or if like me you rarely call then you can do T-Mobiles $30 a month 5gb 4g plan w/ 100 calling minutes.
I'm in no way trying to thump my chest here, I'm trying to provide a detailed look at this lifestyle within the overall context of FI's ideas regarding saving and well planned finances. I also apologize if I somehow led you to believe I was saying anyone regardless of circumstance and income could retire at 30.
I'm genuinely a little puzzled as to why you're going at me so aggressively, would you mind going into your own lifestyle and why you feel I must be lying to you?
EDIT: As far as being mad I wasn't more specific, pay some mind to the demographic that visits this site. I would be surprised if even 1 in 10,000 visitors to this site will never in their life have a job paying more than ~20k/yr (assuming they live in the 1st world). My message was obviously directed at this sites prevailing demographic.
Consider: When I was single I lived a very very very comfortable life on $22,000 a year (cash, not income). I put that much in my checking account and everything else in savings and investment. This was after I spent several years putting the majority of my pay on loans to become debt free and paid off the $60,000 in student loans and a very small car loan.
If someone makes a salary of $30,000 a year than they probably take home around $22,000 after taxes and insurance. It would be much less comfortable for them to have a lot of savings. True, not impossible, but much much harder than me since their takehome pay is equal to my "frugal" pay. They would have to give up much more than I do. Obviously you can't max out your 401(k) and IRA on that salary, maxing those out would be more than your take home pay! Basically - not possible until you get past median income (which is around $50k)
As an aside I don't think children have to be that expensive... Granted I don't have them but I see all my friends spending a massive amount of money on very silly things for their kids. Nobody needs the majority of crap that is bought for kids. Household size has, IIR, doubled in the last 60 years. It isn't like kids' needs have changed to take up double space since my grandparents were raising them - it is parents just give them more.
Yes, but the amount they'd save is "a few thousand a year". I doubt they'd save more than $3,000/year after the big expenses and random things happening [e.g. dental, medical]
You'd need around $1,000,000 to produce $30,000 a year [3% "safe return"] indefinitely.
http://www.bloomberg.com/personal-finance/calculators/401k/
You'd need to save for 35 years to retire before 60 [using the defaults, no employer match since you need access before you could access a IRA/401k, etc] which is what /r/financialindependence is about.
Mr Money Mustache and all of their idols retire early [by 40] and that is what they emphasize. That simply isn't possible on $30k/year in the US.
EDIT:
> Which was exactly my point. :)
Ah okay. I thought you were like the guy I was replying to who is completely 100% convinced that they can retire in their 30s like /r/FI aims for if they'd just "save more money".
You'd have to basically be homeless to save enough to be able to retire very early on a modest income such as $30,000.
The real costs of kids are the necessities. Child care, clothing, food, medical & dental expenses.
I live in the midwest and send/sent my children to a daycare that is extremely price conscious even for this area. It cost me over $7000 per year per child. So when I had 3 kids in day care at the same time; I was paying $21,000 a year just for daycare. For some people that is not sustainable; it is as much or more than they earn.
The vast majority of my clothes were hand-me-downs or thrift store or sometimes sales rack stuff. My mom and her sisters and brothers passed around garbage bags full of their kids' old clothes for the smaller kids and clothes were passed on to coworkers and friends. Several kids all wore clothes until they fell apart. I was allowed to have one pair of shoes (only from Payless) and I wore them either until they didn't fit or until the next schoolyear came. My parents didn't spend hardly anything at all on clothes.
Medical costs obviously are high (unless you are in the military)
I never even felt deprived or anything either. Not being able to pick out my clothes wasn't even a big issue for me.
People talking about saving money by not spending money on clothes and toys really don't know what they're talking about. Brand new clothes and toys today are super cheap compared to what they were when I was a kid. For example, I just bought some brand new baby shoes and shirts on sale for $2 at the grocery store. If I was poor it would cost me more in bus fare to get to the used clothing store than I would have saved had I just bought stuff new at the grocery store. The biggest cost for me _by_far_ is childcare and summer camps.
These places were pretty friggin boring though, just a bunch of sitting around doing not much of anything except playing with yarn with minimal supervision.
The "free camp" (as we called it) was especially boring.
Exclude a few other optional behaviors and the numbers shift more positive pretty quickly. Examples: smoking, iphone plans, pets.
Someone doesn't have to go without those things forever but cutting out all the non-necessities for a few years to stabilize and build a little savings is a great thing everyone should be encouraged to do.
Ditto: I don't drink, and I don't have a car. And I still struggle.
Don't know how some students do it.
But someone studying STEM is already doing those things and it's much easier to continue doing them than to start in the first place. "An object in motion.." and all that.
My mother also went through for a degree in a STEM field. And got caught in a bubble of biochemists. To the point where people with PHDs are applying for research tech work.
It's poor form for a rich person to say "just stop doing [luxury that I consider a social norm]" when a person on median income most probably doesn't do [luxury] to begin with.
You are really saying that poor people are not welcome to those things: cheap entertainment is not for them; the comfort of a pet is not for them; access to communication is not for them. Not having fair access to those things keeps people in poverty.
I would point out that owning a pet, in particular, has major health benefits for the owner - the benefit of owning a pet may easily outweigh the cost.
It's great that you've cut unnecessary things. But I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about the overall trends and data:
According to Mintel[1][2], 57% of those making less than $35k own pets. Further, 34% of people without a high school diploma and 31% of those with only a high school diploma smoke[3]. Odds are those two groups are also low income.
Social norm or not, you have to prioritize and make hard choices.
[1] - http://www.marketingcharts.com/traditional/3-in-5-americans-...
[2] - Updated report: http://store.mintel.com/americas-pet-owners-us-september-201...
[3] - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stanton-peele/why-do-poor-peop...
Yes, my point is that you have to prioritize and make hard choices to live at that level of income; not to build savings.
(I edited my parent comment because I didn't feel my personal data was really relevant, sorry for any confusion.)
In my original - and still unedited - comment I said: "cutting out all the non-necessities for a few years to stabilize and build a little savings is a great thing everyone should be encouraged to do."
It's not about "not welcome to..." anything, it's about making hard choices for a while to have better options in the future.
For others, that pet may be the only creature on Earth that ever acts happy to see them. It may also be entirely dependent on them for survival. That has an important--and possibly even necessary--psychological benefit.
If you're single, and don't have a pet, I certainly don't begrudge you the expense in acquiring one. It is certainly cheaper than dates or typical group entertainment activities with your friends.
And if I may pat nerd culture on the back for a moment, tabletop board games, role playing games, and certain card games are very often cheaper than bowling, professional sports tickets, dance clubs, movies, concerts, amusement parks, or even pay-per-view television events.
But I'm still not going to fault anyone for attending a pro baseball game for $30 per attendee for nosebleed seats, rather than play a tabletop RPG at $5 for some PDF downloads, paper, and a communal bag of pretzels. In the same way, I don't fault anyone for living in a tiny studio apartment rather than in a van down by the river.
The theoretical possibility that I could survive entirely on dandelions and fresh roadkill does not establish the lower bound for anyone's standard of living. Everyone at that income level has already made more economic substitutions than most people realize. And in a lot of cases, novel substitutions are criminalized or otherwise prohibited by people for whom such substitutions are violations of social norms.
For instance, if you substitute a grass lawn for food-bearing plants in your front yard, some HOA busybody may fine you for it, then convince the cops to force you to destroy it and replant grass seed. And good luck trying to raise rabbits or chickens in your back yard. Or maybe you don't even have a yard in which to make the attempt, and your landlord won't allow windowboxes.
So that "social norm" sword swings both ways. If you find the unaesthetic economic substitutions made by povs to be unacceptable, you cannot reasonably also complain about the expenses incurred in not making those substitutions. I see owning pets as a substitution for more expensive human relationships, and smoking as a substitution for having any sort of hope for a better life in the future or having pride in a lasting accomplishment. If those things were less costly and more widely available, the inferior substitute goods would be less prevalent.
We've also chosen, collectively and as a society, to make a lot of high-productivity places artificially expensive: http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0...
We always chuckle when our friends talk about how expensive their kids are, right before mentioning their three cross-country trips. Financial literacy can apply to child-rearing too!
However, when the going rate for daycare in NYC is $3K/month per child, you need to make an extra $50K/year (pre-tax) to just cover that (if you were to maintain your pre-kids lifestyle). Then there are other expenses. Point it, kids aren't free.
That's where you need to start making choices (less eating out, etc.)
I have two kids, and it's fairly easy (at least before starting school / sports)
1 - Second hands clothes, toys, etc are super cheap 1.1 - Hand me down across the extended family and your family (seriously, they grow out of it in minutes, try not to buy it new) 2 - Your kids don't need a lot of toys and crayons and paper are cheap 3 - GO TO THE LIBRARY 4 - Parks are really fun, and really cheap, as in free
Where it adds up, at least for me, is I now have a 2 & 4 year old in school and that's $1K a month (drops to zero once they hit public schools), but for a few years that's hefty. However, that's also a choice
1 - I chose private school for preschool, so that's costlier 2 - I moved to a specific area for the 10/10 public schools to save money
You pay either way. Picking the nicer location is probably cheaper, but I wouldn't bet on that always being the case. It's difficult to quantify the costs of location to compare the two.
My ONLY point being, my family wanted a house sooner, but we waited, and waited, and waited it out to find one that met our financial needs in the area we wanted.
IF you do that (knowing it the stars may not line up) it's incredibly helpful.
For child care, either a parent stays home (cost = what that parent would be making, including retirement and benefits) or you pay (around here) ~$600-$1200/month per kid for day care, depending on the quality/reputation of the place.
Tax credits help a bit, but not much.
But keep in mind, in SF, a 3br house or apartment south of 280 (a bit blighted in spots, but far safer than its reputation) starts at 800K, and really, unless you're at the outskirts and buying a property in need of considerable work, you're probably going to shell out over a mil. Child care is easily over $2k a month, so 50K a year.
So at least in SF, you're probably looking at about 90k+ on housing and child care. Health care is another huge cost, but it's hidden.
What percentage of that is really spent on creature comforts like expensive travel or christmas gifts? New clothes? You're a parent, you've seen what things cost at lower cost spots like Old Navy or payless shoes. It's not a big expense. I do a lot of hand-me-downs (I have 2 kids myself), but in the end, I'd estimate very generously that clothing costs about 0.5% of the yearly budget.
Now, one could certainly reasonably say that living in SF is a financially illiterate thing to do (though if this is the case, then many of the employers claiming a shortage of software developers are actually claiming that there is a shortage of financially illiterate developers, since these companies are generally located in SF or Silicon Valley).
But is Boston, New York, Washington DC, Seattle, or LA really that much better? I think it just goes from impossible to difficult.
The reason I mention this is that I believe the middle and working classes in the US are eroding, and while some of this can be self-indulgence (look at the way some people treated houses as piggy banks, for example), I wouldn't write off middle class struggles as financial illiteracy or excessive self-indulgence.
For some reason I thought houses up there had gotten crazy expensive. Not too far from Reston and Tyson's and some of the best schools in the country. Can't beat that.
This is an aside, but when silicon valley companies say there is a desperate shortage of software engineers, Obama[1] nods gravely in agreement. Why doesn't he at least ask why they don't let people work from places like Fairfax? I understand that there are benefits to being in the valley, but if the shortage is that desperate, wouldn't they at least try?
As for the original point, even if things get easier outside SF, I'd still say that you'd need to be taking some pretty serious shopping trips for kids clothes to approach the chunk of the budget that goes to health care, housing, and child care/education, even in a less brutal housing market like Fairfax. As for good public schools, well of course that's a relief once they get out of day care age, but you still shell out - I have two kids in public school, and just paying for the local YMCA run after care (so my wife or I can pick them up after work) is $6k per kid per year (so $12k total for me). We cancelled cable, which saved us about $1k a year.
[1] not to pick on Obama, this is common reaction from politicians.
The Valley companies in general don't like remote workers, despite all that is said about the shortage. The executives/managers want the convenience of being able to bother an engineer on whim. Amusingly, remote work is in practice more common in the DC area (and for more than just software engineering), in part because the federal government has driven telework as a huge perk.
sounds like 2k a month isn't unusual, but you can get this down if you look around and find a more neighborhood based one. These exist in SF too, they are licensed but tend to be run out of someone's house.
I'd say that for two kids, you'd probably be at over 3k a month easily in fairfax. Mortage on a 500k house with a 10% down would probably be about another 20k a year, so you're looking at a conservative estimate of $56,000 a year for childcare and mortgage costs (I know there's a deduction, but there are also property taxes and other housing related costs that in my experience offset this and then some). Keep in mind that if you're a 2 income professional family, your income is too high to qualify for a tax deduction for child care (I always wonder why people haven't identified this as one of the things that deters women from re-entering the workforce).
This is perfectly manageable on a good tech salary with a second spouse working - in SF, those numbers would probably be closer to 100k. So what is perhaps impossible in SF is absolutely workable in fairfax, though of course this really just scratches the surface, I don't know much about life in DC.
I'd still maintain that housing, health care, education/child care costs in both places probably still vastly eclipses the savings you can get from cutting back on things like cable, cars, or travel, unless you're extremely self indulgent or are in an unusual situation (such as a sick family member living at some distance from home).
You do realize that those are luxuries you are not taking because they're going to other priorities i.e. your family? It has nothing to do with not having kids and being financially irresponsible. Kids are very expensive and have incredible amount of all kinds of risk attached to them.
- Child care (necessary if both parents work or there's just one parent)
- Larger apartment/house, in an area with good schools
My wife and I live in a large midwestern city. Prior to having kids, we had more than enough space in a 2-bedroom apartment. We had in the past (as students) lived comfortably on less than $20k each a year.
Putting an infant in a day care costs between $1200 and $1600 here. It drops a few hundred when the baby moves into the toddler room, and a few hundred more when the toddler moves into the older kids' room. With two kids in day care (an infant and an older kid), that still costs in the ballpark of $2000-2500 per month.
The 2-bedroom apartment is too small for 2 adults plus 2 children, plus visiting family members who help with kids, and moving to a bigger place in an area with good schools also increases monthly costs substantially.
Even if you're not spending money frivolously, having kids is expensive compared to not having them.
In the US by 2008, maternal sole-custody had declined to 42% of custodial arrangements (from 80% in 1986), while equal shared custody rose to 27% (from 5%).
http://psychcentral.com/news/2014/05/22/joint-custody-becomi...
And I have seen too many people at work struggling with ugly divorces.
Or, the vast majority of the time, men use custody of the children as a bargaining chip to secure a better financial settlement, which is why they mostly don't end up with custody.
In contested divorces, there may be a presumption operating that the person who acted as the primary caregiver is most suitable custodial parent, and traditional gender roles means that that will often be the mother.
But that's not a gender-based assumption, that's a gender-neutral assumption applied to facts that happen to be influenced by traditional gender roles.
Now, if men who were the primary caregiver during marriage were generally losing custody in contested custody proceedings, that would be a different story.
1) That's 100% incorrect
2) That isn't even what was said.
>women end up with the kids the vast majority of the time, and the only time they don't is when there's seriously wrong with them (e.g. abusive, mentally ill, etc.).
Once again, completely and totally incorrect. The "vast majority" of people that I personally know about don't have the woman ending up with the kids. I know of one guy whose ex-wife took off halfway across the country and left him with the kids.
I also know (and hate) someone who is male and did the same - took off halfway across the country and left his ex (girlfriend) with the kid.
I would say that women can tend to be unfair with the kids. Insisting "I'm going to get my way" and the father just giving it to her rather than fight in court over it.
My sister in law isn't abusive or mentally ill.
The obvious solution is to separate the assets proportionally based on how much was put into it in the first place, though I'm sure that's much easier said than done (and a bit of an oversimplification of most situations).
The convincing argument I've heard against that is that it gives someone leverage to keep their partner in a relationship against their will, once they are used to a certain standard of living they can't have on their own. If someone with significant assets marries someone living paycheck to paycheck, for example.
If you don't want to merge your equity with someone, either don't marry them or sign a prenup. I don't think people with significant net worth go into marriages without understanding what they're doing.
Also, the original logic that any of this will have anything to do with a man's willingness to work seems really quite over-stretched.
Both of our comments are completely random, uncited, and not even mentioned in the article.
Check out "Men on Strike" by Helen Smith. She highlights the trends and proposed a number of theories to explain it.
Where is this said? Straw man runs wild.
"I believe most women want to find a man to marry and have kids"
and please share your responses.
go on! i dare you!
But as I suggested, why not test it?
Up to and including paying child support for someone who isn't even yours. Or paying child support for a child resulting from you being raped.
And there's no way around it currently. Currently, even if both parties agree, there's no way for them to actually form a binding agreement. It's gotten to the point where prenuptials are essentially useless. They are far too easily thrown out.
However, I would not tell you as such in person unless specifically asked, and possibly not even then. It's a good way to get ostracized.
Though there's also a moral component for me, but that is another matter.
The main loss here is the exodus of manufacturing jobs. No simple way around it.
I'm willing to wager that, because there's only so much land and crops, there's only so much demand for labor--unless you want like one person per bushel or something silly. Meanwhile, the rest of the population continued to grow.
I finished my Bachelor's in Spring 2009 in finance, right after the collapse and took the first shitty job I could find. After a couple more finance related positions, I decided I needed to be doing something different and started teaching myself CS, Math, Stats.
I built a few moderately successful iPhone apps, enrolled in Harvard Extension's distance courses. The past couple years have been me teaching myself, taking distance courses, and doing contract work now and then.
I'm a decent programmer and built some pretty cool things.
I'm in the Bay Area (East Bay) and live in a crappy apartment and burning through what is left of my savings. I don't have a job. I don't have contract work. I don't have friends that work in the industry and grew up fairly poor.
Not asking for a 'pity-party', I guess I'm not sure what the next step is and feel disillusioned and paralyzed. I've never had a real job in Tech, I don't have credentials and not sure where to get started.
like, shouldn't there be some transition, explanation, or...something? The first paragraph made perfect sense on it's own, and then it's off to talk to about men.
Anyway, seriously... "why male models" (why men)?
With an entirely separate article on women: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/upshot/us-employment-women...
Don't assume the worst!
entrepreneurs?
Times they are a changin', always have been, always will.
> (People in the military, prison and institutions are excluded from these figures.)
But if you're shocked at 1%, 2.9% are in jail or on probation or parole. They are mostly non-violent offenders. Laws are unequally applied toward African Americans at a ratio of about 10 to 1 (when accounting for incidences of the illegal behavior in each population) with African Americans receiving 60% longer sentences than whites for the same crime.
Prisoners are then put to work in industrial manufacturing for as little as 18c/hr and as much (ha) as $1.50/hr. The prison manufactures are guaranteed to win any government bid, regardless of whether their bid is higher than competitors.
Sorry for the tangent, pet peeve.
There are various biases that impact the validity and reliability and there are methods for accounting for those biases. Rates of criminal behavior in the population is a very active and mature area of research.
Another method is extrapolation from statistical trends in crime. For example, most violent crime occurs within race. So you can take victims of violent crime that were not solved and extrapolate fairly good estimates of the perpetrator's traits from the victim. Of course, you still have to account repeat offenders and other confounding factors.
Short answer is, there's not just one way.