"They found that manufacturing declines significantly affected the supply of what they termed “marriageable” men—men who are not drinking or using drugs excessively and who have a job. (...) the numbers of marriageable men relative to women declined, because men had migrated elsewhere, joined the military, or fallen out of the labor force."
How many in which category? The article treats men who moved away as the same problem as being junkie. Social problems like alcoholism and drugs are talked about as if they would be same as being unemployed. It is odd conflation, it is not the same, not even nearly.
The root problem seems to be that we have made money (or rather, the ability to make some) an ends instead of a means.
I don't know how all of the 8 billion people on this planet can be expected to meaningfully contribute to something (that can't be done better and more cheaply for everyone by automation) and "earn" their money, without seriously crippling technological advancement (e.g. the advent of self-driving vehicles, or robot lawyers/doctors.)
If they're not a burden on the rest of society, then there's nothing wrong with that. I take issue with able-bodied people not working, and collecting welfare while contributing nothing - which is a problem worth billions of dollars in my country.
> Social problems like alcoholism and drugs are talked about as if they would be same as being unemployed. It is odd conflation, it is not the same, not even nearly.
When comparing two things, it's useful to understand what is the comparison being made. Of course these things aren't the same in general sense of things - but as far as making a man "unmarriable" (as in statistically desired by either gender for a long-term relationship and partnership), they have a pretty similar effect, don't they?
No, because this ignores the cause & effect reality of nature. If people are turning to drug-based stimuli for the purpose of numbing and unfulfilled life of 1) no sexual partners 2) few job prospects, then we should not act as if the drugs are the first-tier causes of their predicament...
Anyone who has seen the upper echelons of society knows how many drugs are used up there too - and therefore knows that they are not first tier-causes (of being on the bottom) in every use case.
I haven't seen the statistics, so I do not know. However,for pregnant young women, marring alcoholic or junkie is freaking stupid idea. Marrying unemployed to soldier on together makes more sense.
Well, given the 18 -> 40% single mother increase, it's not a zero sum game. Not all women who would have married from the factory worker pool are now marrying into the white collar pool; many of them are simply choosing not to marry.
"Fewer men were working in manufacturing, which tended to mean their wages were lower than they had been when manufacturing had more of a presence in their area. And their wages were not significantly higher than women’s wages, which they had been during the heyday of manufacturing. (Fewer women worked in manufacturing in the first place, so they were less affected by the shocks.)
"This made the men less appealing to the women, the authors suggest—so there were fewer marriages. They find that trade shocks reduced the share of young women who were married, and reduced the number of births per woman."
In terms of marriage candidates, those are the same problem (except those who had moved elsewhere).
Yeah, I guess. But actually, that's a pretty standard characterization, I think.
Me, I'm amused by the title of George Lakof's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind . But actually, it turns out that "Women are not dangerous things", according to Plaster and Polinsky (2007).[0]
AIDS causes deaths, and car crashes cause deaths. Am I putting them in the same category? Is that wrong to do? Getting breast implants requires general anesthesia and a lung transplant requires general anesthesia. Am I putting them in the same category? Is that wrong to do?
For instance, dudes that joined military or found work in different city are not on local marriage market, but they are marriageable wherever they currently are.
I find it odd that the article manages to completely ignore/miss the effect of welfare and the change in incentives it may result in. Also, it appears that statistically, single mothers are much more likely to vote Left than Right.
In the sci-fi movie Advantageous, a future society with a lot more automation, has high unemployment rates. Recruitment (which in the movie is mostly done by AI) eventually evolves to a consensus whereby most jobs are assigned to men because otherwise society would become a lot more dangerous to everyone.
> Also, it appears that statistically, single mothers are much more likely to vote Left than Right.
If you're married to the state, then you vote for more of the state. It's one of the many examples where liberty has been eroded in recent decades, but few talk about it because it's a sensitive topic.
Ah yes, the sweet liberty of being unable to provide for your children. Welfare is a pitifully small percent of the budget compared to military, health, and education not to mention the massive amounts of corporate welfare that happens ("I'll get those taxes down for you"). But you're right it's the left voting single moms that erode our liberty. What about the right-voting single moms? Are they "welfare queens" eroding our liberty too or are they just good people who had to make a tough choice?
Absolutely. For a country referred to as "the land of the free" you surely have a lot of "sensitive topics". As soon as I posted my comment, I started getting down-voted. I believe the post was quite factual, not offensive in any way or prejudicial, so I can only imagine it was affecting someone's sensitivity.
Or, you know, given how wed conservatives have been to the Evangelicals, you tend not to vote for people that tell you you're a sinner and demonize your lifestyle. Homosexuals similarly vote more Left than Right.
I'm not convinced of the effect, especially in the context of single mothers and divorce. Welfare would seem to decrease the incentive to divorce an unemployed husband. I've also seen claims that just 100-150 years ago a lower proportion of men were married, and far more died childless, which would go against the narrative trend if true (but who knows if they are).
That's because women don't decide to have children in order to get welfare, they decide to get welfare because they got pregnant. Also, as a community starts to go downhill, couples often have less access to birth control and other family planning options, especially those who are "just getting by" to begin with.
The only people who actually seem to think that welfare causes these problems, are the ones who don't think we should be paying welfare. People who are on welfare or know those on that kind of assistance know better.
Some people from former Yugoslavia mentioned that during the war all women clustered around the few men that had means for survival and who led gangs or were involved in all kinds of shady business bringing in resources. I guess the effect described in the article is similar.
It's similar to the entirety of human history, minus the last little bit. The notion of most men finding female partners is a relatively recent development. Throughout most of our history, most men haven't procreated. There was a story posted here a while back that cited DNA analysis to show that humans have roughly twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. Apparently, the historical averages are around 80% of females that reproduced and only around 40% of males that did. It sounds like we experienced a brief period of middle-class prosperity that made that phenomenon far less pronounced and we're now seeing a regression back to the norm.
I'm not making a value judgment or saying we should want this disparity, just pointing out that throughout our history, it's mostly been this way.
It would be interesting to see studies on this. Intuitively this makes sense - in times of societal breakdown, the ability to violently compete for resources will return as a key signal of fitness
I hate to sound this much politically incorrect but women in these times of social unrest and upheaval turn into resources themselves and this clustering, as you described it, would be more of involuntary and less of at will.
This doesn't mean that women in these situations wouldn't tend to gravitate toward the most power male with the largest resources in the pack but in most case it's the other way around.
Which is really more politically incorrect to say, that women are basically looking for a man to provide for them, or that, more or less, pimps are survivors?
It sounds like manufacturing jobs left, so the men have no jobs, but the women still have jobs. Yes?
Why won't the men compete for the jobs the women are getting?
Alternatively, the men could stay home and take care of the kids while the women work at the jobs they have, providing the stable two-parent household.
It seems like a large portion of the problem is tied up in men's idea of what constitutes a "manly" role. I don't mean to trivialize the difficulty of changing one's perspective, but changing diapers has to be a better option than dying from an Oxycontin overdose doesn't it?
This may be true now, but there's a trend of women accepting that a man earns less (or even sometimes doesn't have a job) as long as she doesn't yet want to have a baby, and the man looks hot. It's still all about supply and demand.
Good point but there's nothing that precludes these assigned/expected roles in a LT relationship from changing or evolving in the future and for persons in the relationship to adapt to the new dynamics and realities.
Feminism, the advocation of equal social and political rights for women? What does that have to do with wanting to form lasting relationships with unemployed men?
Maybe, but a lot of shit heads are unemployed, and a lot of men who become unemployed become shit heads too. I read in a related article posted here that most prime aged men who've given up on the labor market aren't doing more child care, aren't doing more work around the house, are watching more TV and using alcohol and drugs more. So, basically, they're shit heads, either because they're out of work or with that cause and effect flipped.
Women are a lot more likely to go to college than men. [0] If you work in a factory, or planned to, you probably didn't go to college.
For all the attention that is given to the lack of women in CS and Engineering the story in aggregate for all majors is that women outnumber men at colleges. It's been that way since 2000 and the trend has continued in the past 17 years. Its to the point where women outnumber men two to one at some large schools like UNC which are, for example, 60% female. [1]
Unfortunately one of the results of that trend has been a lot of young women with less-than-useful degrees and mountains of student loan debt, working rather low-paying jobs. Which, to be brutally honest, makes them rather unattractive marriage partners, all other things being equal.
Very important point. Unequal distribution in higher education will exacerbate the issues raised in this post. Unfortunately, we are looking at a near future where increasingly large percentage of unemployed people in the West will be young, sexually unsuccessful males.
Did you ever hear of a man losing his job, or getting ill, then shortly after his wife leaving? It's quite common.
It's very much both sex's perspective of role. Clichéd it may be, but there's a truth behind women preferring men with money, power or strength, or a combination of all.
> Did you ever hear of a man losing his job, or getting ill, then shortly after his wife leaving? It's quite common.
Okay well how exactly "common" is it?
> but there's a truth behind women preferring men with money, power or strength, or a combination of all.
And men prefer attractive women...so what?
The majority of these men are uneducated and unemployed. The article states many are HIGH SCHOOL drop outs.
I'm a male. and I can tell you right now that I probably would not marry a female high school drop out.
The problem to me is not the women. it's that boys are being left behind in school and more work needs to be done to educate and re-purpose males from unskilled drones to skilled or white collar workers.
It's worth noting that job
loss often results in depression, especially if finding another job isn't easy for the person. That also tends to be a reason for divorce.
The thing is, if men switch roles with women, they will not be picked by them. Men are not selected for their capacity to stay at home raising kids. This will not change. So while what makes women attractive to men is still working (more than ever! Just look at Instagram), the opposite isn't holding true anymore. What is the man women are looking for now? The one with hundreds of thousands of instagram followers and gorgeous pictures. They just wanna enjoy this same fake happiness online together. How long is this behavior be mainstream? I don't know. What comes next can be even worse.
Humans are half-way between a tournament species and a pair-bonding species. Pair-bonding species certainly do select males for their ability to raise children. So to you I say, not all women!
You seem to conflate flicks or one-night stands and LT relationships. From my experience, women tend to choose marriage partners who are well-off and this is very understandable esp. in societies which are barely above the survival level or where women don't enjoy the full benefits and opportunities available to men.
I'm dating a gorgeous inspired woman. She doesn't have a Facebook account or an Instagram. I don't have a full time job. We have been living with my parents to save money during the winter, and bike touring / camping during the summer.
That is incredibly naive. Most women with a stay-at-home man become resentful and see them as a drain on their resources. They rarely succeed even if the man does the child raising household chores etc. Of course there are plenty of successful cases but they're in the minority. The reason why women don't marry men who don't earn more than them is because they want a successful guy, and by that they mean one that can earn more than them.
It's not just a changing of one's perspective. It's the destruction of your whole identity. It feels incredibly jarring and like you're going insane. It's what people with personality "disorders" have to go through to "fix" themselves to fit society.
Or sideways. There's this tendency to look at the lower classes of history and assume that since we too are not 'the rich' our behaviour should follow the same patterns of our class in the past.
Today, the burden of household work has been cut to 1/10th of what it used to be, jobs are primarily intellectual, and education is paramount. The model to compare against is not the factory worker who was poor in the 1900s, and somehow due to a quirk of history became middle class in the 1950s.
We ought to compare against the gentleman class---those who in the 1900s had maids, butlers, personal transportation, and intellectual jobs akin to what we do today: management, clerking, accountancy, licensed professions, etc.
In those cases, people married sideways---intellectual women marrying men then helping to run the estate, daughters of merchants marrying other merchants and participating in the businesses, 'professional' socialites giving the entire clan a leg up by creating situations where networking was possible.
This is the position we have inherited, and if we must take lessons from the past--we should take lessons from the right class.
I haven't researched it deeply, but I wonder if it's better to assume that most two-parent families simply need two wage earners. Women tend to earn less than men, and might not be able to support kids plus a non employed husband on their income.
Anecdotally, I know at least two families in my neighborhood, in which the father stays home with the kids. One of the moms is a physician, and the other is a business executive.
"Fewer men were working in manufacturing, which tended to mean their wages were lower than they had been when manufacturing had more of a presence in their area. And their wages were not significantly higher than women’s wages, which they had been during the heyday of manufacturing."
> Why won't the men compete for the jobs the women are getting?
Because different people are suited to different jobs. Why didn't (and don't) women generally compete for manufacturing jobs? Because being a creative designer or HR professional or pre-school teacher or dental hygienist is something much preferred for certain types of people. Just look at the numbers [1].
Men not only don't want to do certain types of jobs, but in many cases can't - they're not well-suited for them. So even if/when they compete, they'll lose to less experienced women just entering the workforce. And vise-versa for other types of jobs with flipped genders. There are gender differences, plain and simple. You can argue why they exist, but for this discussion it's not as relevant at this point.
I would like to note that the next "industrial wave" could affect women pretty hard as well: artificial intelligence. Recruiting and HR software, health-care robotics technologies, therapist chatbots, etc, could upend the female-dominated jobs listed in [1].
> Alternatively, the men could stay home and take care of the kids while the women work at the jobs they have, providing the stable two-parent household.
Heh, I guess you haven't read many women's online dating profiles for what is acceptable in a mate and what isn't. You generally have to be higher up on the ladder (education, wealth, status, etc) to attract a woman for mating in the first place. How this manifests in data: 80% of guys are "below average"! [2]
But who needs data, ask your grandfather if he could have "stayed home and taken care of the kids while the woman works" and he'd laugh at you and tell you to stop being a sissy. They may not have been able to explain it, but older generations have typically understood more about human nature than we give them credit for.
What 'average' is being highlighted? Is this an actual average, or a perceived one? Either way it sounds harsh and reminds me of that XKCD comic that concluded there was no way to win 'the game of love'.
Wait, you actually think that men are just so tied up in their gender role of "manliness" to enjoy the benefits of all of the reproductive success that low-paying jobs would afford them?
So basically, you think men are given the following scenarios, but are choosing option A?
A) Be a man, don't compete for women's jobs, drink beer instead of going to work, likely don't have a girlfriend or get laid because you don't have your finances in order...
B) Be less of a man, compete for women's jobs, drink less beer and more wine at dinner parties, bite your tongue about the manliness and receive willing girlfriends and sexual partners...
Anyone with any sense will laugh at this above false choice implicitly being promoted.
Or what about, examining the sense of bitterness in yourself, so that you can hold yourself in esteem at dinner parties regardless of your work, or what you happen to be drinking, and enjoy the personal connections that develops, even if they don't result in getting laid
> This group includes Olivia Alfano, a 29-year-old single mother living in Evansville, Indiana, where she works as a waitress at Red Lobster. The money is pretty good, she told me: She drives a BMW and was able to buy a house last year.
Am I the only one who is surprised by that? (I don't live in the US)
Millions of Americans were "able to" buy houses in the mid-2000s. The problem is they bought these houses entirely on credit, wholly without the means to eventually pay for them. Cars are also a type of purchase Americans typically take on debt for. It is slightly more difficult to obtain a loan you shouldn't qualify for these days, but there's plenty of opportunity in the US for those who want to get in over their head.
The problem with a story like the quoted is that it presents the superficial elements of someone's lifestyle without giving any actual insight into the fundamentals (i.e., budget) on which the lifestyle is based.
So, I guess stuff like this might seem surprising to those unfamiliar with US culture. But my point is it may only seem surprising if the assumption is the person actually paid for those things. It's highly unlikely that a house, car, and kids are in the clear on a part-time waitress salary, and more likely that the person is up to her eyeballs in debt and neglected to mention it.
It's hard to say. The given information is consistent with either "nothing strange at all", OR someone who is living far above her means using credit, or has sketchy / black-market income sources.
For the "nothing strange at all" argument: Median home value in Evansville Indiana is $105700 [1] - even with a bog-standard 30 year mortgage at 4% with no down payment that's a monthly payment of only $505. A relatively small down payment ($20K via help from parents), and/or some fancy (unwise) 5/1 ARM financing could probably get you below $400/month mortgage payment. Depending on age and model and condition, a used BMW can be had for under $3K.
If she owns an above-average home and a new/expensive BMW, then I would say there are important details being left out.
In some towns, Red Lobster is a very popular resturant. Its pretty terrible, but is seen as a splurge for the lower class. With the splurge status, tips are often decent compared to other family friendly establishments. Homes are pretty cheap outside the city there. Used bmw's are dirt cheap here, for any doubt see LeMons racing, which is packed with em, at a $500 budget (sans safety gear).
Probably all on credit. If your debit to income ratio (ironically, not a measure of your actual debit to income, but of how much money you have to pay off debts every month) is good enough, and your credit score is good enough (influenced mostly by using your credit and paying things on time), you can get some pretty huge loans out of the system.
IOW, it matters less if you're living with less than a month's worth of savings, so long as you can afford the payments and have a history of making payments; so here's a BMW.
An attractive woman could probably make $40,000 a year there, maybe a good bit more.
I worked at an similar restaurant back in the 2000s and cleared $25k a year working part time, mostly weekends. I'm an unattractive man. The attractive women I worked with would clear double what I made each shift.
Evansville is a cheap place to live, relative to the rest of the US. It's doable to raise a family on that salary with help from family for child care.
In addition to the other replies we have this interesting social custom in the U.S. where certain jobs have been arbitrarily recognized as worthy of extra compensation by the paying customers (tipping). So with a number of states raising minimum wage combined with tips and given the right conditions of cost of living, frugal living, and money management I could see it being pulled off.
As a general rule, the minimum wage does not apply to "tipped" jobs.
"The American federal government requires a wage of at least $2.13 per hour be paid to employees that receive at least $30 per month in tips. If wages and tips do not equal the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour during any pay period, the employer is required to increase cash wages to compensate. As of May 2012, the average hourly wage – including tips – for a restaurant employee in the United States that received tip income was $11.82."
In the comments it was mentioned that she was arrested for involvement in a Haitian cocaine distribution ring out of Miami 7 years ago (as per an FBI press release)
The article implies that it's solely the woman's decision to marry, but the reality is more complicated. Many men are choosing not to marry since it is fraught with economic risk to do so. This has been building for a generation.
> “You don’t want to marry a man who is in all likelihood not economically viable, because it’s not a free lunch,” Autor said.
"Not economically viable" is the exact phrase used in the movie "Falling Down" by the man who was denied a loan by a bank and was arrested while the Michael Douglas character looks on sympathetically. His wife ditched him, too.
I disagree with the title and message with its overall sentiment.
Yes, old school partnerships are dying, but that doesn't make males more disposable.
If anything,it gives men and women more options and opens up our society to fine tuning. (effects of large scale single momhood/dadhood, competetive job markets and novel family and supporting social structures) the old was nice, but if a single unit can function and achieve what a complex unit used to, wed all benefit. Supposing the experiment doesn't end in failure and twist society. Though even if it does, we'll self correct. After all, nature still rules us.
It's a culture of work hard, fuck-young and marry-old(er) for partnership for the coming future, we'll see where that takes us.
That doesn't take into account the fact that (through no fault of their own, and meriting no shame), single parents are pretty systematically worse statistically than bioparents in a nuclear household. Take into account the impact of parental "abandonment" on the child, which is traumatic regardless of whether the abandonment was voluntary or not, and regardless of whether it's one parent no longer seeing a child at all, or the other parent seeing the child less because she has to work harder to provide; both count as "abandonment" emotionally, and can be traumatizing.
Single-parent families, step-families all require better parenting, management, and communication skills, since they're more complex, and these parents aren't more skilled than the average, with predictable consequences.
Check the statistics on "fatherless" households, children of single mothers perform worse on every single metric. Worse academically, commit more crime (and much more rape), more runaways, more addictions, the list goes on.
> Yes, old school partnerships are dying, but that doesn't make males more disposable.
Implies that "old school partnerships" are dying, but being replaced by something new. That's not the case. It's not a case of old-thing-evolving-into-a-new-thing. It isn't being replaced by anything, just being destroyed. I'll bet you single mothers are much less happy than married women, especially in their 50s and 60s, not to mention the increased likelihood of being abused by dates, strings of failed relationships, increased stress, and loneliness.
tbh you're preaching to the choir here, i believe in 2-parent models for the sake of spending more time with the child and nurturing it better.
that said, ill add that single parents of the past are often a result of a broken house hold. the single parents of the future will do so by choice, this will give rise to interesting dynamics, i think.
it isn;t replaced by anything right now, but crises leads to break through, we might/(most likely will?) deal with is, as nature would have us, by either coming up with a new paradigm, or breaking then reverting to (a better?) version of the old.
maybe im an optimist, but ive seen so much shit, and the world is knee deep in shit these days that i need to believe that we'll make it.
to deal with this issue i personally would suggest community (kibutz style?) child care, which ironically echoes a communist tint, to deal with time-not-spent with children. top that with corporate/workplace restructuring (ala sweden with mandatory father-time as well as mandatory mom-time off for birth) and we'd be on our way.
one issue i do see is old age and loneliness. i see so many lonely old people here in europe. for now, females are growing older and finding it more difficult to find a partner after choosing not to marry. the men are reluctant to take an older woman as a partner, and while i understand hypergamy, im not sure i understand why the older men are not taking mid-30-smth women as partners.
also, i dont understand why can't couples marry and support each other's careers and just have kids later. is it so unnatural? it might boil down to the socioeconomics of hypergamy, which is a thought that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, to think that our females are "programmed" as such is no comforting notion.
The title is a simple quantifiable assertion taken directly from the conclusion of the research [0] while your comment is just an opinion. I encourage you to read the conclusion to the paper and its supporting analysis - and then to argue with the data, or to at least propose something falsifiable.
Wow, I just looked at the title of the paper, and it's the opposite of the HN title: one is about marriage (yes, of course jobs matter a lot), the other is about relationships. Number of married years per person is declining, number of relationships without babies are increasing.
> Supposing the experiment doesn't end in failure and twist society. Though even if it does, we'll self correct. After all, nature still rules us.
Well that's the problem, isn't it? The self-correction is for nature to destroy us so that something else can take our place.
It's completely possible for births to be below the population replacement rate until the people die out. It already is in first world countries save for immigration, and that can't save you if the third world industrializes and automates to the point they're in the same situation.
If we don't want that to happen we may have to start finding ways to enable people to marry and have more children.
Wait, what? In a world where the population keeps increasing, automation is and will continue to drive unemployment, and environmental destruction is rampant... you're concerned that we're going to die out for lack of breeding?
I don't see how factory jobs vanishing give men more options. Yes, for the lucky few who still have marketable jobs that aren't subsidized by the public sector, they have more money and options. For the vast majority of men, the job market is a much more brutal place than it was before with a lot fewer actual options.
It doesn't give men more options. It puts a lot of unexpected pressure on men to adapt.
And adaptation is a real challenge, because it may mean learning completely new technical skills as well as completely new social and political skills as well as being unusually creative and inventive - and most men have to attempt this after a very poor education and little or no mentoring or modelling of the possibilities.
In the past, men could get by fairly passively because the job-market was full of ready-made slots for them. They could turn up and fill a slot and money would start flowing.
Now the slots have to be invented before they can be filled. That immediately disenfranchises the 90% or so of the population who aren't particularly creative or entrepreneurial.
And even if a slot is invented, the odds of lasting success aren't great. Most projects fail, and failure isn't tolerated well.
So we've gone from an open job market with limited selection pressure and relatively easy rewards to a very closed and challenging job market which only works for maybe 5% of the male population - specifically unusually intelligent, creative/inventive, socially connected and/or wealthy, or just plain sociopathic men.
It's a huge, huge change, and I don't think we've even started to see the effects.
I understand your argument, but it assumes humans don't adapt.
So what if the coal mines close down?
We dont live in aculture where needs stop evolving. Where there's a need, there's industry of some sort.
Humans brains adapt, especially generationally.
I dont see Germany suffering any detrimental consequences of the modern workplace (where I am right now) and infact it's flourishing.
That Said, the education system and the industrial system works close together here, and it's a better system than most. So countries need to pitch in to the effort if educating it's populace for modern day jobs
What are the options for men who want to have a family/live with their children?
I guess men who just want to have sex might benefit, because they can just sleep with women and then leave, and society takes care of the single moms. Likewise, women can have more sex with varying partners.
The downside is not having a family or having a stressful family life (as a single mom).
And for the absent dads, the state will try to get the money back from them, so their outlook isn't pretty. They'll bend up being poor and lonely.
The main downside is for the children. Believe me, you would not want to be the child of such a man or such a woman.[0] This is worse than lack of iodine, lead in the pipes, or congenital deformities from pregnant drug abuse. It's a societal time-bomb.
> Children living in female headed families with no spouse present had a poverty rate of 47.6 percent, over 4 times the rate in married-couple families.
> The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states, “Fatherless children are at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse.”
> Children of single-parent homes are more than twice as likely to commit suicide.
> Children age 10 to 17 living with two biological or adoptive parents were significantly less likely to experience sexual assault, child maltreatment, other types of major violence, and non-victimization type of adversity, and were less likely to witness violence in their families compared to peers living in single-parent families and stepfamilies.
The "gender roles" crowd is deeply dogmatic and misguided, and it's having incredible consequences.
The article claims the effect of varying employment levels on society are different depending on gender- lower male employment means lower marriage rates. Lower women employment means higher marriage rates. Lower marriage rates imply higher numbers of children born out of wedlock. Children born out of wedlock are more likely to have disadvantaged backgrounds. But increasing number of single mothers reduce the stigma of being a single mother, and allowing single mothers to "soldier on".
Civilization is built on monogamy. People might not like the sound of it, but that's the reality of the situation. This is why all successful cultures and religions promote marriage, while tagging everything else as 'degeneracy'. You can't build a society if 90% of men are frustrated, disenfranchised and blow things up, and children are raised by single parents. You need a social contract that gives men a purpose and a legacy (sex), so that they can focus their efforts toward the development of the tribe.
EDIT: To clarify, I do NOT condone violence toward non-traditional arrangements. Sorry if I came off that way.
Interesting that you mention "the tribe" as basic unit of society. We have abandoned the concept of tribalism gradually in favour of (1.) feudalism, (2.) absolute monarchy and finally (3.) the nation state. Today, we don't have to deal with "the development of the tribe", because the greater family has become utterly unimportant [wich is a good thing IMO, because we can focus on more important issues].
Moreover most tribal societies in Western/Central Europe up until the 7th century -- in Scandinavia until the 10th century -- were polygamous. Some of these societies were highly successful. The Vikings for example weren't just barbarous brutes and pirates, but also tradesmen and farmers with highly sophisticated technologies like metallurgy, coinage and shipbuilding.
So no, I don't think that "Civilization is built on monogamy". If anything, monogamy as a family model is built on the roman church, and it's the heritage of the roman church our society is based upon.
>> The article claims the effect of varying employment levels on society are different depending on gender- lower male employment means lower marriage rates. Lower women employment means higher marriage rates.
That's not a claim, it's a fact. You need to study evolutionary psychology. Women seek a man to provide and protect. Period. Other qualities are in play too, but I'm talking about an evolved need. You take away the ability of a man to provide and protect and he becomes shit to a woman. You take away the womans ability to provide for herself and she becomes more dependent on marriage to get by. Why does this gender difference exist? Because being pregnant and caring for children both make women more vulnerable and detract from their self preservation ability. Hence the evolved family structure that works.
Readit News
How many in which category? The article treats men who moved away as the same problem as being junkie. Social problems like alcoholism and drugs are talked about as if they would be same as being unemployed. It is odd conflation, it is not the same, not even nearly.
I don't know how all of the 8 billion people on this planet can be expected to meaningfully contribute to something (that can't be done better and more cheaply for everyone by automation) and "earn" their money, without seriously crippling technological advancement (e.g. the advent of self-driving vehicles, or robot lawyers/doctors.)
Dead Comment
When comparing two things, it's useful to understand what is the comparison being made. Of course these things aren't the same in general sense of things - but as far as making a man "unmarriable" (as in statistically desired by either gender for a long-term relationship and partnership), they have a pretty similar effect, don't they?
Anyone who has seen the upper echelons of society knows how many drugs are used up there too - and therefore knows that they are not first tier-causes (of being on the bottom) in every use case.
I'd challenge TFA's "men less desirable" summary, however. Some men are less desirable, but that would seem to make others that much more desirable.
I was thinking the same thing. Hooray for being marriage material.
Not familiar with that acronym.
Care to elucidate?
"Fewer men were working in manufacturing, which tended to mean their wages were lower than they had been when manufacturing had more of a presence in their area. And their wages were not significantly higher than women’s wages, which they had been during the heyday of manufacturing. (Fewer women worked in manufacturing in the first place, so they were less affected by the shocks.)
"This made the men less appealing to the women, the authors suggest—so there were fewer marriages. They find that trade shocks reduced the share of young women who were married, and reduced the number of births per woman."
In terms of marriage candidates, those are the same problem (except those who had moved elsewhere).
Me, I'm amused by the title of George Lakof's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind . But actually, it turns out that "Women are not dangerous things", according to Plaster and Polinsky (2007).[0]
0) http://scholar.harvard.edu/mpolinsky/files/Dyirbal.pdf
Birds fly and planes fly.
In the sci-fi movie Advantageous, a future society with a lot more automation, has high unemployment rates. Recruitment (which in the movie is mostly done by AI) eventually evolves to a consensus whereby most jobs are assigned to men because otherwise society would become a lot more dangerous to everyone.
EDIT: References:
[1] 74% of single mothers voting Democrat
[2] one quarter voting Republican
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/single-mothers-give-... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/opinion/sunday/single-moth...
If you're married to the state, then you vote for more of the state. It's one of the many examples where liberty has been eroded in recent decades, but few talk about it because it's a sensitive topic.
The only people who actually seem to think that welfare causes these problems, are the ones who don't think we should be paying welfare. People who are on welfare or know those on that kind of assistance know better.
I'm not making a value judgment or saying we should want this disparity, just pointing out that throughout our history, it's mostly been this way.
This doesn't mean that women in these situations wouldn't tend to gravitate toward the most power male with the largest resources in the pack but in most case it's the other way around.
Why won't the men compete for the jobs the women are getting?
Alternatively, the men could stay home and take care of the kids while the women work at the jobs they have, providing the stable two-parent household.
It seems like a large portion of the problem is tied up in men's idea of what constitutes a "manly" role. I don't mean to trivialize the difficulty of changing one's perspective, but changing diapers has to be a better option than dying from an Oxycontin overdose doesn't it?
The reality on the ground is that many women consider extended unemployment a good-enough reason to end a marriage.
A cynical but not unrealistic view is that humans tend to display loyalty to performed roles in relationships, not to individuals.
If one individual stops performing their assigned role, the relationship ends.
http://on.mktw.net/2li9AOT
>If one individual stops performing their assigned role, the relationship ends.
This is a very succinct way to describe reality.
Thank you for stating it so clearly.
I am a feminist man and I would not be keen to form a lasting relationship with an unemployed woman unless she was already wealthy.
It's statistics and sociology.
The last time I saw data on this, that was one of the most common causes.
Source?
Edit, forgot to include the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13795397
For all the attention that is given to the lack of women in CS and Engineering the story in aggregate for all majors is that women outnumber men at colleges. It's been that way since 2000 and the trend has continued in the past 17 years. Its to the point where women outnumber men two to one at some large schools like UNC which are, for example, 60% female. [1]
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/fashion/07campus.html
It's very much both sex's perspective of role. Clichéd it may be, but there's a truth behind women preferring men with money, power or strength, or a combination of all.
Okay well how exactly "common" is it?
> but there's a truth behind women preferring men with money, power or strength, or a combination of all.
And men prefer attractive women...so what?
The majority of these men are uneducated and unemployed. The article states many are HIGH SCHOOL drop outs.
I'm a male. and I can tell you right now that I probably would not marry a female high school drop out.
The problem to me is not the women. it's that boys are being left behind in school and more work needs to be done to educate and re-purpose males from unskilled drones to skilled or white collar workers.
The article said it is women making the decision.
Today, the burden of household work has been cut to 1/10th of what it used to be, jobs are primarily intellectual, and education is paramount. The model to compare against is not the factory worker who was poor in the 1900s, and somehow due to a quirk of history became middle class in the 1950s.
We ought to compare against the gentleman class---those who in the 1900s had maids, butlers, personal transportation, and intellectual jobs akin to what we do today: management, clerking, accountancy, licensed professions, etc.
In those cases, people married sideways---intellectual women marrying men then helping to run the estate, daughters of merchants marrying other merchants and participating in the businesses, 'professional' socialites giving the entire clan a leg up by creating situations where networking was possible.
This is the position we have inherited, and if we must take lessons from the past--we should take lessons from the right class.
Anecdotally, I know at least two families in my neighborhood, in which the father stays home with the kids. One of the moms is a physician, and the other is a business executive.
It's a real mess everywhere.
Because different people are suited to different jobs. Why didn't (and don't) women generally compete for manufacturing jobs? Because being a creative designer or HR professional or pre-school teacher or dental hygienist is something much preferred for certain types of people. Just look at the numbers [1].
Men not only don't want to do certain types of jobs, but in many cases can't - they're not well-suited for them. So even if/when they compete, they'll lose to less experienced women just entering the workforce. And vise-versa for other types of jobs with flipped genders. There are gender differences, plain and simple. You can argue why they exist, but for this discussion it's not as relevant at this point.
I would like to note that the next "industrial wave" could affect women pretty hard as well: artificial intelligence. Recruiting and HR software, health-care robotics technologies, therapist chatbots, etc, could upend the female-dominated jobs listed in [1].
> Alternatively, the men could stay home and take care of the kids while the women work at the jobs they have, providing the stable two-parent household.
Heh, I guess you haven't read many women's online dating profiles for what is acceptable in a mate and what isn't. You generally have to be higher up on the ladder (education, wealth, status, etc) to attract a woman for mating in the first place. How this manifests in data: 80% of guys are "below average"! [2]
But who needs data, ask your grandfather if he could have "stayed home and taken care of the kids while the woman works" and he'd laugh at you and tell you to stop being a sissy. They may not have been able to explain it, but older generations have typically understood more about human nature than we give them credit for.
[1] https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.ht...
[2] https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0...
A) Be a man, don't compete for women's jobs, drink beer instead of going to work, likely don't have a girlfriend or get laid because you don't have your finances in order...
B) Be less of a man, compete for women's jobs, drink less beer and more wine at dinner parties, bite your tongue about the manliness and receive willing girlfriends and sexual partners...
Anyone with any sense will laugh at this above false choice implicitly being promoted.
or in women's idea of what constitutes a "manly" role.
> This group includes Olivia Alfano, a 29-year-old single mother living in Evansville, Indiana, where she works as a waitress at Red Lobster. The money is pretty good, she told me: She drives a BMW and was able to buy a house last year.
Am I the only one who is surprised by that? (I don't live in the US)
The problem with a story like the quoted is that it presents the superficial elements of someone's lifestyle without giving any actual insight into the fundamentals (i.e., budget) on which the lifestyle is based.
So, I guess stuff like this might seem surprising to those unfamiliar with US culture. But my point is it may only seem surprising if the assumption is the person actually paid for those things. It's highly unlikely that a house, car, and kids are in the clear on a part-time waitress salary, and more likely that the person is up to her eyeballs in debt and neglected to mention it.
For the "nothing strange at all" argument: Median home value in Evansville Indiana is $105700 [1] - even with a bog-standard 30 year mortgage at 4% with no down payment that's a monthly payment of only $505. A relatively small down payment ($20K via help from parents), and/or some fancy (unwise) 5/1 ARM financing could probably get you below $400/month mortgage payment. Depending on age and model and condition, a used BMW can be had for under $3K.
If she owns an above-average home and a new/expensive BMW, then I would say there are important details being left out.
[1] https://www.zillow.com/evansville-in/home-values/
IOW, it matters less if you're living with less than a month's worth of savings, so long as you can afford the payments and have a history of making payments; so here's a BMW.
I bet she has a gigantic pile of debt and gets a lot of help from state. And alimony.
I worked at an similar restaurant back in the 2000s and cleared $25k a year working part time, mostly weekends. I'm an unattractive man. The attractive women I worked with would clear double what I made each shift.
Evansville is a cheap place to live, relative to the rest of the US. It's doable to raise a family on that salary with help from family for child care.
"The American federal government requires a wage of at least $2.13 per hour be paid to employees that receive at least $30 per month in tips. If wages and tips do not equal the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour during any pay period, the employer is required to increase cash wages to compensate. As of May 2012, the average hourly wage – including tips – for a restaurant employee in the United States that received tip income was $11.82."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage_in_the_United_St...
Edit: incoherence
> “You don’t want to marry a man who is in all likelihood not economically viable, because it’s not a free lunch,” Autor said.
"Not economically viable" is the exact phrase used in the movie "Falling Down" by the man who was denied a loan by a bank and was arrested while the Michael Douglas character looks on sympathetically. His wife ditched him, too.
Yes, old school partnerships are dying, but that doesn't make males more disposable.
If anything,it gives men and women more options and opens up our society to fine tuning. (effects of large scale single momhood/dadhood, competetive job markets and novel family and supporting social structures) the old was nice, but if a single unit can function and achieve what a complex unit used to, wed all benefit. Supposing the experiment doesn't end in failure and twist society. Though even if it does, we'll self correct. After all, nature still rules us.
It's a culture of work hard, fuck-young and marry-old(er) for partnership for the coming future, we'll see where that takes us.
Single-parent families, step-families all require better parenting, management, and communication skills, since they're more complex, and these parents aren't more skilled than the average, with predictable consequences.
Check the statistics on "fatherless" households, children of single mothers perform worse on every single metric. Worse academically, commit more crime (and much more rape), more runaways, more addictions, the list goes on.
> Yes, old school partnerships are dying, but that doesn't make males more disposable.
Implies that "old school partnerships" are dying, but being replaced by something new. That's not the case. It's not a case of old-thing-evolving-into-a-new-thing. It isn't being replaced by anything, just being destroyed. I'll bet you single mothers are much less happy than married women, especially in their 50s and 60s, not to mention the increased likelihood of being abused by dates, strings of failed relationships, increased stress, and loneliness.
that said, ill add that single parents of the past are often a result of a broken house hold. the single parents of the future will do so by choice, this will give rise to interesting dynamics, i think.
it isn;t replaced by anything right now, but crises leads to break through, we might/(most likely will?) deal with is, as nature would have us, by either coming up with a new paradigm, or breaking then reverting to (a better?) version of the old.
maybe im an optimist, but ive seen so much shit, and the world is knee deep in shit these days that i need to believe that we'll make it.
to deal with this issue i personally would suggest community (kibutz style?) child care, which ironically echoes a communist tint, to deal with time-not-spent with children. top that with corporate/workplace restructuring (ala sweden with mandatory father-time as well as mandatory mom-time off for birth) and we'd be on our way.
one issue i do see is old age and loneliness. i see so many lonely old people here in europe. for now, females are growing older and finding it more difficult to find a partner after choosing not to marry. the men are reluctant to take an older woman as a partner, and while i understand hypergamy, im not sure i understand why the older men are not taking mid-30-smth women as partners.
also, i dont understand why can't couples marry and support each other's careers and just have kids later. is it so unnatural? it might boil down to the socioeconomics of hypergamy, which is a thought that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, to think that our females are "programmed" as such is no comforting notion.
[0] http://www.nber.org.sci-hub.cc/papers/w23173.pdf
Well that's the problem, isn't it? The self-correction is for nature to destroy us so that something else can take our place.
It's completely possible for births to be below the population replacement rate until the people die out. It already is in first world countries save for immigration, and that can't save you if the third world industrializes and automates to the point they're in the same situation.
If we don't want that to happen we may have to start finding ways to enable people to marry and have more children.
And adaptation is a real challenge, because it may mean learning completely new technical skills as well as completely new social and political skills as well as being unusually creative and inventive - and most men have to attempt this after a very poor education and little or no mentoring or modelling of the possibilities.
In the past, men could get by fairly passively because the job-market was full of ready-made slots for them. They could turn up and fill a slot and money would start flowing.
Now the slots have to be invented before they can be filled. That immediately disenfranchises the 90% or so of the population who aren't particularly creative or entrepreneurial.
And even if a slot is invented, the odds of lasting success aren't great. Most projects fail, and failure isn't tolerated well.
So we've gone from an open job market with limited selection pressure and relatively easy rewards to a very closed and challenging job market which only works for maybe 5% of the male population - specifically unusually intelligent, creative/inventive, socially connected and/or wealthy, or just plain sociopathic men.
It's a huge, huge change, and I don't think we've even started to see the effects.
So what if the coal mines close down?
We dont live in aculture where needs stop evolving. Where there's a need, there's industry of some sort.
Humans brains adapt, especially generationally.
I dont see Germany suffering any detrimental consequences of the modern workplace (where I am right now) and infact it's flourishing.
That Said, the education system and the industrial system works close together here, and it's a better system than most. So countries need to pitch in to the effort if educating it's populace for modern day jobs
I guess men who just want to have sex might benefit, because they can just sleep with women and then leave, and society takes care of the single moms. Likewise, women can have more sex with varying partners.
The downside is not having a family or having a stressful family life (as a single mom).
And for the absent dads, the state will try to get the money back from them, so their outlook isn't pretty. They'll bend up being poor and lonely.
[0]: http://www.fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-consequen...
Some statistics:
> Children living in female headed families with no spouse present had a poverty rate of 47.6 percent, over 4 times the rate in married-couple families.
> The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states, “Fatherless children are at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse.”
> Children of single-parent homes are more than twice as likely to commit suicide.
> Children age 10 to 17 living with two biological or adoptive parents were significantly less likely to experience sexual assault, child maltreatment, other types of major violence, and non-victimization type of adversity, and were less likely to witness violence in their families compared to peers living in single-parent families and stepfamilies.
The "gender roles" crowd is deeply dogmatic and misguided, and it's having incredible consequences.
EDIT: To clarify, I do NOT condone violence toward non-traditional arrangements. Sorry if I came off that way.
Moreover most tribal societies in Western/Central Europe up until the 7th century -- in Scandinavia until the 10th century -- were polygamous. Some of these societies were highly successful. The Vikings for example weren't just barbarous brutes and pirates, but also tradesmen and farmers with highly sophisticated technologies like metallurgy, coinage and shipbuilding.
So no, I don't think that "Civilization is built on monogamy". If anything, monogamy as a family model is built on the roman church, and it's the heritage of the roman church our society is based upon.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21...
That said, infedility is also a corner stone of our civilisation.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/210277.php
http://bit.ly/2n1QoVx
That's not a claim, it's a fact. You need to study evolutionary psychology. Women seek a man to provide and protect. Period. Other qualities are in play too, but I'm talking about an evolved need. You take away the ability of a man to provide and protect and he becomes shit to a woman. You take away the womans ability to provide for herself and she becomes more dependent on marriage to get by. Why does this gender difference exist? Because being pregnant and caring for children both make women more vulnerable and detract from their self preservation ability. Hence the evolved family structure that works.
Do you have any idea what the social structures of paleolithic humans were?
Is that a good thing? Is it something we should pursue?
http://www.fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-consequen...
It's much more complex than "we need to accept everybody! Every arrangement is just as good as any other!"