Why is the participation rate of men in the workforce so low?
Daily Mail: “The 69.9 per cent labor force participation rate for men is at lowest level ever recorded.”
This statistic that I saw on Drudge got me thinking about something I read in Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Murray started looking at male employment in two towns–Fishtown and Belmont– prior to the recession and had this to say on page 181 of his book:
To sum up: There is no evidence that men without jobs in the 2000s before the 2008 recession hit were trying hard to find work but failing. It was undoubtedly true of some, but not true of the average jobless man. The simpler explanation is that white males of the 2000s were less industrious than they had been twenty, thirty, or fifty years ago, and that the decay in industriousness occurred overwhelmingly in Fishtown.
Murray points out that prime-age men are much more than three times as likely to be out of the labor force if they are unmarried. He also found that these men were spending much more of their time on leisure activities.
So, as I ponder this data, I wonder if men are going Galt, staying home and collecting unemployment or no longer need jobs because they don’t get married as often? Or is it that they just can’t get a job because the industries they work in are no longer hiring? Could the Obama administration also be part of the problem, focusing only on women’s jobs and not on those of men? Or a combination of these. What do you think?
Also read: Behind the Unemployment Numbers: It’s Worse than You Can Imagine
For about 40 years, women have been complaining that men make more than women, that is, men make “too much money”. So fine, we are doing what women want, making less money. On the other hand, women are more willing to have relationships with men who make more money. I believe that the phrase “double bind” applies here.
The reasons for this are many.
A single man can support himself by working only 10-15 hours a week. Now… when society decided to incentivize men to work more than that (to uplift the whole society), they ‘carrot’ they dangled was :
1) You can marry a woman when you both are age 21-22, so that you get most of her years of beauty, and she is a virgin at marriage.
2) You both will have 5-10 kids, meaning you have a double-digit number of grandkids.
3) There was no way the woman could walk out, taking your kids and your life’s earnings, just because she is ‘bored’….
Unfortunately, we have replaced this with :
1) Women show up at age 34 expecting a provider. She is too old to have more than 1 kid, and has 10+ sexual partners.
2) She can walk out and take the kids and your life’s earnings. Both Democrats and Republicans jump through hoops to make this evil act look moral, by providing moral cover for the selfish woman.
3) The tax bracket is far too progressive, so hard work pays less and less.
Eventually, men figure out that this society has given them just 4 choices : slave, outcast/recluse, criminal, or pickup artist. Among these choices, the last one is the best among bad choices…
So why should men work hard? There is no reason to.
If a man really wants to be a family man, he should expatriate.
If a man really wants to be a father yet still live in the US, he can do what Toban Morrison did, and hire a surrogate to become a single dad (thus bypassing the riskiest part – marriage to a female).
http://www.parentcentral.ca/parent/newsfeatures/article/1038283–single-man-wanted-a-child-hired-a-surrogate-had-a-baby
Of course, women will not allow men to not be in the slave role, so they are turning to the state to coerce men to work hard against their will.
Hey, how come I said something like this (although in a nicer manner) about how the protection and incentive for men to marry are now gone and it got delted?
My bad… was being premature about that.
I was going to go the other direction, and point out that most men ARE in the workforce — it’s the overgrown boys who stay home or work part time jobs while new Mommy is the primary financial provider and also the maid, laundress, kids’ chauffeur, shopper, and cook.
However, you also have a point. So both genders got screwed. Huh.
When did we decide that we wanted to let the disgruntled singles organize our society around their problems and insecurities?
When I was in my twenties and out of college for the first time, I hated my job. Being frank about it. I kind of hated the world because I saw women leeching off men without any societal disapproval, and thought that was really unfair. I wanted to have a nice house and car at age 25 while I sat around and watched TV.
But I look back on it, and I am frankly glad that the world was tougher on me as a man. I HAD TO develop a good occupation, either that or jail, frankly. I went back to school, law school, and then slowly built that up as a freelancer. That was the first step that made me enjoy work more – not having a boss.
30 years later, I like my job, I get satisfaction from it, and I make good money. The women around me who were parasites are starting to feel the other end of life. Although they still have plenty of money from the idiotic men in their twenties, they are losing their looks and will not be able to replenish it. No one respects them and, more importantly, no man even pretends to respect them because they are useless, aging bitches.
I am also very thankful that – although I was engaged once in my twenties – I ultimately never married and never became a wage slave.
The problem is that men today probably don’t care as much about appearing to be an up-and-coming whatever. They see that it is the ticket to fork over all their money to a woman if they make one misstep. I would probably react the same way today if I were 20 all over again. Getting harnessed up to be in service for some ungrateful women for the rest of your life – no thanks.
The problem is that men today probably don’t care as much about appearing to be an up-and-coming whatever.
Well, I think it’s all-of-the-above for the several posts here, but you’ve put your finger on one there – but maybe it’s not that men don’t care as much, as that there are far fewer opportunities since about 1990, when Greenspan first started taking the economy for a ride because he had to, for three reasons:
* Pay for the first Gulf War
* Outsourcing to China starting to surge, sucking jobs from US economy
* Automation eliminating a large part of what had been the US middle class
We can argue the fine points, but this pretty much covers the period of Murray’s book. In short, men didn’t change but the economy did.
The femininization of the work place, filling many slots with useless affirmative action coordinators and other government-imposed useless overheads, and working men finding slots outside the traditional and partly or entirely off the books, are all good reasons, too. And going Galt.
I think my experience includes every one of these topics.
Other countries – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Japan, etc. – paid most of the cost of the first Gulf War.
Well they made nice contributions it’s true, but tell it to Greenspan, who nailed US rates to nearly nothing for a couple of years to make sure the economy would recover or something. It worked sort of, creating a bubble – and setting the stage for doing it again in 2001, creating the real-estate bubble that inflated until it burst bigtime in 2007/8.
Personally, I think there’s 2 reasons:
1) The Slacker mentality – Kick back, play video games and let the “rents” worry about the bills.
2) Who needs females, children, bills and the house? All are in a constant state of need.
Why bother? I’m going fishing.
Underground economy. Just because they aren’t working on the books doesn’t mean they aren’t working.
Why work? Once you’ve made your nut, why do more? The ‘profits’ are eaten up either by your dependents, which is good or now by the government, which is bad. Are the men completely out of the workforce or are they just not consistent? Or have white males just found alternative ways to keep themselves up than to participate by continual effort in a game rigged to favor others? I don’t think that so many men have dropped out completely but they sure might have dropped out of the government statistics created to track a large industrial workforce that stayed under the thumb of an employer or union.
Why would any white male want to contribute to the government? Women, blacks, gays, water and air all hate them.
Personally, I’ve not dropped out of the traditional workforce, but am getting very close to that decision. The kids are out of college and employed, the wife is semi retired and I’m getting really close to saying “screw it” and going back to consulting (I’m an Engineer) only this time for small jobs and cash only.
The “safety net” looks to have become a nice comfortable hammock. Why continue to work my brains out only to support others who look down on me with disdain?
Totally agree. I’m 40 and put my 20 years in. Been out of “work” for almost a year now but do jobs on the side. I’m mechanically inclined so doing work on cars and even a wood chipper to make cash has been my staple. Also picking up scrap metal, and you’d be surprised how much money people toss out, has been another. Still single and no kids but my house is paid so even if I do settle down (highly unlikely with the liberal women in my town), I still won’t be working full time.
Well hey, at some point you’ve just made enough money!
John D. Mueller in his book Redeeming Economics did some interesting calculations that inversely related labor-force participation rate for men to federal transfer payments for welfare and unemployment. It’s been a while since I read the book; I think his conclusion was that men were being pushed/pulled out of the workforce by income transfers. As more money is transferred by government fiat, the less men need to work in order to earn it, etc.
Thanks for the book mention, it sounds like a good one. It does seem to me that more men are on some type of unemployment, disability or veteren’s benefits, all of which do not discriminate against men like WIC or other welfare payments for women and children.
Mr. Mueller expanded this paper into a chapter in his book, if I remember what I read in the footnotes correctly: http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubid.2671/pub_detail.asp
The key quote: “As the share of government transfer payments in national income has risen, the labor force participation of men has fallen, while the labor force participation of women has risen. The employment/population ratio for men has fallen about two percentage points for each one percentage point increase in transfer payments as a share of national income.”
It’s about halfway down the page, near the beginning of the seventh section.
From what I have seen, once somebody works off the books for a year, they never go back to the Regular Economy. Lots of illegals work off the books, so do a lot of people on Social Security disability AND SS retirement. And a lot of divorced men either work off the books entirely, OR work off the books to supplement their nine to five job. A lot of white men think that they can’t get ahead at a “real job” so they give up. I don’t blame them. I’m female and white and over 50, and the job market for people like me is also grim.
Once you don’t have to go to a job that you hate, and once you downscale your lifestyle, working off the books can give you a lot more leisure time, etc. Those who work off the books don’t have to file tax returns, either.
The real shame is when people develop an addiction to video games or the internet, and stop accomplishing ANYTHING.
A few theories:
1. Except for a few outliers like the Dakota oil fields, we’ve devalued men’s particular non-intellectual contributions of physical exertion and willingness to undertake risk. Workplace safety standards, automation, and the social status or stigma attached to particular jobs have all made it more difficult for men to trade their non-intellectual assets in the job market.
2. those industries that do tap men’s particular workforce skills are either still depressed (construction) or scleroric (heavy manufacturing)
As an aside, the failure to recognize physical exertion and risk is usually a good way to defuse “pay gap” arguments, by bringing up the “workplace death” gap and the way workplace death and wear and tear are a major source of the life expectancy gap.
There is also a fundamental difference in how a “desirable job is these days: http://www.mikeroweworks.com/2012/09/the-first-four-years-are-the-hardest/ This guy specializes in doing jobs “no one else will do,” including illegals … and he got Mitt Romney’s attention: http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/150321/ (hat tip to your insta-half
Go on Yahoo! and see their occasional filler story (really a generic pitch for on-line education often) about New High-Paying Jobs That Don’t Need a Master’s Degree or Career Fields With the Greatets Opportinity Growth or some such; e.g., “Seven Part-Time Jobs with Full Pay,” http://career-services.monster.com/yahooarticle/part-time-jobs-with-full-time-pay#WT.mc_n=yta_fpt_article_part_time_jobs_full_time_pay
Art Director
Veterinarian
Acupuncturist
Information Technology Consultant
Master Plumber
Marriage/Family Therapist
Physical Therapist
How many of those seven are male-concentrated jobs? Master Plumber only, most likely. (My grandfather was an Art Director and IT Consultants were often male twenty years ago, but today things are often different.) And, even with the economy as it is, this is what’s available.
“Could the Obama administration also be part of the problem, focusing only on women’s jobs and not on those of men?”
Partly. If you look at the Dem convention it appears that the most powerful group in the Democratic party are middle/upper class (mostly white) women: Abortion, contraception, “equal pay”, etc. All the issues that we are told are important to that group. If you are male, you’re seen as part of the problem. If you’re a mom, you’re not that important either – especially stay-at-home moms, which might as well not exist.
Last night, the MSNBC cheerleaders were discussing the gender gap– why women favor the Dems so consistently.
This topic comes up a lot and that left me wondering, why is there never a discussion of the corollary: that men favor the Repubs? Why the disparity in gender-interest?
1. When women do poorly, it’s discrimination. When men do poorly, it’s because their lazy.
2. As more women enter the workforce; has the economy doubled to create an entire second set of workforce jobs? Or are women now doing jobs that were done by men? And therefore, are men now doing jobs that were done by women? Which is another way of asking how much of the 30.1% are now Mr. Mom?
3. Interesting that as Higher Education has become more expensive and less applicable to daily life…women are now graduating more, and men less. Since when did higher education become a pair of shoes? To borrow a phrase: Credentialed, not Knowledgeable…and due to increased EEOC litigation, credentials are the objective factor for employment rather than productivity. Until higher education returns to being a competitive challenge with a meaningful outcome that can sustain masculine interest for 4+ years…
From about the middle of the 1800s on, most schooling was consumed by females. As the 20th century began, most higher education was consumed by females. The post-WWII G.I. Bill benefits interrupted female dominance of the student population but this ended by the early 1970s.
Post-secondary schools have become the finishing schools for girls of our era. Think about it. If girls weren’t seeking a way to signal “good breeding” or Mrs. degrees, would they be crowding into fluff bachelors degree programs with poor job market value as they do?
“…it’s because their lazy…”
they’re
Not the same. Learn the difference.
There is also an issue regarding the types of jobs that are available today.
I see that Michele Obama was a “diversity coordinator” making well over $200k a year. An Internet search will also reveal that some of her co-workers said that she was never really around and never really did anything. I would say: She doesn’t really have to with that kind of job. She just has to be “for” diversity.
I looked at the Web site for my university (a Big Ten school). They now have a vice president for diversity coordination reporting directly to the president.
I think you could cut out the entire Department of Education, and no one would really notice. But look at the kinds of orders they place. They pay for propaganda and women-oriented victim crap. The female women’s studies professors who write them are cleaning up, the people who order them are earning a great salary, and everyone wins. Except for the men (they are statistically the biggest taxpayers) paying for all this dopiness.
There really isn’t much change between now and 1900 – roughly the same number of women won a Nobel Prize in physics in the first half of 1900 as did in the second half – but society has found lots of bullshit jobs for women.
Indeed you could eliminate the DoE, and certainly should. There will be screams of anguish, naturally. Counter that with this: today, we must rent space on Soyuz to send an American up to the space station.
In 1969, we sent men to the moon, all by ourselves, culminating a 9-year program of science and engineering that involved tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, chemists, mathematicians, biologists… every single one of whom, without exception, were educated during a time when the Department of Education didn’t exist.
The DoE is a jobs program for bureaucrats, and that’s all it is. We don’t need it. Get rid of it.
You’re just an emergency room physician who doesn’t even clear 250 k a year?
Loser!
You aren’t even close to being a diversity coordinator.
Hah! Funny…and sad as hell.
I grew up in a town that could be Fishtown. From my observations, I would say that it is because the jobs that once allowed a working class male to support a family are gone. It is not just an Obama problem. The economies in rust belt towns have been spiraling downward for years. The decent paying jobs that remain are local government jobs, teaching, nursing etc; essentially female dominated professions. There is still opportunity for males who have a modest amount of ambition and do not have a problem with the daily grind, and many work in low paying retail jobs, but there is also a subculture of men who prefer the black market. I have not witnessed many men not working at all, however it is quite common for women to be the major breadwinners.
The black market kind of guys seem to be the types who have children with several different women. Perhaps they are trying to avoid paying child support, or in some cases maybe living in a household with their children in a pseudo-marriage to the “single” mom. Perhaps this arrangement allows them to maximize benefits. There is a cost to being married.
If the co-habiting couple have a child or more apiece, whether together or separately, they can each file a tax return with “Head of Household” status and get a lower tax rate, and each get the Earned Income Tax Credit if their on-the-books income was low enough. One or both of them may be entitled to food stamps, housing benefits, etc., that would definitely NOT be on the table if they were legally married.
This is a big part of why the white working classes don’t get married anymore.
Laura, that’s a big part of it. From experience with these sort of people, I can tell you that the “jackpot” nature of the EITC (it’s awarded in a lump-sum payment for the year, instead of doled out monthly) is like heroin to them.
Sometimes, if there are no jobs where you are then you have to go somewhere else. I did that myself a couple months ago. Jobs in the town where I’d lived for 26 years dried up. Fortunately, I was able to find another job over 1000 miles away. It isn’t easy and sometimes it isn’t possible but moving is still an option for a lot of people.
I agree. I was just sharing my observations.
The main reason is there’s not sufficient motivation for many men. (following are arguments made by other people at various places)
Men don’t work to become empowered or make a statement or to attain a particular lifestyle for themselves. Many men can make do with very, very little (see this post:
http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2012/07/minimalism-threat.html
The main two reaons men ‘work’ at ‘jobs’ are roughly
(a) To not feel like a loser. The problem is that most of the jobs that men can get in the current economy (as shaped by generations of elites) will still make them feel losers (often moreso than unemployment or welfare or skid row would) so that motivation is gone.
(b) To support a family. How many women in the US want a real husband (that is a non-exciting, flawed but reliable spouse who can get and keep a job and help keep a home afloat)? How many are holding out for a sparkly vampire or wealthy executive guy into S&M? Fantasies are fine as long as you remember that’s what they are. Too many US women now are held hostage to a fantasy view of themselves and the world and how it works that they are very poor marriage material so _that_ motivation is gone too.
Cliff, you are 100% correct as far as I’m concerned. Excellent observations.
I suspect the answers vary depending on where you are. Here in Alaska a lot of young men are sentenced to either unemployment or minimum wage jobs because they can’t pee in a bottle or pass a background check. While the BI is usually a requirement only of law enforcement or security jobs it is increasingly a part of the application process for any job that might put one in contact with the “vulnerable” of any sort. While a misdemeanor criminal record may not legally constitute a barrier, an employer with a choice of one with a “checkered” past or one without such a past, the employer will usually pick the clean record and that clean record is much more likely to belong to a female. A major issue with this is that so much has become criminal that was once just boys being boys. You don’t get your beer poured out or your cigarettes taken away these days; you get arrested, tried, convicted, and carry the record for life. You can become a FELON with repeat offenses of “minor consuming,” being a minor in possession of alcohol. You don’t get a shotgun in your face and a quick marriage if your underage girlfriend gets pregnant, you become a sex offender. I worked with a guy whose life was made a living hell by the women in the workplace because he was a registered sex offender; he was 18 and his 16 year old girlfriend got pregnant. When I was 18, there but for the Grace of God went I except the worst that would have happened to me is a brother or father might have kicked my butt and I would probably be getting married. Likewise, any recent drug use has become a barrier crime in many jobs and a pre-employment drug test is pretty much standard in any jobs where there is the slightest exposure to dangerous equipment of conditions. Workers Comp claims are such a pestilence and insurance so expensive that employers just eliminate anyone who might use drugs and with really dangerous jobs even random tests are common. In urban Alaska a young man would have trouble going two hours among his age peers without being exposed to nominally illegal drugs and adolescent drug use is almost universal. When use of marajuana within the preceeding two to often five years is a barrier, a lot of young men are disqualified. Right now the State of Alaska really needs Correctional Officers and my kid, who really needs a job, is qualified and can pee in a bottle but he can’t answer “no” when asked if he’s used marajuana in the past two years and he’s therefore disqualified.
The other side of it is that young kids of both genders all too commonly come out of school with absolutely no work habits, no sense of appropriate behavior in a workplace, and no ability to communicate in standard business English rather than adolescent patois. They’re quick to tell you that you’re stupid and old-fashioned because you don’t want to see their buttcrack or the girls’ thongs or their piercings, etc. and they don’t seem to understand that everyone around them is wearing a business suit.
I hired a good number of young lawyers and, frankly, didn’t look for opportunities to hire young men; they had lots of self-esteem and damned little reason to have it. The young women weren’t nearly so cocky nor did they feel so entitiled. Many of the women would, however, try to trip you and beat you to the ground either to try to manipulate you with sex or just to set up winning the sexual harassment lottery. Few have any exposure to any competitive activity and have never been challenged so they really don’t know how to handle challenges. We mocked most upcoming hearings. The person assigned to the case put on the gist of their case and it was open season of them for the rest of the staff. I had several young lawyers just come apart and a couple even quit over their first exposure to having their head handed to them by an experienced advocate. You can come out of even good law schools these days with zero advocacy skill but still feeling very, very superior to mere mortals, especially mere mortals who didn’t go to law school.
And as others have pointed out, a lot of young men work and make money but do it in the underground economy. It isn’t just illegal aliens hanging on the corner at Home Depot or cruising neighborhoods looking for houses or cars in need of some repair or maintenance.
Art, +1,000,000.
You prefer women over men? It’s probably because you have crap taste in men and you’re probably a big beta yourself who’s whipped by the women in his life.
Congratulations. Men like you have destroyed America by handing over the power to women for no apparent reason other than your inability to converse with vigorous, healthy American men.
Insecure much?
Let me guess; you’re male and under 40. Else you’re doing a really good imitation of the ignorant, arrogant young punks who used to try to get me to hire them. Do you excell in the popular culture questions but can’t answer any others in Trivial Pursuit? Do you have a fantasy football team? Can you rattle off the stats of all the players in your fantasy football team but couldn’t write it out in a standard English paragraph? Do you wear baggy pants? Can you knock down a half-rack in an evening? Do you have tee shirts that advertise beer or other alcoholic beverages? Would you wear one to work? Is there a bag of dope in your room? Some oxy or another benzo maybe?
Right on, dude!
Art,
Sure miss you over at RedState. Ain’t been the same since you left. Glad to see you’re still around though. Great observations, as always.
Best,
Scott
None of your insulting sneers apply to me, and although I do not endorse precisely what Samseau said, I understand his message: guys like you opted to not mentor younger men. You may not actually belive this, but at one point, you were as big an asshole as those young men you now ignore. In fact, some might suggest you still are that same arrogant punk. You just got older, achieved a little material success, and now prefer to lord it over others, rather than pass on what others helped your generation achieve at work.
But hey, I am sure you are right about those durn kids who won’t stay off yer durn lawn.
Well said.
You can’t “mentor” arrogant, ignorant little assholes whose eyes roll back in their heads as they mutter, uh-huh, uh-huh, I know, I know as you try to tell them something and then they haven’t a clue what you said and go out and fu*k precisely as you warned them against while they were too cool to listen.
I don’t watch sports and I don’t drink. I eat clean and lift three times a week. I worked 100 hour workweeks at $10 an hour to support myself in college and support my financially bankrupt father. I went to law school and left when I saw how much of a scam it was.
You’re a traitor to America and young men everywhere. Little sniveling betas like you are the mirror opposites of who I want to become.
Problem is, punk, no matter what you “want” to become, you’re an idiot.
Calm down. Your criticism is totally unwarranted and more than a little weird. Worse, its totally off point.
If he was in a position to hire them, why would he be competing with them ? (he can, after all, fire them…).
Moreover, if he chose the best person for the job, in light of his experience, how would that make him afraid of competition? I he was motivated in the crass way you posit, he would choose the most feeble-minded, right? (i.e., the slack-jawed males).
Climb down off your high horse, his comment has a lot of value and insight (especially the part about the remorseless criminalization of American life), if you’d care to open your mind a little…
Well, a lot of kids, male and female, come out of school these days with wildly unrealisitc expectations. I’ve had several positions in the past where part of my responsibility was interviewing candidates, and many of them were woefully unprepared, both in terms of “how to do a job” and in the technical training aspects of their chosen field. The Big Myth that they were raised on is that school is a big rainbow with a pot-of-gold job waiting for you at the end of it, and all you have to do is put in your time (and pay the fees) and the pot of gold is yours. It’s the union view of employment: work effort and job skills have nothing to do with advancement; it’s all time and seniority.
The thing you have to remember is that anti-discrimination laws make women more valuable employees, de facto. No one ever got sued by the EEOC for hiring too many women.
“I hired a good number of young lawyers and, frankly, didn’t look for opportunities to hire young men; they had lots of self-esteem and damned little reason to have it. The young women weren’t nearly so cocky nor did they feel so entitiled”
I knew guys like this when I had to endure corporate life. Horny middle-aged guys trying to build a sexless harem at the workplace, and part of that was keeping out the young men who would otherwise be competition. Gawd, am I glad those days are long behind me.
Every day was a mid-life crisis intervention with that sort, where you tried to deal with the older guys’ insecurities about their declining, while not trying to shine too much. On the best days you could learn something from them, but most days they were just grouchy assholes staring at the intern’s ass and scowling at you when the intern smiled … at you.
@all the arrogant punks I’ve attracted-
You little assholes need to learn to pay your dues and work your way up. There is a reason people can’t stand you and won’t hire you. I don’t care how smart or cool you think you are, you work your way up and prove you’re smart and cool. All that self-esteem your teacher gave you is simply crap; you earn esteem, you don’t walk into the office expecting it.
Not entirely sure what your problem is here, “Art Chance”. You obviously have some kind of internal conflict going on.
Cool screen name; some of us even know what it means. I don’t have any issues with them anymore; they’re working to keep my retirement coming in. I’m just stating my observations of, especially, the last fifteen or twenty years as my applicants got dumber and dumber and the males especially became more and more obnoxious.
FTW! +1
This is a great answer because it ties in any number of serious issues that face people today. Whether it is an encroaching legal system that creates criminality to self-justify, insane drug laws that accomplish nothing or the ridiculous end result of excessive focus on unjustified “self esteem” of young people.
Seriously, how hard is it to not do drugs and keep your pants zipped?
Men are doing the math. When you see your friends vilified in family court by their “christian” wives, you have to take a step back and ask yourself a question. If that admired pastor with 30 years of ministry, community service and business is going to lose his kids, income and ministry because his wife isn’t happy anymore, what chance do I have?
Exactly. Your wife goes “I do… until I don’t feel like it” then takes the house, your kids and half your income to go shack-up with some guy she likes better. Where’s the protection and incentive for men?
The main reason is there’s not sufficient motivation for many men. (following are arguments made by other people at various places)
Men don’t work to become empowered or make a statement or to attain a particular lifestyle for themselves. Many men can make do with very, very little captain capitalism did a post on this (go to his site and look for ‘minimalism’)
The main two reaons men ‘work’ at ‘jobs’ are roughly
(a) To not feel like a loser. The problem is that most of the jobs that men can get in the current economy (as shaped by generations of elites) will still make them feel losers (often moreso than unemployment or welfare or skid row would) so that motivation is gone.
(b) To support a family (which mostly makes men not feel like losers no matter how awful the work if the family is worth it). How many women in the US want a real husband (that is a non-exciting, flawed but reliable spouse who can get and keep a job and help keep a home afloat)? How many are holding out for a sparkly vampire or wealthy executive guy into S&M? Fantasies are fine as long as you remember that’s what they are. Too many US women now are held hostage to a fantasy view of themselves and the world and how it works that they are very poor marriage material so _that_ motivation is gone too.
Cliff Arroyo said: “How many women in the US want a real husband (that is a non-exciting, flawed but reliable spouse who can get and keep a job and help keep a home afloat)? How many are holding out for a sparkly vampire or wealthy executive guy into S&M? Fantasies are fine as long as you remember that’s what they are. Too many US women now are held hostage to a fantasy view of themselves and the world and how it works that they are very poor marriage material so _that_ motivation is gone too.”
Marriage is a “relationship” not a “commitment” any more (as my ex-wife blamed be for believing)… all those giddy romantic “in love” feelings no have to continue forever and ever (a la Twilight, Fifty Shades, etc.) or “it’s over” and she’s outta there. No morals or foresight, just feelings.
Aren’t typos great? “Marriage is a ‘relationship’ not a ‘commitment’ any more (as my ex-wife blamed be for believing)… all those giddy romantic ‘in love’ feelings noW have to continue forever and ever (a la Twilight, Fifty Shades, etc.) or ‘it’s over’ and she’s outta there. No morals or foresight, just feelings.” (How it should read, anyway.)
Just a quick explanatory note: I thought my comment (13) was in moderation because I’d included a link so I reworded that part (and added an important sentence). Please delete my first comment and let the second one through.
I have an easier explanation, particularly for office jobs.
I work in a law firm, in a staff position. I haven’t had a man for a boss in over 17 years. That is normal in most offices, as most middle-management positions are now filled by women.
Since most people hiring hire people who look like themselves, guess what? Women managers tend to hire more women.
It’s that simple, I think. Regardless of whatever “war on women” the Democrats claim, women still control most of the wealth in this country, and, since they are most of the middle managers in corporations, they control most of the hiring. Go figure.
In my experience there is truth in what you say; I left a female as my successor and when she subsequently moved up, she promoted another female as her successor. They’ve left one and hired another eunuch to the staff, but most of the staff is now women.
As I said above, I came to prefer women just because they’d work harder than most of the men but I tried to keep some balance. Lack of balance doesn’t seem to bother the women. I guess just like blacks can’t be racist, women can’t be sexist.
And the firm is much less likely to be sued for employment discrimination, so no one discourages one-sided hiring. If the same thing happened on the male side, your employer would be a sitting duck.
Absolutely true. I’ve observed the same; women get promoted over equally qualified (sometimes more qualified) men, because men don’t tick the EEOC check boxes.
Well one contribution, is how many men are in jail, prison, parole or some form of detention that women even if they do the same crime don’t end up in.
Last I checked it was about 3.2% of the US population. Which since it is mostly male. Makes about 6% of the male population in some form of correction. Most for non violent, crimes, often drug use.
Unwanted, unneeded, looked down on, not only are there few open doors but we are forced to work in environments that are toxic to our nature, soft, safe, unchallenging, The political and politicly correct bs it’s infuriating, and even when working for yourself it’s nearly impossible to see an outcome in this world worth striving for. There used to be honor and dignity in men’s work. Men used to have passion and drive to accomplish big things. Now, we are castigated and viscerated by constant assaults on our nature, value, character, and interests. Add to it all of the Legal challenges, divorce and custody laws, and increasingly strict penalties for what used to be acceptable behavior. America used to be a land of opportunities, but now it is becoming increasinly a land of broken dreams. Only victim class standards open doors for the politically unconnected. I have worked as hard as I can for years, and I have skills and training, but I am also disposable. Even after I started my own business, there was still ever less work. I am thankful I’ve been able to have steady part time work for over a year, but it’s still a pitance compared to the 40k plus I used to bring in. This used to be a man’s world. But now, I am like a foreigner in my own country. There are no networks for me to find, train, and develop skills and talents, they all been broken up by women. You can’t walk into any job these days, even McDonald’s with any expectation of getting hired.
I am on active duty with the Air Force. To my inexpert eye, the Air Force is made up of about 70% males, of those males, probably 80% are white. Yet the other day I attended a promotion ceremony and out of the approximately 50 people being promoted to ranks Senior Airman to one Senior Master Sergeant, maybe 4 of them were white males, another 6 or so were black males. The rest? Take a guess!
How much is reverse discrimination and how much due to women seeking promotion more than men. What about the officer ranks?
All those “two-fers” who meet double diversity “targets” of import today!
One thing I’m realizing is that women are seldom challenged on claims of additional minority status, as we’ve learned with the Elizabeth Warren case, and so many of them wind up as double- or triple-dippers. There’s no way an Irish-looking blond white guy gets away with claiming to be part Cherokee.
There was a time when society, schools and parents expected boys to grow up and work, while girls were expected to grow up and get married. Obviously that message has changed for girls, but I’m not sure what message today’s boys get. How does society, schools or parents make it clear to boys that we expect them to work?
With no ordered conception of life in society or the social contract about the division of labor and responsibilities, why should we make it clear to boys that we expect them to work? That’s the point – no one else wants to hold up their end of their bargain.
The responsibilities part of the message hasn’t changed all that much, at least for middle-class boys. (Boys growing up in the ‘hood I don’t think are getting any message at all.) They are still expected to grow up and get to work. What’s changed is that there used to be a bright vision of the future held out to boys, of rewards both material and spiritual, for those that held to the straight and narrow. They could basically make as much money as they wanted to, depending on how hard they were willing to work. Somewhere out there was a woman for them, who would be a devoted and loving wife. There was the promise of family of their own. And later in life, they would have earned the respect of society, and assured themselves of a secure future in their later years.
Today, boys can see for themselves that rewards for living the proper life are meager and chancy. Few jobs are out there, thanks to our government-strangled economy, and if their were jobs the boys would not be fit for them because the education system failed to teach them what they need to know. Young women are encouraged by society to hold out for the best possible deal in a marriage, and so they seem to have impossibly high exepctations of what a husband will do for them. There is no promise of family when it can all be destroyed at a moment’s notice by unilateral divorce, or when women are encouraged by the culture to cheat. And for boys that have grown up being denigrated and discriminated against because of their gender, promises of future respect ring hollow.
Under those circumstances, it’s no wonder that young men look at the bargain that society has offered them and conclude that it’s a ripoff.
One of my neighbors has a house, muscle car and a sedan, 4X4, boat, ATV, motorcycle, fishing gear, hunting gear, big screen TV and game system, and a ‘low wage’ job. Some of his stuff is new, most of it bought used.
What he doesn’t have, and never has had, is a wife or kids.
Poor bastard doesn’t know what he’s missing.
What your neighbor has though is debt… Just “need” in another package…
He owes on the house, but the rest is pay-as-you-go.
What he does not have is the ‘death of a thousand cuts’ financial obligations of supporting a family. The problem is, what is good for the individual is not so good for the society.
If you do not live in a high cost area, do not have to have the latest and greatest gadget, aren’t particularly concerned about your clothes being stylish, eat at home instead of every meal an ‘experience’, don’t have the expense of insuring for the financial security of others once you’re gone, shop for what you need rather than shopping for retail therapy… but you get the drift of it.
There is no reason for a man to marry, when the laws surrounding marriage are preposterously unfair to men.
I admire the courage of the man you described. What is needed in society for men to stop putting themselves last. Men need to think of themselves for a change.
You can live quite well on little money if you don’t have to also constantly pull the weight of a demanding woman who doesn’t work.
There’s another factor that gets ignored. Innovation has been stamped out in the U.S. This notion of “intellectual property” has all but destroyed the open marketplace where your ability to profit from an idea hinged just as much on your business acumen in getting your idea to market, as it did on developing the idea. Todays technology marketplace tells innovators that you have to patent/copyright/trademark your entire business and product before it exists, and still beat the big-boy-tech companies to market.
Look no further than all the absurd legal cases surrounding innovative products to see yet another reason why men say, “meh, why bother trying to create my idea, Microsoft/Apple/Samsung/Google will simply undercut my idea with a more broadly-marketed copy, and their lawyers are better.”
It used to be that you competed in the marketplace, and if someone copied your technology, you got angry but you moved on. Now we have cases like Apple where most of the “infringment” is on DESIGN and LOOK AND FEEL, not the technology, but Samsung has to cough up $1billion.
Legislate a 10-15 year moratorium on copyright/patent/trademark lawsuits, and you’ll see another cultural renaissance occur, and a lot of creative guys go back to work making cool shit.
It used to be that you competed in the marketplace, and if someone copied your technology, you got angry but you moved on. Now we have cases like Apple where most of the “infringment” is on DESIGN and LOOK AND FEEL, not the technology, but Samsung has to cough up $1billion.
I’ve been working with small computers for 30 years. Look and feel lawsuits have been around almost as long. Lotus sued Borland back in the 1980s (or early 90s) because the Quatro spreadsheet could use the same commands as Lotus 1-2-3. Apple sued other companies over their programs’ look and feel if they got too close to their own products. This has been going on for a long time.
Ever look through copies of LIFE magazine over a period of years from before 1967 or so? If you had, you would have seen lots of pictures of men (and women) at work: on farms, in factories, on fishing boats, fighting fires, building dams and skyscrapers, working in just about every “walk of life”. It wasn’t just LIFE magazine. In those days, work, even hard manual labor, was largely respected, if not celebrated. It certainly was treated as an essential part of living. All that respect is gone. In a complete cultural reversal, many of the “good jobs” that people used to be proud of now are something to be ashamed of. Not only are the people who take those “good jobs” treated like failures, they also have been taught that they effectively are suckers for doing “boring” and “unfulfilling” work while the fat cats sneer at (and exploit) them. I blame the leftists and their flacks in the media for this profound cultural shift.
“I came to prefer women just because they’d work harder than most of the men …”
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I haven’t really experienced that to the point of drawing a conclusion.
But here’s something I’ve thought about in general: Men are mostly expected to work in society, so you have the entire range of men, except for those in prison and a few househusbands, working or under pressure to find work.
There is an entirely different situation with women. The bottom portion in terms of willingness to work, competency, industriousness etc. can just drop out of the workforce with no societal censure, in fact praise. They can become a “housewife”. I distinguish that position from that of a working woman who stays home with her kids while they are young. A “housewife” may well not have any kids, and her distinguishing characteristic is her allergy to any kind of real work.
So you’ve got the laziest and most incompetent women already being shunted off to be taken care of by a man. The remaining women out in the real world are going to look better because they are not a random sample of women. They are the women who feel an obligation to also work if they don’t have kids and who also feel an obligation to do a job competently.
Admittedly I was dealing with a self-selected group: women with the resume for a fairly high-level job and their male competitors. Frankly, most of the men, especially the law school grads were arrogant pains in the butt; took one look around, demanded the corner office with the view and wanted to know when I was planning to retire; not a good path to advancement.
I have a lot less experience with the “other” kind of woman; the one looking to be kept. Back in my more recent single days, twenty-odd years ago, I was late thirties, early forties, recently divorced with a high-level job, a nice car, and a house. I had a kid but she was old enough that any woman wouldn’t look at her as an additional responsibility – though some came to look at her as a rival and justifiably so in some cases.
The “want to be kept” women ranged from recent grads living at home or in a low-level job and on their own to the welfare mommies. The welfare mommies lived a lot better than the women on their own in a low-level job. I had a fling with one who the first time I saw her I said to myself, “she’s either an heiress, a welfare mommy, or a call girl” as she strutted around a stylish watering hole in designer knock-off clothes. She was a welfare mommy on a mission: finding a man who would support her in the manner to which she preferred to be accustomed, for which she would exchange fairly skillful sex – and nothing else; none of that cooking and cleaning and getting up before noon stuff. She was made to be a decoration on a rich man’s arm. Trouble is; that don’t last long and even the best sex for the sake of sex gets boring pretty quickly. That said, there is the place for the grand horizontale and she found a divorced cop who would keep her and she even whelped a bunch of kids off him; last I heard, they were still together but then her options are limited now twenty odd years later.
I never knew any “good girls” in the want to be kept category, though I know they’re out there. I was into players and party girls so I didn’t meet them in church. After a few years I got really tired of the world of sluts and nuts and came to limit my “dating” to somewhat older women that I knew mostly as the result of my work though the nature of my work was such that dating women who worked very close to me was out of the question. The older women had some sense of romance, some manners, and weren’t nearly as self-centered as the younger ones; some of them could even be led when you danced.
Your female attorneys also skew towards lesbians and forever single non-moms.
Else they’d never get through law school or pass the bar.
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Many, many, many legal pleadings are in family court — in front of female judges.
It’s a self-licking ice cream business: Gal Qaeda becomes self-reinforcing.
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I suspect that a lot of this has to do with the type of person who is attracted to law practice these days. Misleading TV shows and movies and newspaper reports have convinced a large portion of the public that all lawyers are big-shot criminal trial attorneys with the power of life and death. Accordingly, law has become attractive to personality-disordered narcissists who crave power over other people. The males are the ones who are more likely to go peacock at the first opportunity; the females are more likely to be high-functioning narcissists who are a lot sneakier.
It’s a matter of incentives and consequence. We have feminized society and removed a lot of the consequences for bad judgement or poor behavior with our social safety nets. At the same time we have become less forgiving so that what was once youthful indiscretion now makes you a criminal for life. And yes, these appear to be opposing statements, but each is true only for 1 of the sexes.
We have devalued the traditional family, and a once wealthy country now owes more than a years output in debt, with bills down the line that total 5 or more times that total depending on who you read. That which can’t be paid for won’t.
You might suspend the law of consequence, but you can’t repeal it.
But I’m not sure we will return to a traditional structure (Read the Next 100 years-the main point being humans are struggling with this new thing called technology). 5% of people work in supplying our food and we export to the world. Technology makes us wildly productive. At the same time we diluted our workforce with the 50% of the population that took care of the home and raised the kids. We’ve sent our kids to education factories (with poor productivity) so they don’t work beside the parents and see there is value to what the parents do or want them to learn. We also have a large segment of the population who has the right mindset to be poor and is content with that.
I don’t know where all of this is going to come out. We can’t continue as we have been. Feel good jobs such as Diversity Coordinator and social benefits such that a minimum wage job qualifies you for benefits that require somewhere in the range of 60-80K wages to match will not continue, there is not the money. One the other hand, as long as expectations are low, we can support large segments of the population NOT working. It is going to be the Millennial generation that bears the majority of the cost and they are the most saturated with the nonsense.
My personal opinion is too few women are leaders, and <0.1% of women understand men or even care to. A healthy society requires both male and female, recognizing and using the strengths of each and having some forgiveness for the weaknesses. In Susan Pinker's book the Real Difference between the Sexes she points out that many women follow a traditional male career path until the early 40's when they figure out that's not them, and so they make a change. But for 15-20 years they have displaced a male that would want to be there. We are not doing ourselves a service by this behavior, neither societally or individually. I think we will see a snap back to male dominance once the consequences begin to catch up to us. I would not be surprised if women are banned from the workplace to some degree. However, this assumes American can keep some sense of our core values, we may be so far down the road that we can't figure out a fix. We certainly can not talk honestly about living beyond our means or what we are doing to men in our country. No wonder the rest of the world thinks we are nuts.
We live in interesting times.
Did you mean Susan Pinker’s book The sexual paradox : men, women and the real gender gap?
Remember that the rest of the world is still full of s**t.
What happened to all the men? There are a lot of reasons they have gone missing from the workforce and family.
On a macro level, the American workplace is more service oriented than it was in the past and requires skill sets more commonly associated with women – meetings, building relationships, office politics, etc. At my former company it was company policy that 50% of all management hires and promotions had to be women or minorities. It was not unusual for middle and senior professionals of any race or gender to be pushed out in their 40s, in part so the company can control the company pension obligations that kick in at age 55. By the time I left at age 47 I was one of the oldest people in my department, and it was a very big department at a large corporation. And in this economy it is more difficult than ever for a middle aged person to find employment, especially at the same salary/benefits level they had previously.
As for the home front, the idea of marriage and children is appealing on some levels, but the divorce rate is close to 50% and the wife usually gets the better part of the deal in terms of custody, child support, and maintenance/alimony. I have read a few articles to indicate that this is beginning to change but those cases are still anecdotal outliers, and it is still the ex-husband/father who pays more financially. They may pay more emotionally as well. I have read that women initiate the divorce in over 70% of cases, so even if the husband wants to stay in the marriage it is really not his decision. So, from a man’s perspective, the chances that a marriage will be happy, successful, and long-lasting are not favorable.
Sure, one could have children out of wedlock, but it is likely that the male would be expected to contribute financially without regard to how much he would be contributing to the day-to-day child-rearing decision as women are given custody in almost all cases.
Even in the celebrated choice of an abortion the male is completely shut out of the decision, except that if the woman decides to keep the baby then the father will have a financial obligation whether he wants the baby or not. We celebrate a woman’s “right to choose” but men are denied that right and are instead called “deadbeat dads” and worse.
So there are a lot of factors causing men to drop out. In some cases they are being forced out, but in many cases men are making a conscious decision to drop out based on a reasonable evaluation of the new world order. For now, men who drop out and stay that way are seen as pathetic slackers since the behavior doesn’t sync with traditional societal mores, but over time, and soon, I think we will see this as more common, rational behavior and not always sad.
The problem is that our welfare system relies on broader participation in the work force and it will be not easy to sustain the system as more and more men opt for the freedom that comes with a more independent and frugal lifestyle. In this sense it is very much a “Go Galt” type of scenario, and our society could break apart much like the one in Paul Ryan’s favorite novel.
Right on the nose.
” the male is completely shut out of the decision,”
I hear this complaint a lot, but what are you implying? You know you’re on the hook for support if she elects to have the baby. That is always the case, whether you marry the mother or not.
Are you suggesting that the father should be able to demand abortion? That’s really the only other alternative.
Well, another alternative is that Manipulative Mommy – if she doesn’t want an abortion or doesn’t want to adopt the child out – may have to pay for the child herself. She may have to actually get a … job.
Manipulative Mommy – in an ideal world – may also lose custody to the father and be ordered to pay a *real* amount of child support to him, with a judge thundering at her that she damn well better get a job or she’s going to jail for non-support.
(That only happens to men today – the thundering judge part – even non-custodial women are just “women”, and thus income is not imputed to them, many continue to live off a boyfriend or welfare and not work – it’s curious that feminists never protest this discrimination).
Carol, he’s talking about what’s called a “paper abortion”, in which the man surrenders all claim to parental rights, and in return is relieved of all financial responsibility for the child. No one outside of the lunatic fringe is demanding the right to compel the woman to physically have an abortion.
Make it optional for the father to provide support.
He knows he’s on the hook, ie he should have thought about it before sex.
Do women not realize sex causes pregnancy, even if they’ve been pregnant before.
Right now we have case law of 13 year old boys who were statutorily raped having to pay child support (or their parents having to pay it) to their rapists.
Apparently this 13 year old boys knew they’d be on the hook but their 20+ year old rapists didn’t realize sex could cause pregnancy.
And women are equal to men, how, again?
Truenorth said: “I have read that women initiate the divorce in over 70% of cases, so even if the husband wants to stay in the marriage it is really not his decision. So, from a man’s perspective, the chances that a marriage will be happy, successful, and long-lasting are not favorable.”
Yup. Pretty much. “If tomorrow all the things were gone, I’d worked for all my life./ And I had to start again, with just my children and my wife,” as Lee Greenwood Sang in “God Bless the USA”… well, no children and wife, too, even in the USA (thank God, at least) half your salary might be gone before taxes to start over despite working hard. Not much of an encouragement.
“On a macro level, the American workplace is more service oriented than it was in the past and requires skill sets more commonly associated with women – meetings, building relationships, office politics, etc.”
I read this several times. and it bothered me each time. And I realized why- it is a completely BS statement. Men build relationships- far easier and faster then women do. They may be superficial, but they exist. And they can flow in and out of them easily as circumstances change. To see the fallacy in this statement look at pro-sports. Football, baseball, etc, all consist of nothing but relationships that are constantly changing. And meetings- and more meetings- and strategy sessions…
What changes with women in boardrooms is that camraderie disappears. You know, the sharing of good jokes, often off-color, for God Forbid (actually EEOC forbid) that a SHE be offended. OFF TO THE LABOR CAMPS! The after meeting martini session? Gone. You have one too many, slip up and say something wrong to a female- SHE CAN’T DEAL WITH IT! OFF TO THE LABOR CAMPS FOR YOU!
And as far as female bosses- I have yet to meet a white female who has stated- “I prefer working for a female boss.” More often then not, it’s the other statement, “I’d rather work for a male any day of the week.” (My own wife falls in this category.) Workplaces are designed to be less competetive in order to accomadate female sensabilities. In the long term, that probably doesn’t bode well for profits.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Women dominate many areas of work for one reason and one reason alone that I can see- creeping credentialism. If I’m supporting a family, I cannot take time off from work to get the credentials needed to promote. Credentials used to not be needed- job performance was all that counted. Not good enough for the EEOC.
I have a good female friend about to make a major career change at age 35. Her husband makes enough to support the family, so she went back to school to become a phamacist. Good for her. But- she was able to do it because a man supported her. How many men get to do that at that age?
Yes
Obama’s administration has been consistently hostile to white males. Remember Robert Reich and his no jobs for “white male construction workers” remark?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duQDVTczGbA
No jobs for burly men.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/659dkrod.asp?pg=1
Those you accusing others of being slackers are slackers yourself. Too lazy to put forth the effort to look deeply into the situation.
All I know is if I had a nickel for every time I, a single male, was passed over for a job for a woman or a guy with kids because “they neeeeed it more”, I’d just about have as much as I ever made working. Someone who attempts to be responsible with his life and not have kids before he can afford them is either inherently less valuable a serf or just abhorrent to the twenty-two year-old HR bimbos with six kids of their own to seven different men.
A 22 year old in an HR office is going to be a clerk or a low-level technical employee. Even a BA/BS won’t get you any higher than entry-level technical work or low-level supervision of a clerical staff. At most she’d (or he’d) have the responsibility to review an application for completeness and at the higher end maybe review to see if the employee met the minimum qualifications. Some employers might allow an HR employee at this level to do screening interviews but nobody at that level is going to make a hiring decision.
In the Philippines which had the most vibrant post-war economy until Marcos took it apart. Now work is in such short supply, the women, some are medical doctors and nurses, have to work as maids in Hong Kong, and send money home so the husbands can take care of the children. In Italy, … You know about Italian men, don’t you?
We’re used to be different. Our macho men fought wars, protected their families. May be our men were “abnormal”, now they are like everyone else.
White males are just leaving the ‘taxpaying’ job market – now working for cash and barter.
Our illegal brothers from south of the border have trained the entry-level white labor force how to game the system.
Men — doing the jobs that Americans won’t do!
“I am woman see me roar!”
Men now in their 40s and 50s, (a period formerly known as their “primary earning years”), were impresssionable boys when violent tarmagants began screaming about the heinousness of America and the beastliness of men. Pro-female anti-male dogma began to enter the public discousre with a vengeance – but what is more, this inappropriate dogma entered the public schools with a vengeance too. My mother participated in the brawl like a giddy idiot, so did the other mothers in my fairly conservative community — from my little-boy perspective I’m being totally honest, and not the slightest bit hyperbolic when I say that the sudden change in the culture was frightening. The rage and obnoxious has not abated, but morphed into an endless parade of victim groups taking their cue.
Today we watch commercials, and god forfend that a white middle aged man be depicted as knowledgeable or authoritative. Instead white men are still belittled, lectured like idiot children by our betters, those women, those minorities, all the victim groups beyond reproach – they have figured it out, we are shown, it’s only a matter of time before the memo gets through our thick sloping foreheads.
The violence wreaked on America by this parade of abuse has consequences. I have written before that cultural self loathing as manifested in all the hatred based grievance industries (who purport to be against hatred, but exploit it endlessly to extort concessions) is akin to the A.I.D.S. this self loathing destroys the sinews of community, and rob a civilization of its defense mechanisms.
Whu on God’s green earth must PJM hold my comments for “moderation”? If I’m such a scary, inappropriate, polotically uncorrect (or whatever) poster then tell me to my face… This kind of imperious censorship is deeply offensive. Oh, and DON’T solicit comments from dedicated readers if you don’t intend to publish their comments.
Morton: Check the email address that you’re entereing when you comment. I think the commenting system has an automated check to see if the email is legit, and if it isn’t, the comment gets held for moderation. I’ve noticed that if I type my email address incorrectly, my comment gets held.
When my son graduated last year with his degree in electrical engineering, one of those STEM degrees in high demand, every female and minority in his class, regardless of class standing, was hired before he and the other white males at the top of the class. So, life lesson 1- white males are worth less even if they work harder.
EEOC compliance is a big path blocker. I have a part time job in non-commissioned sales. All of us can see each others sales- and productivity can be measured in sales per hour. My SPH is routinely over any 1 month or 1 quarter time period more then twice that of anyone else in the department. Always more then 4X that of the department’s one full timer- a minority female. She has never met the sales goal over a month or quarter, though she sometimes makes it for a single week. Yet, she stays employed. And makes not much less then me, per hour. Because if I made twice as much, with the same job title, the EEOC would be all over the store wanting to know why they were discrininating against her…
If you hang around workers and managers who will open up after they realize you are not a lawyer on a fishing expedition, you can hear all kinds of stories like this. Minorities and females have to really screw up to be fired once hired. White males, one accusation of sexual harassment and you’re gone. Minor screw-up, you’re gone. Need to down size- you’re gone.
My full time job is with the federal government. Less then 1% of the people in my full time employment field are female, less then 5% non-white. It requires training, skill, shift work, and mandatory overtime if your relief doesn’t show up.
I’ve been retired for a couple of decades now, but prior to my retirement I saw men being passed over for jobs though they were well qualified in order to hire women based on a woman preference quota, the agency called a target. The women were often under qualified if not totally unqualified, especially in jobs requiring shoulder girdle strength, like forest fire fighting. In one case I was told “hire the Hispanic woman or find another woman”. I hired the woman and immediately regretted it.
Why is the U.S. economy in the doldrums? Why are we not kicking butt like we have for decades/centuries?
Because women are in positions of leadership and becoming dominant throughout the economy (and government).
Women, we’ve been told, are more cooperative and better for group projects. Women, we are told, aren’t so aggressive and see a bigger picture where everyone wins. Women, we are told, don’t take the old male template of “winner take all” and vanquish rivals. Women, we are told, are more inclusive and sharing. Everyone gets a piece of the pie.
However, the rest of the world (outside of metrosexual France & Britain) didn’t get the sensitivity training that American men have.
Thus, a rugged, manly individualism in China, Korea, Brazil, Vietnam, Russia and elsewhere is kicking our butt.
Until ruthless American males reclaim their business and political roles (yes, I’m looking at you, Barack) America will slip and slide.
Can men get off the doormat? Will we swoop in and save America? Tune in tomorrow for more thrilling stories of yesteryear.
This conversation reminds me of an old Phil Donahue show from the 70s when women’s entry into the workplace was so controversial. A woman in the studio audience stood up and, with great hostility, accused the show’s guest of taking away her husband’s job. All the yapping, scolding , finger wagging, ideological ankle biting crones got into it then, many vilifying the woman who had made the accusation, and demeaning each other. They were too preoccupied hearing themselves talk and so limited by their partisan mindsets to really listen, that they missed the big picture.
Something didn’t add up, and sure enough it was not a case of a woman taking away the husband’s job; rather his job, like many others, was being automated out of existence. I don’t remember now, whether he was a steel worker, longshoreman, or worked in a refinery. Just as an example, the number of longshoreman is 1/4 of what is was in 1970, but our ports are handling six times the volume that they did then. Let that sink in for a minute, yes, a longshoreman handles 24Xs the volume, using today’s technology, as a longshoreman did using 1970′s technology. But wait, his wages have only increased by about 10% when weighted for inflation. The new jobs that were emerging, in the 70s, were the kind that used the skill sets that give women the advantage. What I didn’t comprehend, at the time, was that this trend, that was just getting started, would snowball. And now of course everyone’s job is at risk even the professions. I am not saying that this flux in employability (offshoring or automation) is historically new, just that the pace seems to have accelerated and the options for the newly redundant are so limited.
Charles Murray has pointed put that among the elites there is still a custom of engaged parenting, usually traditional, and yes, stay at home moms, even while they pay their “two faced” lip service to the “Career” Mom. It is a paradox that the successful elites celebrate or cheerlead for the antisocial, self destructive, and perverse lifestyle options, but privately eschew it for themselves and their own families (though, not necessarily those in sports, media, or entertainment).
Just saw the story linked below.
Seems construction is coming back, skilled construction workers not so much. You can’t dump your skilled workforce and not expect them to find more stable employment. Not to mention, the new leaner construction firms are bailing out of the OJT which is costly.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/48926517
“We lost over half of our production builder companies, and the subcontractors were enormously gutted as well,” notes Wilson. It’s not like these guys are waiting by the phone. It’s been six years. These guys have moved on and found other jobs.”
Here in the Northwest, most of the highest paying blue-collar careers for men have been wiped out by radical environmentalism. Logging has been virtually shut down. Trees are now left for the pine beetles to kill and later fires to burn up. Mining still goes on, but most mining companies spend their capital oversees to get away from the fed and Sierra Clubbers. Oil drilling is going great over in the Bakken, but areas to the West tend to be government land. Good luck drilling there. You can still ranch and farm here, but the pay sucks.
Actually what has happened here is White men have figured out what other men in other cultures have known for centuries. It’s better to go hunting and fishing and let the women do the work. Too bad ladies, but it’s your life. Get used to it.
While other factors are at work, I believe that a large part of the drop in male participation is due to the demand that male workers in fields that have grown the most, like office work, be capable of meeting the social communications demands of the majority population in office work, …women. As more women went into that job market, it is natural that assumptions about how, and how much, and in what circumstances, and about what, you communicate will change to accommodate the majority far more than in 1962.
Add to this the legal reinforcement of these demands by anti-discrimination laws, in which discrimination standards are misapplied to neurologically based communications differences between most men and most women, and things become more extreme. Multiply all this by the increased real communication needs of team-based work, and the increased need to communicate in world-wide networks, and it becomes more easy to see how discomfort with the work environment can become outright demoralization on the part of many males.
I say this from the perspective of someone on the autistic spectrum, where these differences are expressed far beyond what most males experience. That is one reason why the unemployment rate for those on the spectrum is so much higher than for neurotypical males. While little can be done to shift the immediate communications differences between the sexes, a regulatory environment that is less manipulable to making neurological differences prosecutable would help. I remember as early as the mid-1980s being threatened by a woman with a harassment allegation at work over my statement of a simple political difference. A change in regulatory environment could help there. Greater changes beyond that will come only with augmentation of human capabilities in communications by electronic/human interfaces that parallel the emotionally cued social communications that Homo Sapiens Sapiens normally uses.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/780000-more-women-unemployed-today-when-obama-took-office
are we including the men hired from other countries to replace the men in the USA? Look at major companies, they look like Bombay!
I have a friend who worked for 30 years in high tech, then was laid off in 2002. He had some health issues, applied for and now receives disability. He paid high taxes his whole life and wants his money back. Figures if he lives to be 75 he will be just about even.
In the mean time he works making things – buildings, wooden products, furniture and the like which he sells for cash and upon which he pays no taxes. He employs no one, gets his materials for free and when someone buys something, he gets a bit of folding money in his pocket.
He is a white man and will never work for anyone again – why would he? He is happy having women and youths and other communists support his lifestyle and laughs every time another socialist buys his products.
Yesterday he saw a customer wearing a button that actually read “Democrat States and Stupid States” with a map of the US on it. The commies around here are actually proud of their hatred. Yep – keep bringing the stupid, comrades, retirement is a blast.
IMHO we’ve done everything we possibly can to drive manufacturing jobs overseas. Sensible policies in the ergulatory arena, taxation, and energy would bring them flooding back. Tighten access to federal and state aid for slackers and the problem is solved.
Nah…. make sure a man’s children are actually HIS, so that he has the same rights as the mother.
Too many selfish women simply kick out the father against the will of both father and child, while using the state to seize his money. These ‘deadbeat moms’ are far more common than the imaginary ‘deadbeat dads’.
What is sad is that ‘conservatives’ will excuse evil as long as a woman does it.
I read all the comments, as I almost always do before posting. No one brought up the really big reason: Sex! You no longer have to pay for it. Forget wining and dining, and (God forbid) marriage. Just hook up. Get good in the sack, and forget the rest. Never spend money on a chick. Never crank out 60-hr weeks to get ahead to support a wife and family. Work a middling job, just enough to buy all the great toys for yourself. Set aside your extra money for hard times or for early retirement. Life was never so good for a single man.
“Just hook up. … Life was never so good for a single man.”
LOL. That works fine until one of your hookups decides to get pregnant, forces you to take a DNA test, and then the full resources of the State are brought against you to ensure that you pay for your unwanted child for the next couple of decades, irregardless of your financial circumstances.
Random heterosexual sex is utterly fraught with peril for males, given our current legal system.
It helps explain the popularity of porn – it may be a lot less satisfying than actual sex, but the potential downside is much, much less.
Life’s so good for single men? Where’s this sexual utopia of which you speak? If it were so easy for men to go out and get laid, why are there tons of books, websites, and seminars devoted to teaching men “Game” and how to be a pick-up-artist?
Those alleged 80% of men who are left out of the sexual marketplace indeed have no recourse but to dig in, do what makes themselves happy, and forgo options unavailable to them. Ultimately, survival trumps the libido. Maslow said as much.
So, ‘going Galt’ eh? If so, I am AMUSED.
With “Obamanomics’, loss of jobs and just ‘burger flipper’ jobs, high taxes, lots of others on welfare, politicians spending money like there is no tomorrow, junkets, ‘we have to pass it to know what is in it’, and all the other BS like Unions getting HUGE benefit packages (just like the Greeks!) and people wonder men just ‘go Galt’?
Tell you what, I’ve worked for over 30 years as a professional, paid lots of taxes, never on welfare, never on unemployment, never on food stamps, what you might call a ‘pillar of society’, and if they lay me off cause the re-elect that stupid Obama, yea I just might go Galt!!!
I AM NOT YOUR SLAVE! Got that Democrats?
In the large corporation from which my husband recently retired, the HR department was populated with minority women. Virtually all the job interviews went to minority women. A minority female employee verbally and physically threatened a white male employee with impunity in complete disregard of company policy. In the reverse situation a man would have immediately been fired. We concluded that, except for self-employment or in small businesses exempt from certain federal regulations, the workplace deck is completely stacked against most men. One of the women at the corporation even put it into words – minority means “anybody but a white male”.
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Rare-spider-halts-San-Antonio-road-project-3848991.php
And, of course, spiders are more important then infrastructure improvement, which employs mostly males…
A factor is alimony and child support. Lots of men deliberately dump jobs in order not to have their wages re-directed to the control of the woman who left them. The kids, obviously, become the innocent victims. The men alternate between welfare and under-the-table jobs.
I’ve read the comments to date and cannot find fault with any but one.
Free Sex?!? I have never heard of a woman not charging for even the slightest affection. And simply put, it’s never worth what you get. Even if you think it’s freely given, you will pay for it in some way, somehow.
Otherwise, I have to concur with nearly everyone. Marriage, in fact, any involvement with women has become at least hazardous and possibly disastrous. Just casual contact can bring terrifying consequences. Note the taxi driver accused of sexual assault when his three fares refused to pay $13.
And no one asks why. It’s a basic question. Why don’t men do what they used to? The answer is simple, there is no pay off for a man to do these things. Why don’t you get married? Two ex-wives and about a hundred observations in divorce court. Why don’t you work a real job? I simply don’t need a real job any more. ex-wives will teach you what you don’t need better than being on a desert island. Why don’t you have a girl friend? I’d rather have a dog. In fact, I’d rather have a bad dog and tape worms than the aggravation of modern women. But that’s just me.
Nope, I’ll roll along with everything paid in cash. No debt, no worries.
Devil cuts to the heart of the matter: lack of respect. There simply is no respect for men in our society today, outside of certain small corners. When concerning the average behavior of large groups, Skinner rules: make a behavior painful and you’ll get less of it. Make it painful to be a man and you’ll get a lot less men.
Men aren’t particpating in the worforce because they can’t score women like you.
The 69.9% is a statistic sitting by itself, and then coupled with some commentary by Murry about lack of Male “industriousness.” Which is just a nicer way of saying that men are lazy. We’re so conditioned that only women get discriminated against…that the “men are lazy” explanation shows up over and over again in these comments in various forms.
Yet what does that statistic by itself tell us? What should the number be? Don’t know. 100%? 50%? Half the women work, half stay at home. Half men work, half stay at home?
A lot of talk about “middling” jobs just to get by. They’d still be counted in the 69.9%. There’s a lot of tangential male-issues being discussed, but the question was about the 30.1% who are NOT being counted in the statistic. Which can be quite different from “lack of industriousness.” The guy doing Matchstick Marvels looks industriousness to me…but I don’t what side of the stat he falls on.
What percentage of women are working, versus their high? What about before and/or after changes in the minimum wage? Child labor laws? ETc… There’s some complexity that a single statistic has trouble shining light on.
Nature or Nurture? I really don’t see why men would be any less industrious today than they’ve always been. It’s just that that industriousness may no longer be channeled into government GDP counting activity as much as it used to be.
Obviously the ideas of the 60′s failed us: Free sex, drugs, women’s lib, one way free trade, technological advancement, bigger government. None of it was good for men.
Failed? I think they achieved their stated goals – to damage white men. Mission accomplished.
Can this society survive without white men? As an old white man, frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn. The descent into tribalism will be great fun, no doubt.
Why Men Fail by David Brooks
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/brooks-why-men-fail.html?hp
( I tell my sons to keep great distance from the Jezebel and beast whores)
In one term Obama has reduced the civilian labour force participation rate back to the idyll of the Carter regime. This is a destruction of the [labour] supply side probably [see US Bureau of Labour data on St Louis Fed database] without historic precedent. The Galtian ‘hidden valley’ to which these former movers and shakers have metaphorically withdrawn is probably visible from Mars. Mr Obama should go up and take a look, at the wreckage.
This letter to a future daughter-in-law goes a long way to explain the younger men dropping out
http://shiningpearlsofsomething.blogspot.com/2012/09/anonymous-letter.html
One problem: Affirmative Action means “White Men Need Not Apply.”
Second problem; High-paying blue-collar jobs have been outsourced.
It’s become hard for a man to make a decent amount of money unless he wants to work his butt off. And what does he get? Material comfort…and not much else.
It’s possible to get material comfort without working all that hard.
Oh, I forgot: the government is against men when it comes to relationships between men and women. So there is no reason for a man to make a lot of money so he can form a family.
I don’t think it’s so much that men are going Galt as much as it is Learned Helplessness. The younger one I see today claim they can’t find decent jobs or decent women. And they’ve been beat down since they were five. So apparently they just give up.