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Binyamin Appelbaum writes at the NYT that the share of prime-age men — those 25 to 54 years old — who are not working has more than tripled since the late 1960s, to 16 percent as many men have decided that low-wage work will not improve their lives, in part because deep changes in American society have made it easier for them to live without working. These changes include the availability of federal disability benefits; the decline of marriage, which means fewer men provide for children; and the rise of the Internet, which has reduced the isolation of unemployment. Technology has made unemployment less lonely says Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, who argues that the Internet allows men to entertain themselves and find friends and sexual partners at a much lower cost than did previous generations. Perhaps most important, it has become harder for men to find higher-paying jobs as foreign competition and technological advances have eliminated many of the jobs open to high school graduates. The trend was pushed to new heights by the last recession, with 20 percent of prime-age men not working in 2009 before partly receding. But the recovery is unlikely to be complete. "Like turtles flipped onto their backs, many people who stop working struggle to get back on their feet," writes Appelbaum. "Some people take years to return to the work force, and others never do "
A study published in October by scholars at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies estimated that 37 percent of the decline in male employment since 1979 can be explained by this retreat from marriage and fatherhood (PDF). “When the legal, entry-level economy isn’t providing a wage that allows someone a convincing and realistic option to become an adult — to go out and get married and form a household — it demoralizes them and shunts them into illegal economies,” says Philippe Bourgois, an anthropologist who has studied the lives of young men in urban areas. “It’s not a choice that has made them happy. They would much rather be adults in a respectful job that pays them and promises them benefits.”
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rivenaleem on Monday December 15 2014, @04:29PM
So these men who are unemployed, sit at home with the Internet, do not get married or have children will disappear from the gene pool over a few generations. Seems like it is only a short term problem (from a civilisational point of view).
Is this not just evolution in action? It will take time, but I have hope that your average female will not see these men as attractive breeding partners and whatever gene expression that leads to these people will dwindle and disappear in time.
(just to be clear, I'm talking about people who are ABLE to work, but CHOOSE not to)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mtrycz on Monday December 15 2014, @04:32PM
Do you even understand what EVOLUTION is about?
It really gets to me when nerds and geeks get thigs so much wrong.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by nitehawk214 on Monday December 15 2014, @05:10PM
Misunderstanding evolution indeed. "Die out over a few generations."
Is GP suggesting that lazyness is genetic? Or, do lazy people live for like 200 years or something? Shit, what am I missing out on?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 15 2014, @05:30PM
Laziness is genetic. If your parents were too lazy to have any children it's likely you won't have children either. ;)
p.s. compare various breeds of dogs and you will see there is a genetic component to "energy" and laziness. Try getting different breeds to pull your sled across Alaska. You'll notice some breeds of dogs have many more representatives that actually seem to enjoy pulling stuff. Whereas other breeds tend to have more reps that go "Fuck that".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 15 2014, @06:47PM
This is how "social scientists" like to pretend they're real scientists. Take some random behavioral observations and hand waive some hereditary explanation on them. "Look! I'm doing science!", to which real scientists look on them with a patronizing smile "Yes you are Timmy. Yes you are. You are a big boy."
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday December 15 2014, @08:50PM
Are you suggesting that all dog breeds are suitable for sled pulling? Or just taking a stab at an author and not contributing anything of substance? It would be helpful if you point out what they are misunderstanding.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Tuesday December 16 2014, @01:02AM
It's strange how these things work. First it's the delusion of self reliance and pondering their own superiority. The collapse of society from below just confirms these ideas right up until the flame-front reaches them, and if the 1920's is any example they often throw themselves from tall buildings. Why? In creating a world-view that rejects others less fortunate they've rejected their current selves. The upshot is that those that survive and rise from the ashes are wiser - witness the birth of the welfare state, financial regulation etc... etc...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @07:29AM
It is funny how the ones who talk of societal upheaval and reformation speak with such hubris as if they, naturally, would not be part of the fall from grace.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 18 2014, @12:48AM
witness the birth of the welfare state, financial regulation etc... etc...
Which in my view are solid counterexamples to your assertion of wisdom gained. A world-view is created which rejects perceived risk and pain no matter how much harm that inflicts on society. Welfare is expensive, particularly the sort of welfare that could be provided by the citizens themselves. Such systems can easily be gamed and corrupted by the politically connected. Sure. there's a few societies that haven't gone to seed by doing this, but there are a lot of societies that have. Then you get articles like the one of this story.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @07:20AM
Are you suggesting that all dogs breeds could pull a sled across Alaska, but most can't because they just don't have the enthusiasm for it??? You are a dolt, aren't you.
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday December 16 2014, @07:01PM
Who is talking about dogs? I am taking a stab at the guy who started this comment thread. Though I will happily expand that to include this entire article as I find it sexist and stupid.
I blame the ancient version of slashcode and the lack of a quote button and the comment threading for confusing who I was responding to. I was trying to agree with the immediate parent of my original post.
(Though you are correct in that I wasn't really contributing anything of substance, but there was none here to begin with.)
Really I was making a pun about the quote "do not get married or have children will disappear from the gene pool over a few generations". Wouldn't they die out in a single generation, seeing as they did not have any children?
But anyhow, this can't possibly work, as it is entirely possible for hard working parents to have lazy children. (Considering I am posting from work, I may be one of those children.)
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Tuesday December 16 2014, @04:14AM
You have explained your situation quite well.
BTW, when are your parents going to have any children?
(Score: 2) by danomac on Tuesday December 16 2014, @07:26PM
Sure, laziness can be genetic. I'd cite sources, but I don't feel like doing that.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday December 15 2014, @05:23PM
Are you sure you do?
Evolution is about mutation and death. With the exclusive goal of increasing multi-generational reproductive success. It shapes a species in whatever available directions promote that outcome. Change the environment so that, say, sociopathic businessmen and irresponsible slackers are the subsets most strongly motivated and enabled to reproduction, and any genetic factors that predispose an individual to following either of those paths will start spreading more rapidly through the population.
(Score: 2) by NoMaster on Monday December 15 2014, @10:32PM
Nope, evolution doesn't have goals. You're thinking of "natural selection".
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...
(Score: 2) by NoMaster on Monday December 15 2014, @10:35PM
(and even then it's an outcome, not a "goal".)
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 15 2014, @04:41PM
Rather comical to swap genders and run the same thought experiment and compare to historical demographics. I don't think they're in any danger of going extinct any time soon.
Another fun one is assuming females are somehow isolated from the rest of culture ... so the girls themselves, and their dads and brothers, can't get jobs either, and the only difference between the guys in her family and that cute guy at the party is the guy at the party looks like fun to reproduce with... Just not seeing a problem here.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Monday December 15 2014, @08:10PM
so the girls themselves, and their dads and brothers, can't get jobs either
You are kinda missing the point. Except for what is an insignificant blip on the scale of history, girls don't really worry about 'jobs' since being female IS their job. And they always have that option, only now they don't need to worry about attracting a mate to provide since Uncle Sugar loves em all and will drop goodies down on any female willing to accept the price demanded, which is so attractive, at least at first.
Men are only obsolete to the extent there is still enough wealth for our society to be this stupid... which won;t be much longer. Which is the problem with progressivism, it is suicidal and self limiting.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday December 16 2014, @03:13AM
Insightful? Really mods? News Flash it has NOTHING to do with "progressives" unless you are just butthurt that there aren't people starving in the fucking streets like they have in places like India and has everything to do with the fact capitalism MUST die because its entire foundation, the idea of trading one's labor for capital, is a rotting corpse that has been dead for a couple decades now.
Do you HONESTLY believe that if it weren't for the "progressive" federal government subsidizing corps like Mickey D's and Walmart's employees that those jobs would still fucking exist? Ever seen the video of the Amazon robot factory? How they have these little robots whizzing around bringing the product to a human picker? Wanna guess what they are working on and in fact have offered a cash prize for somebody to develop? If you said a robot to replace the lone picker then you'd be correct sir!
The simple fact of the matter is everyone took away the wrong message from the story of John Henry, the ACTUAL moral is "no matter how hard you work the machines keep on coming, work yourself to death and they will STILL win in the end" and nothing you right wingers can do or say will change that fact. Remember when everyone said "its all about education, to compete you just have to be better educated"...well how did that work out? Oh yeah, trillions in student loans that will never be paid back because not only do you have someone with 100K+ in student loan debt who is being told, with a straight fucking face mind you, that they should have to compete with a guy in Bangalore that paid less for a Master's degree than the cost of 3 year old Mustang, but it completely ignores the fact that the world doesn't need a billion rocket scientists because there simply is no point, a handful can do the job and then have their work replicated infinite times with perfect accuracy!
What too damned many on both the left and right haven't had drilled into their fucking skulls is one simple fact, get ready for this as its a mind scrambler... we have reached the point where human labor is obsolete. Every so often we have what is known as a "singularity", a point in time where the entire world is altered forever,the printing press, the steam engine, internal combustion engine, the airplane, the atomic bomb, these things altered EVERYTHING and completely changed life as we knew it. Nobody thinks anything about reading this page yet before the press only nobles and clergy could read, nobody thinks about getting something shipped from Asia yet before the steam and ICE this was something that would take fricking years and now if you are in a hurry? Just have it shipped airmail and it will be here in days!
We have reached the point where you can go from gathering the raw material to the finished product on a store shelf using ONLY robots and machines, human interaction is really not required. The only reason you have actual humans doing any of the non skilled labor is the government subsidizes basically being used for "make work" roles. think Mickey D's couldn't replace the worker with an automated assembly line? Hell you'd end up with less screw ups and more consistent output from the machine!
It is the height of fucking arrogance to blame "progressives" when in reality you have over 300 million in the USA and you don't even need 50 million to do every job that needs doing, in fact of the 7 billion on the planet I'd argue at most you'd need around 1 billion to do every job that can't be done by the machine....what are you gonna do with the other 6 billion? You gonna call them lazy and tell them to bury themselves in debt for jobs that aren't there? Take away their reproductive rights and play eugenics? Put them into camps? Like it or not capitalism like every other ism simply has to die because as Roddenberry predicted in a future with everything done by computers and machines capitalism just does not work. We have already seen what trying to stick with capitalism gets you, it gets you dynasties based on which vagina you happen to fall out of and the 1% controlling more than 85c out of every dollar and with each downturn that number climbs. So either you let capitalism go the way of the USSR or you will likely end up with revolutions all over the place as the poor refuse to go crawl off and die, which will it be? As much as I'd like to dream we would be civilized enough to have the former sadly I believe it will be the latter and probably within the next 20 years. First the student loan bubble will burst and then the financial bubble and when the government can't keep the peasants quiet with survival payments then shit will be hitting the an.
But until then blaming technology making the working man obsolete on "progressive" programs that keep these people from starving? Assholish to the extreme sir, assholish to the extreme.
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Tuesday December 16 2014, @04:22AM
Well said, good sir!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @08:50AM
Just the right amount of salty language in there.
This page goes well with that.
The 6-Step Process to Eradicate the Impoverished Half of USA [commondreams.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by Kell on Tuesday December 16 2014, @09:00AM
At first I mistook you for a crackpot, but then I saw your artful and liberal use of capitalisation and bold font and was immediately converted.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday December 16 2014, @05:27PM
Spoken like a true libertarian, who when faced with the fact that they have NO actual useful counter argument (other than "fuck them poor motherfuckers, i got mine beeiotch!") will do nothing but throw insults or try to move the goal posts.
This is why I lump libertarians with other radical religions like Scientology, Moonism, and hardcore Islamist because that is the response you get from all of the above when you point out the giant gaping holes in their religions, they cannot debate, only insult.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Kell on Tuesday December 16 2014, @11:23PM
It's funny when you say that because you can't possibly know a lick about my politics from the two dozen words in my reply. Ironically, I actually agree with pretty much every point you were making (shocking, right?). However, when you make those points in the style of a rambling manifesto, you also makes it difficult for other people to take you seriously. Oh, and immediately going ad hominem when someone calls you on it also isn't helping.
If you want your arguments to actually convince people (presumably your goal?) then the form of delivery is rather important. Let your concise logical arguments speak for themselves - if your arguments are strong, then there is no need to dress them up with formatting, and certainly no need for ad hominem.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Tuesday December 16 2014, @09:55AM
If you haven't read this, (based on your comment I highly doubt you haven't) you will love it. It is a sci-fi story about robots replacing unskilled labour.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm [marshallbrain.com]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday December 16 2014, @09:25PM
Hear! Hear!
For over a century man has dreamed of a future where machines do the labor and people enjoy leisure time and great prosperity, but capitalism alone can't get us there. The die-hard capitalists would apparently happily turn the dream into a nightmare for most of the population (never the part they occupy, of course) in order to keep their religion alive a little longer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:33AM
we have reached the point where human labor is obsolete.
Which is not a fact because it is not true.
What I find absurd about this whole argument is the obvious, huge demand for human labor that exists in the world today. Do away with minimum wage and mandatory benefits and you'd find people employed throughout the developed world, just like they are in the developing world.
We have reached the point where you can go from gathering the raw material to the finished product on a store shelf using ONLY robots and machines
It is the height of fucking arrogance to blame "progressives" when in reality you have over 300 million in the USA and you don't even need 50 million to do every job that needs doing, in fact of the 7 billion on the planet I'd argue at most you'd need around 1 billion to do every job that can't be done by the machine....what are you gonna do with the other 6 billion?
Listen to people who understand comparative advantage [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:34AM
we have reached the point where human labor is obsolete.
Which is not a fact because it is not true.
What I find absurd about this whole argument is the obvious, huge demand for human labor that exists in the world today. Do away with minimum wage and mandatory benefits and you'd find people employed throughout the developed world, just like they are in the developing world.
We have reached the point where you can go from gathering the raw material to the finished product on a store shelf using ONLY robots and machines
Another "fact" which isn't true.
It is the height of fucking arrogance to blame "progressives" when in reality you have over 300 million in the USA and you don't even need 50 million to do every job that needs doing, in fact of the 7 billion on the planet I'd argue at most you'd need around 1 billion to do every job that can't be done by the machine....what are you gonna do with the other 6 billion?
Listen to people who understand comparative advantage [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday December 15 2014, @05:15PM
> but I have hope that your average female will not see these men as attractive breeding partners a
"You'll never fail like common people
You'll never watch your life slide out of view, and dance and drink and screw
Because there's nothing else to do. "
-- William Shatner.
See also, the gene pool bit at the beginning of Idiocracy.
But yeah, your social darwinist / eugenicist attitudes are both scientifically and morally objectionable.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday December 16 2014, @03:19AM
Uhhh just FYI but that is a Pulp song [metrolyrics.com] although nobody can cover a song like The Shat so I can see why the confusion ;-)
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday December 17 2014, @04:33PM
Thanks for the correction, I admit my error.
"An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." --Leonard Nimoy.
(Score: 2) by dcollins on Monday December 15 2014, @05:28PM
And by the time they're dead, technology and the economy has moved on and an even larger slice of the population is unnecessary. So they die out too. And technology progresses again and makes more people unnecessary and they die out. And at the end we have a perfected technology and economy and everyone is dead.
Or you have Arab Spring type upheavals and revolutions driven by the masses of rudderless young men, who knows?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 15 2014, @08:38PM
Right, because millions of people who have been rendered superfluous by technology are historically known for committing mass suicide to remove their worthless carcasses from the collective social burden.
Is this what libertarians and extreme social darwinists tell themselves these days? If so, I would say that among those millions of "surplus" humans are at least thousands of men, women, and children who are brighter by orders of magnitude than you are. If you gave at least a tenth of them a chance, they'd cure your cancer, solve atmospheric carbon, or do any one of a hundred things that would immediately make your life better. But, you choose instead to dehumanize and discard them like trash.
For me, this is the core obscenity of our world system as such. Humans are bright and creative and hopeful the world over, and man we would be on the far side of the galaxy inside a decade if we could stop brutalizing and oppressing people. The store of human potential that goes squandered by modern crony capitalism is a crime.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by dcollins on Friday December 19 2014, @07:33AM
Wow, your reading comprehension is truly atrocious. But what's the point for someone who apparently believes that interstellar travel is possible within a decade. Psst: Star Trek is fictional.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday December 15 2014, @09:02PM
In this case the people are not unnecessary. Them working is unnecessary and that is a big difference. There is no mass of rudderless young men. They have their rudders in the water and are just going with the flow instead of helping to paddle.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Monday December 15 2014, @08:02PM
The article says they don't provide for children, not that they don't have them.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday December 16 2014, @05:44PM
Actually when I was dead broke? I had more women than I knew what to do with. News Flash, just as many shallow women as guys out there and while I was never handsome I was (and am apparently judging by how many times my new wife has threatened to whomp the women trying to flirt with me at the shop or in the building) what is known as "cute and cuddly like a teddy bear" and if I was irresponsible I could have easily had 4 or 5 kids when I was in my "struggling artist" phase.
So despite the stereotype of women always looking for a sugar daddy there is just as many that just want some plaything and couldn't care less what is in his bank account.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Thursday December 18 2014, @03:39PM
Were you dead broke because you were lazy and had no interested in working, or were you dead broke, but still actively seeking work? I met my wife while I was unemployed, but seeking employment. I wasn't a lazy layabout like the people I'm talking about in my original comment.