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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: 5, Interesting) by ikanreed on Monday December 15 2014, @05:06PM
Yeah, work to achieve something you believe in is great. Anyone who has their more basic needs and securities taken care of realizes that need to make something you're proud of. But Maslow's hierarchy of needs [wikipedia.org] is a real thing.
I think all of us have an amount of money that's "enough" and after that you want your work to have meaning, and you'll start considering exchanging pay for meaning. The problem is that the working poor don't get that. They often don't get enough to really reach the security rung.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 15 2014, @05:42PM
> Anyone who has their more basic needs and securities taken care of realizes that need to make something you're proud of.
Based on personal experience, I don't think that's even close to being universal. I made about 1.5M and basically dropped out of the workforce 6 years ago. I don't do shit with my time and I don't feel any great motivation to do shit. I've considered doing volunteer work, habitat for humanity that sort of thing. But I've got no interest in being proud of it, just that I'm kinda bored and better to help out the poor than to help out the rich. Maybe I'm just a nihlist, but I doubt that I'm alone.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tibman on Monday December 15 2014, @09:11PM
You've missed the really big one. Your don't have to work anymore so you don't. You traded that future income for more personal time. Some people would just work less but still stay involved. You went all the way.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @12:33AM
Oh I recognize that. But there is no pride in that. I'm not accomplishing one damn thing. And so that's why I'm inclined to believe, that given a sufficient baseline standard of living, a whole lot of the human race would do the same - do nothing, contribute nothing.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday December 16 2014, @05:00PM
Do you mind telling what exactly it is that you do with your time then? This is the classic argument against socialism -- if people didn't have to work to put food on the table, they won't work at all. And frankly, I've never been able to buy that. I have an endless list of things I want to build or do. Much of it solely for myself, but much of it that could be useful to others as well. Ordinarily I don't get much done. I work 40 hours a week, and I get home tired and burned out and sit on the couch watching TV or playing a game. But as soon as I have three or more consecutive days off, I start getting busy. Give me at least three days off and by day three I'm setting up public servers, looking for open source projects to contribute to, building hardware and posting photos and build details online. Granted, it's all pretty small personal projects, but that's just because that's all I have time for anymore. Give me three months off and I'll be back contributing to Freenet or some other project like I used to. As it stands now I get so few opportunities with sufficient time and motivation that it takes me a couple years just to set up my home network. I'm a pretty lazy dude, I can spend a *long* time hedonistically watching TV, smoking joints, and ordering takeout...but at a certain point even I will be driven out of my freakin' mind with boredom.
So...yeah, surely you can't just be sitting there watching TV and reading Soylent all day, right? You must be doing *something* productive...? I mean if we're comparing hobby level work to employment level work, that just means you have to be at least as valuable to society as the guy flipping burgers at McDonald's, not necessarily curing cancer or building the next space shuttle.
Or perhaps you just travel or something? I'm pretty sedentary too so that makes the boredom hit faster I guess. Or wife and kids maybe? I'm sure that would keep you busy, but I'd certainly consider raising children to be something of value.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 15 2014, @05:49PM
Maslow's hierarchy is overrated : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs#Criticism [wikipedia.org]
It doesn't fit well enough to a lot of real life stuff. Too many exceptions, and those exceptions are often important parts of human behaviour, society and culture.
Plenty of people willingly die while trying to achieve nonphysiological goals.
Many people for sentimental etc reasons insist on staying somewhere that has become unsafe.
Many people do dangerous stuff to satisfy esteem needs (and not physiological - air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep).
It is true that if you don't have any food or water you're not going to be able to work for very long towards any goal. But you don't need Maslow's hierarchy to explain that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 16 2014, @11:48AM
It is true that if you don't have any food or water you're not going to be able to work for very long towards any goal. But you don't need Maslow's hierarchy to explain that.
So what? It fits with the model so it can't be used as a criticism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @07:49PM
Different AC.
It is not a useful model. It has no explanatory power and it has no predictive power. It is far too simplistic. It is an abstract imagined hierarchical idealization (according to Maslow's ideals) based on hypothetical extremes and no one actually prioritizes according to it in its hierarchical order because nearly no one if anyone at all would survive if they did. Instead people are amazingly flexible and varied and defy any such rigid templates.
The easiest way to disprove Maslow is through any of all the people who consider themselves to have none of the needs fulfilled: anyone who doesn't answer "physiological" has broken the validity of the pretentious pyramid. Most people in such a situation will list everything they're missing, not only one or a handful of things belonging to "physiological". If it is only supposed to apply to starving people first and so on up through the hierarchy then it is nothing but perverse. There are many other ways to attack Maslow's pyramid, particularly the definitions and their meaning and/or their somewhat arbitrary nature and levels of fulfillment, and they all succeed.
However what it is extremely good at is to convince people they've understood more than they actually have and that they have reached some kind of insight when they have not. Pure dogma. It is to social sciences what Freud is to psychology: somewhat embarrassing in its infantile self-absorbed nature. It's the kind of thing left behind in textbooks as an entry point for those who choose to go on to a relevant field of study which should quickly teach them why it was significant and why it is useless and obsolete. Primary and secondary education is full of it. It is annoying as hell because it leaves behind an awful lot of anti-education which people either wrongly believe in or do not appreciate the significance of. Sadly the same technique is used all the way up to and including introductory tertiary education (secondary and tertiary freshman "Philosophy of Science" is the most horrific I know of, half year forwards and then two years backwards undoing all the damage lol but if that initial half year is all someone has got then at least they have some straws to cling on to).
As science improves the volume of old less correct science increases and some of it is tenacious and hard to remove. some of it much worse than other and some of it wrong from the beginning, bubbles of dead science languishing in faculties and studies all over the place.
Let me give you a much nicer example for you to test yourself privately: you might already know the actual answer but why is the double slit experiment on the physics curriculum? Answer on your own before looking up its actual significance (and you might have to search and read a good while to find that anyway). I'll tell you in advance that despite what most textbooks says (and which the relevant Wikipedia page uses most of its space on) the answer to why it is one the curriculum is not actually because it illustrates and introduces "wave-particle duality" (whatever that is *cough*). That's the entry point placeholder right there. I was amazed when I was told (and I had to be told the significance), it makes far more sense and of course considering that relevance they had to include it or the whole entire school subject of physics would be a joke, too bad they didn't say why. No it isn't quanta either, just one small step and you can say hello to Thomas Kuhn while passing goal.
(I think it's a waste. Poor students don't gain anything by being told fibs or by being misled by superficialities and smart students have to be reeducated, maybe geniuses just drift by grasping the actual truth or importance despite it but there's no reason they would. It makes things harder to "learn" because it doesn't actually contain anything particularly sensible or explanatory which in turn makes it boring and dumb.)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:21AM
It is not a useful model. It has no explanatory power and it has no predictive power.
How about we actually look at the model? First, what does it attempt to model? Human preference. One feature is that needs/wants range from the physical to the abstract and are arranged in some sort of order of priority. A second is that such wants saturate. Just because you can have more food, doesn't mean you want more food. So it is allegedly possible to saturate and sate wants at a certain level. It explains why populaces tend to prefer safety over freedom. Or prefer food over social stability or environmental protections. It also explains why we haven't driven ourselves to extinction with overeating. Hence, it has explanatory power.
As to predictive power, it predicts that wants of a certain level are not infinite by the person. We won't want an infinite number of hamburgers right now, an infinite supply of fresh air, or an infinite stream of entertainment. It predicts that as wants and needs are satisfied, new wants and needs appear. And these new wants and needs tend to be more abstract and harder to quantify.
It is far too simplistic.
Compared to what? What are you trying to do with the model? You already have claimed it doesn't actually do anything for you. Meaning simplicity is already irrelevant.
It is an abstract imagined hierarchical idealization (according to Maslow's ideals) based on hypothetical extremes and no one actually prioritizes according to it in its hierarchical order because nearly no one if anyone at all would survive if they did. Instead people are amazingly flexible and varied and defy any such rigid templates.
Have you actually looked at the hierarchy? The first needs are immediate survival-based, then the next level is long term survival-based. Fulfill the first two levels and you can check off survival. Second, what is "extreme" about the model?
Let me give you a much nicer example for you to test yourself privately: you might already know the actual answer but why is the double slit experiment on the physics curriculum?
It's a table top demonstration of wave interference. The quantum version, where you interfere with single photons passing through double slits in particular ways and get profoundly different interference patterns as a consequence, is a demonstration of wave-particle duality despite your contrary assertion. Further, these are experiments which are historically relevant (your reference to Thomas Kuhn's "paradigm shift") and only tried for the first time (in the quantum version) within a human lifespan.
Anyway, getting back to the subject at hand, if you have a better model than Maslow's hierarchy for explaining human preferences, then by all means mention it here. After all, you can't have a paradigm shift without a better model.
(Score: 1) by Synonymous Homonym on Tuesday December 16 2014, @02:46PM
Maslow a shit.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is decidedly not a real thing, it is wishful thinking by arseholes like Maslow.
Oh, you don't need human contact, you don't even have enough food!
Oh, you don't need to have ideas of your own, nobody likes you anyway!
Oh, you cannot possibly have depression, you don't make enough money for that!
How can anyone actually believe any of that?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday December 16 2014, @02:49PM
Almost every criticism of the idea comes from this strawman deconstruction where lower needs prohibit interest in higher needs. That's not quite right. Lack of lower needs diminishes interest in higher ones.