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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: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 15 2014, @07:26PM
I was next door to welfare court delivering paperwork. There was a fat minority lady there with 9 kids, ages about 1 year old to low teens. Gotta love those freebies when you sit home all day pumping out kids to get on welfare.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 15 2014, @09:56PM
You saw someone you assumed was a mother and made a further assumption about her lifestyle based on a visual impression, therefore it must be true!!!111oneoneone
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 15 2014, @11:30PM
The problem is there are people who really do this. One of my friends' mother did this, and now the friend's sister does it to some extent. Somehow I wonder my friend wasn't trans (i.e. was biologically capable of doing that) if she wouldn't be like that too. We're worried somewhat that her niece, who is a total geek, will opt for Mother as a career instead of engineer or biologist or programmer just like mommy and grandma. Working in a female-centric environment I also can't help but to overhear that so-and-so doesn't need to work a job every now and then.
A more positive way to spin this is to look at it as the birthmother career in The Giver. Now, granted, there are some differences. Birthmothers were there to do just that and only that, and I recall after they reached about 30 they were repurposed for manual labor. I don't think the movie version touched on that.
The larger question in my mind is how we transition to post-scarcity or at least drastically-reduced-scarcity.
The part that's unfair about all this is that we've taken a biological function that only roughly half the population can perform, put it on a pedistal, and essentially privileged those born able to give birth. Is this fair? I don't think so.
The solution I think is some kind of minimum guaranteed income regardless of gender that only scales up to two kids. However, along with throwing out the perverse incentives for single mothers to have an absurd number of kids (absurd unless you're a Catholic or similar, I guess), we also need to innovate some real family values, not the “family values” that is little more than a code word for homophobia, transphobia, and traditional gender roles. This process would also entail removing the female privilege of being presumed to be honest when reporting a crime and severely restricting what constitutes rape. More fairness needs to come to divorce as others have pointed out.
Separate but equal doesn't work. Didn't work for race and it's not going to work for gender.
But men and women are different! Well, no shit. What's between the ears is different, and there's no getting around that. The task is figuring out how to work past the differences we can't change and change the differences we can change. Women have been sexually liberated (sometimes perversely as I pointed out above), and now we need to sexually liberate men. Men aren't getting married? So what? If we were hand-wringing over women not getting married, we'd have a shitstorm out of the SJWs and feminists. As for the physical differences, I imagine that before I kick the bucket, I'll read about a trans woman being implanted with a complete female reproductive system and giving birth. Fortunately, the vast majority of people are cisgendered which makes things less complicated, but also makes separate but equal too compelling.
(Now imagine the shitstorm if trans women are able to have children and hold out their hands to Sugar Daddy government like cisgendered women can.)
tl;dr Just like there are deadbeat dads out there, there are deadbeat moms. The difference between the two is that we send deadbeat dads to jail while happily funding deadbeat moms. One way or another, that double-standard needs to go away. (Either pull the funding to the deadbeat moms and send them to jail like the deadbeat dads or give everyone a minimum guaranteed income. Either way, remove the perverse incentive that is destroying real family values.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 16 2014, @01:04AM
I lived in a low income neighborhood for a short while while learning a trade. I was pretty much the only one with a job, everyone else was on welfare, food stamps, whatever, and spending their welfare checks on booze and drugs. I tried to help some get a job, they wanted a management position or nothing, some even asking me why I work when I could do what they did. One boasted about how he has never worked a day in his life, he was 35 at the time. I went on working, bought a house far away from that shithole, and was able to retire at 55.