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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) 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.