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August 1 - August 13, 2023
Suicide is now the biggest killer of British men under the age of 45.14
Suicide is the biggest killer of British men under 45! That's crazy.
“but the more common complaint was something vaguer—a quiet desperation that, if I were forced to generalize, seemed to stem from a gnawing sense of purposelessness.”16
Men felt as if they lacked purpose.
useless and worthless.
Australian researcher Fiona Shand looked at the words that men used to describe themselves before attempting suicide and found words like "useless" and "worthless" appeared.
cultural redundancy.
What is cultural redundancy?
When men struggle, families become poorer.
The point here is simply that if men were doing better, most families would benefit.
If men were doing better economically, most families would benefit.
In the U.S., one in four children under 18 are being raised by a single adult,
25% of children being raised by a single parent in the US.
Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage, that many women in poor neighborhoods have come to see men, including the fathers of their children, as just another mouth to feed, an inversion of the men’s expected role.21
For poor women, men become another mouth to feed.
men need to clear a higher bar to be seen as husband material.
Now that women make more money, men need to clear a higher bar if they want to get married.
The falling earnings power of noncollege males is one reason for their falling marriage rates,
Falling earnings power of non college males is part of the reason for their falling marriage rates.
Marriage rates among well-educated, affluent Americans have held steady, at quite high levels, in recent decades—but have fallen for everyone else.28
Upper class people get married.
The marriage rate of men aged 40–44 with a high school education or less has dropped by more than 20 percentage points over the past 40 years, compared to 6 percentage points for those with college education.
Uneducated people get married less.
Most births to women with only a high school diploma now occur outside marriage (59%),
Terrible!
Andrew Cherlin’s work shows that even if college-educated women are not married when they have their first child, they are quite likely to be married by the time they have their second, usually to the man who is the father of both children.
Interesting! Even if college educated women are not married to the father of their first child by the time that child is born, they are usually married to him by the time the second one is.
“Marriage remains more central to the family lives of college educated Americans than to those without college educations,” Cherlin concludes.33
There is something of a paradox here. The women who have achieved the greatest degree of economic independence, with high levels of education and earning potential, are the ones who are now most likely to get married and stay married.
Paradox: The women with the highest levels of education and are thus able to take care of themselves are the most likely to get married and stay married.
economic dependency into a joint venture for the purpose of parenting.
From economic dependency to joint venture for the purpose of parenting.
I call these high-investment parenting, or HIP, marriages.
a growing number of men who are “unburdened and unmoored,
Without a script, there is no choice for many men except to improvise.
Men have to improvise.
“created the attachments, investments, involvements, and beliefs that guided and gave meaning to human activity in specific social domains.”
Work, family, and religion gave meaning to a lot of men's lives.
The result is an increased number of men with what the team labels “a haphazard self,” oscillating between different plans and priorities, struggling to stay on any particular track, and often slipping backward.
The haphazardous self.
with 15% of men saying they have no close friends, up from 3% in 1990.43
Men are lonely. They have fewer close friends than women have.
A tragicomic sketch from Saturday Night Live aired in November 2021, showing women taking their male partners to a “man park” in order to socialize with other men. “Which one’s yours?” asks one woman of another.
SNL sketch of men being taken to the park by female partners so that they can socialize with other men.
they often rely on girlfriends or wives not only to organize social lives but as their principal confidant.
Men on their own tend to be men alone. “A guy needs somebody—to be near him,” says Crooks in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. “A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody.… I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.”
Men need company.
The concern among some scholars is that where Japan leads, other nations may follow.
Where Japan leaves, other nations will follow in regards to the hikikomori--men who shut themselves off from the world.
boys suffer worse consequences from childhood adversity.
Many boys are orchids; they need the right conditions to bloom and suffer worse from adversity than girls do.
Boys do especially badly if they are raised not only in poor families but in poor places.
Boys are more fragile than girls.
On the plus side, Black boys raised in neighborhoods with a high proportion of fathers have better prospects as adults.
In high school, boys’ academic performance is much more affected by family background—measured in terms of income, parental education, and marriage—than girls’.
In high school, boys' academic performances are affected by the education of the mother, household income, and whether or not the parents are married.
Boys raised by single parents, especially single mothers, have worse outcomes than girls (including their own sisters) at school and lower rates of college enrollment, in part because of bigger differences in behavioral problems in the classroom.66
Boys raised by single parents struggle more than girls who are.
His story fits with the research suggesting that men are more likely to zig-zag through the college years, while women follow a straighter path.
Boys lack focus and drive.
Tarrant County College,
Where Israel works
The only real exception to this rule is vocationally oriented programs or institutions, which do seem to benefit men more than women, which is one reason why we need more of them.
Scholarships for vocational programs seem to benefit men more than women.
motivation:
independence:
persistence:
planning:
motivation, independence, persistence, and planning
Women show motivation, independence, persistence, and planning over men.
There generally seems to be a greater spirit of adventure among young women.
To truly understand what’s going on with boys and men, we need anthropologists at least as much as economists.
Exploring gender differences in today's world is something that anthropologists can do.
I’ll then argue that both our immediate environment and broader culture matter greatly as well, shaping the ways in which biological differences develop and are expressed.
A large majority of the most aggressive people are male, but the differences in aggressiveness in the general population are much smaller.
Aggressiveness distribution between males and females needs further explanation.
these sex differences can be magnified or muted by culture.
Sex differences can be muted or magnified by culture.
The real debate is not about whether biology matters, but how much it does, and when it does.
There is always a danger of succumbing to the “naturalistic fallacy,” presuming that everything that is natural must necessarily be good.
Naturalistic fallacy: everything that is natural is good.
in the beginning was the female.
Creation myths posit the male before the female, but biologically, the female preceded the male.
Men are “basically genetically modified women,” in the words of Oxford geneticist Brian Sykes.
Men are genetically modified women.
sex is strongly determined by what happens in the womb, rather than after birth.
Evidence that sex is strongly determined in the womb rather than after birth.
