No One Expects Young Men to Do Anything and They Respond by Doing Nothing (2022)

This whole article is talking about absentee fathers, but every example is listing why the mother left or kicked out the father.

Nowhere in the article is mentioned the obvious common denominator - women are no longer utterly dependent on their husbands. People didn't stay together more often in the 50s because the couples were better, or because people were held to higher standards, it was because getting out of a terrible marriage was incredibly difficult if not impossible, and even if successful would cause immense hardship.

The article also simply takes for granted that it's a bad thing that these nuclear families do not stay together. While it's true that just directly comparing the children of single mothers to those raised by two parents the former tend to be worse off by a number of metrics, this disadvantage disappears once you normalize for the socioeconomic conditions of the mother, and indeed they are actually slightly better off.

People aren't irrationally making their lives harder, they take actions they feel will be beneficial, and it's unsurprising that they have a good idea of what would be personally beneficial. While the exact mechanism is up for debate, the leading theory is that in underprivileged communities where people tend to have children at a young age a heavy reliance on multi-generation family is more beneficial than the nuclear structure (or in other words, when you have a kid at 18, your 40 year old mother can probably provide a lot more resources and experience than a 19 year old guy).

You can't simply say that men aren't stepping up; the world has changed, mostly for the better, and as a consequence family structures are going to look different now from what they once did.

Something that intend to write on someday that I'll excerpt here: the phenomenon of "young men with nothing to do" is driven by a society-wide misallocation of capital that is itself driven by wealth inequality - specifically, old people and elites who command too large a proportion of wealth. This concentration of wealth in the hands of a cohort that is less diverse, and has less diverse interests, than the general public concentrates investment and bids up the prices of common necessities while leaving nascent demand for other goods and services to languish, often unborn. This diverse set of would-be goods and services are the ones that would have employed many of the "shiftless" young men described (myself included). Instead, there are no ventures available with which to employ our skills, or the things we could have become skillful in; we're forced to compete with elite practitioners in the fields rich old people care to invest in or purchase from.

As TFA details, this is actually to the advantage of the aforementioned cohort - whatever particular shape a family takes (and it can be successful with queer parents, or one parent, or grandparents), its instability is useful when fighting advocacy for labor, community investment, and such. The energy expended in keeping things together at home can't be redirected against elite interests. That's why they take exception, not because one-dad-one-mom-one-boy-one-girl is the only way to successfully do-the-family.

Man I hate when people use the phrase “broken home” unironically. My parents divorced when I was young and I can assure the writer that both of my homes were always whole. Do you know what breaks a home? Two people who no longer want to live together being forced to cohabitate because of regressive notions of the what makes an effective family. Definitely preferred swapping weekends with each parent to having to listen to them fight while they thought I was asleep. Overall this article felt quite broad, moralizing, and assertive with very little actually substantive evidence.

> Amy, a white thirty-year-old mother of three, ages six, five, and three, had a boyfriend who worked steadily but insisted on spending on selfish pursuits. This is what eventually broke the young couple up. ‘He wouldn’t spend money for the kids’ food. I had to send my kids across the street to my mom’s to feed them and stuff. That’s what I got fed up with. I shouldn’t have to live like that…I said it’s time for him to support these kids instead of [me] being on [assistance], and he didn’t like it.’”

Translation: “I was impregnated by 3 other guys, and they all left me, and now I finally found a boyfriend but it turns out he doesn’t want to spend his money to feed my kids.”

Sweetie, we’re not married, so there’s no reason for you to expect I feed your children. My earnings are my earnings just like your earnings are your earnings in this feminist culture of independence.

We expect young men to grow up and become "husband material". Due to various changes (standards for husbands rising, economic opportunity diminishing), this goal has become clearly unreachable for many.

I would opt out if I was a poor young man today, and focus on enjoying the small pleasures (drinking with my buddies, playing PS5). The hill they are expected to climb is ludicrous, and I am not surprised they respond by walking away.

This article spells out the incentive structure that leads to low-status men underperforming.

> Some of the jobs he can get don’t pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss.

> The educated class decides cohabiting partnerships are just as valid and important as marriage. And they also believe it’s okay to walk away at a moment’s notice from a cohabiting relationship… Poor and working-class people follow suit.

Tightening constraints from the employer class around employment, and loosening constraints from middle class individuals on cultural expectations leads to low status men abandoning their partners.

I think I see where he's coming from, and it makes sense to me. But where is the evidence that expectations have changed for young men? A paragraph or two with examples would be useful. It is of course a bit nebulous to try to define "expectations on young men" so I'm willing to go with some sort of essay that presents the evidence.

A lot of this is only applicable to Western Societies. IMO this is entirely due to the breakdown of Family and Social structures in the name of so-called Freedom/Progress. When you have no Structure/Discipline imposed on you by Society/Culture your Freedom of Choices become too much to handle and you simply give up and choose nothing.

These are some of the opening remarks of this article:

> It is usually the young father’s criminal behavior, the spells of incarceration that so often follow, a pattern of intimate violence, his chronic infidelity, and an inability to leave drugs and alcohol alone that cause relationships to falter and die.”

> Over the past half-century, the number of men per capita behind bars has more than quadrupled.

and this is the conclusion:

> Norms were loosened around being an absentee father. So more men took the option.

Is it just me, or is there a massive disconnect here? The rising prison population was not caused by a loosening of the norm that one should not go to prison; that's absurd on the face of it. Intimate violence and alcohol abuse have not somehow become de rigueur over the last few decades because of the luxury beliefs of the middle class.

This discusses what "elites" think a lot, but does not discuss why that matters

From 1950 to 1979, times we think of more stable families, the Gini index in the US never went above 39. From 1993 to 2019 it never went below 40. There has been a shift where working class men were more on par with the heirs of the USA, but things have shifted so this is less so. The shift in power to what elites think is more important coincides with a shift of income and wealth to these heirs.

Another problem cited is a lack of "a submissive attitude toward the boss". From the 1930s to the 1970s, US workers had larger union representation, and engaged in sit-down strikes and wildcat strikes. This does not sound like a submissive attitude toward the boss. As the heirs have successfully cracked down on worker organization, this becomes individualized, with submissive workers getting low pay (according to this) getting work, and those not "submissive" as this says, who seek higher pay not being connected to production, leading to instability outside of the workplace.

There has been a conscious shift by the mentioned elite to remove workers representation, power, organization, pay and stability. These are seen as less of a problem than some supposed lack of a paternal attitude from the elite to lecture the working class about their lack of a "submissive" attitude as this says.

It's the same nonsense we've heard since 1980, from funded think tanks and various establishment institutions, it goes hand in hand with the policies and shift in income and wealth disparity which led to this.

I see this as the victory sign of feminism. Women doesn't need men anymore so men are left on their own. Nothing wrong with that.

This is the kind of article you get when you abandon materialism or, worse, never heard of it. It's an attempt to locate all cause of social form in the ideological superstructure. Deeply incoherent and irrelevant.

The article seems to contain a lot of hand-wringing about upper class' beliefs allegedly harming lower class families, but I don't see any mention about the main change in the labor force since 1960 - namely the participation rate of women. Men probably work less nowadays simply because it's easier to do in a two-income household vs a one-income household.

We didn't want young men to do anything.

We wanted ever-increasing returns for shareholders, and that meant moving factories (where these young men's grandfathers were working 60 years ago) overseas while doing nothing on the whole to retrain the workforce.

We got the shareholder returns. Too bad that can't buy a functional society for people born after 1980.

There's an elephant in the Argument: Why don't women adopt these elite ideals and leave their kids? We should at least have an explanation why either nothing significant changed in the last 100+ years (a stretch), or something else that is counteracting said elite ideals. To put another way, why did the elite woman act against her own publicly professed Expectation? [0]

Another hint there's something amiss is the flawed premise. Men are not doing nothing! I see a whole bunch of consumption. Here is one of the author's citations:

> Edin and Kefalas describe the behavior of young males in low-income neighborhoods:

>> [...] Young mothers regularly rail against young fathers who squander too much of their earnings on alcohol, marijuana, new stereo components, computer accessories, expensive footwear, or new clothing, while the needs of the family are, in their view, not adequately met. [... Amy] had a boyfriend who worked steadily but insisted on spending on selfish pursuits. This is what eventually broke the young couple up.

All those are true, but try to tell that to every one of those Industries. If you were the CEO of a shoe company men spending on food is money not spent on your shoes. Why have your primary consumer spend less with at your company, even if that benefits the broader social fabric? It is in your material interests (one could argue your "Fiduciary Responsibility") to drive spending towards your company, which is why you pay the Marketing Department the big bucks.

If I were to throw out a guess, I suspect the difference is between Expectation and Ideal, or the difference between external and internal motivation, respectively. You can't form a cohesive self-identity from constantly shifting external expectations (ask your therapist), it must be stitched together from already free-floating desires/values/signifiers of society. Where I think the author gets close is how society influences how and what to Desire [1].

[0]: For those who read Cialdini's Influence this is an apparently powerful violation of the Commitment to Consistency, which hints something deeper is going on. Her deliberately going out of her way to correct the interviewer's view of her perhaps speaks to a greater commitment to another consistency?

[1]: https://iep.utm.edu/lacweb/#SH2b

This article is riddles with biased language and seems generally unscientific. This undermines the premise being highly specific.

Born too late to enjoy exponential asset growth. Born too soon to see the true environmental impact of the asset growth.

Lost generation, can I just get some drugs to cope please, my computer job is making me lose my humanity ;(

Just kidding it’s all good :)

> Norms were loosened around being an absentee father. So more men took the option.

> But nobody wants to admit it because it upsets people.

Author can explain "everyone".

> Instead, we retreat to discussions of poverty and economics because talking about family and parenting makes people feel weird and judgmental.

And again.

I suppose the jury is still technically out on whether the Western strategy of leaving mostly everything up to mostly chance is a good idea, but I am not liking the preliminary results. I imagine the experts are on it somewhere though (because science and democracy essentially guarantee optimality), so I won't bother worrying about it.

> > we have found no evidence to contradict the basic general principle that men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex, and perhaps not a great deal more.

Yes, because evolution, no?

Any other situation is really weird (contra-entropic) which is why things that channel sex/violence (testosterone) into constructive ends are so important. We call them "civilization" (verb and noun.)

- - - -

Anyway, the article seems to overlook the Sixties:

> The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon and political movement that developed in the Western world during the mid-20th century. It began in the early 1960s, and continued through the early 1970s. It is often synonymous with cultural liberalism and with the various social changes of the decade. The effects of the movement have been ongoing to the present day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture_of_the_1960s

It's hard to describe how crazy things got and how we live in a different world now, even the people who were there can barely articulate what happened.

What I took away from this article is that many low-income men have no real interest in being fathers or raising children. Yet, they tend to produce children anyway.

We should focus on making birth control more accessible, instead of trying to make people take responsibility for raising children they obviously don't want.

That guy who spends all his money on weed and booze while his kids go hungry? He should have gotten a vasectomy. We need to be asking why he didn't- was it a lack of education, or was the procedure too expensive?

simply, when a boy is dependent on his mother's approval for a sense of self it's all the justification he needs, and there is almost no increasingly-terrible situation in which a mother will not love her son. the worse his life, the more he depends on her, the less abandoned she is. it's the definition of a co-dependent cycle. Maybe he replaces her or shares that role with other women, but he ends up in the same cycle of dependency and collapse. Fathers teach boys to set boundaries for themselves, which has the effect of weaning them off psychological dependency on their mothers approval and innoculates them to some of her edges and those of other women. This is why only can men make other men, as without masculine boundaries, their emotional locus of control is external.

We blame the absent fathers, and that's at least half the problem, but only half. The other half is that mothers don't raise men alone, and so you get punks and criminals, boys with "nice guy" predatory survival strategies, neurotics, and other maladapted and unserious men. It's arguably why "bastard," is such a longlived epithet. The only reliable escape is to master something and find mentoring in pursuit of the competence that develops the necessary self-confidence and esteem for setting personal boundaries.

> He should be held to high standards. Otherwise, he will sink to the level of his environment.

A male peer group can raise these standards, but it's mean reversion, and if you're in a neighbourhood of boys raised alone by their mothers, that's going to be a low bar. The entire culture war is between people who resent their dads for being absent or weak, and those who don't. There are paths out, but as a wise woman once said, "no one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them."

Men* have to have a purpose for being. They will either find a constructive one or a destructive one. If they fail at either, they'll find a way to self-destruct. It's really that simple.

* Can't speak for women.

The author makes good points, but there is no mention of the demise of religion or the social factors leading to the dismantling of the nuclear family as causes.

"Hoisted on the petard of the our own decadence" seems to be a valid interpretation only if you think that the last 200 or so years of family structures in capitalist, Western nations is the only valid way of raising children and maintaining family bonds. This sort of thing reeks of the kind of chauvinism you only get from the echo chambers reverberating within the hallowed halls of places like the author's alma maters.

A big subtext of this article is that individuals with low socioeconomic status are incapable of making good decisions and must be strictly governed, and that the upper middle class is just as guilty as the absent fathers for the erosion the nuclear family structure.

I find the argument that folks with disposable income set a poor example for those of lesser means to be specious, pernicious, and divisive. It's the kind of argumentation that sets lower middle class conservatives up against upper middle class liberals so that they're too busy fighting a culture war to consider what new atrocity billionaires are getting away with behind their backs.

I've read TFA and another one linked by TFA. I did enjoy the reads and the links but... In both articles the author seems to contradict himself, more than once.

For example:

> The affluent have decoupled social status from goods, and re-attached it to beliefs.

> it is those who have more to start with (i.e., upper-class individuals) who also strive to acquire more wealth and status.” Plainly, high-status people desire status more than anyone else.

So which one is it to achieve status: goods/wealth or beliefs?

Or this:

> It used to be high-status to hold a job and take care of your family. Not so much anymore. Those who sit at or near the apex of the social ladder (who decide what behaviors are prestigious) have decided that family stability is unimportant.

> The people with the most money and education—the class most responsible for shaping politics and culture and customs—ensure that their children are raised in stable homes.

Once again: which one is it?

Then in both articles there's the same mechanism of saying basically "it's not visibly the fault of X, but under the hood it's actually the fault of X".

I mean: how can you argue with people who consider that everything that is wrong on earth is the fault of the "rich" and that even if the rich have good values, it's their fault that the poor have bad values?

"They do A, they say A. But they think B. Hence the poor are suffering".

Another take is that intellectuals, including in universities, have been very hard at work in the west (both in the EU and the US), since decades, to push the religion of the state. And what stands between the state and the individual? Religion and family, for a start.

And in a deliciously ironic turn of events, it's the one class leftist intellectual from universities (there are no right-wing intellectuals in universities anymore) hate the most, the "rich", that managed to push back against that narrative and raise their kids perpetrating the notion that being a united family is a good thing.

I really don't buy it that the rich are oppressing the poor by showing united families. And no amount of quoting french intellectuals is going to change my mind.

This really is not the greatest article in my opinion.

Much of the rhetoric follows circular reasoning without solid evidence and is mostly biased opinion.

What is promoted as forgone conclusions, is harmful, and follows along similar lines to Critical Theory seen in Marxism and its more modern derivatives.

Ultimately the issues come down to the social norms which have been degraded, while also not going into why or how those social norms were actually degraded (in any real fashion).

Critical Theory is caustic, and promotes nihilism and the absence of a cohesive cultural/social norms or mores. We have seen this more definitively recently with the Woke, but its been ongoing since the 70s.

If the author was at all genuine in their coverage, they would at least have covered this in some reduced fashion, it seems telling that no mention is made about the actual causes.

Instead, the overarching structure and themes are blame unemployment, then blame the men for being selfish (needing respect), then blame the rich who lie, but its not the mothers fault (so you can't blame them). In essence, its blame everyone but the group who is contributing most to the problem (those with the snake tongues pushing critical theory to distort reflected appraisal).

All said, its very childlike, and on its face the article checks almost all of the boxes to be considered soft-socialist/communist propaganda.

The article fails to follow rational principles (utilizing multiple fallacies with little to no direct support), it hits common socialist talking points. These include aspects where foregone conclusions are drawn towards destructive interference of gender relations, employer relations, government/societal relations, and western identity/concepts [indirectly].

The article presents much opinion as fact, and while some of the numbers referenced are correct in isolated cases the conclusions drawn are not.

In my opinion, the author lost all credibility by the end of the article, and it is clear they are promoting harmful narratives that don't address the underlying issue.

TL;DR don't bother reading the article; it has no real insight into the problem.

> Those who sit at or near the apex of the social ladder (who decide what behaviors are prestigious) have decided that family stability is unimportant.

The author unironically writes this after pointing out that research shows that affluent families the share of families with biological parents has only dropped to 85% from 95% while the share for poor families has dropped to 30% from 95%.

The idea that the social apex has decided that family instability is unimportant is disproved by the numbers the author themselves shows.

But most such narratives are based on grievances and not facts. So it’s not surprising that the author makes claims that are not only not backed by evidence but are disproved by all the evidence the author themselves includes in their article.

Many have not yet squared up to the fact that society itself is an unprofitable boondoggle that requires massive moral radicalization and willingness to participate in odd, polarizing institutions and practices.

We live inside the semi-decayed skeleton of a society built by deeply religious people who believed that society should be built and maintained because that is the moral thing to do. They weren't only motivated by per-capita GDP or the promise of weekends off or the pursuit of variety in breakfast cereals, as neoliberal economists seem to claim. They had deep underlying motivations to create a civilization in which they and their families could flourish and engage in the twin pursuits of culture and commerce.

We are now seeing the third-or-fourth generation that is growing up in an era where economic metrics are cited as the "core fundamentals" of a society; unfortunately, comfort and consumption are not motivating enough factors to drive people to feel loyal and energized to contribute to their civilization. Take away the glory and meaning from the basic acts of living among your peers and you will end up with large swaths of people who do enough to get by, and not much more.

> “Chanel, a white thirty-three-year-old with three children, ages fifteen, nine, and three, broke up with her youngest child’s father just after we met her for the first time. When we ask about him later, she says dismissively, ‘He’s not around no more. I got rid of him…He was only here to sleep—didn’t want to pay no bills, didn’t want to do nothing. When he was here all he did was fight and argue and drink. I had to get rid of [him].’ She purses her lips in disgust as she tells us such men are unworthy of the children they father.”

She had 3 children with that guy. Instead of picking a nice dorky Christian boy, she went after the tingles. I hear so many stories from young mothers about how they had the opportunity to settle down with a wholesome boy who was willing to care for them, but she preferred the bad boy without a job because the sex was just so fucking awesome. And then she gets pregnant and start tricking on the streets. I have no sympathy for such women because they can’t help their monkey branching tendencies. The social media has convinced these girls that it’s ok to play fast and loose with sex, which results in fast and loose choices and long-term devastating social consequences. As much as men need to be taught, women need to be taught to lower their physical standards. Because the hot gangster guy who gets “play” is hardly going to settle. Sure the acne-ridden nerd is ugly, but he’ll be there for you through thick and thin.