Thread time.

Theory: For low-education native-born men, the American Dream is dead.

There are several problems which I think are related:
1. A disturbingly large % of native-born American men are not working or going to school.
2. Marriage rates are down, and falling

3. More and more men are not having sex
4. Widespread measurable loneliness is increasing

Part of me wonders why some of these things are necessarily bad. Maybe I’m an old fuddy duddy but I think nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I want to see men working, fucking, marrying (or at least partnering up) and being in community.

There are many theories to explain these trends, especially the trend away from marriage.

Some think easy sex and the birth control pill are to blame.

Except these men aren’t fucking either. Others blame feminism. But destroying marriage isn’t a goal for most feminists. We haven’t even been able to get our high-priority items done.

As long as police are throwing away rape kits without testing them I think we should be circumspect about how much cultural power we ascribe to feminism.

Some say “the culture” hates marriage. I guess call me when, for every positive depiction of a single woman in movies, tv, songs, ads, etc. there aren’t 5,000 about how a woman’s life begins when she finds the right man. Every aspect of our society is set up around the couple.

Some say women don’t want to get married anymore. But public polling shows both men and women still very much would like to marry.

One interesting lead comes from David H. Autor.

His research found through time-use surveys that young American native-born men who weren’t working or in school spent hours and hours of their days on video games and porn.

In his book Hooked, Nir Eyal describes how to build habit-forming products.

Keys: frequent trigger, ease of use, variable rewards. Porn, video games, social media, gambling all hijack our brains this way.

However, most people don’t get addicted to even the most addictive products. Most people quit opiates when their prescriptions run out without issue.

There are way more men without work or school than people who show signs of addiction to porn and video games. Addiction can’t explain a phenomenon this widespread.

My theory is that, in short, men aren’t leaving their parents’ basements because they don’t see anything rewarding enough outside to draw them out. Men in the bottom half of earners have seen their wages stagnant since the 1970s. Economic mobility has been declining for decades.

Each generation sees their standard of living declining on average. The K-shaped recovery slides low-education workers further away from the top half. For even a chance at climbing to the top-half of earners, low-education men increasingly must move to a few high-growth cities.

Yet rates of moving for opportunity are the lowest they’ve been in decades due in large part to a nationwide housing crisis.

In short, for low-education males, the American dream is dead. These men have no realistic hope of doing even as well as their parents did.

For low-education women, there’s at least the hope of marrying up, since polling shows most heterosexual couples prefer for the man to be slightly higher earning and more educated. But low-education men have almost no realistic hope of getting a high-paying job.

Most women are prone to avoid marrying men without high-paying jobs or degrees due to cultural scripts about male breadwinners. And even if they could manage to find a high-paying job and a wife, buying a house is still likely out of reach.

Our increasingly bifurcated economic system leaves low-education males without much to reasonably aspire to. So they play video games and watch porn.

/fin

Thoughts?