Male Labor Force Participation Rate Drop Is About Masculine Identity | National Review - 0 views
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history crisis culture politics work working class male identity
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some economists think identity plays a starring role in the economy. “Some of the decline in work among young men is a mismatch between aspirations and identity,” said Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard University. “Taking a job as a health technician has the connotation as a feminized job. The growth has been in jobs that have been considered women’s jobs — education, health, government.” The economy is not simply leaving men behind. It is leaving manliness behind.
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The problem is not working women, the problem is genderphobia, the half-century growth of the pervasive ideology that acknowledging the basic realities of gender and gender difference is somehow a crime against women
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Here’s what humanity understood for thousands of year that we’ve forgotten or trashed: If you want good men, you need to admire, idealize, and reward masculine goodness.
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for most of human history, men worked in really nasty jobs that damaged their health for three reasons: to support themselves, to support their families, and because that was what manliness required.
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we have simply failed to replenish what we inherited from the Greatest Generation of these sources of identity for the Americans who cannot pat themselves on the back because they’ve made it to Harvard
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For most of humanity’s history, masculinity was something achieved, not given, and it pointed men in directions that their society defined as pro-social
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Above all, in modern times, to work and marriage. The connections between work, marriage, fatherhood, and manhood unleashed enormous social energy
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Being a husband and a father was a socially and sexually reinforced masculine identity. It wasn’t just being a parent or a caretaker
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A good husband and father worked. The guy who didn’t was not just a deadbeat, not just a social menace, but a failure as a man.
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The redefinition of masculinity into personhood has not produced a generation of men who act like women. The deep sources of motivation are not the same for both genders.
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Today we’ve defined men as the enemy unless they pretend to conform to the idea that gender doesn’t matter.
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Adult men are now retreating to the world of video games where their aggressive impulses are valorized, not despised — without risk and without real reward.
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If the future of work isn’t quite biased against men, it certainly seemed biased against the traditional idea of manliness. Construction and manufacturing, two male-dominated industries, are down 3 million jobs since 2008. Most of those jobs are dead, forever.
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Meanwhile, the only occupations expected to add more than 100,000 jobs in the next decade are personal care aides, home health aides, medical secretaries, and marketing specialists, all of which are currently majority female.
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“The hours that they are not working have been replaced almost one for one with leisure time. Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games.” And, so far, they like it pretty well this way: “Happiness surveys actually indicate that they [are] quite content compared to their peers,”
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this situation is largely voluntary: Not only are these men not looking for work, “only a minority report that they’ve left the labor force because they cannot find a job.”
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“Ever-greater numbers of working-age men simply have dropped out — some for a while and some forever — from the competition for jobs. These men have established a new and alternative lifestyle to the age-old male quest for a paying job.”
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Between 1948 and 2015, the proportion of women between 25 and 64 in the workforce doubled from 34 percent to 70 percent, masking the continuing retreat of men from work.
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By the late 1990s, women’s workforce participation stopped rising. “Only then did the overall work rate for U.S. adults begin to register a decline,” he writes. “For two full generations, the upsurge of employment for women disguised the steady decline in work for men.”
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the number of working-age men without work is still almost 10 million, or about 10 percent of the working-age male population.
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Between 1965 and 2015, the share of working-age men who are jobless more than doubled, from 10 percent to 22 percent. Among “prime age” men, the percentage without jobs shot from 6 percent to nearly 16 percent