💰 Economic

⬅️ Hub: Boy Crisis MOC

Wages, NEET, labor market shifts, and STEM.

Economic

• Young women in urban areas under 30 are out-earning men, reversing traditional gender roles. However, this shifts after age 30 when women face career setbacks due to childbirth.
• Economic policies favor the top 1%, leaving unremarkable men without viable middle-class paths. College acceptance rates have plummeted (e.g., UCLA’s from 76% to 9%), excluding many.
• Economic Necessity: Men are depicted as having to work long hours or take on dangerous jobs to ensure the financial stability of their families. This often means less time for nurturing, bonding, or even daily interaction with their children.

1. Stability
   1. Your daughter is more likely to hold jobs in stable sectors that are more recession proof, like health and education, both of which are 7percent women.
   2. your son will enter an economy that has made a transition Irom muscle to mental—or Irom muscle to microchip.
2. Support family
3. Need two incomes
   1. Over the last Iorty years, the median annual earnings oI a boy with Must a high school diploma dropped 26 percent.
4. Provider attraction
   2. If your son plans to live in an urban area, he’ll likely live in one of the 147 US cities in which young women under thirty haven’t just caught up to their male peers, but now outearn them (by an average of 8 percent). In only three cities do young men earn as much or more. Belinda Luscombe. “Workplace Salaries: At Last, Women on Top,” Time, September 1, 2010, http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,899,201274,00.html. And single women are now buying their own homes at two and a half times the rate of single men. National Association of Realtors, “First-Time Buyers, Single Women Gain Traction in NAR’s 2016 Buyer and Seller Survey,” National Association of Realtors, October 31, 2016, http://www.realtor.org/news-releases/2016/10/first-time-buyers-single-women-gain-traction-innar-s-2016-buyer-and-seller-survey. Single women represented 17 percent of home purchases, single males 7 percent.
   3. And if your son is unemployed? Three out of four women say they would not date an unemployed man. 11 In contrast, for two-thirds of men, dating an unemployed woman is a nonissue.

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The deepest fissures in the labor market are not those between men and women. They are between white and Black workers and between the upper middle class and the middle class and working class

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Many in the women’s movement and in the mass media complain that men just ‘don’t want to give up the reins of power,’” writes Susan Faludi. “But that would seem to have little applicability to the situations of most men, who individually feel not the reins of power in their hands but its bit in their mouths.”2

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Over the last three decades,” write economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman, “the labor market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition; employment rates; occupational stature; and real wage levels.”

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Labor force participation among men in the U.S. has dropped by 7 percentage points over the last half century, from 96 to 89%.

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One in three men with only a high school education are now out of the labor force.5 That is 5 million men, a reserve army of labor twice the size of the People’s Liberation Army of China.

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Chinese imports caused declines in U.S. manufacturing employment, of around 2 to 3 million jobs

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I will say that the political elite spent decades complacently arguing that on net, and in the long run, free trade is good. And so it is. By definition, however, this means that some people, in some places, are being hurt right now. Not much was done to help these people, even by center-left politicians who claimed to be on the side of the working class. The assumption in policy circles that some of the winnings from free trade would be redistributed to the losers proved mostly false. The victims were basically left behind, told to buck up their ideas, engage in some “lifelong learning,” and get with the program. Up until 2017, for every dollar the U.S. government was spending on Trade Adjustment Assistance for workers, $25 were being spent on tax subsidies toward the endowments of elite colleges.

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As the Council concluded, “Essentially all of the income gains that middle-class American families have experienced since 1970 are due to the rise in women’s earnings.”43

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In 1970, most mothers were not in paid work—today, almost three out of four are.

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At the top of the economic ladder, especially in the top 20% of the income distribution, both women and men are flourishing on almost all measures, from their growing wealth to the lengthening spans of their lives.

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gap between highly paid workers and everyone else has widened. In 1979, the earnings of the typical woman were 63% those of the typical man. By 2019, this had risen to 82%. By contrast the wages of the typical worker (i.e., at the median) fell from 54% of the wages of a high earner (i.e., at the 90th percentile) to 42% by 2019.4 By these measures, then, the gender pay gap narrowed by 19 percentage points, while the class pay gap widened by 12 percentage points.

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Class warriors downplay gender concerns, focused only on the oligarchy. Gender warriors downplay class concerns, focused only on the patriarchy. But inequalities of class and gender have to be considered together, especially when they pull in different directions.

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When men struggle, families become poorer. One of the most striking facts about recent economic history is that it is only women who have kept American families financially afloat in the last few decades. And even then, just barely. except for the richest families (i.e., the top fifth), all the growth in household income since 1979 resulted from the increased working hours and earnings of women. As Heather Boushey, appointed in 2021 to the Council of economic Advisers, and Kavya Vaghul write, “Women’s contributions saved low-income and middle-class families from steep drops in their income.”

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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.

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As Edin’s and Kefalas’s ethnographic work illustrates, many women decide that “I can do bad by myself.”22 In the bottom fifth of the income distribution, seven out of ten mothers are now the main breadwinner— usually because they are the only one.23 This growing class gap in family life shows how economic factors, especially the position of men, both in absolute terms and relative to women, influences family formation.24 The falling earnings power of noncollege males is one reason for their falling marriage rates, according to David Autor and Melanie Wasserman.

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I think educated Americans have transformed marriage from an institution of economic dependency into a joint venture for the purpose of parenting. Marriage here serves primarily as a commitment device for shared investments of time and money in children. I call these high- investment parenting, or HIP, marriages.35 Affluent, highly educated parents have more flexibility at work, more money to outsource domestic labor, and more wealth or credit to buy time at home if they choose. If one of them takes time out of the labor market, the family finances will survive. That study of MBA graduates I cited in chapter 2, showing how time taken to care for children caused the gender pay gap, also found that women with the highest-earning husbands were the most likely to take time out of the labor market.36 This underscores the differences in the position of men of different classes. College-educated men have been largely insulated from the labor market shocks that have derailed so many others. With high and rising earnings, they have remained attractive marital prospects, even for women who are themselves flourishing in the labor market. These men have not, by and large, become stay-at-home dads, however.

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social scientists are piling up the evidence that boys suffer worse consequences from childhood adversity. Boys raised in families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, for example, are less likely to escape poverty as an adult than girls from similarly poor homes.

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Gender gaps in adulthood have roots in childhood,” write Raj Chetty and his coauthors, who conducted the U.S. study, “perhaps because poverty and exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods during childhood are particularly harmful for boys.”

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Boys do badly, for example, if they are raised in neighborhoods with high levels of crime, and a large share of single-parent-households seem to be particularly detrimental to boys. This is why boys seem to fare particularly poorly in certain cities, including Baltimore, as well as places like Detroit and Fresno, while outcomes for girls are less influenced by their zip code. on the plus side, Black boys raised in neighborhoods with a high proportion of fathers have better prospects as adults. The bottom line, according to Chetty, is that “neighborhoods matter more for boys than girls.”

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The bigger impact of class position on boys and men is also clear in postsecondary education: girls raised in the poorest families (i.e., the bottom fifth of the distribution) are 57% more likely to get a 4-year college degree than boys from similar backgrounds, compared to a difference of just 8% among those from affluent (top fifth) families.

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Looked at from every angle, then, the pattern is clear. Economic and social disadvantage hurts boys more than girls. This is an extremely important fact, and one that has yet to receive nearly enough attention. The problems of men are not only fueling social and economic inequality but also being caused by it. “A vicious cycle may ensue,” write David Autor and Melanie Wasserman, “with the poor economic prospects of less- educated males creating differentially large disadvantages for their sons, thus potentially reinforcing the development of the gender gap in the next generation.”

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Any serious effort to improve rates of upward mobility or reduce economic inequality must take into account the specific challenges being faced by boys and men. Otherwise, patterns of male disadvantage will repeat across generations.

STEM

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In 2018, two researchers, Gijsbert Stoet and David Geary, showed that in more gender-equal countries, such as Finland and Norway, women were less likely to take university courses in STEM subjects. Stoet and Geary called this the “gender-equality paradox.”

Gender Pay Gap

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While women’s wages have risen across the board over the last four decades, wages for men on most rungs of the earnings ladder have stagnated. Only men at the top have seen strong earnings growth.

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The gap instinct leads to two errors of perception. First, we fail to see how much overlap there is between two groups. Second, we fail to see the bigger gaps that typically exist within groups, rather than between them.

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40% of women now earn more than the typical man, up from just 13% in 1979. That two in five women are earning more than what 50% of men earn seems counterintuitive to many people.

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The gap between high-wage women and low- wage women, and to a lesser extent between high-wage and low-wage men, has widened dramatically.

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There is certainly very little evidence that women are paid less than men for doing the same work in the same way. Women are paid less because they do different work, or work differently, or both.

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The one-word explanation for the pay gap is: children.

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The men were twice as likely to work overtime (which pays extra), even at short notice. They also took fewer hours of unpaid leave, and so on. Among train drivers with children, the gaps were even wider. Fathers wanted even more overtime pay; mothers wanted more time off.

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Take women who leave Harvard with a professional or postgraduate degree, arguably members of the most elite educational group in the world. Fifteen years after graduating, only half of these women are working full time.

Automation

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Male employment has not fallen because men have suddenly become feckless or work-shy, but because of shifts in the structure of the economy. Simply put, male jobs have been hit by a one-two punch, of automation and free trade. Machines pose a greater threat to working men than to women for two reasons. First, the occupations most susceptible to automation are just more likely to employ men, as my colleague Mark Muro shows. “Men … make up over 70 percent of production occupations, over 80 percent of transportation occupations, and over 90 percent of construction and installation occupations,” he writes.14 And these are “all occupational groups with current task loads that have above-average projected automation exposure.” By contrast, women make up most of the workforce in relatively automation-safe occupations, such as health care, personal services, and education.

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Second, men often lack the skills required in an automating world. According to Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, “the high-skill, high-pay jobs of the future may involve skills better measured by EQ (a measure of emotional intelligence) than IQ.”

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The long-run shift away from jobs requiring physical strength is going to continue. Fewer than one in ten jobs now require what the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes as “heavy work,” which requires “occasionally lifting or carrying 51–100 pounds or frequently lifting or carrying 26–50 pounds.” As the muscular demands of work decline, men are becoming physically weaker; one study of grip strength, a good marker of overall strength, shows a sharp decline among men.19 Meanwhile, and perhaps more surprisingly, women are getting physically stronger. In 1985, the average man in his early 30s could squeeze your hand with about 30 pounds more force than a similarly aged woman. Today, their grip strength is about the same.

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Most of the occupations set to grow the most in coming years are female dominated.20 There has been a commendable and largely successful push to get more girls and women into jobs that require STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) skills. But it is now even more important to encourage men into what I call HEAL (health, education, administration, and literacy) jobs, which are dominated by women.

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Male workers are challenged on one side by robots, and on the other by workers in other countries.