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Are young men falling even further behind?

The Wall Street Journal today has yet another entry in the seemingly endless series of articles about the problems with young men in America. I've taken this on in great detail before (here and here), so I won't do it again. But I will say that at the simplest level I always come back to this:

Young men did take a hit during the aughts, most likely due to the China shock, but for more than a decade since then they've been doing pretty well. Today's 20-year-olds were in sixth grade the last time you could say they were doing poorly. Every one of them has grown up in a world where young men were doing quite well.

But then something occurred to me: the anecdotes in the Journal story all focus on a particular type, men who went to college but left after a semester or two. How are they doing?

Oddly enough, the BLS has a category just for this: "some college, no degree." It only goes back a few years and it's not broken down by age, but it might still tell us something. Maybe this demographic in particular is doing poorly? Let's look:

To my great surprise, "some college" is the highest performing group. I wouldn't take this too seriously since the growth rates are small and the data is limited. Still, it suggests at least that this particular group of men, who don't have their act together enough to figure out what to do in college, aren't doing any worse than anyone else.

The same is true of lots of other things too. When you dig into employment; living arrangements; education; loss of friends; drug use; and other things, it mostly turns out either that young men are doing OK or that their problems are generic ones that affect all age groups and both sexes. It's really hard to tease out any data pointing to serious problems.

15 thoughts on “Are young men falling even further behind?

  1. aldoushickman

    Sure Kevin, you may have data showing it, but how can that compare with what people feel from twitter and half-remembered anecdotes? The beardy "Yes" memes on social media and political prominence of JD Vance surely indicate that young (white) men are plainy under siege no matter what the evidence says and that somehow Trump for some reason is the answer.

  2. Master Slacker

    There is a whole world out there that lives by anecdotal data. Numbers are meaningless, unless you have a story about your cousin's first born child's friend.

    1. Barry Galef

      The first chart says 'median' so it's not averaging in the high end with the trust funds and the golden parachutes. It's also not averaging in the disasters at the bottom, which might be where WSJ is getting it anecdotes. But it's a good, robust measure of the group as a whole.
      I don't know about the other chart -- it says 'first quartile' which could be somewhat robust, but it's just not clear.

  3. zic

    It's really simple, women are doing better, so (in a zero-sum world,) men must be doing worse.

    In particular, women seem more reluctant to date men, and more inclined to leave men, who don't treat them well, so there's an increase in men without a women to steady them down. The ball and chain broke free.

  4. jamesepowell

    With all these "left behind" complaints, I think we need them to specify behind what or whom? Their highest hopes?

    It's like how everyone in the media let the "Make America Great Again" slide without making Trump say when he wanted to go back to and why.

  5. cmayo

    Just like the "Trump voters are just economically dissatisfied" trope, the answer here is that it's not about the money.

    It's about relative power and privilege.

    By "left behind", what they mean is that Others are catching up to them.

    1. akapneogy

      I think that is right. Also, when I saw the "some college" data I thought of the lesser Bill Gates who found something better to do.

    2. OldFlyer

      🎯🎯🎯 "Damed if any of my seniority or taxes will go to "those people"

      Even MAGAs who are not Haves and Have Mores understand the conservative agenda screws their education, labor leverage healthcare, etc. Loss of White Privilege is the only logic that explains why they ignore science, stats, and proudly vote against the own economic self interest.

    3. SnowballsChanceinHell

      Or, perhaps, there is absolutely nothing here ... just algorithmically fuelled ressentiment afflicting both men and women who are being pitted against each other to make some media baron wealthy.

  6. golack

    Map it with debt.
    College costs and amount of loans needed to go to college has climbed faster than inflation.

    Typically when kids have to find a place to live, get their own insurance, and, god forbid, pay for their own streaming and phone services, then they feel they have no money. Not to mention, they're paying taxes now too. Republicans try to turn that into resentment.

  7. Austin

    Men without college degrees used to be able to get jobs that paid enough to be breadwinners, and now they aren’t able to do this at all, even if their wages are increasing faster than any other demographic group. Practically nobody with even college degrees can afford to be a sole breadwinner anymore. (I don’t know a single person my age or younger who has been the sole breadwinner for their family for more than maybe a year here in metro DC, and I have a master’s degree.)

    So the more troglodyte-ish among them lash out at the world for denying them access to women, houses and career success like their ancestors had back in the pre-1970s.

  8. skeptonomist

    Whoopee, young men's real income has actually risen above what it was in 2000 - what progress. However, all production worker real wages have not yet attained the 1972 level. Median income and wages have fallen far short of GDP/capita (productivity) since 1972.

    Of course this kind of stagnation is not peculiar to young men, although it seems that men have done worse than women (whose incomes are nevertheless still lower than men's). Does the WSJ talk about how basically all the productivity increase over the last 50 years has gone to the highest incomes?

  9. jdubs

    Median income and wages are important, but they aren't so important as to dismiss everything else. Especially when median wage gains arent that impressive.

    This is a pretty weak response to the actual topic.

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