I got pointed to a Washington Post editorial today which suggests that political polarization is hurting marriage rates because young women are considerably more liberal than young men. I'm not so sure that's a big issue, but what really drew my attention was this:
A growing number of young women are discovering that they can’t find suitable male partners. As a whole, men are increasingly struggling with, or suffering from, (1) higher unemployment, (2) lower rates of educational attainment, (3) more drug addiction and (4) deaths of despair, and (5) generally less purpose and direction in their lives.
I don't know how to measure #5, but I can measure the others and they are literally all untrue:
Among young men, unemployment is historically low; educational attainment is high at every level; and drug use is stable. It's true that so-called deaths of despair are up, but they're up less than they are for young women.
This meme about slacker young men just won't quit even though the evidence for it is zero. When are people going to cut the crap?
POSTSCRIPT: I suppose I might as well throw this one in too:
Are you asking the Washington Post reporters to stop making things up?
It's not a reporter writing, it's an editorial, that's where they're supposed to make things up! And apparently do nothing but feed right-wing misinformation. One reason I still refuse to get a newspaper (NYT or a local rag) is because the editorials are always the worst right-wing takes, with few if any bends over to the left, much less the far left.
Two things.
1) You may be referencing the wrong thing. "More" may be in comparison to women - if the gap is growing in educational attainment, then there more women dissatisfied with their mate-selecting prospects given that people tend to mate with people of similar educational attainment levels, etc.
2) Like other social phenomena, such as latent racism, it may be that the number of men who are unacceptable as mates has always been a problem but simply under-discussed/under-reported. I'm GREATLY simplifying this point.
The anecdata of my female friends supports the "men suck more than they used to" "meme" as well.
Your female friends should talk to their elders so that they can be informed that man have always sucked, and probably worse in the past.
I have a hypothesis with little evidence to support or contradict it.
The hypothesis is that young men these days are less vested in being the "strong, silent" type, something I call the "man with no needs". The Man With No Needs never existed, but men often pretended to be him. And maybe not so much any more.
This is, of course, going to seem like it is a change in how needy men are. But they were always needy, just like everybody else.
The answer is "never", because there is a powerful coalition allied against them.
Reactionaries hate them for being young the exact same way they were but in a cultural context that confuses them. Employers want a reserve of them out of work to keep the rest in line. They're easy fodder for politicians, preachers and other professional malcontents. Hell, I get annoyed with them sometimes for being young and dumb, despite having the feeling that they're on average slightly better-adjusted than my cohort was.
I'm an old now myself and do not have kids, but I imagine being a young man is just as confusing as it was in the 80s, and just as filled with shitty "advice", shitty examples of "what being a man means", cruelty, and stupidity. The fact that most folks can socialize themselves out of that is a testament to the power of social nudges, I think.
Kevin misses the point, which is that woke young women refuse to marry knuckle-dragging young Trump cultists and it's hurting America.
I don't know if "women choosing not to marry Trump fans" is hurting America. It may be hurting the egos of men who think that women have to be socially and personally suppressed so those men can even up, but America will do just fine with empowered women.
One thing that surprised me about dating again (after my divorce) was seeing that a large percentage (30-40%) of women state plainly in their profiles, "If you are a Trump supporter, do not contact me. We won't get along."
I occasionally see the opposite sentiment, "No liberals please", but that occurs at what I'd say is the 5-10% level.
I met my wife after 9/11 and before Bush's Axis of Evil SOTU, which I consider the last moment in American history when politics was not a primary factor in who you picked to be friends or a mate. It wasn't that people didn't have a politics before then, but it seemed unbecoming to make it into the top ten things you thought were important about a person.
Near the end of my single days, I remember sitting across from a guy at a singles dinner who went on about Bill Clinton (he was no fan) and getting the cold shoulder from everyone, not so much for partisan reasons but because people figured if you couldn't hold a conversation about something other than politics you were a boor. Those were the days.
Being single gets old. Wouldn't want to be there today.
(For the record, my wife was apolitical back in the day, a strong Democrat now, and her family, alas, is a bunch of unrepentant Republicans.)
Unmarried women attributing their marital status to terrible men is a trope as old as time.
If anything todays young men are the best in history. Non-violent, educated, sensitive, hard-working, willing to change diapers, good in the kitchen, etc.
Not a trope. When women talk believe them. There are plenty of good men who will be good partners but there are still plenty of "bad guys" and currently a good way to quickly sort out good versus bad is to weed out the Trumpers as one of their core values is supremacy of the male over women. This isn't to say there aren't sexist pigs who lean liberal, because there most certainly are but far more Conservatives want submissive women.
Fewer people should get married, and fewer people should breed, than were pressured into in the past. Marriage and / or kid(s) is not necessary for happiness. (Both "Fight the Power" chapters in https://www.losingmyreligions.net/ )
The question is whether it's true that young men are having trouble getting a date or finding a mate because of their political or cultural inclinations. It could be!
As we saw after Trump's election in 2016, there's an automatic presumption that social and economic factors must be involved, when the truth seems to be that voters are just more racist and sexist than is commonly acknowledged.
I don't know - besides shouting into the wind here are you also contacting authors and adding comments to articles?
My understanding is this is concentrated in working class men not all men. Essentially well educated richer women no longer have to settle and poors of both sexes don't marry because they have limited future prospects.
"When are people going to cut the crap"?
Probably when all political stories no longer need the "Dems in Disarray!" theme, when every news report doesn't have to attack "both sides" (even if only the Republican side is relevant), and when we can stop hearing about The Defendant as if his behavior is normal, not to mention probably okay.
For the record, I too long for this day.
Oh, and why all the concern about men's increasing "deaths of despair" when the number of women dying is significantly higher and rising at a higher rate? In a sane world, that would be the lede.
Where did you find your statistics on higher deaths of despair among women? My searches find references to men dying by suicide at 4 times the rate of women.
Umm - you realize that a chart showing a larger percentage increase in deaths of despair among women than in men only tells you that the rate of DoD among women is rising faster than men. (Assuming that the numbers are actually correct, of course and the people who made the chart didn't play "cute games" with noisy data.)
Without some information on actual deaths per unit of measured population and the current population of the two measured groups the chart really doesn't say the number of women dying of despair is larger than the number of men yet.
The employment rate of men has been going down, but that's a very long-time trend.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25MAUSA156S
The employment rate for women is about the same as it was in 2000, still lower than that of men.
Your graph shows that the decrease in employment in working age men went from 86.7 to 86 since 1990. That iteeny change is the result in the slight social acceptance of stay at home dads with women who made more then them before they had children. That is a good thing. (Women who both want equality with man and insist on a mate that makes more than them are illogical and unreasonable.)
- US life expectancy for men is 73 and women 79.
- For suicide, in 2022 there were 39,358 deaths for males and 10,194 for females.
- In 2021, there were 4,741 male occupational injury deaths in the US, compared to 448 deaths for females.
- In 2021, there were 11,440 victims of murder who identified as male, compared to 3,150 victims of murder who identified as female.
- For opioid overdose deaths, in 2021 there were 53,992 male deaths compared to 21,793 female deaths.
Not sure what you mean by "women dying is significantly higher and rising at a higher rate? In a sane world, that would be the lede."
Are you specifically talking about the rising US maternal mortality rates or something else?
Thanks for introducing numbers! I looked briefly at Mr D's graph, saw the female line well above the male line, and went from there.
I think the point is for *young* women and young men. The chart refers to the 25-29 year old cohort.
I don't think statistics or editorials are really capable of telling this story effectively. Perhaps both Mr. Drum and the Post should "cut the crap". If there is a metric worth viewing, wouldn't it be the marriage / divorce rate among 20 somethings?
Over the last 50 years, the marriage rate in the U.S. has dropped by nearly 60%.
It's like the war in israel, pick the time frame and the data fits your notion of what's happening.
They're doing fine except in most areas these days they can't afford to buy a house their prospective wives would want to live in.
Women are committing suicide at higher rates than in the past, but men still vastly outnumber them in suicides.
Men are pretty steady in terms of attaining degrees, but women are blowing past them. That mismatch is the issue.
As for illicit drugs, does that include marujuana use in states where it is decriminalized? Research is showing more marijuana use in states that have legalized.
Of course, increased focus on politics, and the gender gap there, is also a huge factor. The types of political disagreements that are biggest today seem designed to make cross-party marriages harder to navigate. In the past many of today's social issues were unacceptable to members of both parties - abortion was illegal and always done in secret, gay kids were almost always ostracized. Political fights were about more abstract things, like whether or not Medicare should exist or tax rates. If the fights today were just about paid parental leave and war funding, more people could ignore them in their personal relationships. But it's harder to ignore what might happen if you have a Trans kid, or if you have a health condition that makes an abortion recommended. Of course, Republicans have a history of bending their morals when it is a close family member, but few women are willing to trust that.
From the Big Bang theory…
Mary Cooper: Hun, you think maybe the reason why you're having trouble finding a guy to settle down with, is because you're letting them ride the roller-coaster without buying a ticket?
most likely the ride is closed if you're a neckbeard wearing a maga hat
Yes, bad sitcoms is the place to get your sociological insights.
Men having to buy sex through marriage is (and always has been ) a recipe for bad marriages and two unhappy people.
Back when you needed a spouse to survive, that resulted in abusive situations that got transferred down to children who continued the tradition.
I don't know about marriage rates - Kevin should look into it - but birth rates have been dropping everywhere in the more-advanced world. This is not likely to be a result of political polarization or anything else unique to the US. Who is making the choice not to have more kids - men or women?
Depends on the country, I suppose. In East Asia (Korea, Japan, China), the choice to have fewer children is primarily made by the women. That's an evergreen feature of newspaper and TV stories in Japan and China (probably Korea, too, but I can't speak Korean).
Kevin, I think you're too concerned with the measurable as opposed to the important but non-measurable. I suspect the issue is not in material terms, it is in things like "sense of purpose". The books that supposedly speak to this group, something like Bronze Age Mindset, are not about material issues, they are about purpose.
One (not great, but available) proxy for this young adults still living with their parents.
https://www.prb.org/resources/in-u-s-a-sharp-increase-in-young-men-living-at-home/
shows this since 2000. The latest census numbers (2021) ramp this up to 22% of men 25..34 and 13% of women.
Now you can view this in many ways.
- The leftist view would be that this is all about more expensive housing, blah blah. This doesn't seem to be true, as we've seen from multiple Kevin Drum analyses of costs of housing relative to income.
- Another viewpoint is that it is cultural. This is the view of, eg _Teen Spirit_, which posits that segregating kids in school where they interact primarily with others of their age and with little adult presence has created successive generations that are ever more "personality"-skewed towards perpetual teenagers, with all that implies in terms of self-control, attention span and so on; and that this is somewhat self-reinforcing as tech allows successive generations to interact with media (books, TV, social media etc) generated by the previous generation of "adults" that are aleady heavily teen-personality-skewed.
- One could somewhat reconcile these by saying something like what matters is less the median than the lower tail, and while the median teen is still able to move on to adult life (functionally, if not very satisfied), the lower tail (lowest 25 to 33%) are finding this ever more difficult. This plays out in various ways, of which the most visible outside the brain of the individual is continuing to live at home with the parents.
And this is not a claim that it's only a problem with the young men in the tail. Both genders suffer from the problem that has no name; it's just more visible in the young men because they feel more keenly the lack of purpose. The young women at least have a plan and a goal (mostly get married and/or have a kid) which is probably achievable; the young men don't even know what they want.
OK, I answered my own question about marriage rates - they have been declining everywhere:
https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces
"The chart also shows that in comparison to other rich countries, the US has had particularly high historical marriage rates. But in terms of changes over time, the trend looks similar for other rich countries."
No explanation which is exclusive to the US is valid.
Better female self-support. If women dont need us they don't want us.
I'm confused. Because what you are saying sounds to be remarkably different from the data that Ezra Klein sited on his podcast. Here's an excerpt:
"In 1972, when Congress passed Title IX to tackle gender equity in education, men were 13 percentage points more likely to hold bachelor’s degrees than women; today women are 15 points more likely to do so than men. The median real hourly wage for working men is lower today than it was in the 1970s. And men account for almost three out of four “deaths of despair,” from overdose or suicide."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-richard-reeves.html?
Is this a simple problem where the solution is that either the data citeds by Kevin or Ezra are right and the other is wrong? I'm not sure what to make of this.
No, because the rate of educational attainment for men is largely unchanged (Kevin's point), while the rate of educational attainment for women has skyrocketed (I believe that's Ezra's point).
Personal example: my mother graduated first in her high school class, took first-generation AP classes in chemistry and biology, and was accepted to an Ivy League university. She wanted to become a doctor. Her guidance counsellor told her that she had little chance of being accepted into medical school, no matter how well she did in college, and recommended that she become a nurse instead.