The vices may (or may not) be different for young women, but this trenchant overview describes the confusing path that all young people have to walk at this point. We need honest-broker clearinghouses - administered by human beings - for housing, dating, and employment. High schools, community centers, and colleges could be places where seekers and finders come together - we need investment funds to train workers in vital skills (anyone see that video about court reporters and escalator repairmen being in short supply?) and yes, laws to prevent corporate buyers in the private housing market. Thank you for the great post!
The problem with corporate buyers is entirely a symptom of insufficient housing construction (touched on only briefly in the essay). If we smash the NIMBYs' power, the housing shortage is solved.
I value Commonplace, but this article started out with so many overstatements that it left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
I have never heard a liberal say "men are trash."
There are about 2500 four-year colleges & universities in the US. About 100 are highly selective, accepting less than 1/3 of applicants. The vast majority of students go to colleges that admit 50% or more of applicants. The experience of applying to these schools is not one of "randomness." The elite's perception that Harvard and Yale are the only place to go is utterly distorted, as Commonplace writers should certainly know.
From my perspective, I have definitely heard the “men is trash” sentiment - sometimes in exactly those words, sometimes just expressed. There was (is?) a recent trend online where it was fashionable for young women to question whether it’s embarrassing to even have a boyfriend. (Of course, a lot of women also pushed back on that!)
I think your point on colleges is valid. It’s not really difficult to get into college. The “elite” ones do make you stand out in the faceless online application process though, and can make tuition feel like less of a gamble in a way that second-tier colleges don’t, and acceptance into those kinds of colleges I think *can* feel random. Lots of people can develop “perfect” college applications on paper over their high school years, and many will still not be accepted into the elite schools they were aiming for (in other words, they won’t be rewarded for their efforts). I think that is the dysfunction John was getting at.
“Men are trash” takes so many forms, who needs men, men are useless, the patriarchs time is over.
For Pete’s Sake, we couldn’t have Boy Scouts without women demanding first entry and then morphing the organization to where boys don’t want anything to do with it.
Schools started a myriad array of special programs to help girls succeed at stem with college entrance processes using DEI agendas to pick up where high schools left off.
Upon graduating women with an engineering degree were promoted at 2-3 times the speed that their male peers were. Women had careers, men had jobs.
So, yes, young men suffer from the removal of a social structure that provides direction for “success” in today’s society. Even worse, they’ve come to see how the game was intentionally rigged against them and their simply opting out.
Very real problems, and with each issue I recognise how much considerably easier it was back when I was young a long long time ago.
Low cost housing was ubiquitous. A cheap room could be had for a week by working day labor half a day, and sucky jobs paid much more. A guy could be self supporting immediately, and a college degree, any degree, from any college would move you up the ladder quickly at any company.
I often read articles by young economists. They look at statistics and figures. They weren't around then. The whole story doesn't get told. They can't see beyond average or median. Pre aids there was more sex, a lot more sex.
Often young economists and thought leaders see only the view from a good college grad. They want affordable new 4 bedroom houses, and foreign vacations, a fancy car. They never look at the world normies lived in back then, or now.
I'm building a tiny house right now, it will probably end up costing me $30K. Tiny bedroom with loft, small kitchen, bathroom, AC, washer dryer, porch across the front. Around me in this town are many houses not much bigger that people used to raise eight or ten kids in while working the mines. Young folks these days need cheap places to live above all else.
We control how things go in our economy a lot more than free marketeers would like to admit. We need to structure things such that a 20 year old feels comfortable starting a family. While still in college if need be. As a society we need a much more attainable floor, a point below which no people can fall. A way to make it to the bottom rungs of the ladder.
It is hard to get back to a lost world. A lot of what is talked about is symptoms rather than causes. Life is a bell curve and we need to figure out a way for people 1.0 SD below median to have a decent life. We used to do that. I think that unions were part of the answer back then. I refer to private sector unions as public sector ones just make things worse. The private sector unions did get over-mighty for a while and contributed to the exodus of manufacturing from America.
Now a lot of 1.0 SD below median are having a hard time of it. Many things I find to be a royal pain are probably impossible for someone 1.0 below median to even figure out.
Used to work. Tech was different so we need to figure out a way to make the tech work for them instead of against them. Having half the population on welfare is unsustainable regardless of what Elon says. Even having the 15% that is >1SD below is hard. From the time records started being kept (Romans) it's been 5 to 10 percent can't function on their own.
Someone with “skills” is already three steps ahead of the game. I spent the past two summers renovating two old homes, the average all-in cost of each house was $70,000.
That’s a new hvac, electrical, plumbing, insulation, Sheetrock, flooring and insulation. Each house is around 1200 sqft. It was hard, dirty work and the end product was not perfect but nice and I benefited from a local economy in North Dakota that valued seeing a couple homes become viable tax generating properties more than over the top building inspections and permit requirements.
Good essay and excellent diagnosis. Many of the proposed solutions are communal; where communal institutions work to provide employment, marriage and social interaction support. Local churches are an established institution offering communal support especially with regard to marriage. The fact that more young men are attending a church is an encouraging development. How a local church or network of believers helps a young man gain employment may take some thought and consideration.
I enjoyed this thoughtful article but believe a glaring omission is encouragement of trade skill training as a legitimate career path for High School seniors. This would seem to be particularly important as some degree of manufacturing will be returning to the U.S. in the coming years.
"a polity cannot write off 90% of the population as losers unable to compete"
We've been doing exactly that for over 100 years. Successfully navigating the 21st century world requires far more cognitive and social ability to its early 20th century counterpart. It's not an rural/urban thing -- 50%+ of all Americans were living in cities 100 years ago. But in that century, we made it harder and harder for the IQ<100 to succeed. (That's half the population.)
The 2-tier society is mostly cognitive, as the smarter and more social get university degrees which are mostly just markers to advertise their genetic endowments and catapult themselves into what we now call "the laptop class." If you're in the laptop class, this world is great. Oh, it's still lonely and atomized and difficult to find meaning or connection... but you've got lots of cheap stuff to distract you from the meaninglessness of your life and job. Everyone else lacks those distractions, so they create their own: porn, video games, drugs, etc... And that everyone else today is about 70% male.
Fundamentally, modern America doesn't need men, at least not American men. It needs consumers (women are good at that) but not producers (which is what men are). Our production comes from overseas. Women are legally equal and it turns out they don't like having babies when given the choice. So how, exactly, is your average 100 IQ, good with his hands, watch the game on Saturday kind of guy supposed to be a man in this world?
I don't have the answers, and those given here aren't bad. But remember Patrick Deneen's diagnosis in Why Liberalism Failed? Great book and many were all looking forward to his answers, but Regime Change flopped because his solutions were so obviously and woefully below the level of the problems he had identified. I feel the same way about the solutions presented here: not bad ideas, but far too little to matter.
The idea that only dumb people end up in "non-cognitive" trades is so wrong and shortsighted. You'll find plenty of very smart people working shit-tier, retail jobs. And often times their superiors/managers are functionally illiterate. The "invisible hand" doesn't select for anything, the job market is mostly about nepotism and social engineering, not intelligence and talent. There are even cases of literal super-geniuses who were expected to redefine entire fields and got free rides through the most elite universities based on their IQ quitting and deciding to work bottom-tier jobs because they liked it more.
Life isn't fair. It is also very random. Through no fault of your own, and having nothing to do with your intelligence or lack there-of you can end up in a dead-end job or unemployed. And that's assuming in the first place that the job market was designed to filter for the best people to reach the top--it very much isn't. At least, not anymore.
I certainly wasn't implying that everyone who works a crappy job is dumb.
I'm a Mensa member, a genius. All that means is my neurons are slightly closer and my neurotransmitter levels slightly higher; the combined effect makes me able to take in new information and act on it faster than 98% of all humans. That's all intelligence is: faster pattern recognition and decision making. I've spent a lot of time around very smart people; I know first hand just how foolish they (and I sometimes) can be.
However, since the 1950's, raw intelligence has been highly correlated with university education, starting with the rise of "meritocracy" (via standardized testing) instad of social standing for admission to Harvard. While college graduation != economic usefulness, the college-income-premium has risen sharply since the 70's. In short, the smart (a purely genetic endowment) are using universities to accrue wealth and status to themselves, while engaging in policies that hurt everyone else. Unlike the older aristocracy though, they believe they've earned their position by merit and thus the "everyone else" is morally beneath them.
As an economic progressive, I'm very happy to read this kind of thinking from "conservative" writers. I've become more wary of defaulting to left-right labels as this new source of economic thinking emerges and dovetails with existing (ok, progressive) thinking. That's because it doesn't matter what one calls the policy on that spectrum. What matters is the policy gets implemented. Exacerbating entrenched left-right knee-jerks is the opposite of helpful. Welcoming our brothers and sisters to join in uniting against corporate control, oligopoly, legal political corruption, and for worker and voter agency is the attitude that can form a genuine movement. If those issues somehow become the legitimate platform of the republican party, I'll become a (progressive) republican. Same if the democratic party legitimately adopts that platform. But, since both are so thoroughly owned by the financial elite, I see a third party as the best option. To form that, social issue neutrality has to be enforced to keep the economic agenda front and center.
The sort of populist fusion you describe is the best hope. I think I can identify leaders on the right side of this like Vance, Hawley and maybe Rubio but I am having trouble identifying left populists to join them. I once had hope for Warren but she joined up with the culture warriors and is now too old. Bernie is even older. Any ideas for younger ones that are focused on those issues? Watching Mamdami but he is too NYC to have much of an impact elsewhere. Plus he has some seriously crazy ideas like depolicing and public grocery stores. If I could figure out how to imbed pictures, I would add the one of Boris Yeltsin in an American supermarket. If the Republican establishment succeeds in retaking the party after Trump, I think you will see a 3rd party. Lots of institutional barriers to success but the Republicans went from zero to total control in 6 years starting in 1854.
"...just walk into an office with a firm handshake and a copy of your resume, and ask to see the manager—is infuriating not because it’s nonsense, but because at one time it was true."
This is bullsh$t. It's a myth. Another 'boomers suck because XXX' myth.
This is a good article that properly articulates the loss of agency young people currently experience. The sadness is that their agency now resides exclusively with those who benefited from it over previous generations and who can now buy single family homes they do not need to get even more pennies they do not need. At which point the only hope is for local | state | federal governments with agency to declare the behavior predatory and end it. Which will not happen because the levers of authority are in the hands of those who enjoyed said now lost agency and mistake it for superiority, and thereby, an entitlement to charge it forward.
Spot on article. The traditional paths to success have gotten harder and harder. And social media has distorted our views of success - it seems there is an endless supply of people getting rich off very little work on our screens.
I believe we either need to collectively accept our views of success are distorted (hard to do considering human evolutionary tendencies) or just go down this path of elite consolidation. While the rich get richer, the floor drops out for everyone else.
The primary cause of 'elite consolidation' I think is capitalist monopolization. There are huge forces under capitalism that directs an enterprise towards monopolization, which is closer to socialism than capitalism. Capitalism must be saved from itself.
Yes, agreed. The people with capital seem to be dropping the pretense more and more these days. Also giving the accrued benefits of this capital to the people closest to them - which is also historically how societies functioned.
Monopolization brings their assets a lot of security, and they can get richer faster while small businesses find it more and more difficult to compete. Any surprise that the top 5% are getting richer while the middle 50% are getting poorer. There can be no other reason for this. Note that technological complexity and government regulation assist in monopolization.
Mike Rowe has an excellent take on the jobs that will need doing and these jobs will provide a huge opportunity for the young men astute enough to see the opportunity and to get in early.
Men built performed the backbreaking labor to build this society and all the required infrastructure that makes it work and men maintain it.
Technological innovation will do away with a wide swath of traditional white collar jobs, it’s already happening and it’s going to get worse, for most a university degree is a suckers bet.
The real opportunities will be in the interface between what used to be blue and white collar jobs, for example think of a locksmiths job, it used to be cutting keys, jimmying locked car doors open, installing door handles etc. today’s locksmith is programming keyless biometric locks, using technology to determine computer coding of smart automotive keys so duplicates can be made and programmed. Etc
Electricians are installing whole-house smart systems that control lighting, heating and cooling, security, power usage, back-up generators that start and stop automatically etc.
There’s a role and a pathway for young men that will easily lead to $100,000 a year jobs buts it’s evolving and part of that evolution is removing the stigma assigned to these jobs.
Meh. Things will work themselves out, they always do despite all the gloomsaying in this piece. To whit, look back in history - to the mechanization of the textile industry, agricultural mechanization, the deskilling of manufacturing work with the assembly line, telephone switchboard automation, personal computers eliminating administrative roles, robotics in manufacturing. In all these cases , new roles and jobs were created, but yes, some groups got left out in the interim as things re-adjusted. For those left out, moving to where the work is, physically and mentally, will be required, but often few do, waiting for a new job to come to the community where the old job no longer is.
The problem with corporate buyers and general lack of home affordability is entirely a symptom of insufficient high-density housing construction (touched on only briefly in the essay). If we smash the NIMBYs' power, the housing shortage is solved.
Credentialism and hence the oversupply of college graduates is a symptom of Griggs v. Duke Power and hence antidiscrimination law.
I have enjoyed this article and the comments, that seem mainly thoughtful and respectful. I am old enough to remember when the pathway to adult life seemed a lot simpler, although it was definitely not as simple as walking into an office with your resume! And getting into an Ivy was not the obsession that it has become. The many opportunities to self-silo (even without trying, in the age of the algorithm) is one big difference that I notice, which seems to keep people apart, as well as the growing focus on the preferences and priorities of the wealthy, in many areas of American life. I do note that this forum skews male, and hope that a wider range of voices will join and enrich it. 'Men are trash' is mainly click bait on media sites, since the financial model thrives on agitation on both ends of the spectrum. Most women I know have fathers, brothers, husbands and sons and love them all. Harassers are out there, though.
The vices may (or may not) be different for young women, but this trenchant overview describes the confusing path that all young people have to walk at this point. We need honest-broker clearinghouses - administered by human beings - for housing, dating, and employment. High schools, community centers, and colleges could be places where seekers and finders come together - we need investment funds to train workers in vital skills (anyone see that video about court reporters and escalator repairmen being in short supply?) and yes, laws to prevent corporate buyers in the private housing market. Thank you for the great post!
The problem with corporate buyers is entirely a symptom of insufficient housing construction (touched on only briefly in the essay). If we smash the NIMBYs' power, the housing shortage is solved.
I value Commonplace, but this article started out with so many overstatements that it left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
I have never heard a liberal say "men are trash."
There are about 2500 four-year colleges & universities in the US. About 100 are highly selective, accepting less than 1/3 of applicants. The vast majority of students go to colleges that admit 50% or more of applicants. The experience of applying to these schools is not one of "randomness." The elite's perception that Harvard and Yale are the only place to go is utterly distorted, as Commonplace writers should certainly know.
From my perspective, I have definitely heard the “men is trash” sentiment - sometimes in exactly those words, sometimes just expressed. There was (is?) a recent trend online where it was fashionable for young women to question whether it’s embarrassing to even have a boyfriend. (Of course, a lot of women also pushed back on that!)
I think your point on colleges is valid. It’s not really difficult to get into college. The “elite” ones do make you stand out in the faceless online application process though, and can make tuition feel like less of a gamble in a way that second-tier colleges don’t, and acceptance into those kinds of colleges I think *can* feel random. Lots of people can develop “perfect” college applications on paper over their high school years, and many will still not be accepted into the elite schools they were aiming for (in other words, they won’t be rewarded for their efforts). I think that is the dysfunction John was getting at.
“Men are trash” takes so many forms, who needs men, men are useless, the patriarchs time is over.
For Pete’s Sake, we couldn’t have Boy Scouts without women demanding first entry and then morphing the organization to where boys don’t want anything to do with it.
Schools started a myriad array of special programs to help girls succeed at stem with college entrance processes using DEI agendas to pick up where high schools left off.
Upon graduating women with an engineering degree were promoted at 2-3 times the speed that their male peers were. Women had careers, men had jobs.
So, yes, young men suffer from the removal of a social structure that provides direction for “success” in today’s society. Even worse, they’ve come to see how the game was intentionally rigged against them and their simply opting out.
See, e.g., Men on Strike, by Helen Smith.
https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/men-on-strike-why-men-are-boycotting-marriage-fatherhood-and-the-american-dream-and-why-it-matters/
Very real problems, and with each issue I recognise how much considerably easier it was back when I was young a long long time ago.
Low cost housing was ubiquitous. A cheap room could be had for a week by working day labor half a day, and sucky jobs paid much more. A guy could be self supporting immediately, and a college degree, any degree, from any college would move you up the ladder quickly at any company.
I often read articles by young economists. They look at statistics and figures. They weren't around then. The whole story doesn't get told. They can't see beyond average or median. Pre aids there was more sex, a lot more sex.
Often young economists and thought leaders see only the view from a good college grad. They want affordable new 4 bedroom houses, and foreign vacations, a fancy car. They never look at the world normies lived in back then, or now.
I'm building a tiny house right now, it will probably end up costing me $30K. Tiny bedroom with loft, small kitchen, bathroom, AC, washer dryer, porch across the front. Around me in this town are many houses not much bigger that people used to raise eight or ten kids in while working the mines. Young folks these days need cheap places to live above all else.
We control how things go in our economy a lot more than free marketeers would like to admit. We need to structure things such that a 20 year old feels comfortable starting a family. While still in college if need be. As a society we need a much more attainable floor, a point below which no people can fall. A way to make it to the bottom rungs of the ladder.
It is hard to get back to a lost world. A lot of what is talked about is symptoms rather than causes. Life is a bell curve and we need to figure out a way for people 1.0 SD below median to have a decent life. We used to do that. I think that unions were part of the answer back then. I refer to private sector unions as public sector ones just make things worse. The private sector unions did get over-mighty for a while and contributed to the exodus of manufacturing from America.
Now a lot of 1.0 SD below median are having a hard time of it. Many things I find to be a royal pain are probably impossible for someone 1.0 below median to even figure out.
Used to work. Tech was different so we need to figure out a way to make the tech work for them instead of against them. Having half the population on welfare is unsustainable regardless of what Elon says. Even having the 15% that is >1SD below is hard. From the time records started being kept (Romans) it's been 5 to 10 percent can't function on their own.
Someone with “skills” is already three steps ahead of the game. I spent the past two summers renovating two old homes, the average all-in cost of each house was $70,000.
That’s a new hvac, electrical, plumbing, insulation, Sheetrock, flooring and insulation. Each house is around 1200 sqft. It was hard, dirty work and the end product was not perfect but nice and I benefited from a local economy in North Dakota that valued seeing a couple homes become viable tax generating properties more than over the top building inspections and permit requirements.
Good essay and excellent diagnosis. Many of the proposed solutions are communal; where communal institutions work to provide employment, marriage and social interaction support. Local churches are an established institution offering communal support especially with regard to marriage. The fact that more young men are attending a church is an encouraging development. How a local church or network of believers helps a young man gain employment may take some thought and consideration.
I enjoyed this thoughtful article but believe a glaring omission is encouragement of trade skill training as a legitimate career path for High School seniors. This would seem to be particularly important as some degree of manufacturing will be returning to the U.S. in the coming years.
"a polity cannot write off 90% of the population as losers unable to compete"
We've been doing exactly that for over 100 years. Successfully navigating the 21st century world requires far more cognitive and social ability to its early 20th century counterpart. It's not an rural/urban thing -- 50%+ of all Americans were living in cities 100 years ago. But in that century, we made it harder and harder for the IQ<100 to succeed. (That's half the population.)
The 2-tier society is mostly cognitive, as the smarter and more social get university degrees which are mostly just markers to advertise their genetic endowments and catapult themselves into what we now call "the laptop class." If you're in the laptop class, this world is great. Oh, it's still lonely and atomized and difficult to find meaning or connection... but you've got lots of cheap stuff to distract you from the meaninglessness of your life and job. Everyone else lacks those distractions, so they create their own: porn, video games, drugs, etc... And that everyone else today is about 70% male.
Fundamentally, modern America doesn't need men, at least not American men. It needs consumers (women are good at that) but not producers (which is what men are). Our production comes from overseas. Women are legally equal and it turns out they don't like having babies when given the choice. So how, exactly, is your average 100 IQ, good with his hands, watch the game on Saturday kind of guy supposed to be a man in this world?
I don't have the answers, and those given here aren't bad. But remember Patrick Deneen's diagnosis in Why Liberalism Failed? Great book and many were all looking forward to his answers, but Regime Change flopped because his solutions were so obviously and woefully below the level of the problems he had identified. I feel the same way about the solutions presented here: not bad ideas, but far too little to matter.
The idea that only dumb people end up in "non-cognitive" trades is so wrong and shortsighted. You'll find plenty of very smart people working shit-tier, retail jobs. And often times their superiors/managers are functionally illiterate. The "invisible hand" doesn't select for anything, the job market is mostly about nepotism and social engineering, not intelligence and talent. There are even cases of literal super-geniuses who were expected to redefine entire fields and got free rides through the most elite universities based on their IQ quitting and deciding to work bottom-tier jobs because they liked it more.
Life isn't fair. It is also very random. Through no fault of your own, and having nothing to do with your intelligence or lack there-of you can end up in a dead-end job or unemployed. And that's assuming in the first place that the job market was designed to filter for the best people to reach the top--it very much isn't. At least, not anymore.
I certainly wasn't implying that everyone who works a crappy job is dumb.
I'm a Mensa member, a genius. All that means is my neurons are slightly closer and my neurotransmitter levels slightly higher; the combined effect makes me able to take in new information and act on it faster than 98% of all humans. That's all intelligence is: faster pattern recognition and decision making. I've spent a lot of time around very smart people; I know first hand just how foolish they (and I sometimes) can be.
However, since the 1950's, raw intelligence has been highly correlated with university education, starting with the rise of "meritocracy" (via standardized testing) instad of social standing for admission to Harvard. While college graduation != economic usefulness, the college-income-premium has risen sharply since the 70's. In short, the smart (a purely genetic endowment) are using universities to accrue wealth and status to themselves, while engaging in policies that hurt everyone else. Unlike the older aristocracy though, they believe they've earned their position by merit and thus the "everyone else" is morally beneath them.
I'm certainly happy to benefit from that man's labor doing practically anything.
As an economic progressive, I'm very happy to read this kind of thinking from "conservative" writers. I've become more wary of defaulting to left-right labels as this new source of economic thinking emerges and dovetails with existing (ok, progressive) thinking. That's because it doesn't matter what one calls the policy on that spectrum. What matters is the policy gets implemented. Exacerbating entrenched left-right knee-jerks is the opposite of helpful. Welcoming our brothers and sisters to join in uniting against corporate control, oligopoly, legal political corruption, and for worker and voter agency is the attitude that can form a genuine movement. If those issues somehow become the legitimate platform of the republican party, I'll become a (progressive) republican. Same if the democratic party legitimately adopts that platform. But, since both are so thoroughly owned by the financial elite, I see a third party as the best option. To form that, social issue neutrality has to be enforced to keep the economic agenda front and center.
Anyway, this is exciting to read.
The sort of populist fusion you describe is the best hope. I think I can identify leaders on the right side of this like Vance, Hawley and maybe Rubio but I am having trouble identifying left populists to join them. I once had hope for Warren but she joined up with the culture warriors and is now too old. Bernie is even older. Any ideas for younger ones that are focused on those issues? Watching Mamdami but he is too NYC to have much of an impact elsewhere. Plus he has some seriously crazy ideas like depolicing and public grocery stores. If I could figure out how to imbed pictures, I would add the one of Boris Yeltsin in an American supermarket. If the Republican establishment succeeds in retaking the party after Trump, I think you will see a 3rd party. Lots of institutional barriers to success but the Republicans went from zero to total control in 6 years starting in 1854.
Left-right is an over-simplification. Check out Horseshoe Theory and other axis such as libertarian/authoritarian.
"...just walk into an office with a firm handshake and a copy of your resume, and ask to see the manager—is infuriating not because it’s nonsense, but because at one time it was true."
This is bullsh$t. It's a myth. Another 'boomers suck because XXX' myth.
This is a good article that properly articulates the loss of agency young people currently experience. The sadness is that their agency now resides exclusively with those who benefited from it over previous generations and who can now buy single family homes they do not need to get even more pennies they do not need. At which point the only hope is for local | state | federal governments with agency to declare the behavior predatory and end it. Which will not happen because the levers of authority are in the hands of those who enjoyed said now lost agency and mistake it for superiority, and thereby, an entitlement to charge it forward.
Spot on article. The traditional paths to success have gotten harder and harder. And social media has distorted our views of success - it seems there is an endless supply of people getting rich off very little work on our screens.
I believe we either need to collectively accept our views of success are distorted (hard to do considering human evolutionary tendencies) or just go down this path of elite consolidation. While the rich get richer, the floor drops out for everyone else.
The primary cause of 'elite consolidation' I think is capitalist monopolization. There are huge forces under capitalism that directs an enterprise towards monopolization, which is closer to socialism than capitalism. Capitalism must be saved from itself.
Yes, agreed. The people with capital seem to be dropping the pretense more and more these days. Also giving the accrued benefits of this capital to the people closest to them - which is also historically how societies functioned.
Monopolization brings their assets a lot of security, and they can get richer faster while small businesses find it more and more difficult to compete. Any surprise that the top 5% are getting richer while the middle 50% are getting poorer. There can be no other reason for this. Note that technological complexity and government regulation assist in monopolization.
Mike Rowe has an excellent take on the jobs that will need doing and these jobs will provide a huge opportunity for the young men astute enough to see the opportunity and to get in early.
Men built performed the backbreaking labor to build this society and all the required infrastructure that makes it work and men maintain it.
Technological innovation will do away with a wide swath of traditional white collar jobs, it’s already happening and it’s going to get worse, for most a university degree is a suckers bet.
The real opportunities will be in the interface between what used to be blue and white collar jobs, for example think of a locksmiths job, it used to be cutting keys, jimmying locked car doors open, installing door handles etc. today’s locksmith is programming keyless biometric locks, using technology to determine computer coding of smart automotive keys so duplicates can be made and programmed. Etc
Electricians are installing whole-house smart systems that control lighting, heating and cooling, security, power usage, back-up generators that start and stop automatically etc.
There’s a role and a pathway for young men that will easily lead to $100,000 a year jobs buts it’s evolving and part of that evolution is removing the stigma assigned to these jobs.
Meh. Things will work themselves out, they always do despite all the gloomsaying in this piece. To whit, look back in history - to the mechanization of the textile industry, agricultural mechanization, the deskilling of manufacturing work with the assembly line, telephone switchboard automation, personal computers eliminating administrative roles, robotics in manufacturing. In all these cases , new roles and jobs were created, but yes, some groups got left out in the interim as things re-adjusted. For those left out, moving to where the work is, physically and mentally, will be required, but often few do, waiting for a new job to come to the community where the old job no longer is.
A worthy analysis, but you left out worker power and unions, which will have to be part of any serious fix.
Most new manufacturing facilities will be "staffed" by robots, managed by a small team of highly skilled and credentialed humans.
The problem with corporate buyers and general lack of home affordability is entirely a symptom of insufficient high-density housing construction (touched on only briefly in the essay). If we smash the NIMBYs' power, the housing shortage is solved.
Credentialism and hence the oversupply of college graduates is a symptom of Griggs v. Duke Power and hence antidiscrimination law.
I have no idea what to do about romance issues.
I have enjoyed this article and the comments, that seem mainly thoughtful and respectful. I am old enough to remember when the pathway to adult life seemed a lot simpler, although it was definitely not as simple as walking into an office with your resume! And getting into an Ivy was not the obsession that it has become. The many opportunities to self-silo (even without trying, in the age of the algorithm) is one big difference that I notice, which seems to keep people apart, as well as the growing focus on the preferences and priorities of the wealthy, in many areas of American life. I do note that this forum skews male, and hope that a wider range of voices will join and enrich it. 'Men are trash' is mainly click bait on media sites, since the financial model thrives on agitation on both ends of the spectrum. Most women I know have fathers, brothers, husbands and sons and love them all. Harassers are out there, though.