Why is this a problem? I genuinely don’t understand.
Me neither.
I’m assuming things in the US are very different than they are here in my country (or I am particularly oblivious), because the comments on Dalrock’s blog post fail to resonate with me at all, and I’m a male—and yet Konkvistador seems to know what this all is about, even though I guess his country is even further away from the US than mine [EDIT: looks like I was wrong] (but he’s much less oblivious than me on this kind of things).
At least for a lot of folk, including many of these men, their choices reflect expressions of limited choice. They’re expressing lack of interest in marriage (and sometimes even dating), higher education, and the job market not because they lack interest in these things, but because the external costs of following these interests are extreme and increasing.
If those costs were reasonable and desired by society as a whole, that might be acceptable, but it’s not clear that they are. The internals of divorce case law are not established by the desires of all of society over the long-term, but on the values of family law judges facing single cases at a time—and unsurprisingly, battles between the legislature and the judiciary regarding divorce laws are pretty common. Likewise for a number of other attributes. Officially, the gender disparity in college education is something we as a society oppose!… just not, you know, in any significant manner.
Also, while men are voicing less interest in marriage, it remains a valuable thing for women, and the majority of these women are specifically interested in marrying men. If we care about their values, having the market for het men collapse into the most tenacious or the least monied probably makes things pretty unpleasant for them.
More directly, Smith’s discussion covers not just marriage or the “rat race”, but a pretty significant variation of success and even what the men she asked described as “growing up”. It’s possible this is a culture-bound assumption, but generally the threshold to maturity, wherever your culture puts it, has some pretty major secondary effects.
Me neither.
I’m assuming things in the US are very different than they are here in my country (or I am particularly oblivious), because the comments on Dalrock’s blog post fail to resonate with me at all, and I’m a male—and yet Konkvistador seems to know what this all is about, even though I guess his country is even further away from the US than mine [EDIT: looks like I was wrong] (but he’s much less oblivious than me on this kind of things).
At least for a lot of folk, including many of these men, their choices reflect expressions of limited choice. They’re expressing lack of interest in marriage (and sometimes even dating), higher education, and the job market not because they lack interest in these things, but because the external costs of following these interests are extreme and increasing.
If those costs were reasonable and desired by society as a whole, that might be acceptable, but it’s not clear that they are. The internals of divorce case law are not established by the desires of all of society over the long-term, but on the values of family law judges facing single cases at a time—and unsurprisingly, battles between the legislature and the judiciary regarding divorce laws are pretty common. Likewise for a number of other attributes. Officially, the gender disparity in college education is something we as a society oppose!… just not, you know, in any significant manner.
Also, while men are voicing less interest in marriage, it remains a valuable thing for women, and the majority of these women are specifically interested in marrying men. If we care about their values, having the market for het men collapse into the most tenacious or the least monied probably makes things pretty unpleasant for them.
More directly, Smith’s discussion covers not just marriage or the “rat race”, but a pretty significant variation of success and even what the men she asked described as “growing up”. It’s possible this is a culture-bound assumption, but generally the threshold to maturity, wherever your culture puts it, has some pretty major secondary effects.