The Missing Fifth: 20% of Men Don't Work

[EVT1]

May 10, 2011 21:49:01 GMT -5 steff said:

there is not enough information to show that the 20% are deadbeats, living off a g/f, on welfare or lazy, other than our own individual assumptions.

What did you expect from Paul- he works backwards from his conclusions- he is as adept with statistics as he is with the law

[ameiko]

May 10, 2011 22:27:29 GMT -5 hannah27 said:

I don't believe that the percentage was ever really over 95%. What groups did they leave out of the calculation?

More money on education? Surely Mr. Brooks is pulling our chain. We need more supervision of what is being taught- especially in government run institutions where topics such as feminist literature is an major.

What is wrong with studying feminist literature, exactly? At least that major guarantees an ability to read and think, which is more than can be said for the educational standards of many government-run institutions where sports dominate to the point of lunacy. Far too many players "study" only as much as they need to in order to satisfy requirements, and they get LOTS of academic assistance, especially if the football team is shaping up as a winner. The world needs more feminists just to compensate for these dullards.

Studying feminist literature guarantees an ability to read and think?

PLEASE! How the hell does that teach you to think? Those courses in general about whining about men and how much they stink. It's just recitation and agreeing with the professor.

If you seek a major that teaches on to think, select a hard science.

[hannah27]

May 12, 2011 5:25:43 GMT -5 ameiko said:

Studying feminist literature guarantees an ability to read and think?

PLEASE! How the hell does that teach you to think? Those courses in general about whining about men and how much they stink. It's just recitation and agreeing with the professor.

If you seek a major that teaches on to think, select a hard science.

Thanks for proving my point.

[moxie]

I am surprised by the percentage. WOW!

[moxie]

I agree, Snerdley. Well-roundedness is important. It makes for more interesting conversation too.

[Deleted]

I'm not. Between unemployment, disabled, and deadbeat guys it makes sense. Weird, huh? I read recently an article about the most graduates with job prospects (college) is now female. Times they be a changing. Which is fine, of course, unless the guy wants to put the kids in day care and drink beer all day long while Big Mama brings home the bacon. Some disconnect here in how kids are being raised, it seems to me.

[moxie]

Daughter graduated college yesterday and she was offered a full-time job with benefits three or four weeks into her second semester internship (12 credits to boot!). Son graduated college last year and is working full-time too. I am so grateful they both have jobs.

[moxie]

You have to be pro-active though...the job isn't going to come to you! I have a niece who is divorcing her husband because for most of the fifteen years they have been married (with two kids), he has been too lazy to put himself out there. Couch potato. She tired of it a few years ago and said there is no point in having him around if she is going to be the only one bringing in the money...may as well be a single parent if he isn't going to contribute. He is going home to live with his Mom and Dad...at age 41. PATHETIC!

[AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP]

May 11, 2011 7:23:08 GMT -5 ugonow said:

I know a couple with 2 kids that the husband lost his job.His wife had a good paying one.After searching for work,they decided the jobs he could get did not pay enough to make daycare for 2 children worthwhile so he is a stay at home dad.I would imagine this is a fairly common and growing scenario,and really don't know how this is the fault of "libs" unless you mean the acceptance of women in the workplace being paid the same as men.

I will grant that this makes sense to me. I have been shocked at the number of people who can't do this simple math. Expenses + Taxes often don't even equal the wages of the lowest income earner in the house-- they're PAYING to work.

We definitely need more information, but this percentage of unproductive men hasn't been seen since the Great Depression-- that we know for sure.

We also know that it ain't ObamaCare that's going to get them back to work- nor any variation of it.

My instinct is that this is a disturbing trend- and that will probably be shown as we're able to dig into the numbers.

[AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP]

May 11, 2011 7:25:12 GMT -5 EVT1 said:

May 10, 2011 21:49:01 GMT -5 steff said:

there is not enough information to show that the 20% are deadbeats, living off a g/f, on welfare or lazy, other than our own individual assumptions.

What did you expect from Paul- he works backwards from his conclusions- he is as adept with statistics as he is with the law

I'm not going to deny that. However, my conclusions are drawn from a combination of wisdom and intelligence guided by experience.

It's quite rare when I'm just flat wrong. I can usuallly look at a situation, and detect approximately what's going on and nail it.

We'll see in this case-- you know sometimes being certain just means that it's highly probable that I'm right. Very highly probable.

[hello fromWarsaw]

Yup, it's just like the last Pub Great Depression- all those men deciding they didn't want jobs- lazy bastids! ;D

[stats45]

I think this is a pressing social problem. An increase in the prison population and the amount of people who have serious convictions on their record is part of the story service economy, it can be difficult to hire someone with a criminal record to be a cashier, for example. I agree with some posters that there is a cultural change in the division of labor between men and women that might explain some of this as well. Education is probably important even though the age group starts at 25 because we have more people returning to college (or initiating college) later in life.

I think immigration is also a big factor. Employment rates are still very high among people with a college degree. Men with only a high school education looking for work can be in a tough spot. Construction and landscaping work, just as an example, is highly dominated by immigrant labor in many places. This can provide a tighter labor market for some groups of male workers or even provide incentives to not hire some employable men.

[Virgil Showlion]

And of the 80% who are working, how many of them are...

politicians...

lobbyists...

lawyers...

[AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP]

May 10, 2011 21:34:50 GMT -5 @krickitt said:

Well, my ex sure believed it. He would not be in the manager's office alone with a woman with the door closed.

Paul-- what DID you mean?

That's exactly what I mean. But nevermind the false accusations, incorrect conclusions, and rumours-- think about the so-called "real" complaints.

The workplace is a hostile minefield of eggshell walking and parsing of language. You can't walk into the cube of a completely incompetent boob (hell, you can't even refer to the person as a 'boob') and ask, "What the hell is this crap?" in reference to their poor excuse for work for fear they'd start crying and you'd have an HR nightmare on your hands that would suck all the energy out of the office, distract people for weeks, cost time, money and morale for years to come.

[AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP]

May 10, 2011 22:27:29 GMT -5 hannah27 said:

I don't believe that the percentage was ever really over 95%. What groups did they leave out of the calculation?

More money on education? Surely Mr. Brooks is pulling our chain. We need more supervision of what is being taught- especially in government run institutions where topics such as feminist literature is an major.

What is wrong with studying feminist literature, exactly? At least that major guarantees an ability to read and think, which is more than can be said for the educational standards of many government-run institutions where sports dominate to the point of lunacy. Far too many players "study" only as much as they need to in order to satisfy requirements, and they get LOTS of academic assistance, especially if the football team is shaping up as a winner. The world needs more feminists just to compensate for these dullards.

From the far right wingers at the NY Times:

www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opinion/15arum.html?_r=1

Your So-Called Education

COMMENCEMENT is a special time on college campuses: an occasion for students, families, faculty and administrators to come together to celebrate a job well done. And perhaps there is reason to be pleased. In recent surveys of college seniors, more than 90 percent report gaining subject-specific knowledge and developing the ability to think critically and analytically. Almost 9 out of 10 report that overall, they were satisfied with their collegiate experiences

We would be happy to join in the celebrations if it weren’t for our recent research, which raises doubts about the quality of undergraduate learning in the United States. Over four years, we followed the progress of several thousand students in more than two dozen diverse four-year colleges and universities. We found that large numbers of the students were making their way through college with minimal exposure to rigorous coursework, only a modest investment of effort and little or no meaningful improvement in skills like writing and reasoning.

In a typical semester, for instance, 32 percent of the students did not take a single course with more than 40 pages of reading per week, and 50 percent did not take any course requiring more than 20 pages of writing over the semester. The average student spent only about 12 to 13 hours per week studying — about half the time a full-time college student in 1960 spent studying, according to the labor economists Philip S. Babcock and Mindy S. Marks.

Not surprisingly, a large number of the students showed no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing that were administered when they began college and then again at the ends of their sophomore and senior years. If the test that we used, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, were scaled on a traditional 0-to-100 point range, 45 percent of the students would not have demonstrated gains of even one point over the first two years of college, and 36 percent would not have shown such gains over four years of college.

[billisonboard]

May 16, 2011 9:13:34 GMT -5 AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP said:

...

... You can't walk into the cube of a completely incompetent boob (hell, you can't even refer to the person as a 'boob') and ask, "What the hell is this crap?" ...