The Male Non-Working Class: A Disquieting Survey

The Male Non-Working Class: A Disquieting Survey

By Orion on Fri, 01/21/2022 - 5:45pm |

Over a quarter of men aren't working. What are they doing?

URL:

https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/the-male-non-working-class

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This is great! We need journalists to write a lot more stuff like this, especially because they are not trying to promote a narrative! They even use headers like Something is Happening, but We Don’t Know What it is....

by artappraiser on Fri, 01/21/2022 - 6:42pm

Before widespread prosperity hit in the 1950s, most men faced work that was involuntary. They had to do it, or some man somewhere had to do it. There's no such thing now. So a quarter of them are just wandering around, and I don't think it's a permanent group - I think wandering around is just a phase that a third of men might be doing at any point and time.

Also, there's actually several universities producing reduced tuition or free online courses and the content seems aimed at a much more male audience than the mainstream curriculum.

by Orion on Sat, 01/22/2022 - 3:38pm

Kinda proud to find out recently that one great uncle, a WWI vet, did the hobo thing riding the rails and ended up in some cabin or something in like Oklahoma, remained a bachelor until his death. His nephew, my father, was the first in their family to go to college, on the GI bill, after being drafted to serve at the end of WWII right out of high school. My father played by the post WWII new nuclear-family rules participated in producing the baby boom. But like a lotta guys, wasn't as successful as the 1950's rise of the middle class myth. Looking back now, I see my dad always maintained an independent anti-authoritarian streak whenever he could. He probably admired and was jealous of his Uncle Charles from his childhood at times, certainly he showed that side after his retirement and my mom's death. He like went back to the Jack London thing, traveling allover the world, including not just things like being on the tour bus but hunting in remote rural Canada (Which he also showed by joining the merchant marine for a stint after returning from the army-which he hated-before using the GI bill)

I guess what I am trying to say: career & job didn't always signify masculinity. Actually "getting married and settling down" was once seen as curbing masculinity.

by artappraiser on Sat, 01/22/2022 - 4:19pm

Back a couple years ago, when I was here at Dagblog, things got bad between me and my family and I ended up on the streets. I ended up largely staying in a church where I met a guy who was thrown out before being given a half million dollar inheritance. I ended up living in a mansion as a result.

Burl Ives got arrested for vagrancy, I believe. It's a part of manhood to have to fend for oneself out in nature, I think.

In contemporary America, men are seen as "incels," basically a whole bunch of losers who have no meaning in their life until they win the lottery of female attention, and then once that attention ceases, they are back to being losers who have nothing to contribute to humanity except for cute hobbies that are only further evidence of their mental retardation. We've got a long way to go to get back to traditional masculinity. Maybe you are right and the men that have opted out of society are getting there.

by Orion on Sat, 01/22/2022 - 6:11pm

Queequeg from Moby Dick. You gotta fight for the right...

by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 01/22/2022 - 4:38pm

Pride and Prejudice vs. Gulliver's Travels or Robinson Crusoe. Different trajectories.

by Orion on Sat, 01/22/2022 - 6:08pm

Queequeg was a royal prince from the South Pacific who had to take a pilgrimage to earn the right to ascend to the throne, a rite of passage, the heroic journey. In the end, his coffin saves the protagonist, the narrator Ahab. Quite the symbolism, some Orpheus underworld thrown in... "and all the fears and problems we thought we'd left behind were waiting ahead of us the whole time"*, the journey being a sinusoid, sketched fleetingly on the ocean's surface, that returns to it's origin, its roots. Roiling in the deep.

*paraphrased

by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 01/23/2022 - 3:12am

https://www.amazon.com/Moby-Classics-Illustrated-Herman-Melville/dp/0425120236

by Orion on Sun, 01/23/2022 - 3:17pm

so here's some of the business elite of the next generation:
A professor said her students think Americans make six figures on average. That’s a long way off.

By Timothy Bella @ WashingtonPost.com, Yesterday at 2:20 p.m. EST

The question asked by Nina Strohminger to her students at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania was straightforward: What did they think the average American makes in annual wages?

Some of the answers, however, were not what the professor of legal studies and business ethics expected from one of the country’s most prestigious business schools, she said.

“I asked Wharton students what they thought the average American worker makes per year and 25% of them thought it was over six figures,” she tweeted Wednesday. “One of them thought it was $800k.”

Strohminger, who put the real answer at about $45,000 a year, had a hard time wrapping her head around what some Wharton students believed was an average wage.

“Really not sure what to make of this,” she wrote.

I asked Wharton students what they thought the average American worker makes per year and 25% of them thought it was over six figures. One of them thought it was $800k. Really not sure what to make of this (The real number is $45k)
— Nina Strohminger (@NinaStrohminger) January 20, 2022

Neither did the Internet.

Strohminger’s tweet prompted reactions from experts and observers wondering whether this classroom interaction accurately reflected what future business leaders think about the state of wages in the United States [....]

by artappraiser on Fri, 01/21/2022 - 8:07pm

part of the mystery is definitely this phenomenon, which those of us in NYC attempting to access services know very well. I don't know the percentage (no one does,) but taxes are not being filed and paid:

The sign on the door for the hairdresser read “Cash only, please!”

first line from this article:

Venmo, PayPal and other payment apps have to tell the IRS about your side hustle if you make more than $600 a year.

FAQ: The agency doesn’t care how much you split checks on payment apps. But it wants to know about that Airbnb income.

By Michelle Singletary @ WashingtonPost.com, Today at 7:00 a.m. EST

The sign on the door for the hairdresser read “Cash only, please!”

I wasn’t sure, but I suspected the reason behind the change in the accepted form of payments might have had something to do with new income-reporting requirements. In the past, payment options had included apps such as Venmo, PayPal and Cash App.

To help identify tax cheats, the IRS as of Jan. 1 started requiring all third-party payment processors in the United States to report payments received for goods and services of $600 or more a year.

This is going to be a jarring change for some self-employed gig workers and people with side hustles.

For others who use such payment platforms for personal transactions, there’s nothing to worry about.

“The government has been looking for ways to close that tax gap by making more transactions reportable to the IRS,” said Eric Bronnenkant, head of tax for the online financial adviser Betterment. “The ultimate goal is laudable, which is to make it harder for people to underreport their taxable income.” [....]

I would add though that it's not just the IRS people are hiding from. Personally I think that maybe more often, it's that they receive income-tested benefits of some kind from state or local government. Even Obamacare is income-tested, an individual's subsidy of the premium is based upon their tax filing...

Throw in that the IRS doesn't have the staff right now to have humans look at filings! Whatever discrepancy a computer can catch is about it...and delays of disputes can drag on past the statute of limitations

by artappraiser on Fri, 01/21/2022 - 8:22pm

It's not free for businesses to take credit card payments from customers. And those fees have been increasing. Several gas stations in my area will take credit card payments but will change 50c if you use a debit card. If your debit card is also a credit card you can use it for free if you click on the credit card option when you use it. I don't know how much the cash only movement is caused by business wanting to avoid the charges but it's part of it.

by ocean-kat on Wed, 02/02/2022 - 9:31pm

Nearly all of the men I have encountered over the past few years are like this. Growing and selling marijuana, doing freelance graphic design or writing work, working security, driving Uber, living off of inheritance, working random sales jobs, event staffing, etc. The modern economy simply doesn't know what to do with men.

That's not a men's rights argument or whatever. Women are still subject to rape, sexual harassment, and everything they claim. In fact, it may be a lot worse with a lot of men out of sorts. Hince #metoo, right? Nevertheless, the information economy has men appearing like weird, moody/angry gorillas that belong in the past. They're wandering around simply because no one knows what to do with them.

The information economy may also break down at some point soon, and that would make all of this even stranger.

by Orion on Tue, 01/25/2022 - 6:14pm

so how does society get to the point where people stop using these facts for culture wars games and start talking about these problems apolitically like you do?

by artappraiser on Tue, 01/25/2022 - 6:07pm

I had some extreme bad luck that abruptly took a break after taking me straight through hell. I have seen some stuff, artappraiser. Stuff most people don't. And I also really, really took a hard look at myself. They'd have to do that, I think.

Also, everything is political in the United States. In a lot of authoritarian countries (like Burkina Faso) people spend their whole lives avoiding politics for reasons that should be a bit obvious.

by Orion on Tue, 01/25/2022 - 6:13pm

this is a woman, but it's a good example, I've been reading a lot of stories where struggling lower class people who aren't working or do gig work are trying out capitalism. capitalism, it's definitely a "thing":

‘I had $10 in my bank account’: This 36-year-old went from living paycheck to paycheck to making over $109,000 selling NFTs https://t.co/AoDI9h6HDi
— CNBC Make It (@CNBCMakeIt) February 2, 2022

by artappraiser on Wed, 02/02/2022 - 4:31pm

to that exact point, Krugman was warning the other day on crypto, especially after checking out the demographics: careful, people, it will eventually crash, and drawing comparisons to sub-prime. Remember the craziness of the house flipping trend before 2009, including all the tv shows?

edit to add: here's another from the CNBC viral story:

'Our account had less than $1': This couple made nearly $120,000 in under 6 hours selling NFTs to save their home from foreclosure https://t.co/tA7IizEwXW
— CNBC Make It (@CNBCMakeIt) January 29, 2022

by artappraiser on Wed, 02/02/2022 - 4:39pm

also, I am reminded by this that males, especially white males, are at the bottom of the Woke hoardes' scale, and are confronted constantly with stories that even if they become successful, they will have to practice extra vigilance for knives at their back

.@jamiljivani is a brilliant black Canadian. A Yale Law grad, best-selling author with an amazing life story.

But he was fired from his radio show for not bowing to the increasingly aggressive woke-left bias of those in corporate media who are intolerant of viewpoint diversity. https://t.co/rO6m14OGhg
— Jason Kenney (@jkenney) February 1, 2022

SO: why even try? Why not just stay in mom's basement? She's the one who loves you unconditionally. Why brave the wilds just to be shot down for who you are?

by artappraiser on Wed, 02/02/2022 - 5:21pm

I had a weird encounter on Twitter where 2 people insisted that "If you take away the racist parts of American history you're not left with much." If you mention a corned beef sandwich, there's a something racist about it. International highway system? Racist. Of course penicillin - racist (because if the Tuskegee experiments 90 years ago). D-Day? "Racist". That longevity has increased equally for different races? "Racist". Just no escaping the everything racist quicksand once you buy into it. Sure, there's quite a bit of racism (and not just black). But it's weird to have it the defining quality of everything.

by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 02/02/2022 - 6:52pm

Noah Smith has got one for ya, PP:

The real racial debate that will eventually tear our country apart is: "Is Worf black?"
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) February 3, 2022

by artappraiser on Thu, 02/03/2022 - 2:30am

Uh, can we get back to "who is Slash"?

by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 02/03/2022 - 5:40am

very interesting guy I've been following for a while, he is trying to teach young kids to enjoy work for other reasons than money:

I’m headed to the great state of Florida to give mowers away . Any more kids there that would like to do our 50 yard challenge but don’t have a mower ? I got a few more with me. pic.twitter.com/O6lNwMlYXY
— Rodney Smith Jr (@iamrodneysmith) February 2, 2022

he has them sign pledges to break the goal of 50 miles of mowing of lawns for seniors and disabled who can't do so.

by artappraiser on Wed, 02/02/2022 - 6:13pm

Damn, the numbers on this post are gangbusters.

by Orion on Wed, 02/02/2022 - 10:58pm

The Male Non-Working Class: A Disquieting Survey

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